Читать книгу Fool Me Once - Fern Michaels - Страница 13

Olivia woke and knew instantly that it was still dark outside. She rolled over so she could see the digital clock on her nightstand—5:30. Where were the dogs? Alice and Cecil liked to sleep on the bed. Maybe it was too cold in the bedroom. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and headed for the bathroom and her robe. Then she remembered what had happened before she had fallen into a tearful sleep. She raced down the hall, skidding to a stop when she saw Jeff Bannerman sitting up on the couch.

“Well, good morning, Ms. Lowell,” he snarled. “I really have to go to the bathroom, so I’d appreciate it if you’d call off these hounds and point me in the right direction.”

Hounds. She didn’t like the sound of that. “I thought I told you to leave last night. I’m not doing you any favors, Jeff Bannerman.”

“What? You’re just going to let me sit here until I—? Well, lady, it’s your couch!”

Olivia’s eyes widened at the implication. “Come on, guys, let’s go into the kitchen. Ohhh,” she trilled to the dogs as she looked out the window, “it’s snowing again. I just love snow.” While the water dripped in the coffeemaker, she slapped bacon into a fry pan and cracked eggs into a bowl. Normally, Olivia didn’t eat more than a bagel or muffin for breakfast, but on weekends she made it a point to have either scrambled eggs or pancakes. When she was growing up, her father had served skimpy breakfasts during the school week but always managed a super, colossal breakfast on weekends, and she continued the tradition. Weekend mornings were a special time to eat slowly while reading the newspapers.

As she turned the bacon, Olivia pondered her day. If it continued snowing, and it looked like it might, maybe she’d stay in, make some chicken soup and even a cake. She did have a sweet tooth. Maybe she’d use her father’s secret recipe—triple chocolate mousse cake. The one he’d entered into her eighth-grade bake-off for parents. He’d come in seventh out of eighty-eight entries. When they called his name for honorable mention, they called him Denise instead of Dennis. Her father had laughed, and she’d cried. The only father in the bakeoff.

The dogs barked to be let in. She obliged, then dried them all off with a towel from the dryer. She looked up to see Jeff watching her. She wished she knew what he was thinking. “Why are you doing that?” His voice sounded curious.

“So they don’t get sick. Dogs get sick just like humans. It’s wet and cold out there. Dogs like to be warm. Watch this bacon, and don’t let it burn while I replenish the fire. They like to lie by the fire and chew on their treats.”

“Oh.”

Olivia wondered if Bannerman was this articulate in the courtroom. She built up the fire, handed out dog chews, and returned to the kitchen, surprised to find the table set.

“Let me cook,” he said. “I know how. My mother made all of us boys learn early. She taught us to do our own laundry and how to clean house. I have five brothers.”

Well, that was certainly more than she needed to know. Olivia just looked at him as he rummaged for a clean fry pan, greased it, then dropped the whisked eggs into it.

“They all live in Pennsylvania. On a farm. In a town called Ebensburg. They raise corn and alfalfa.”

That was definitely more than she needed to know.

“Two of my brothers are dentists. They have a partnership. One brother is a thoracic surgeon, Jack is an architect, and Kirk farms with Dad. I’m the only lawyer. Think about it,” he babbled. “I get a lifetime of free dental care. I have the best teeth in the family. No cavities, no veneers, no bridges. And I still have my wisdom teeth, but they have to come out. Jack is drawing up plans for a house for me. It’s going to be a work of art. I just have to come up with the money to build it. If I ever need a thoracic surgeon, I just have to call my brother. I get corn on the cob and other vegetables free all summer long.”

“And I need to know this…why? I don’t remember inviting you for breakfast.”

Jeff whirled around. He was still wearing the baseball cap. He shrugged. “You seem to have an unfavorable opinion of me, like the dog. I’m really a nice guy. You can even ask my mother.” At the murderous look in his host’s eyes, Jeff cut off whatever else he was going to say. He scrambled the eggs and pressed the plunger on the toaster at the same time. “I invited myself. I’m starved. I can pay you for it if money is the issue.”

Olivia waved her hands in frustration. She felt like crying and wasn’t sure why. She looked down at the plate he put in front of her. The bacon was just right, extra crispy, not a speck of grease anywhere. The eggs were fluffy and golden. The toast expertly buttered, not too much, just right. “Thank you,” she said grudgingly.

“My pleasure. I’m sorry if I said something…Obviously, I hit a tender spot somewhere along the way. Does it have anything to do with this?” he said, withdrawing the baby bracelet from his pocket. “When you pitched that bowl at me last night, it fell out. I picked it up.” He slid the little bracelet across the table. Olivia made no move to pick it up but couldn’t take her eyes off it.

Olivia licked her lips. She nodded. “It has everything to do with my…attitude. I guess I should apologize. I said ‘guess,’ and that doesn’t mean I’m going to do it. Shouldn’t you be leaving? Don’t you have company waiting for you at home?”

Jeff blushed again. The sight pleased Olivia. “I don’t think so,” he hedged. “You pretty much took care of that.” He grinned. In spite of herself, Olivia laughed.

“So, you take dog pictures!”

“Yep.”

“Nice in-home business. That overhead can kill you, though. How long have you been doing this?”

He sounded like he really wanted to know. “Forever. I took over from my dad when he retired. He lives in the islands and takes charters on his fishing boat. I do calendars, too. A dog a month, that kind of thing. All breeds. I’m working on next year’s right now. I’d like to put Cecil on it, but I’ll need permission. In case your next question is ‘which one is which,’ I still don’t know.”

Jeff groaned. “I don’t do dishes,” he said, to avoid discussing the dogs. “I use those shiny plastic things you just toss in the trash. Listen, if you want to talk about…whatever it is that’s bothering you, I’m a good listener. If you pay me a dollar, we can log it under attorney-client privilege. I was just going to hang out today and write a brief.”

She didn’t mean to speak the words, but they tumbled out of her mouth anyway. “I was going to make chicken soup and maybe bake a cake. My dad always did that on bad-weather days.”

Jeff’s eyebrows shot upward. He removed his baseball cap, suddenly aware that he was still wearing it. He shoved it in his back pocket. Olivia noticed how the cap had mashed down his unruly curly hair. “My mother does the same thing. If it isn’t chicken soup and cake, it’s stew and a pie. We had a lot of bad weather back in Pennsylvania growing up, so we did eat hearty in the winter.”

Again, words she didn’t mean to utter tumbled from her mouth. “What’s your mother like?”

Jeff leaned back in his chair. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew nonetheless that he was treading on troubled ground. “I wrote an essay on her once for school when I was little. I got an A. Mom framed it. She hung it up in her bedroom. I think my dad was a little miffed. She has a wonderful smile. I kind of look like her, or so my dad says. She’s the one with the curly hair. All us boys have curly hair. My dad’s hair is poker straight. She wears glasses, and her hair is gray now. She says she’s a little heavier than she’d like to be. She’s active in church stuff, 4-H and the like. She enters all the cooking contests when they have the county fair. She wins, too. She helps Dad and can drive the tractor. Sometimes she mows the lawn. She never went to college, never had a job outside the house. Six boys were enough to handle. On Thanksgiving we always had to have two turkeys. When we’d get brave enough to take a girl home for the first time, we always knew right away if Mom liked her or not. If she was polite and formal, that meant a no-go. If she was herself, that meant the girl was okay. None of us ever pushed our luck in that department.

“When we’d get sick, she’d sit by our beds and read to us, play checkers, stuff like that. She made more noise at our graduation than the whole stadium combined. You can’t be embarrassed when it’s your mother.”

Tears flooded Olivia’s eyes.

Jeff ran his fingers through his hair, then rubbed at the stubble on his cheeks and chin. “What did I say? Talk to me. I’m a lawyer, I’m trained to deal with problems. If there are taboos, tell me.”

Olivia blinked away her tears. She got up and carried her plate to the dishwasher. With her back to him, she said, “I never had a mother. The day I was born, she told my father she didn’t want me and that she wanted a divorce. My dad told me she’d died. Then a few days ago a lawyer showed up at my door and said my mother had just died a few weeks ago and left me her fortune.”

Jeff was suddenly at a loss for words. When he finally found his tongue, he said, “Well, that damn well sucks.”

Olivia busied herself unplugging the toaster, wiping it off, and sliding it back under the counter. She tied a twist-tie on the package of bread and put it, along with the bacon and eggs, back into the refrigerator. “Yeah. It does. I called my dad, and he flew up. He left last night before you came. He said he was sorry.”

Jeff struggled for words. The only thing he could come up with was, “You didn’t pay me a dollar.” Olivia reached into the cookie jar and withdrew a dollar bill. She handed it to him. Jeff shoved it into his pocket. “We are now lawyer and client.”

“I hate lawyers,” Olivia said.

“Yeah, yeah, everyone hates lawyers until they need one. Is there more? There is—I can tell. You might as well spit it out right now.”

Olivia’s eyes narrowed suspiciously as she stared out the kitchen window at the falling snow. “How do you know there’s more?”

“My fine legal intuition, which is honed to a sharp point. Nah, it just stands to reason there’s more.”

Olivia poured more coffee into her cup. Jeff held his out for a refill. She obliged before sitting down. “My mother changed her name from Allison Matthews to Adrian Ames. Does that ring a bell with you?”

Jeff looked perplexed. “No. Should it?”

“She is Adrian Ames of Adrian’s Treasures. It’s a huge mail-order house. Wait here a minute.” Olivia ran into the great room and returned with her printouts and the letter. She had no idea why she was suddenly confiding in a total stranger. No idea at all.

Minutes later Jeff said, “Wow! What are you going to do?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. One minute I think I should do what she asked because ‘it’s the right thing to do.’ Then the next minute I say, screw it, she did it, I’m not making it right for her. What would you do?”

Jeff’s eyes almost bugged out of his head at the question. “I don’t know, Olivia. I guess it would depend on how much hate I was carrying around. You look to me like you’re carrying a bushelful.”

“I had such a nice life before I was bombarded with all of this. I had wonderful memories. I had this fantasy that my mother gave up her life so I could live. In my mind she was a martyr. Her picture—well, not really her picture—was on the mantel. My whole damn life was a lie. If that wasn’t bad enough, then I find out not only was my mother alive all those years when I hungered for a mother, but that she was a thief. I hate feeling like this. I don’t know if I can…I just want it all to go away, but, like my dad said, that isn’t going to happen. I have to deal with it.

“In addition, I have to deal with you and the dogs. Before I do anything else, I have to square that away. So let’s get to it. What are we going to do in regard to Cecil?”

“I do my best thinking in the shower. Do you mind if I take one in your bathroom? By any chance, do you have a razor?”

“Everything you need is in the downstairs bathroom in the linen closet. I’m going to take my own shower. I sure hope you come up with something.”

“Yeah, me too…. Who am I kidding?” Jeff mumbled to himself as he made his way to the bathroom.

Olivia was the first to return to the kitchen. She’d dressed quickly, in jeans and a bright yellow long-sleeved shirt. While she waited for her houseguest, she got out her soup pot and a frozen chicken from the freezer. She worked like a robot as she added frozen stock and water to the huge pot. She pared vegetables and proceeded to chop with a vengeance. Everything was simmering nicely when Jeff entered the kitchen, the four dogs at his heels.

“Smells good.”

“It gets better as it cooks. I love the smell. One of my friends used to say our house always smelled like celery and parsley. I think it was a compliment.”

“Our house always smelled like apples and cinnamon. Mom did a lot of baking. It was nice to smell when we came in from school. It still smells like that.”

Olivia looked out the window. “Let the dogs out, okay? While you’re out there, you could sweep off the patio before the snow piles up again. You need to earn that dollar I paid you.”

Jeff looked at his hostess. Really looked at her and was stunned. She’s beautiful, he thought. And she smelled so good! She smells like soap and water, green grass and flowers. He thought then about the woman he’d been with the night before. She’d smelled like nothing he’d ever smelled before. A hair-spray smell, a makeup smell, a perfume smell, and a deodorant smell. For a split second he couldn’t remember her name. Then it came to him. Melanie. Melanie something. A paralegal from his law firm. They’d gone out for a drink at the end of the day with a few coworkers and somehow ended up at his place, which hadn’t been his intention at all. Everyone at the office said Melanie was a manipulator. They were right. He’d never been a one-night-stand kind of guy. Hell, he wasn’t much of anything in the romance department. He was married to his job. It worked that way when you put in sixty to seventy hours a week. Any leftover time was spent sleeping and eating. Just another way of saying he was a dud, romantically speaking.

“They aren’t going to attack me, are they?” He wondered why his voice sounded so strange. It looked to him like Olivia was wondering the same thing. He marched to the door and opened it. The dogs barreled through, barking and squabbling, almost knocking him over. Olivia tittered behind her hand.

The phone rang. Probably her dad calling to see what was going on. She almost said, “Hi, Dad,” but changed her mind and simply said, “Hello.”

“It’s Clarence, Olivia. How are you this snowy morning?”

Olivia winced. “Fine, Clarence. How about you?” Please, please, don’t regale me with details of your latest tax cheat.

“Fine. I’m fine. I was wondering if we could get together this evening. I could pick up some Chinese or maybe some Italian. What do you say?”

Olivia crossed her fingers and fibbed. “Gee, Clarence, my dad is in town. I have to spend time with him. Can we make it some night next week? I’ll cook.” As an added incentive, she continued, “I’ll even make you a pie.” She had to get off the phone before Jeff came back into the house.

Clarence laughed heartily. Olivia shuddered at the sound. “Well, I can’t turn that down.” Didn’t think so, Olivia said to herself. Cheapskate.

“Okay, it’s a date. I’ll call you on Monday to set up a time. I have some great stories to tell you. You aren’t going to believe some of it.”

“Oh, I’m sure. Okay, Clarence, call me Monday.” I need to get Caller ID. Olivia made a mental note to call the phone company first thing Monday morning, then uttered her good-bye and hung up the phone. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Clarence. As a friend, he was okay. But he was incredibly boring, and, as a suitor, which was what Clarence wanted to be, he was sadly lacking. She saw him from time to time because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. She really had to break it off with him. Maybe she could do that gently over the pumpkin pie she would bake him next week. She shivered at the thought of an IRS audit if Clarence didn’t take rejection well.

As Olivia gulped her coffee, her gaze fell on the tall man wielding the broom on the patio. The dogs were trying to catch the broom and the snow at the same time. She could hear the lawyer laughing through the closed door. He looked like he was having fun. For some reason she felt buoyed at the sight and sound of him.

The moment Jeff opened the door, the dogs bounded through and headed for the laundry room. Jeff followed, reached for a towel, and dried them off the way he’d seen Olivia do it. He looked up and grinned. Olivia felt her heart start to melt. Then it hardened immediately when she thought about the chirpy voice she’d heard the night before.

“Did I earn that dollar? Where are the treats? I have these,” he added, scrutinizing the Milk-Bones Olivia handed him. “That’s how we can tell. Cecil won’t eat these. He wants those bacon strips.” Olivia laughed as all four dogs gobbled the treats.

“Guess that shoots down your theory. Come on, sit down. We have to figure out what we’re going to do about Cecil.”

Jeff felt his heart start to flip-flop in his chest. “Look, if I go to my boss and complain, he’s just going to give Cecil to someone else to take care of. That’s the unknown. Everyone is in the same position I’m in. Too many hours at work, not enough hours in the day. Most apartments don’t allow dogs. It’s best, I’m thinking, if we keep this between us, with Cecil’s best interest being our main goal. It’s obvious he’s happy here. He likes the other dogs. Since we don’t know which one is which, here’s what I think. If you agree to dog-sit him, the stipend is yours. I know you said you don’t care about that, but fair is fair. It’s the best situation for Cecil, considering the circumstances. I’ll try to make it out here a couple of times a week plus weekends to do my share. In return, I’ll help you with your…your situation. If you want me to. If you want to drive to your…to the house you inherited tomorrow, I’ll go with you. I need to see the information she said is in her wall safe in regard to the robbery. What do you think?”

What did she think? It sounded like a win-win situation. Still, she didn’t want to appear too eager. It was best for Cecil. She couldn’t argue with that. She wondered if they would be breaking any laws but was afraid to ask. It would be nice to have some company, some legal company, when she traveled the forty or so miles to the nearby estate Adrian Ames had left her.

Olivia brought her gaze up to meet Jeff’s. He had incredible brown eyes. Soft and caring. “Okay. But you have to do your share. I don’t want any money. I would like…it very much if you would agree to go to that house. If the snow lets up, that is.”

Jeff’s sigh of relief was so loud, Olivia sighed in response. Little did she know her own sigh was equally loud. Jeff stretched out his hand. Olivia grasped it. He had a handshake just like her dad’s.

Maybe this was a good thing after all.

Time would tell.