Читать книгу Dr. Charming - Judith McWilliams - Страница 12

“Well, that about covers it, Ms. Tessereck. I’ll get on to the state police with a description of your car,” said the rotund little man whom Nick had introduced as Chief Mygold.

“What do you think the chances are that they’ll find it?” Gina asked him.

He sighed and ran his pudgy fingers over his balding head. “Depends,” he finally said.

“On what?” she persisted, feeling as if she was pulling teeth.

“On who took it,” he said. “If it was a couple of kids who took it to go joyriding, then they’ll abandon it as soon as they’re done, and you should have it back in a day or two. But this being a Friday night don’t argue well for that scenario.”

Nick looked from Gina’s blank expression to the chief’s mournful one and said, “Well, if she won’t ask, I will. What does it being a Friday night have to do with anything?”

“The high school’s football team is playing an away game,” the chief said.

“And all the kids who might have pulled a stunt like that are at the game?” Gina deduced.

“Yep,” Chief Mygold said.

“Which narrows the list of suspects down to whom?” Nick asked.

“Someone who stole it to convert to cash. All your stuff being in the back seat would have only made it that much more tempting. You should never leave things lying in a car in plain sight,” the chief said.

“Sorry,” she muttered, trying not to show her annoyance at his attitude that this was all her fault. First she wanted to get her car back, and then she’d tell him what she thought of his “blame the victim” policy.

“You should have left your stuff at home,” the chief belabored the point.

“Ah, but I was running away from home,” Gina said.

Nick’s eyes narrowed at her words, wondering if she meant them literally. And if so, where was this home she was running from? Or was it a person she was escaping from? Like a lover or a husband?

His eyes dropped to her left hand. It was bare. Nor could he see any sign that she might have recently worn any rings. Not that it mattered to him personally, he assured himself. He had no intention of getting emotionally involved with her. He didn’t dare. A personal relationship would demand more from him than he could give.

He was just going to take advantage of her being stranded to get his house cleaned and to get a few home-cooked meals. And to get some company. He felt a prickle of anticipation. It would be nice to have someone to talk to in the evenings.

“Now, then, Ms. Tessereck, how will I contact you if I hear anything?” Chief Mygold asked.

“She’ll be at my place,” Nick said. “She’s going to be my temporary housekeeper.”

“Um,” Gina muttered uncertainly, with a quick glance at Nick’s rugged features. “Sheriff, being a stranger in town…and while I appreciate Nick’s offer, I mean…”

“You mean you want me to assure you that you won’t wake up one morning to find yourself murdered in your bed?” Mygold broke into her convoluted sentence.

“Strictly speaking, being murdered precludes waking up,” Nick observed.

“It precludes most everything,” Gina said tartly, refusing to back down at the humor she could see in Nick’s gorgeous eyes.

“Don’t you worry about Nick here, Ms. Tessereck. I’ve known him, man and boy, and he ain’t the type to force himself on a woman.” Mygold gave a wheezy chuckle. “Beating the women off is closer to what he faces. Same as his father before him. Why I remember—”

“Spare the poor woman tales of my family tree.” Nick hastily sidetracked the sheriff before he said something about him being a doctor. Or that his great-grandfather had been in business with George Eastman of Kodak fame.

Gina relaxed slightly at the chief’s words. She’d been almost sure that Nick was as trustworthy as he looked, but it was nice to have her opinion vindicated. Nor did she particularly want to hear about Nick’s prowess with women. She wasn’t interested in the past, only the future.

“If I hear anything, I’ll give you a ring at Nick’s, Ms. Tessereck,” Mygold said.

Gina nodded, not liking the sound of that “if.”

“I’ll check back with you in the morning,” she said as Mygold walked them to the door. She was determined to make him understand that she wasn’t going to be put off with vague promises.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” Mygold said cryptically as he closed the door behind them.

“What does tomorrow being Saturday have to do with anything?” Gina asked as she followed Nick down the front steps. “Does he only solve crimes during the week?”

“He doesn’t solve crimes anytime,” Nick said with what Gina thought was heartless cheerfulness. “If your car gets found, it’ll be the state police who do it.”

Gina grimaced, not feeling any better about having her suspicions about Mygold’s incompetence confirmed. “If he can’t solve crimes, then why is he the sheriff?” she asked in exasperation.

“Because he’s the local undertaker.” Nick unlocked the passenger door of his battered pickup. “You will note that I locked my door?”

“I did, too, for all the good it did me. Besides, who in his right mind would steal this…thing? They’d be afraid it would break down before they made their getaway.”

“Don’t malign the wheels that are providing your transportation. I’ve had Old Octavius since I was sixteen.”

And he hadn’t been able to afford to replace it yet? Gina wondered as she climbed onto the front seat, being careful to avoid the rip in the upholstery. If he was that short of cash, how could he afford to pay a housekeeper’s salary? Even a temporary one like hers. But on the other hand, if he didn’t have the money to pay for one, why had he offered her the job?

Could he have felt sorry for her? The appalling thought made her feel faintly ill. No! She refused to even consider the idea. She might not have much in the line of sex appeal for men, but neither had she ever noticed that they pitied her. Mostly they ignored her.

It was probably just as he’d said. He’d seen a chance to have someone take care of the household chores while his arm was in a cast, and he’d grabbed it.

She studied him in the dim light from the truck’s dashboard, wondering exactly what he did for a living. He’d said he was a technician, but that could mean anything.

Her eyes lingered on his left hand where it gripped the steering wheel. His fingers were long and powerful-looking with neatly trimmed nails that were immaculately clean. There were no little cuts and scrapes that one would expect on a man who earned his living working with his hands. Although, since she had no idea how long it had been since he’d broken his arm, any abrasions could have healed. Maybe his employer had laid him off when he’d broken his arm. She had no idea what the labor laws regarding accidents were. That could be why he was so reticent about his work. He might be embarrassed about being unemployed.

Gina rubbed her forehead, which was beginning to ache from stress. It had been a long day even before the crowning finale of getting her car stolen.

“You okay?” Nick shot her a quick glance.

“Just confused. Tell me, why would being the undertaker make Mygold the sheriff?”

“Small town, not too many deaths, so he has the time. And he could use the extra money.”

“Oh.” Gina considered the words. “Isn’t there a potential conflict of interest there?”

“Only if Mygold had a very Machiavellian turn of mind, and believe me, his mind only turns on his dinner and his bowling average. You must not be familiar with small towns?” Nick slipped the question in.

“No.”

Nick waited, but she made no attempt to elaborate on the single word. Was it because she didn’t want to talk about her past or because she was a naturally reticent woman? Just because he’d never run across one before didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

It figured, he thought in frustration. Usually he couldn’t get a woman to shut up. But let him find one who promised to be interesting, and he couldn’t get the first personal fact out of her.

“Where do you live?” Gina asked as they left the village behind.

“About a mile outside of town. It’s a vacation cottage my great-grandfather built, and my parents gave it to me.”

“Oh?” Gina let her voice rise questioningly. Nick Balfour sounded like an educated man. And he had excellent manners when he cared to use them. She flushed slightly as she remembered how he’d rescued her from that guy in the bar. He clearly hadn’t wanted to be bothered, but he’d done it anyway.

But he also gave her the impression that he didn’t suffer fools gladly. That attitude might not go over well in a work environment. Every office she’d worked in during the past four years had had at least one pompous fool in a position of authority, so it made sense that a factory would be the same. Had Nick run afoul of someone like that?

To her disappointment, Nick didn’t add any facts, and Gina pressed her lips together to hold back the personal questions she wanted to ask. It’s none of your business, she told herself. Just because she was intensely curious about him didn’t mean she had any right to keep prying into something he obviously didn’t want to talk about.

Gina jerked upright as she suddenly realized something.

“What’s the matter?” Nick hastily scanned the road for suicidal wildlife.

“I haven’t got any clothes,” she blurted out.

Nick’s fingers involuntarily tightened around the steering wheel as the most incredible image of Gina lying naked in his bed suddenly filled his mind. He took a deep breath, hastily banished the intoxicating image, and asked, “What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. I don’t know why I didn’t remember till now, but all my clothes were in the car. All I have is what I’m wearing. I haven’t even got a nightgown.”

And if there were anyplace around here open at this time of night, he’d turn around and buy her a nightgown himself, Nick thought. A satin one. A pale rose satin nightgown with ecru lace around a bodice cut low enough to offer tantalizing glimpses of her breasts. And a midthigh slit up the side so that he could catch glimpses of her long legs as she moved.

“Is there any place I could buy something to wear?” Gina asked with a hopeless look around the wooded area he was driving through.

“Nothing closer than Vinton, which is twenty miles away. Except for the convenience store, all the local shops are geared to the tourist trade, and they close at five. I’ll take you to Vinton first thing tomorrow and buy you some clothes.”

“You can take me, but I’ll buy my own,” she said firmly. “My credit card was in my purse so I still have it.”

“Consider it an advance on your salary,” Nick said.

That certainly sounded as if he could afford to pay her, she thought. Or was it a case of him doing without something in order to come up with her salary? She instinctively rejected the idea.

“About this job…”

“You can’t weasel out now,” he said, suddenly afraid that she might have changed her mind.

“I’m not trying to ‘weasel’ out of anything! I was simply going to say that I would prefer a trade to a salary.”

“A trade?” he asked cautiously.

“I’ll do some housekeeping chores in exchange for room and board for a few days.”

Nick gritted his teeth in frustration. He hadn’t even gotten her home yet, and she was already making plans to cut out as soon as she could. Where was she in such a hurry to get to? Or was it that she was in a hurry to get to someone?

He felt a sharp twist of some emotion that he refused to analyze.

“When I said temporary, I meant weeks, not days. Why don’t you give the job a two-week try?” he said. “Unless someone’s expecting you somewhere?”

“It’s not that. I just don’t want to tie myself down.” In case he turned out to have zero interest in her as a person, she thought. In that case she sure didn’t want to hang around and be constantly reminded of what she couldn’t have.

“I would think your lack of transportation, to say nothing of lack of money, would do that more effectively than a job. A job gives you freedom to make choices. If you didn’t like being a data-entry clerk, what does interest you?” He decided the question wouldn’t seem unreasonable from someone offering her a job.

“Teaching,” she said promptly. “I had almost three years of my teaching degree finished before I had to quit to help out at home when my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died thirteen months later. That was two and a half years ago.” Her voice broke on the painful memories.

Nick reached across and gently brushed the tips of his fingers across her cheek in a gesture of sympathy that unexpectedly made her want to cry.

She took a deep breath to steady her voice and continued, “He left me enough money to finish my degree. I’m enrolled at the University of Illinois for the winter semester, which starts in January. In the meantime I’m determined to do a Robert Frost.”

“‘The road less traveled,”’ Nick quoted, wondering why she hadn’t used her father’s legacy to go back to school immediately after his death instead of taking a job that by her own admission she’d hated. There was something else there that she didn’t want to talk about. And for the moment he had no choice but to respect her silence.

“That’s right.” Gina blinked in surprise that he’d understood the reference. Not many people she knew were acquainted with Frost’s work.

“How about if you try the job for two weeks?” he offered.

Gina thought it over a moment and then said, “All right. Two weeks.”

“And after that, we can negotiate a longer stay.”

“I really am just passing through,” Gina said, feeling she was warning herself as much as him.

“So pass through at a walk. That way you can get a good look at the scenery.”

“From what I’ve seen so far, it’s certainly worth looking at,” Gina latched on to the impersonal subject gratefully.

Nick, feeling he’d won a victory by her agreement to stay two weeks, was perfectly willing to let her change the subject.

Ten minutes later he turned off the road, pulling onto a blacktop driveway. For a moment, a huge clapboard house was illuminated in the headlights before he cut the engine, plunging them into total darkness.

Gina blinked. “If that’s a cottage, what do you call a house?” And more important, how was one person supposed to clean something that big? she wondered.

“My great-grandfather built it as a summer house, and summer houses are always called cottages by the locals no matter how big they are,” Nick explained.

She glanced around in the stygian blackness and shivered at the house’s isolation.

“This looks like a stage in a science fiction movie,” she muttered. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find an alien lurking in the corners.”

“I would,” he said dryly. “Any being smart enough to build interstellar spaceships would be far too smart to have anything to do with mankind.”

“Good point,” she admitted.

“Watch your step.” Nick used the irregular footing of the path as an excuse to give in to his growing compulsion to touch her.

Gina swallowed uneasily as his fingers closed around the bare skin of her upper arm. His touch made her feel both excited and safe at the same time, which made no sense. The excitement she could understand. Nick Balfour was a very exciting man. Especially given her limited experience. It was the feeling of security his touch brought that confused her. She knew full well that security didn’t come from outside. It came from within. Not only that, but she didn’t know this man. Not really. So why did she find his touch so reassuring?

Confused, she watched as Nick unlocked his front door. Maybe her whole reaction to him was nothing more than a temporary aberration? Maybe tomorrow morning she’d wake up, take one look at him in the cold, hard light of day and wonder what on earth she had ever seen in him. Other than the fact that he was ruggedly handsome, tall and well built. Very well built.

“Welcome to my humble abode.” Nick’s voice broke into her thoughts. He flipped a switch just inside the door, and light flooded the entrance hall, momentarily blinding her.

Blinking to clear her vision, she followed Nick through the archway to the right into what appeared to be the living room, and looked around curiously.

About twenty by thirty, it was painted a depressing, mud color and was filled with comfortable-looking, stuffed furniture that had clearly seen better days. Early Salvation Army, she labeled the room’s decor, wondering how well paid Nick was when he was working. Or was it simply that this was what he was used to and he hadn’t noticed the general air of shabbiness? It was possible. She remembered a few of her girlfriends complaining about their husbands’ refusal to part with old, worn-out chairs because they were comfortable.

Between the pair of French doors on the opposite wall, there was a table with a large television on it. Beside it was a VCR and an elaborate stereo system. On the floor underneath were stacks of videos, DVDs and CDs.

Surreptitiously, Gina studied Nick as he tossed the truck’s keys on the dusty surface of the end table beside the door. Somehow, the house didn’t quite mesh with her initial impression of him. But she wasn’t quite sure why, and she was much too tired to try to figure it out at the moment.

“You can see why I need a housekeeper,” Nick offered into the growing silence.

Yes, she could certainly see that, she thought ruefully.

“Upstairs there are eight bedrooms and a bath. I sleep in one and use another as a study. There’s also a bedroom and bath downstairs off the kitchen. You can have it.”

Gina blinked. Eight bedrooms and one bathroom? That must have caused a few problems in the mornings.

“Come on. I’ll show you where your room is,” Nick said.

Gina followed him through the archway to the side of the living room and into a huge kitchen.

“The kitchen’s kind of…” Nick waved his arm around the room.

Gina winced. It certainly was. The room reminded her of the before pictures of a renovated, inner-city house she’d seen featured in the Sunday papers a few weeks ago.

“My mother threatened to gut this room and completely remodel it, but my dad refused to hear of it,” Nick confided. “He used to say that, if it was good enough for his father, it was good enough for him.”

“Your mother has my heartfelt sympathy,” Gina said.

“Oh, she took care of the problem,” he said. “When they retired and moved to Florida, she gave the house to me, and I don’t mind. I mean, Dad was right in a way. My great-grandmother used to prepare meals here with no trouble.”

“Your great-grandmother also didn’t have penicillin,” she shot back. “That doesn’t mean she was better off.”

“Does that mean you don’t like it?” Nick glanced around, and Gina’s heart constricted at his uncertain expression. Poor man, he probably couldn’t afford to even replace the World War II–era appliances, let alone remodel the whole room. It was hardly kind for her to make him feel bad about it.

“It’ll do just fine for the short time I’ll be here.” I hope, she added mentally with a jaundiced look at the ancient gas stove.

“Where is my room?” she asked. “And may I borrow a pair of your pajamas?”

Nick felt his entire body clench at the thought of her intense femininity actually inside his clothes.

Down, Balfour. You give her even a clue as to what you’re thinking, and she’ll be out of here so fast you won’t even see her go.

“Sorry, I don’t use pajamas,” he said. “How about a T-shirt instead?”

Gina swallowed at the captivating thought of his body sprawled out on his bed wearing nothing at all.

“That’s fine.” Her voice sounded odd to her, and she rushed on, hoping he hadn’t noticed. “I think I’ll go to bed now. I know it isn’t all that late, but I’ve been driving since six this morning, and traveling always makes me tired.”

Gina winced as her breathless babble echoed in her ears.

To her relief Nick didn’t seem to notice.

“I’ll get you a T-shirt then. Your room is through there.” He pointed to a hallway behind her. “And sheets for your bed are in the linen closet in the bathroom.”

“Just leave the shirt on the kitchen table,” Gina told him, and then beat a hasty retreat to her room. She desperately needed some time alone to regain her normal equilibrium. Exploring life’s possibilities was a lot more nerve-racking than she would have thought.