Читать книгу Out of Town Bride - Kara Lennox - Страница 9

Airplane seats were way too small and too crowded together. Sonya Patterson had never thought much about it before, since she’d always flown first class in the past. But this was a last-minute ticket on a no-first-class kind of plane.

She’d also never flown on a commercial airline with her bodyguard, which might explain her current claustrophobia. John-Michael McPhee was a broad-shouldered, well-muscled man, and Sonya was squashed between him and a hyperactive seven-year-old whose mother was fast asleep in the row behind them.

She could smell the leather of McPhee’s bomber jacket. He’d had that jacket for years, and every time Sonya saw him in it, her stupid heart gave a little leap. She hated herself for letting him affect her that way. Didn’t most women get over their teenage crushes by the time they were pushing thirty?

“I didn’t know you were a nervous flyer,” McPhee said, brushing his index finger over her left hand. Sonya realized she was clutching her armrests as if the plane were about to crash.

What would he think, she wondered, if she blurted out that it wasn’t the flying that made her nervous, it was being so close to him? Her mother would not approve of Sonya’s messy feelings where McPhee was concerned.

Her mother. Sonya’s heart ached at the thought of her vibrant mother lying in a hospital bed hooked up to machines. Muffy Lockridge Patterson was one of those women who never stopped running all day, every day, at full throttle with a to-do list a mile long. Over the years Sonya had often encouraged her mother to slow down, relax and cut back on the rich foods. But Muffy seldom took advice from anyone.

Sonya consciously loosened her grip on the armrests when McPhee nudged her again.

“She’ll be okay,” he said softly. “She was in stable condition when I left, and Tootsie was with her.”

“Tootsie? Is that supposed to comfort me?” Tootsie Milford, Muffy’s best friend since boarding school, was a consummate snob who never did a kindness for anyone unless she thought she could get something out of it—usually attention.

Sonya said little else to McPhee during the short flight, and he returned the favor. It was only after the limo picked them up at Hobby Airport that they spoke openly, safe from curious eavesdroppers.

“Do you want to go home first?” McPhee asked.

“No, of course not. Tim,” she said, addressing the chauffeur, “let’s go straight to the hospital, please.”

Tim hit the gas as Sonya fastened her seat belt. McPhee, as usual, didn’t bother. Sonya tried her best to ignore him. She rooted through her suede bag for her compact and busied herself powdering her nose and refreshing her lipstick. Other people might consider her vain, worrying about her appearance during a crisis. But grooming rituals had always given her comfort. That was something she and her mother shared. The world might be crashing down around her ears, but that didn’t mean she had to take it with a shiny nose and flyaway hair.

“Are you going to tell me what you were doing in New Orleans with your ‘sorority sister’?” McPhee asked, apparently unwilling to be ignored.

So, he hadn’t bought her cover story. But she’d had to come up with something quickly when McPhee had tracked her down hundreds of miles away from where she was supposed to be. She’d already been caught in a bald-faced lie—for weeks she’d been telling her mother she was at a spa in Dallas, working out her prewedding jitters.

“I was shopping in New Orleans for my trousseau,” she tried again. “Brenna’s a fashion consultant.”

McPhee laughed out loud at that one. “Lord help us if you start dressing like her.”

All right, so Brenna was a little avant-garde with her spiky hair, miniskirts and platform shoes.

“Anyway,” McPhee continued, “why would a fashion consultant be wanted by the FBI? Come on, Sonya, who is she? And don’t tell me she’s an old friend. I know all your old friends.”

“You think you know everything about me, don’t you? Well, you don’t. I met Brenna at the spa.”

“I checked with Elizabeth Arden. You haven’t been there in over three years.”

“I went to a different spa this time.” The lies were stacking up—and none of them were flying with McPhee.

He didn’t respond, merely stared her down with those incongruously dark-brown eyes. His eyes had always fascinated her, so dark when his hair was blond, and so blasted knowing, as if he could see straight to her most intimate thoughts.

She resisted the urge to squirm under his gaze. She was an adult, she reminded herself. “I have private reasons for my trip to New Orleans, and they don’t concern you.”

“Very well, Miss Patterson,” he said in his Jeeves-the-butler voice. “Forgive me for overstepping my bounds.”

She hated it when he accused her of acting like mistress of the manor. She wasn’t the class-conscious one around here, after all. In fact, she’d once tried to erase the social and financial barriers that separated them. McPhee was the one who had erected most of those barriers, making them more unbreachable than a twenty-foot concrete wall.

“What are you going to do about the wedding?” McPhee asked, abruptly changing tacks. “It’s only two months away.”

Sonya felt a hot flush at the mention of the wedding. Oh, Lord, she should have called it off a long time ago. “We’ll consider the wedding on hold until we have an idea when my mother will recover.”

“I think that’s wise.”

“You sound almost pleased. I thought you were looking forward to being unemployed.” Muffy had agreed that, much as it pained her, McPhee’s services would no longer be needed after Sonya was married.

“I don’t plan to be unemployed,” McPhee said curtly. “You might want to talk to June. She’ll have to find a way to announce the wedding postponement without raising any alarms.” June was her mother’s secretary, who always dealt with anything having to do with the media.

“Has the press been nosing around?” Sonya asked.

“June issued a statement that Mrs. Patterson was going in for routine tests. But there’s been one persistent magazine reporter who isn’t buying it.”

“Let me guess. Leslie Frazier?”

“That’s the one.”

Ugh. Leslie Frazier had a nose for scandal, and she worked for Houston Living, a gossipy society magazine. If she got wind of Sonya’s disappearing act, she’d have a field day. And when she found out the truth—that the marriage would never take place at all, followed by the truth about her purported fiancé, Marvin Carter III—she would turn Sonya into a laughingstock.

Sonya knew she couldn’t stop the real story from coming out eventually. It was only a matter of time. But she wished she could have some control over how and when the news broke.

The truth was, Marvin Carter III was a con man with multiple “fiancées.” Weeks earlier, Marvin had disappeared from Sonya’s life, along with her jewelry, her furs and all her money.

Yet she hadn’t found the courage to tell her mother she’d been jilted and fleeced, and wedding plans continued like a runaway train.