Читать книгу Everything but the Baby - Kathleen O'Brien - Страница 8

FOUR HOURS LATER, Mark Travers entered the downtown Boston Lullabies with a grim lack of enthusiasm, cursing the chivalrous impulse that had made him agree to any rendezvous poor, jilted Allison Cabot suggested.

He understood completely her need to get out of that fairy-tale wedding dress before she discussed the details of her fiancé’s treachery. It even made sense that she’d wanted to meet here, at the flagship store of her successful string of baby boutiques, because this was obviously where she felt most powerful.

However, Lullabies was every bit the estrogen explosion he’d expected. Hundreds of ornate, overpriced cribs, tinkling mobiles and sickeningly cute booties being stroked moronically by pregnant women. Even the walls frothed with sweetness, as if the floor had thrown off stuffed ducks and bunnies the way a cotton-candy machine throws off pink sugar.

He turned sideways to avoid a woman who was so pregnant she definitely needed a wider aisle and just might, if he bumped her too hard, need an ambulance. Unfortunately, that caused him to knock into a three-foot-high plush lamb that immediately began to make weird whooshing noises. Emits Womblike Sounds, the tag on the lamb’s tail said. Mark dug around for the off button, but apparently the damn thing was motion activated.

Hell. He set his jaw and strode toward the staircase that led to the second-floor loft, where Allison had said her offices were located. The stairs were carpeted in pink frogs; butterflies dangled from the banister rails. The public-relations professional in him admired the imaginative decor, but he’d still rather have met her at the city dump.

He didn’t do babies and he didn’t do women who wanted to do babies.

He saw Allison even before he reached the top. The front wall of her office was all glass, so that she could survey her sugarplum kingdom and monitor her subjects, the sweet-faced salesgirls who hovered around the pregnant women like handmaidens.

She was watching him now as he ascended. She wore a severely tailored suit and her hair no longer floated in an auburn cloud around her shoulders. He couldn’t read her expression—the glass was mottled with reflections of rainbows with happy hands and moons wearing nightcaps. He was struck, though, by how completely still her stance was, rigid and cold, the antithesis of the warm fuzzy chaos below her. She looked like a mannequin that had wandered away from the Armani store across the street.

When he hit the last step, she met him at the door.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. She extended her hand and when he took it he could tell it was stiff, too. He glanced at her left hand and saw that she’d substituted a small ruby ring for the diamonds that should have been there.

“I needed to be at the office,” she went on, clearly just talking to fill the space. “I had a lot of things to catch up on. Preparations for the wedding ate up a lot of my time for the past several weeks.”

Thank goodness the pink frothing had stopped at the door of the office, replaced by calming beige and brown with blue accents. He felt his guts relax.

“No problem.”

She made her way to the chair behind her desk while he took the seat she offered him, its back to the window. He crossed his legs and waited for her to begin the questions she must be burning to ask.

He decided not to mention how absurd her opening statement had been. A lot to catch up on? If Lincoln Gray had shown up today, she would still have been over at the Revere, dancing and eating cake. And then, according to his P.I., she would have spent the next two weeks in Dublin making love and buying extravagant presents for her insatiable new husband.

But why rub it in? Let her save a little face.

“You were going to tell me about your sister.” She put a hand up to her hair, checking the braid that dove straight as an arrow down her back. It was so tight he wondered if it made her temples ache.

“Yes. My sister, Tracy. Well, the story is sad but simple. She’s five years older than I am. Last year, while I was out of the country, she met Lincoln Gray at a local fund-raiser. Apparently he swept her off her feet, because she married him two weeks later, without a prenup. A month after that, he disappeared. So did a lot of her money.”

Her lips parted and her brows tightened. She met his gaze for a few seconds, but as she took in the full implications of his speech, her eyes darkened.

She squared off some papers on her desk. Finally, she looked up, and her eyes were less revealing.

“Look, Mr. Travers. It’s not that I think you’re lying—”

“Call me Mark. After all, we were nearly in-laws.” He smiled. “Or something.”

She clearly didn’t like the joke. But too bad. This whole thing was a classic bedroom farce, and she now had a leading role. So did he. And Tracy. They all just had to get used to it.

“Mark,” she amended politely but without warmth. “I do have to tell you that I find it…difficult to believe that Lincoln—that he would really—”

“I thought you might.” He opened his jacket and pulled a sheaf of legal papers from his breast pocket. “I brought these, to help make it more concrete.”

She took the papers and read them carefully, her lips pursed as if she needed to double-check every word for some kind of trick. She kept her back ramrod straight and he could see under the desk that her knees were locked, her brown pumps lined up, toes and heels touching in military precision.

This tailored look didn’t suit her. She wasn’t the Armani type, however much she might wish she were. Her features were too rounded and girlish, and she needed her clouds of hair to keep from looking like a lost kitten. The brown suit washed out her cheeks and dimmed her green eyes to an uninteresting hazel.

Though she was pretty, she wasn’t beautiful. His sister, Tracy, wasn’t, either. That was apparently how Lincoln Gray liked it. He picked nice-enough-looking women so that it wasn’t a chore to bed them. But not true glamour queens, who might forget to be awed by his own golden charms.

Still, Allison Cabot had looked far more sexy and alive this afternoon, wearing her tilting pearl tiara and creamy wedding gown. Not beautiful, even then, but quite nice. Intensely female. Vulnerable. And strangely enticing, considering Mark was almost as allergic to brides as he was to babies.

She set the papers down on the desk. “The existence of a marriage certificate does not necessarily prove anything. There might be a divorce decree somewhere, as well.”

“There might be,” he agreed. “But there isn’t.”

“Mr. Travers—I mean, Mark.” She took a deep breath. “Are you seriously trying to tell me that I was about to—” She stopped and cleared her throat. “That if the wedding had gone as planned today, I would be married to a bigamist?”

“Yes.” A little blunt, perhaps, but he didn’t think it would help to sugarcoat the truth. Still, he did hope she wouldn’t start crying. He’d dried a million of Tracy’s tears in the past months and he’d run out of patience. And clean handkerchiefs.

To her credit, the Armani and the tight braid seemed to be doing the trick. Her eyes were bright, but she had no intention of falling apart.

“It’s—” Again she had to regroup and start over. “I just find it so impossible to—”

She bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry. I’m practically incoherent here. I must sound like a fool.” That made her flush, which brought out a few freckles she’d tried very hard to hide with makeup. “On the other hand, if what you say is true, I guess I am a fool.”

“It’s not that simple. My sister is an intelligent woman, but she fell for Lincoln Gray, too. She married him. She put his name on all her bank accounts and safety-deposit boxes.” He shook his head. “Apparently, the man is quite good at what he does.”

She looked down again. “Yes,” she said. “He is.”

“He picks his targets shrewdly, too. My sister is thirty-eight. She’s already been through one divorce and suffered two miscarriages. Her most recent relationship had ended badly, just weeks before Lincoln arrived on the scene, and I was out of the country. A lonely time for her. I also think her biological clock is ticking pretty loudly.”

He smiled. “Any of that sound familiar?”

Allison shrugged, but the pink hadn’t left her cheeks. “I’m afraid it does, a bit. My father died a few months ago. He was my only family.” She lifted one hand, palm up. “And, of course, we all have biological clocks.”

That interested Mark. Allison was at least ten years younger than Tracy. Was it possible that a woman in her twenties was already so desperate for a baby that she’d marry a jerk like Lincoln Gray just for the pretty blond genes?

He laughed inwardly at his own naïveté. Of course it was possible. He knew firsthand how baby-lust could trump common sense, self-preservation and even love.

“Did you love him?”

He could tell the question shocked her. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. With effort, she arranged her features as close to classic hauteur as her upturned pixie nose and freckles would allow.

“I’m sorry,” she said crisply, “but I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”

He smiled again. That tone might intimidate the handmaidens downstairs, but she still looked like a freckle-faced kid to him. He hadn’t forgotten the cockeyed tiara or her desire to slice off poor Lincoln’s puny banana penis.

“Which means,” he said, “that you didn’t.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Again, I fail to see why that angle concerns you.”

“It concerns me because I am going to continue looking for Lincoln. For me, this is just a setback, not the end. And I’m hoping you’ll help me in any way you can. But if you really were in love with him, you might not be as eager to see him get caught.”

She had picked up a pencil and was tapping the eraser absently against the polished-mahogany desktop. A fidgeter. Earlier, she’d been twisting her ruby ring so much he’d been surprised she hadn’t unscrewed her finger.

In PR you had to learn to read people quickly and he knew what that meant. In his experience, fidgeters were impulsive people, given to emotional decisions. Occupying their hands helped to slow them down, to sort things through in a more orderly fashion.

She brought the eraser to her lips and nipped it thoughtfully with her teeth. An oral fixation, too. He took a minute to admire her mouth, which was her sexiest feature. Full lips with a lot of rich natural color, a broad span and the beginning of a laugh line. Those lips were a neon sign, labeling her accessible, innocent and generous.

Lincoln Gray probably trolled the upscale resorts, searching for women with mouths just like that.

“I’m not sure I understand,” she said finally. “Caught for what? If your sister put his name on her accounts, that means the money was legally his, doesn’t it? Ethically it’s mean and rotten, but people don’t get tossed in jail for being morally bankrupt.”

“I don’t intend to toss him in jail. I just want to—” He hesitated. “Talk to him.”

To his surprise, she laughed. It was a decidedly non-Armani laugh—light, unaffected, hitting several musical notes that were easy on the ears.

He wasn’t sure exactly what had struck her as so funny, but he was glad she could laugh at anything today. Tracy hadn’t so much as smiled for weeks after Lincoln left and she still sometimes cried herself to sleep. Either Allison Cabot was stronger than she looked or her heart really hadn’t been bunged up much by her fiancé’s defection.

“Sorry,” she said, putting her pencil down so that she could wipe her eyes. “It’s just that men are so predictable. My father would have said exactly the same thing if he were alive today. I assume your talking will be done with your fists?”

He smiled. “I can’t imagine it would come to that. I never met the guy, but I’ve seen pictures. I don’t think he’d want to risk messing up his handsome face.”

She nodded. “Yeah. Little Lord Fauntleroy meets Batman. Not much of a match.”

It was his turn to laugh. No one had ever compared him to Batman before, though he assumed it had something to do with his coloring. But the vision of Lincoln Gray dressed up in black velvet knee pants, lace collar and ringlets was just too perfect.

And she was right about the rest of it, too. The primitive part of him would dearly love to kick Little Lord Fauntleroy’s ass.

“How much money did he take from your sister? Has he left her in serious financial trouble?”

“Not really. Luckily most of her assets aren’t liquid. It’s not easy to abscond with real estate and trust funds. But he cleaned out their joint account—a few hundred thousand—and her secondary safety deposit box, which had a lot of fancy jewelry. Not bad for less than two months’ work.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Were they heirlooms? I have a ring of my mother’s—” She frowned, touching the ruby ring again. “I might have hired a private detective and tracked him down myself, if he’d gotten his hands on this.”

“Yes, some of them were family pieces. One in particular is an irreplaceable loss. A large gold brooch, shaped like a peacock, with emeralds and sapphires in its tail. It’s tacky as hell. I’ve seen jewelry out of a gumball machine that was more restrained. But it’s a valuable piece with a long history.”

Mark tried to mask the fury that boiled in his veins every time he thought of that asinine Gray standing in the bank vault, stuffing the Travers peacock into his pocket like a kid stealing gum at the drugstore. That scum wasn’t capable of recognizing real worth—in women or in gemstones.

“It’s been in the family for almost four hundred years,” he finished. “I intend to get it back.”

“But it sounds quite valuable. What if he’s already sold it?”

He shrugged. “Then we’ll have a problem.”

The buzzer on her desk sounded. With an apologetic grimace, she turned and answered it. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, Ms. Cabot, but the man from Cuddles is here and the order is all wrong. Mrs. Blakeley’s crib didn’t come and you know the baby is due in—”

“It’s all right, Sylvia. I’ll be right down.”

Allison clicked off the speaker and turned to Mark.

“I’m going to have to deal with this,” she said.

“That’s all right. I’ll wait.”

“No.” She wiped her hand over her eyes. “Honestly, I think I’ve talked about this all I can today. I’m feeling a little muddled. It has been—” Her voice trembled slightly and she coughed to hide it. “It’s been a strange day. I’m sorry for everything your sister has lost, but I’m not sure how I can help you. Lincoln didn’t leave me a forwarding address.”

“But he might have said something—some detail that could give us a place to start.” He tried to read behind those sad green eyes. She looked incredibly tired, as if all the fiery indignation of the knife-throwing episode had died away.

Maybe he could fan the flame.

“He made a fool of you, Allison. Even if he didn’t break your heart, he wasted months of your life. He left you alone again, with the biological clock ticking louder than ever. Wouldn’t you like to see him get what’s coming to him?”

She hesitated just long enough. Damn it—Mark had his answer. Just like Tracy, this woman was still soft in the head where Lincoln Gray was concerned. Was the guy really that good in the sack? If not, he must have been putting stupid-drops in their bottled water.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I have to think.”

He made a small, harsh gesture with his left hand. Women didn’t think. They emoted and they dithered and they let bastards like Lincoln Gray get away and start this madness all over again with some other weak-minded female.

“Try to understand…” She sighed. “Just this morning, I woke up believing that this man would be my husband—my lover, for life. The father of my children. It’s a little difficult, a few hours later, to send the bloodhounds after him.”

He stood. He’d wasted enough time already. “I understand. But the bloodhounds are already after him. I’m not giving up. I just hope I find him before he insinuates his way into some other woman’s bank account—and her bed.”

She made a sound, but it wasn’t a word. It certainly wasn’t a denial.

He extracted a business card and lay it on the table. “If you think of anything that might help, call me.”

WHEN ALLISON GOT HOME that night, the brownstone was dark and cold and so empty it felt as if even the molecules of air had stopped moving.

She had come back here to change out of the wedding dress, but it had been about three o’clock. Her housekeeper, Loretta, had been bustling around making comforting noise with a vacuum and the June sun had been shining in through the tall foyer windows.

Tonight it was like a tomb.

In a way, she thought as she thumbed through the mail, not really seeing any of it, the house was exactly that. So many ghosts lived here already. Her mother’s was the palest, most insubstantial one because Allison had so few real memories of her. Mostly she was a wide, warm smile and a halo of red curls.

Her father’s ghost was disturbingly robust, his edicts echoing down the halls announcing what was acceptable and what was beyond the pale. Even now, when Allison dared to flout those edicts, she caught herself looking over her shoulder.

And now the ghost of Mrs. Lincoln Gray would float here, too, in her transparent Vera Wang gown. That contented young bride who had believed she’d never feel alone again. The happy wife who had planned to be pregnant within the year and had already picked out baby names from a book hidden in her nightstand drawer.

Amanda Anne and Michael Joseph Gray. They had become so real to Allison. In her mind, she’d already redecorated the study upstairs with all her favorite baby furniture from Lullabies. She wondered whether she’d ever be able to work in that study again without feeling haunted.

Allison, for pity’s sake, don’t become one of those superstitious Irish peasant women. She could hear her father now, wearily disdainful. It isn’t possible for the mere idea of babies to turn into ghosts.

She put her hand to her chest, where her heart seemed to be having trouble finding a steady rhythm. Big, painful squeezes alternated with fast, frightened trips.

She had to do something. Anything. She was going to fall apart. She was going to let her father down again, render futile his years of training. She couldn’t do that. He was, in the end, the only one who had stayed with her, who had loved her without leaving her. If she couldn’t be what he wanted, then she was nothing at all.

He believed in work. Emotions were just illusions, he’d said. Illusions that could be chased away by some nice, practical action.

She knew he was right. It had helped to be at Lullabies today, sitting in her office tallying columns of figures. The numbers had added up so cooperatively, so neatly. Her associates had glanced at her oddly, but so what? She had been clinging to the one firm log in a sea of confusion and self-doubt.

Work. Process inventory.

She bent down and opened a box that had come with today’s shipment from Cuddles, one of her favorite vendors. They had mixed up Jenny Blakeley’s order today, but ordinarily they were as reliable as—

The box opened. Her thoughts froze. The words disappeared.

Inside the box, nested on tufts of white popcorn packaging, were a dozen pairs of designer baby shoes. Miniature white Mary Janes, blue-striped sneakers, soft-pink leather ballet slippers…

She picked up the slippers, which fit in the palm of her hand. They were so little. What kind of magical being could wear such tiny shoes? How helpless, how fragile the creature would be, with toes the size of diamonds, whole feet not much bigger than her thumb.

So small…too small, really, to carry a big name like Amanda Anne or Michael Joseph…

And yet.

And yet…

She must be her mother’s child, after all. Because as she pressed the tiny pink slippers to her heart, she thought she heard a baby crying.

It wasn’t until the hot tears hit her knuckles that she realized they were her own.