Couldn’t chance it. That’d spook her, and Regina Dalton had other, more important, uses.
She was his ticket out of this crummy life: living out of his car, nickel-and-dime scut work, taking orders from bastards like Berry. He was going to trail her right to the goods, let her sniff out the story for him. She had the cover after all, and he didn’t.
Man, he was going to make it big on this one. Then he was headed for fun in sunny Florida. He’d sprawl on the beach while some hot little thing in a thong bikini brought him piña coladas and spread warm oil in all the right places. Now that was his idea of living. Hell, he might even work on that novel he’d had in the back of his head for years.
Berry was a real hard case. Holding him up for a wad of cash was going to take some doing. But Dudley Slater was no softy, either, no sir. It’d be pure pleasure to take that manipulating, egotistical little SOB, Gervis Berry, for a pile. He’d have to be careful, though, Dudley thought as he scratched his itchy beard. Had to keep it on the up-and-up. He couldn’t afford any slipups, sure didn’t want to be looking over his shoulder the rest of his life. Berry was mob connected, he’d bet his last pint of blood on it. If he wasn’t, it was only because the Cosa Nostra couldn’t stand the arrogant bastard, either.
Dudley shifted position again and cursed raggedly as he let out a groan. God, but his back was in bad shape. He was going to have to make a move soon, in more ways than one. That red-haired witch had given him a once-over before she went inside; he was sure of it. He thought he’d attracted the attention of the dude in the pickup, too. That was the trouble with dinky little towns. Too hard to blend into the woodwork.
He was hungry enough to chew the steering wheel. The BLT he’d had for lunch was long gone. Steak and a baked potato, that’s what he needed. Fat chance. Junk food was all he could afford, timewise. Couldn’t risk missing anything.
He leaned over to paw through the litter of candy wrappers and empty chip bags, searching for something he might have missed. A bag of peanuts. It would have to do. The coffee in his thermos was lukewarm, but better than nothing.
He needed to speed things up here. Not only was he sick to death of this game, but the trial was fast heading his way. If that bitch who owned the motel was any indication, he didn’t have a hope in hell of getting anything useful out of these people himself. But that was all right, because gorgeous Regina Dalton did. And she would if somebody would just light a fire under her cute little butt. He’d have to put his mind to the problem. He knew how he’d like to do it, but hey, first things first.
What if, instead, he just gave her a little hand at getting to the lawyer.
Now that was an idea. He popped a handful of salted peanuts into his mouth, then followed them with a swallow of warm coffee. Staring squint-eyed through the windshield, he chewed slowly.
He stopped.
Better yet, he could do a preemptive strike, get in ahead of her. Berry might go for that. No plaintiff, no trial, right? Right.
Yeah, that just might get it.
Yeah.
Old Dudley liked having an alternate plan. Or two. If one thing didn’t work, then the other would.
6
Regina half expected to find Kane at Hallowed Ground when she reached the house next morning since he seemed to appear every time she turned around. Lewis Crompton was alone, however, having his breakfast in a sun-splashed room with a Boston fern in the bay window behind the table and his big yellow cat sprawled on the floor beside him. The air was redolent with ham, eggs, chicory-laden coffee, and the heartwarming aroma of the hot golden biscuits stacked on a platter in the middle of the table.
Mr. Lewis rose to his feet as Regina was ushered into the room by the housekeeper. Brushing aside her apologies for appearing uninvited and disturbing him at his meal, he pressed her to have breakfast with him. She wasn’t hungry, but accepted a cup of coffee because it appeared he wouldn’t go on with his meal otherwise. The housekeeper brought another cup from a sideboard and poured the steaming brew while her employer seated Regina. Then the woman went away, leaving them alone.
Regina cleared her throat the instant the door closed, ready to begin her carefully worded effort to discover something of use to Gervis. Mr. Lewis forestalled her.
“I believe Kane took you out to see the lake yesterday,” he said, all congeniality. “What did you think of it?”
“Beautiful, so peaceful,” she answered. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. But what I wanted to talk to you about was—”
“You met Luke, too, I hear. You really ought to go to his open house, my dear. Nobody throws a party quite like Luke. Why, that boy has more life in him than a one-legged, one-man band. You’d have a grand time.”
“I’m sure you’re right. About the jewelry, Mr. Crompton?”
The man across the table waved the silver knife he held in a dismissive gesture before using it to slit a biscuit. He tucked a slice of ham inside, then put it on a bread plate and slid it toward Regina. “Vivian said she spoke to you about it. She was right taken with you, I could tell. Mentioned you had the nicest smile, raved about your hair, of course.”
Regina pushed the small plate with the biscuit back toward him. In exasperation, she said, “Mr. Crompton, if you don’t want to sell your wife’s jewelry collection, you have only to say so.”
He studied her a long moment, a judicious expression on his fine old face. Then he put down his knife and heaved a sigh. “That’s just it, my dear. I don’t know whether I do or not.”
“Because you’ve decided to marry again?”
He sat back in his chair in surprise before his expression turned drolly accepting. “Now who could’ve told you that? Not Kane, I’d imagine. Must have been Vivian.”
“Are you sure the woman you’re interested in would care for it?” Regina asked, sidestepping his question. “Some people prefer to have no reminder of a former spouse.”
“True, true.” He sighed. “But Miss Elise isn’t the problem. It’s Kane.”
“Kane,” she repeated in resignation.
“I never dreamed he might object. Now he has, I really feel I should make certain it’s not just his pride talking. I mean—suppose he has some female in mind who he’d like to marry? He deserves the opportunity to give her his grandmother’s trinkets if he’s so minded.”
Trinkets. That was an inadequate description if she’d ever heard one. “I see what you’re saying,” she said as patiently as she was able, “but do you think it’s a real possibility?”
“I just don’t know, which is the point. Now I realize it’s an imposition to ask you to hold off. You must have other things to do besides hang around, waiting for an old man to come to a decision. But I’d take it as a favor if you’d give me the time to discover what’s on Kane’s mind.”
His suggestion was perfect, exactly what she needed. It was so perfect, in fact, that suspicion rose immediately in her mind. She searched his lined and craggy face, looking for craftiness, deceit, or at least some idea of why he might be so accommodating. There was nothing in it except warm courtesy. Which might indicate that he was absolutely aboveboard, but could also mean that he was a certified master at guile and manipulation.
Either way, she couldn’t afford to refuse. She even felt a little spurt of gladness that she had an excuse to stay. That was only because it made things easier from her point of view. Naturally.
She lowered her gaze to her coffee cup. “I suppose I can do that.”
“Good,” he said with satisfaction. “I’m glad we got that settled.”
“On the other hand,” she went on with some hesitation as she watched the steam curl across the surface of her coffee, “as I’m already here and have nothing better to do, I could look at the pieces and give you a written estimate that you could hold until you’re ready. You could call me in New York with your decision, and we could take it from there.”
Even as she made the suggestion, she wondered what she was doing. If Ger
vis knew she was throwing away the chance to stay longer in Turn-Coupe, he would have a stroke. Regardless, she was driven by an attack of fairness she didn’t quite understand. She almost hoped, in a way, that Mr. Lewis would take her up on her offer so she would no longer have an excuse for trespassing on his hospitality.
“Now, now,” he said, easing the bread plate and biscuit toward her again, “there’s no need for such a rush. You’ll give yourself ulcers, you don’t watch out. Just try a bite of this, then tell me what else you and Vivian found to talk about.”
Regina had no intention whatever of eating the biscuit. As she told the older man about the visit with Kane’s aunt, however, she reached out idly to pick up a bit of light brown biscuit crumb with the pressure of a fingertip, then put it on her tongue. A few minutes later, she picked up another. Then she broke a little of the crisp biscuit crust and ate it with the sliver of ham that was attached. Before she realized, the whole biscuit was gone.
“Hungry and didn’t know it,” Mr. Lewis said, slicing another biscuit, then reaching for ham. “All you young people with your juice and granola don’t know what good food is anymore. A bite here, a snack there, eat on the run, never slow down to savor the flavors or enjoy a nice, quiet conversation, and you wonder why you’re tired all the time. You’re not really living, just going through the motions.” He shook his head as he passed over the biscuit. “Pitiful.”
He had a point. Regina leaned back in her chair, sipping the perfectly brewed coffee in its fragile china cup. It was amazingly quiet in the breakfast room. No traffic noises or other hints of the mechanized world intruded on the old house on its hill. Blue jays, cardinals and mockingbirds called back and forth in the garden beyond the bay window. She could even catch the sandpaper rasp of the cat’s tongue as it groomed itself.
“I just might be able to get used to your way of doing things,” she said with a whimsical smile. “It’s so restful.”
“Not much happens to make it otherwise. Usually.”
He was thinking of the suit, she thought, which was a subject Regina was suddenly reluctant to explore. She asked instead, “How long have you lived here—or is that a silly question?”
“The only silly question, so they say, is one unasked. If you mean how long I, personally, have lived here, the answer’s all my life. If you’re talking about my family, well, my great-granddaddy came from North Carolina in the 1830s. He and his wife and a pack of children traveled in a wagon pulled by oxen, along with a caravan of six other families. They stopped for a few years in Alabama, where a couple of the older kids got married, but they left the newlyweds behind and came on. Because of that, there are Cromptons scattered all across the South.”
“Were the Benedicts one of the families in the caravan?”
He shook his leonine head. “They were already here when my folks made it. Nobody really knows how long they’d been holed up out on the lake, but it’s a while.”
“You’re talking about the Native American bloodline, as long ago as that?”
“What? Oh, only Luke’s bunch have Indian ancestors, but the rest were here anyway. Story goes, there were four brothers who left England in a hurry back in the 1700s. Something to do with the death of a sister’s snake-mean husband, as I understand it. They tried their hands at piracy a couple of years, but finally landed in New Orleans. Not caring particularly for the strict Spanish government in power at the time, they pushed inland and wound up here.”
“Fascinating,” she said, leaning forward to pick up the second ham-filled biscuit. Then she paused and tilted her head. “Unless you’re pulling my leg?”
“Would I do that?” he asked, his eyes twinkling.
“In a heartbeat.”
“Yes, I guess I would,” he allowed genially, “but not this time.”
She believed him, which seemed strange but nice. “So what happened? How did the Benedicts manage to survive and multiply?”
“The oldest brother took a Scotswoman to wife somewhere in the Caribbean, one with hair every bit as fiery as yours and a temper to match. Kane comes from that line. The next married the Indian woman who had guided them to the lake, I think. Another kidnapped a Spanish woman who wasn’t too unwilling to be spirited off, and the youngest wound up wed to a Frenchwoman he found wandering around lost in the woods.”
“And they all lived happily ever after,” Regina said in dry mockery directed mostly at the romantic images conjured up in her own mind.
“You might say so. At least, they had long lives and big families. Oh, they had their tragedies and mysteries, their deaths from accidents and childhood diseases and whatnot. But they endured and they prospered. Now the woods are full of Benedicts.”
“So it would seem.” She paused to refill her coffee cup from the carafe that sat ready, then added to Mr. Lewis’s, as well. “What kind of mysteries?”
“The usual,” he said, amusement lingering around his mouth for the part of what he’d said that caught her interest. “Mainly who fathered whom, how so-and-so really died, which son ran with outlaws or whose daughter was a hoyden who got men killed in duels, which child wasn’t right in the head, where somebody buried their gold in the old days.”
Having so little family herself, Regina was always intrigued by the stories of other people’s. Added to that, her own ancestors, so far as she knew, were fairly recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany. It was hard for her to imagine a clan as diverse or long entrenched as the one to which Kane belonged. She said, “The Benedicts sound pretty colorful.”
Mr. Lewis pursed his lips. “I guess they are at that. Proud as Lucifer and touchy as all Hades, most of them. They’ve been known to take the law into their own hands, too, living so isolated out on the lake before there was much in the way of law and order. But the Benedicts live well, love hard, and pay their bills. They’re good, strong stock, no finer people in this state, I’ll stake my life on it. I’m proud to be associated with them.”
“Especially one of them?” she said with a teasing note in her voice.
“I’m partial to my grandson, I’ll admit, but there’s a lot to be partial about. Kane’s put his practice more or less on hold for the suit I’ve got going. All his energy and brain power are being channeled into the battle. His temper may be a mite short and his manners not quite up to par, but it would be a shame if anybody let such things stand in the way of seeing the fine man he is inside.”
He was making excuses for Kane. Why? Did he think she and his grandson had got off on the wrong foot, so was trying to make it right? Or was he attempting to smooth Kane’s way with her because he felt his grandson might be interested? Regina wasn’t sure which idea disturbed her more.
She made no answer, but allowed a small silence to fall. Then she changed the subject by asking if the china they were using was antique. Her host was involved in a comical tale of how his wife had chosen the pattern for her wedding china back before World War II when the housekeeper appeared at the door.
“Mr. Kane’s coming.”
“Well now, Dora, you don’t say.” Mr. Lewis lifted a brow as he met his housekeeper’s gaze. “This is a red-letter morning. I guess you’d better heat the biscuits back up. That’s if Regina and I left any.”
Some communication passed between the two of them, Regina thought, a shared opinion, perhaps, on the sudden influx of company at breakfast time. Their relationship seemed to have the ease that comes from long years.
Dora, a tall, rawboned black woman with a Native American cast to her features, wore her hair in two braids crossed over her head and had gold earrings flashing in her ears. She seemed an integral part of the household. Regina wasn’t sure what she expected, but it wasn’t an arrangement that closely mirrored the same position of responsibility held by Gervis’s bodyguard and houseman. Regina watched the woman as she brought another cup and saucer and plate from the sideboard, then reached for the coffee carafe. It was better than wondering why Kane couldn’t go away and let her get on
with her job.
He appeared in the doorway seconds later. His greeting was polite; still the temperature of the room cooled by several degrees. Regina felt the muscles of her abdomen tighten in visceral reaction. Not all of it was wariness, however. A large part was sheer female response to the sight of his broad shoulders stretching the cloth of his knit shirt and the fresh scent of just-shaved-and-showered male that he brought with him into the room. To be unsettled so easily was annoying.
“Had breakfast?” his grandfather inquired.
“I’m not hungry,” Kane answered, though he pulled out the chair at the place setting where Dora had just finished pouring his coffee. He waited until she had gathered the empty plates from the table and took them away before he sat down.
“Neither was Miss Regina. Must be something going around.” Mr. Lewis kept his features perfectly straight, though his eyes gleamed.
“Actually, it’s Miss Regina I came to see.” Kane interjected irony into that title of respect as he looked straight at her for the first time.
“Yes?” Her smile felt pasted on.
“I’m interested in hearing what your connection might be with a notorious tabloid reporter named Dudley Slater.”
Her reaction to the accusation she heard in his voice was instant and instinctive. “I don’t know what you mean.”
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