by Jenna Ryan
Sam sounded very far away when she asked, “Is she—gone?”
Aidan managed to nod.
He heard her at closer range, caught the scent of her perfume and braced for the sensual kick that was bound to follow. This time he met it halfway and blotted it out with an image of Domina’s contorted face.
“What’s that in her hand?”
God, she was bending over him. And, dammit, he was re-acting. A woman lay dead in front of him, and all he could think of was Sam and her luscious, living body. His nephew in Dublin would call him “one buggered up dude.”
He dropped his gaze with an effort to Anthea’s hand. In typical murder mystery fashion, her left palm was partially open. Between it and her cuff, Aidan spied a small piece of paper.
“She must have hidden it up her sleeve,” Sam said as he removed the thing. “Is it a note?”
“We already know who did it, Sam.” He smoothed the wrinkles and held it up. “It’s part of a photograph. Must be a picture of Mary. It isn’t Anthea or Margaret.”
“I guess.” Taking it from him, Sam studied the plump features and dyed honey-blond hair.
No face-lifts; a modicum of makeup. Aidan got no sense that the woman was clinging to the last days of her youth. Large brown eyes, shrewd, discerning and perhaps a trifle secretive, stared back at them. Laugh lines crinkled the corners; strength of purpose glimmered within.
“She doesn’t look crazy,” Sam remarked.
“Neither did Lizzie Borden, but she was. Appearances…”
“Can be deceiving, I know.” Going to her knees, she cast a guilty glance at Anthea. “I feel terrible. She might have lived if I’d called 9-1-1 when we got here.”
Aidan shook his head. “Alistair’s right. The bullet passed very close to her heart. Not a chance she would have lived.” He stood, bringing her gently with him. While feelings of tenderness weren’t foreign to him, the depth of his emotions at this moment had the power to terrify—more so when she rested her forehead against his shoulder and fitted her trembling body to his.
He released an inward sigh of relief as a distant wail of sirens filled the air. Cops and paramedics to the rescue. Wonder what Humphrey Bogart would have done in this situation?
He was losing it, badly and fast. He needed air and time alone to think. A car crunching along the driveway, red and blue lights flashing, told him he wasn’t likely to get either of those things for several hours.
The first police officer to arrive, Sergeant Lionel Dempsey, was well into his fifties. He regarded the body doubtfully, asked the usual plethora of questions and made notes in a dog-eared book. “What’s her name?” he inquired of Sam.
Her composure semirestored, she replied dully, “Anthea Pennant.”
The sergeant’s pen halted in midair. His eyes snapped to her face. “The Anthea Pennant?”
Sam nodded.
“Well, who on earth would want to murder her?”
Sam looked angry and resentful. “Mary Lamont,” she stated without hesitation. She met Aidan’s steady gaze. “We weren’t supposed to say anything at the request of her doctor, but Mary escaped from Oakhaven a couple of weeks ago. She killed Anthea Pennant, Sergeant. And I don’t believe for a minute that she intends to stop there.”
SAM SAT, swamped with guilt, in Guido’s cluttered, comfortable office. The Sins of Elizabeth, a vintage Margaret Trues-dale film, played on his television. She had a pile of magazines on the desk and three more stacks on the floor beside it. She’d been through half the collection, a full pot of coffee and two jelly doughnuts. She wanted to phone Aidan and apologize for snapping at him earlier. She wanted to forget this entire day had ever happened.
“I had to tell Sergeant Dempsey the truth,” she’d insisted at the restaurant where they’d stopped after the nightmare at Anthea’s. It had a Bishop’s Wife theme, charming as Michel’s had been, elegant yet trendy and strongly reminiscent of the late forties. A collection of booths and tables had afforded them only marginal privacy. They’d had to keep their voices low.
Aidan had held his temper well in the face of her aggressive outburst. Maybe he’d known it had nothing to do with him. Her anger had been and still was entirely self-directed.
“You didn’t mention Margaret,” he reminded her. “And you’re right, you had to tell the sergeant some portion of the truth. You did fine, Sam.”
She sighed. “You’re being kind. I’m not sure I deserve it. Fine translates to acceptable. I can’t believe I didn’t see her breathing. Anthea had to crawl to the counter and smash a cookie jar to get our attention. I don’t think that’s fine at all.”
“She’d be dead now, regardless. There’s no blame involved—except for the person who killed her.”
He was right. Guilt was not an emotion she handled well. The only thing she hated more than feeling guilty was feeling foolish—and right now she felt both those things and angry to boot. If she accomplished nothing else, she was determined to avenge Anthea’s death.
The glossies in Guido’s old movie magazines blurred. Closing her eyes, Sam folded her arms on the desk and laid her forehead against them.
Thoughts of Aidan moved with the tumult in her mind. Tall, lean, sexy Aidan, the Rob Roy of insurance investigators. Would he be as good in the bedroom?
“Forget it, Sam,” she murmured into her arms. “He’s not for you.”
On the television screen, Margaret as the title character Elizabeth slipped into the second of her four personalities. Mary hadn’t been in this movie, but she’d been in the first one Sam had watched, a picture titled The Dark Horse. As she was trying to do in real life, she’d plotted to kill Margaret throughout the film.
“Doing penance?” drawled a voice from the doorway.
She braced but merely raised her head and shot a nasty visual dagger at him. “What are you doing here, Brodie? How did you get in? I thought you went home for soccer, pizza and a good night’s sleep.”
He leaned a lazy shoulder against the door frame. “You didn’t turn the lock, soccer and pizza lost their luster, and sleep eluded me. It’s almost 1:00 a.m., Sam.”
She dragged her gaze from his sinewy body and placed it on the flickering TV. “I need to know more about Dorian Hart.”
“Why?”
“Because according to Alistair, his grandson was at An-thea’s today.”
“Anthea said Mary shot her,” Aidan reminded her, still trapped in the shadows of the doorway. “Dorian Hart’s people arrived after the fact.”
Sam brought her eyes reluctantly back to his face. She couldn’t see much of it in the murk. “After what fact, Aidan? Why, if Margaret’s husband owed him money, would a gangster or a loan shark or whatever Dorian is, want to find An-thea?”
“I can think of a reason or two.”
“Exactly. Say Margaret’s husband Frank never paid Dorian. Say Frank disappeared, along with Margaret and Cousin An-thea. Time passes, Dorian fumes, and still there’s no sign of Frank Durwald or a payback. No self-respecting gangster would be willing to let that go, not even after forty years. So Dorian keeps searching.
“Then one day he hears about a man and a woman who’ve been asking a lot of questions about Margaret Truesdale and Mary Lamont. He decides to have them watched. Maybe he even taps one of their phone lines. Your phone was clicking a lot last night, Aidan. So was mine this morning when I called Anthea to confirm our appointment. After that it would be a simple matter of logistics and logic. Dorian Hart wants his money. The best way he would know to find Frank Durwald—because he wouldn’t necessarily be aware of their divorce—would be through Margaret. And the best path to Margaret would very likely be through Anthea. It’s probably the first link he’s ever found.” She paused to look away, frowning. “Can you get an address by tracing a telephone number? I wonder if he did bug my phone. His people got to Anthea’s before us, so he must have known where she lived. But he couldn’t have known for long, or else…What are you doing, Brodie?”
He�
�d come in, unzipped his jacket and dropped onto the sofa. “Helping you,” he said, and reached for a handful of newspapers.
Sam hesitated then picked up the microfiche box. Having him here would be torture for her nerves, but it was preferable to sitting alone mired in guilt.
She’d told Margaret what happened and extracted a promise from Sergeant Dempsey and his associates not to volunteer any information to the press. She’d also spoken to her editor, Sally Dice, before she left today. Sam’s human interest column was down to its reserve stories, and Sally was getting understandably anxious. To her surprise, and suspicion, Sally had waved her explanations aside.
“No problem, Sam. We’ll run a few of your more popular back columns.” Then her eyes had gleamed, and Sam had seen Guido’s hand clearly. “I’ll expect an exclusive, of course. ‘The Story Behind Margaret Truesdale’s Disappearance.’ We’ll beat the rest of the industry to the punch and put our paper on the map at last.”
Sam could have objected. If it had been anyone except Sally, her seventy-year-old editor and mentor, and Guido’s checker-playing partner, she would have. But since she’d only told Sally a minute portion of the whole story, she couldn’t see the harm in making the promise. After all, it wasn’t as if she planned to splash Margaret’s Laurel Canyon address over the front page.
Her pricks of conscience on that score came and rapidly departed. Which left only Mary—and Aidan—to deal with.
She glanced up, noticed he was studying a certain picture poster, and contained a heavy sigh. “Margaret wasn’t in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Aidan. If you really want to help, stop ogling Ingrid Bergman and find what you can on Dorian Hart.”
Aidan sent her a dark look but made no comment
Three exhausting hours later, Sam swept the long hair from her face and switched off the microfiche. “One lousy reference,” she said, deflated. “Dorian Hart attended a winetasting convention in San Francisco in October of nineteen forty-nine, in, quote, ‘the company of several of Hollywood’s finest’ Terrific, but the least they could do is mention who those ‘finest’ were. Maybe he met Margaret on that trip, or—”
“He didn’t meet Margaret there,” Aidan interrupted. “She was in Calcutta at the time.”
Sam missed the subtle inflection. “She went to India?”
“No, she went to the backlot. Calcutta’s a movie, not quite as exotic or visually stunning as Casablanca but along the same lines. I doubt if it was one of her bigger hits. The reporter who wrote the article on it said she appeared subdued and unhappy during filming.”
Sam snapped the lid on the mircofiche box. “Maybe that’s because she gave her child up for adoption the year before. Some form of delayed postpartum blues, except in her case there was no baby to lift her out of her depression.”
“That’s a very clinical analysis, Sam.”
She faced him unabashed. “I feel clinical, Aidan. Margaret’s…” She wasn’t sure how to put it. “Fine,” she said at last.
Aidan saw entirely too much. He stood. His hands hung loose at his sides, his brown leather jacket was open, his long hair was rumpled, damp and windblown. She couldn’t read his bland expression, and didn’t think she wanted to when he started slowly toward her. “‘Fine,’ Sam?” he challenged in a mockery of her earlier charge. “Just ‘fine’? That’s the best you can say about your maternal grandmother?”
Her defenses surged. “I don’t have anything to say about her, Brodie.” She stood, stubborn and defiant, her heart racing, her palms damp. “I’m doing the job I promised to do. It has nothing to do with blood—you know what I mean.” She made an impatient gesture when he would have offered a comment “I don’t have to explain my motives or my feelings, not to you or anyone else.”
The defensiveness of her tone made her shudder. Or was that Aidan’s effect on her? He continued to close in, smoothly, soundlessly, his eyes steady on her face. The predator preparing to pounce on its prey, she thought, then firmed up her resolve. She was nobody’s prey, male or female. However, since she also wasn’t invincible, she made a point of putting Guido’s swivel chair between them.
“Don’t,” she warned when he would have shoved it aside. “You’re too complicated for me, Brodie. You have angst and ghosts and danger swirling around you like a miasma. I have goals and a strong desire for simplicity in my personal life. We don’t go together.”
“Neither do oil and vinegar.”
“Don’t be obtuse. We’ve got people chasing us all over L.A. Mary’s one of them, and there must be others. I don’t like crazy, murderous people, old-style gangsters or the unknown. Not when any of those things might leave me dead. Our getting involved beyond a professional level would be stupid. It could even prove fatal.” When she stopped for breath, she noticed that he looked bored rather than annoyed and infinitely more sexy than seductive. Had she misread the intent behind his approach? Had she been wrong about him from the start?
He made no further attempt to push aside the chair. Sam ran a tired hand over her eyes and let the tension drain from her body. She was being ridiculous, overreacting to the events of the past week. Overreacting to Aidan’s powerful brand of sensuality.
“Are you done?” he asked when she didn’t add anything more.
She hesitated, not trusting him or herself. “I don’t know. Maybe. It depends what you have in mind.”
“What makes you think I have anything in mind?” Same dispassionate tone as before. Her suspicion mounted.
“Because you’re too agreeable, that’s why.”
“Yeah?” He moved and she jumped, her backside colliding with the wooden windowsill. His eyes narrowed on hers. “You’re not afraid of me, are you?”
He’d told her once that she should be. And yet…“No,” she said, swallowing the knot of sudden panic that had inched up into her throat. “Of myself.”
That stopped him. Only for a moment, but he stopped, dead in his tracks. Then he swore softly and started to turn away.
“Aidan, wait.” Her action was purely involuntary. She grabbed a handful of jacket and held on. “What is your problem?” Frustration bubbled to the surface. “You come here, make me as defensive as hell, break it all down and finally get me to admit that I’m more afraid of my own feelings than yours—and then you walk? Do you also pull the wings off flies in your spare time?”
He stared at her, his expression grim and unyielding. “Only when they come into my parlor. I came looking for you, Sam. I don’t know why. I don’t want to know. I let my guard slip and so did you. Fortunately, we did it at different times, otherwise…”
“Otherwise what?” Her chin came up. “I’m not a pushover, Aidan. Andy could tell…well, no, he couldn’t, but trust me, I don’t fall to pieces at the sight of a handsome male. I like my life the way it is. Besides which, what I don’t know about you could fill half the city library. So forget ‘otherwise’, Brodie. We’re working toward a common goal. Let’s leave it at that and figure out our next move, okay?”
He thought about it, though what he thought was anyone’s guess. Sam had never met a man who could shut down his facial expressions so completely. He must be half Irish actor, half Scottish chameleon.
Finally, a single wicked brow rose. “Would dinner be an acceptable next move?” he asked.
She staved off a smile but couldn’t hide the amusement that danced in her eyes. “At one-fifteen in the morning?”
“The last food I remember eating was at Lulu’s this afternoon.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That pretty place was called Lulu’s?” Yet even as she asked, she was reaching for the red knit jacket that matched her dress. “Our poor world needs a good stiff shot of fifties-style romance.”
Aidan stared at The Sins of Elizabeth for a moment, saw Margaret wrestling with her antagonistic, soon-to-be lover, and pushed the Stop button. “Fifties romance was an illusion, Sam,” he told her. Reaching out, he pulled several trapped strands of dark hair from her collar. “Hollywood hype
dished it out by the plateful to a war-weary America. The illusion’s just gotten tarnished over the years. It’ll be back. We need it back. Computers may be a fact of life, but they have no heart, no soul. People have basic urges. They also love sensual pleasures.”
“Do you love sensual pleasures?” Sam asked softly.
A glint appeared deep in Aidan’s green eyes. “Right now I’ll settle for satisfying a basic urge.”
Her mood had lightened considerably, although a trace of wariness lingered. You could never really trust a hungry cat. Smiling succinctly, she picked up her shoulder bag. “I assume you’re referring to food.”
“Food, dancing. And maybe,” he added as she passed him at a dangerously close range, “a glass of homemade elderberry wine.”
Chapter Eleven
Two in the morning.
Mary rubbed her sore feet, her excruciatingly painful feet. She wasn’t up to a shoot-and-dash-and-drive-and-walk. But she’d seen Dorian Hart’s eyes and nose on his grandson’s slender face and wisely hightailed it out of there before he’d slithered inside the house.
She’d seen the Jaguar, too. Hell, she’d almost stumbled headfirst into it She’d had to walk half a mile around it to reach her own little Legacy and its nearly empty gas tank. Now her corns hurt, her bunions stung and her arthritic ankles throbbed. Trust Anthea to live in the back of beyond. Trust Tobias not to fill her stupid tank.
Crankily triumphant, she shouted, “Tobias! Bring me hot water in a basin. And plenty of Epsom salts. Then park your presumptive backside in here. I have a bone to pick with you.”
Five minutes later she’d picked it clean and the poker-faced Tobias Lallibertie with it. “I’m warning you, Tobias,” she finished ominously. “My deeds go no further than the walls of this house. It’s been you and me for a long, long time now, partners in crime as well as employment”
He looked displeased. “I’m not a criminal.”