Laura and the Lawman

by Shelley Cooper

  She expelled a long, long breath. “Nothing’s wrong with them.”

  “What do you look for in a man?” Michael asked.

  “Money,” she snapped.

  “Just money?”

  “Just money.”

  They worked in silence for several minutes. Whenever they passed each other on their way to enter information into the laptop, she studiously avoided his gaze.

  “Something bothering you?” Michael finally asked.

  “No,” she lied.

  “You seem awfully quiet all of a sudden.”

  Her objective when she’d initiated the conversation had been to lighten the mood. And maybe, if she was being totally honest, to pull his chain just a little.

  Laura summoned a carefree laugh. “I guess I am a little piqued. Even if she’s not interested, when a man rhapsodizes about his fantasy woman in front of a woman who will never look like her, well…” She spread her hands. “You’ll have to forgive her if she tends to get a little out of sorts.”

  “Would it make things better if I told you I found your figure to be quite…adequate?”

  She felt her lips give a wry twist. No woman, interested or not, wanted to be told that she was merely adequate. And no matter how much she ranted and raved on behalf of all the real women in the world, he wouldn’t get it.

  “I appreciate the thought, Michael. But right now the only thing that would make things better is if we concentrated all our efforts on making up for lost time.”

  “In that case,” he replied, “wouldn’t it be more efficient if you and I worked in separate rooms?”

  If only that were possible. She didn’t bother looking up from the computer.

  “We work together. That way we keep each other honest.”

  “Or we collude and pocket some extra cash for ourselves.”

  The silence that fell after his remark was deafening. At first Laura thought she hadn’t heard him correctly, but the look on his face told her otherwise. The man certainly had guts, she would give him that. He was also taking an awful risk that she would report his offer to Joseph. Why?

  And here she’d been about to rethink her opinion of him. She should have known better. Especially after his description of the perfect woman.

  “Joseph trusts me not to do that,” she said carefully. “I value our relationship too highly to risk it. For anything.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting you should,” Michael answered smoothly. “I was just pointing out the obvious weakness in the arrangement.”

  Okay, so maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe he hadn’t been suggesting what she thought he’d been suggesting.

  “There’s no weakness, if there’s no collusion.”

  “No,” he replied. “There’s not.”

  She was busy studying another portrait when she heard him ask, “So you’ve never been tempted?”

  “To do what?” she replied, distracted.

  “To collude with someone while on the job.”

  It was there in his eyes, plain for her to see. No mistake this time. If she was willing, he would form an alliance with her. An alliance to steal from Joseph.

  Why was she so surprised? Laura asked herself. He’d already admitted he was looking for a way to make some easy money. And he’d spent over two years behind bars for thumbing his nose at the law. Instead of being angry and outraged that he should suggest such a thing to her, what she really felt was an absurd desire to cry.

  “Maybe, a time or two.”

  “But you never did?”

  Had Joseph put him up to this? Or was he simply searching for another way of lining his pockets? Where, exactly, did Michael Corsi’s loyalties lie?

  “Why collude with someone, when all I have to do is ask, and Joseph gives me anything I want?”

  He shrugged, as if to say he couldn’t care less. “Why, indeed?”

  Laura turned back to her work.

  “I guess that’s the end of the idle chitchat,” Michael murmured in a low voice.

  She didn’t answer.

  Lunchtime found them in the massive dining room, eating the meal Laura had arranged to have delivered. The remainder of the morning had passed swiftly, if silently. They’d finished cataloguing all the items in the living room and Vincent’s study, along with three other rooms on the first floor.

  It was amazing, she reflected, exactly how much they had accomplished. Despite his other character flaws, there was no denying that Michael was a hard worker. At this rate, and with minimal overtime, they should have no problem finishing up by Friday.

  Since they were working in the dining room when their lunch arrived, they decided the most efficient thing to do would be to eat on the intricately carved mahogany table that had been crafted to seat fifty. As she sank her teeth into a BLT, Laura kicked off her sandals and let her toes sink into the oriental carpet, the pile of which was thicker than the heels of her shoes. An enormous crystal chandelier hung above their heads, a cleaning nightmare if ever she had seen one. Portraits of men and women, long gone on to their heavenly—or otherwise—rewards, lined the walls.

  She wondered why Vincent, or perhaps it had been Serena, had purchased them. They were all over the house—dozens of portraits of people who, according to the nameplates, were not family members. Most had been painted in the mid to late 1800s by varied artists. Had the Bickhams simply collected portraits, the way some people collect coins or stamps? Maybe lining the walls of almost every room with the paintings was their way of populating this huge, old place, since they’d seemed to have no family besides themselves.

  As she took another bite of her sandwich, Laura half imagined that the long-dead men and women were glaring down their patrician noses at her for despoiling the gleaming table with paper plates and cups instead of using fancy china, cut glass, fine linens and gleaming silver. She didn’t care. The sandwich, the baked potato chips, the ice-cold lemonade, even the apple, plain as they were, were entirely delectable. Surprisingly, since she was still upset with Michael, her appetite had returned. With a vengeance.

  “Can you imagine eating in a place like this?” Michael asked around a bite of sandwich.

  “We are eating in a place like this,” she pointed out.

  He gave her a patient look. “You know what I meant. I was just searching for a subject that wouldn’t set one or the other of us off.”

  Their voices echoed hollowly in the cavernous room. Laura placed her sandwich on a paper plate and reached for her lemonade.

  “You think such a subject exists?”

  He grinned. “Put it this way. I haven’t entirely given up hope.”

  She refused to let that engaging grin of his soften her up. Although she was in no mood to smile back, she decided proper manners dictated that she behave in a civil way.

  “Neither have I. Yet.”

  Settling more comfortably into her chair, she stretched her legs out in front of her. Her first impulse, when she saw Michael’s gaze follow the motion, was to pull them back beneath her and sit upright. The only thing that stopped her was the sure knowledge that, once aware of his regard, Ruby would have taken the opportunity to stretch languorously. Plus, she was wearing pants. Even though they were cropped above the ankle, it wasn’t as if he was getting an eyeful of leg.

  While she couldn’t quite pull off the languorous part, Laura did manage to stay put. “Why did you become an auctioneer, Michael?”

  It took him a heartbeat or two to raise his gaze to her face. When he did, the look in his eyes made her hot all over.

  “Your effort at finding a neutral topic of conversation?” he asked.

  Her effort at trying to concentrate his attention on something other than her. Slowly, and as naturally as possible, she slid her feet back into her sandals before crossing her legs at the ankles and tucking them beneath her chair.

  “Just trying to do my part.”

  He opened his bag of potato chips. “So you’re just making polite conversation. You don’t really
want to know.”

  “No, Michael. I’m curious. I really would like to know why, out of all the careers you could have chosen, you became an auctioneer.”

  “As opposed to a mafioso, you mean?”

  He was teasing, she knew, but sometimes it was downright scary how close he came to reading her mind. “As opposed to anything else.”

  “I don’t know if I told you, but I have five brothers and a sister.”

  Since previously he had only mentioned his sister, the five brothers were a revelation. “Go ahead,” she encouraged with a nod.

  He shrugged. “In order to give each of us special time that belonged to us alone, my mother chose seven different activities to share with us. One Saturday every seven weeks, beginning with my sixth birthday, she and I would go to an auction together.”

  His voice had grown nostalgic with his memories, and Laura found herself listening in fascination. She was no longer killing time. She really wanted to know about Michael and those Saturdays he spent with his mother.

  “Please,” she said. “Tell me more.”

  “There’s not much else to tell. We avoided the big auction houses. Instead, we spent all our time at small estate sales, where we focused on the furniture. My mother taught me all about the different grains of wood and what to look for when judging a particular piece. It became a game for us to find the most undervalued item at each auction we attended.”

  Laura found it astonishingly easy to picture him as a six-year-old, his thin legs poking out beneath a pair of shorts, his small hand thrust trustingly into his mother’s, his brown eyes sparkling with eager curiosity as he gazed at the wonders around him. Could the Michael Corsi she knew ever have been so young, so eager, so innocent?

  “What special memories for you,” she murmured.

  “Yes, they are,” he replied. “Do you have any memories like that with your mother?”

  Laura did. Warm, happy memories of baking cookies together and then taking them to shut-ins. Of drawing endlessly with chalk on the sidewalk in front of the house she had grown up in. Of tea parties where they would dress up in old clothing and pretend to be from a bygone time. The childhood she had fashioned for Ruby, however, had been far different.

  “My mother did things for me, Michael. She never did things with me.”

  “But those things,” Michael pointed out, “were done with love, weren’t they? That made them special in their own right.”

  “Yes,” she said, as if realizing it for the first time, “I suppose they were. Thank you for pointing that out to me.”

  And how extraordinary that he would think of it in the first place. There were, it appeared, more facets to his personality than there were to a brilliantly cut diamond.

  “So,” she said, adding the new information she’d learned about him to the stockpile she was amassing to be evaluated at a later time, “you became an auctioneer because of those Saturdays you spent with your mother?”

  “Not at first.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that, in my early twenties, I worked as an investment analyst.”

  He had such an affinity for money, that choice made complete sense to her. Of course, since he’d started searching for other outlets to increase his cash flow, maybe he hadn’t been so good at it. Or maybe the funds he’d invested in simply hadn’t accrued at a fast enough rate for him.

  “That’s what you were doing when you got caught…” She trailed off.

  “Dealing drugs,” he supplied with a nod. “Yes. When I got out of prison, there weren’t too many job openings for an investment adviser with a record. I bounced around from place to place for a bit. Then I remembered those times I spent with my mother, and I went to school and learned how to be an auctioneer.” He spread his arms. “The rest, as they say, is history.”

  “I bet your mother’s really proud whenever she sees you conduct an auction,” Laura said. Especially since he had managed—so far, anyway—to avoid further incarceration.

  Michael looked down at the bag of potato chips. “She’s never seen me conduct an auction.” Regret laced his voice.

  “Why not? Does the thought of having her there make you nervous? Have you asked her to stay away?”

  When he raised his head, the pain in his eyes pierced her heart.

  “I would love to have her there. The reason, Ruby, that she has never been to one of my auctions is that she died when I was eleven.”

  Death, and its impact on survivors, was something Laura understood far better than she had ever wanted to. She couldn’t help feeling a kinship to him. They’d both known terrible loss.

  “I’m sorry, Michael. That must have been hard on you, on your entire family.”

  “It was.”

  “It was fortunate you had each other to help you through.”

  He nodded. “We each developed different coping mechanisms for dealing with it. Kate, the baby, became fiercely independent. Franco retreated behind his books. Bruno refused to talk about it, as if ignoring it meant it didn’t happen.”

  She was surprised he was telling her so much. Then again, they truly had seemed to stumble upon a subject they could talk about without immediate argument. Maybe he was as reluctant as she to spoil the mood. Or maybe he just needed to talk about that time in his life.

  “What about you, Michael?” she asked. “What coping mechanism did you develop?”

  He mulled the question over, as if he’d never given it proper thought before. “People used to say I was a daredevil. I’d do anything—and I do mean anything—someone dared me to do.”

  “Tempting death?” she asked.

  “Probably.”

  “What kind of things were you dared to do?”

  “Playing Evel Knieval with my bike. Jumping off the roof of my house onto a mattress.” His mouth curved. “I broke an arm and a leg that time and was grounded for a month.”

  Laura chuckled her appreciation. “What else?”

  “Skateboard wheelies in gullies. I bought my first motorcycle when I was sixteen. And on my seventeenth birthday, I got my private pilot’s license.”

  “You can fly a plane?”

  He nodded. “A friend of mine owns a Cessna Skyhawk. He lets me borrow it whenever I want. Flying relaxes me.”

  She’d totally forgotten her earlier irritation and her disappointment in him. Like his affinity for animals, this was a side of Michael she had never expected existed.

  “What about your father? How did he handle your mother’s death?”

  Michael gave a long sigh. “As you can imagine, he was pretty much torn up about the whole thing. He didn’t function well the first year, so my brother, Carlo, stepped in.”

  How well Laura remembered the paralysis that had taken hold of her that first, agonizing year. “Is Carlo the oldest?”

  “No, Roberto is. But he had just gotten married, and his wife was pregnant.”

  “So Carlo stepped in.”

  “Yes.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “He must be a remarkable person.”

  She was beginning to believe in the nature part of the nature versus nurture argument. Because, with all the love and support he had been given as a child, Michael had still ended up in jail. It was a pity he didn’t share more of his older brother’s admirable traits.

  But then again, as she well knew, loss could do strange things to people. Maybe Michael’s forays into illegality were less about money and more about his subconscious shouting, the way it had when he’d jumped off that roof, “Look at me! I’m here, and I’m alive.”

  “He is,” Michael said. “I owe Carlo more than words can express.”

  His mother’s early death explained so much, Laura realized. Not only did it hold the key to understanding his character, but it also clarified why he flitted from relationship to relationship, as well as why he only looked to the physical when entering into those relationships.

&nb
sp; She didn’t want to think of him as a little boy, crying into his pillow each night because he missed his mother. Nor did she want to think of him haunting auctions in the vain hope that he could recapture the magic of the time they had spent together. And she knew the minute her head hit the pillow tonight and she closed her eyes, she would forget all about his murky past and do just that.

  Worse, she was feeling way, way too sympathetic toward him, which left her only a step or two away from, what? Nursing warm, fuzzy thoughts about him? Forming an alliance with him against Joseph? Throwing herself into his arms? Ludicrous.

  “I thought you’d never been burned by love,” she said.

  He blinked, obviously confused by her abrupt change of subject.

  “I haven’t.”

  “Oh, yes, Michael,” she stated confidently, “you have.”

  “When?”

  “The day your mother died, you got burned.” Seared was more like it.

  “Your turn to psychoanalyze me?” he said.

  “Ever hear the old saying, ‘Turnabout is fair play’?”

  He gathered up his lunch wrappings and stuffed them into the paper bag they’d been delivered in. “I thought we were looking for a subject that wouldn’t push either of our buttons. This isn’t exactly it.”

  “I know,” she replied. “But it…interests me.”

  “And it makes me…uncomfortable.”

  “What can I say? Better you than me.”

  “How about neither one of us.”

  “Did I hit a nerve, Michael?” she asked with mock innocence.

  “Okay, Ruby.” He acknowledged her challenge with a wry smile. “I’ll indulge you. For a minute or two, anyway. As I recall, when we had that discussion you’re referring to, we weren’t speaking of a mother’s love.”

  “Loss is loss, Michael. It would only be natural if you put up barriers.”

  “To women, you mean?”

  “Of course.”

  “The way you did to men when your father ignored you?”