MacKenzie's Promise

by Catherine Spencer

  He could, and did, hang up on importuning phone calls from strangers; disregard their messages on his voice mail. But even he, hardened case that he’d become, hadn’t been able to turn his back on a woman whose physical presence defined the weary hopelessness hers had betrayed.

  “That’s why I had to come to see you in person.”

  He drummed his fingers on the leather-bound steering wheel and debated broaching the one subject which had been nagging at the back of his mind ever since he’d agreed to take on the case. “How much do you really know about me, Linda?”

  “Only what I’ve read, what my journalist friend mentioned, and what you yourself have told me. I know you’ve already published one book, which is being heralded as the closest thing to a bible ever to land on a police chief’s desk, and you’re working on a second. That you do some media work once in a very rare while, and occasionally get called in to consult when an official investigation hits a snag. You’re also difficult, reclusive and guard your privacy as if it were on a par with the Hope diamond.” A thread of laughter lightened her voice. “I half expected I’d find myself looking down the barrel of a shotgun when you caught me trespassing on your territory yesterday.”

  “Yet you hung around anyway, even after I told you to take a hike.”

  “Yes. With my sister practically catatonic, and my niece missing nearly two months, what did I have to lose?”

  He didn’t tell her, Quite possibly the only thing you have left, which is hope! If they were chasing a lost cause, she’d find out soon enough. Instead he said, “Do you know why I turned in my badge?”

  “Because you’re a rebel and wouldn’t play by the rules.”

  “No,” he said. “Because I screwed up the last case I worked on and a child died as a result. A baby, Linda, not much older than your niece.”

  She recoiled, burying herself deeper into the plush leather seat. “But it wasn’t really your fault. You were hamstrung by protocol.”

  “It was my fault. I was the one who undertook to bring that child home, and I was the one who failed.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?” she asked, in a small, wounded voice.

  “Because I’m no miracle worker. I can’t guarantee I’m going to find your sister’s baby. I can’t promise you anything except that I’ll do my best. I don’t want to mislead you on that. And I don’t want you misleading yourself. So if, in light of what I’ve just said, you don’t think I’m the right man for the job after all, feel free to say so. I’ll drive you to the nearest airport, put you on a plane for Vancouver, arrange to have your car delivered to you within the week and no hard feelings either way.”

  The silence spun out, matching the miles. Finally, when he was about ready to stop the car and shake her into responding, she said, “I’m not going to change my mind. I…trust you.”

  “So did the parents of that other baby, and I let them down.”

  “So you say. But if Angela…” Her voice quivered and died. Obviously fighting to bring her emotions under control, she drew in a long, shaking breath and tried again. “If something’s happened to my niece and we’re too late to save her, I need to know it wasn’t because of lack of effort on my part. I need to know I gave it my best shot—which, at this point, is you. Otherwise, I don’t think I’ll be able to face my family ever again.”

  “You took a real chance, just showing up on my doorstep like that, you know,” he said, steering the conversation into a less sensitive vein. “What if I’d been away or refused to see you?”

  “I wouldn’t let myself dwell on those possibilities. I had to take some sort of action. Anything was better than sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring, and being afraid to answer because the news might be bad.”

  “Are you always this impetuous?”

  “Only if the occasion calls for it. Why? Haven’t you ever done something on impulse?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got married on one.”

  “Why didn’t things work out, do you suppose?”

  “I was too obsessed with my work. I brought it home with me. It was my mistress, always coming between us, even in the bedroom.” He swung a glance at her, deeming it wise to make his next point, even though their association was purely professional. Women sometimes got strange ideas on the strength of very little. “I’m not good marriage material, cookie.”

  She turned to watch the passing scene so that he couldn’t read her face, and said, “Were they your ex-wife’s bath crystals I saw in your bathroom?”

  “No. She’s never seen my house. Never set foot in Trillium Cove, as far as I know. She’d be bored silly in a place like that. She’s a city woman, born and bred.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  She was beginning to irritate the hell out of him again. It seemed to be something she did very easily, when she put her mind to it. “Sometimes I miss the sharing, the closeness. But I’ve learned to compensate. A man doesn’t have to take a wife to find companionship, if you get my drift.”

  That pretty much killed the conversation until they approached the outskirts of Salem where they stopped for a sandwich. “Not up to your omelet standard, by any means,” he told her, inspecting the sparse layers of his pastrami on rye. “Where’d you learn to cook like that anyway, at the Cordon Bleu in Paris?”

  “Among other places, yes.”

  He gulped and just about swallowed his sandwich whole. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No.” She picked daintily at the shredded lettuce hanging over the edge of her chicken salad on whole wheat. “I spent eighteen months at the New York Restaurant School, followed that with nine months in Paris, and finished up in Brescia at the Italian Institute for Advanced Culinary and Pastry Arts, with a couple of externships at internationally renowned restaurants thrown in between for good measure.”

  “Cripes, no wonder you make a good cup of coffee and the best cornmeal muffins in the western hemisphere!”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Amusement danced in her eyes.

  “You really enjoyed making a damn fool of me, didn’t you?”

  She burst out laughing, a ripple of sound as sweet as the music of the stream running down beside his house, and he was stunned by the transformation. He’d thought her eyes were her best feature, but he saw now that she had a lovely, sexy mouth, a beautiful smile. “I did get a kick out it, yes.”

  “I can see I’m going to have my hands full with you.” Too bad his gaze happened to settle on her equally lovely breasts when he said that. Too bad, as well, that he couldn’t control the inappropriate stirring in his loins.

  She was a client, and that put her firmly off-limits as far as anything personal went. But it was a pity. She had the kind of subtle appeal that crept up on a guy. Under different circumstances, they could have enjoyed quite a fling together.

  “Have I spilled something on my shirt?” she asked him, so pointedly that he realized he was still staring.

  He cleared his throat and tore his gaze away. “No. I was just…thinking.”

  Suspicious as a Sunday schoolteacher patrolling the choir stalls in search of unseemly goings-on, she said, “About what?”

  “The best place to start,” he said, knitting his brows in what he hoped passed for a reflective scowl. “When we get to Vancouver, I mean.”

  “I should think, by then, you’ll have had enough for one day.”

  He checked his watch and pushed away from the lunch counter. “Could be. We’re going to hit the Tacoma-Seattle area right in the worst of the rush hour, and who knows how long we’ll be held up at the border crossing. Drink up, and let’s get a move on.”

  They covered the stretch between Salem and Portland in chitchat which, though casual enough on the surface, in fact resulted in a whole slew of personal information being exchanged. That was the problem with the enforced intimacy brought about by spending hours on end in a car with someone. It made strangers seem familiar, and lowered a guy’s guard to the point where he revealed things b
etter kept to himself.

  The conversation finally petered out though when she lowered her seat to a reclining position and, settling her sunglasses more firmly on her nose, let out a mighty yawn. Cripes, if I was boring you, all you had to do was say so! he felt like telling her.

  On the other hand, her snooze did present him with the chance to make better time. Whistling under his breath, he kept one eye on her and the other on the road. When, after a good five minutes, she hadn’t moved a muscle, he turned on his radar detector and let the speedometer needle inch up another notch.

  “I’m watching you,” she said, her disembodied voice floating up accusingly. “Slow down.”

  “I thought you were sleeping.”

  “Uh-uh. Just thinking.”

  “About?”

  “You.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Her admission sent a strange jolt of awareness through his gut. “How so?”

  “You’re very handy in the kitchen. That steak you served last night was top-notch.”

  “So?”

  “So did you do all the cooking when you were married, or is it a skill you picked up after the divorce?”

  “Mostly after the divorce,” he said, wondering why she kept harking back to the topic of his failed marriage. “It was a question of doing that, or living on leftover pizza and beer.”

  “You could have hired a housekeeper.”

  “Not a chance,” he said. “I don’t need some woman underfoot all day, ironing my undershorts and overcooking the vegetables.”

  “That’s a pretty sexist attitude! Not all housekeepers are women, any more than all good chefs are men.”

  “Somehow, I don’t see myself living with a man, even one in a servant capacity. Alone and doing for myself suits me just fine.”

  “Do you ever think about remarrying?”

  “I already told you, I’m lousy marriage material. But just in case you’re wondering about my sexual preferences, I do like women. I just don’t want one moving in on me.”

  “Well, I didn’t think those were your bath crystals,” she said, hinting pretty broadly that she’d like to know who did own them.

  No dice, cookie! he thought. “But they were my condoms.”

  That shut her up. She pulled her glasses back over her eyes and didn’t say another word for the next thirty miles.

  Traffic started to build just north of Olympia, becoming so congested as it approached Tacoma that, rather than fight it, he swung off the I-5 onto Highway 16 and followed it west as far as Gig Harbor.

  “There’s got to be someplace decent where we can get dinner,” he said, cruising down the main street, “and I need to stretch my legs.”

  “I offered to drive so you could take a break.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks! A nervous Nellie like you doesn’t belong behind the wheel of a car like this. You’ve been hitting a nonexistent brake so hard this last hour, it’s a wonder your leg hasn’t fallen off.”

  “Because you drive like a maniac!”

  “You forget,” he said, pulling into a parking space half a block from a waterfront restaurant, “I spent a lot of years in a patrol car, chasing the bad guys.”

  “Well, you’re not in a patrol car now!”

  He stroked his hand down her face. “Relax, darlin’. We’ll have a nice leisurely dinner, take a walk along the harbor, and by the time we hit the road again, the commuters will have gone home and it’ll be smooth sailing all the way to the Canadian border.”

  She blinked slowly, giving him a close-up view of those ridiculous lashes, and nestled her cheek against his palm. “Promise?”

  “Promise. Now let’s eat.”

  They secured a table at the window and ordered wild salmon, caught that morning. It arrived flanked by asparagus spears, baby potatoes drizzled with butter and chopped parsley, and slivers of roasted red and yellow peppers.

  “I guess that once we get to Vancouver,” he remarked, as they finished off the meal with strawberry cheesecake and coffee, “the first thing I have to do after I drop you off at your place, is find a hotel. Any place close by that you’d recommend?”

  “No. You’ll stay with us.”

  “Us?” He finished his iced tea and got to his feet.

  “With my mother and me.”

  “You’re still living at home?”

  “Temporarily. Until the baby’s found.”

  “And then?”

  She licked a smudge of strawberry syrup from her lip, once again drawing his unwilling attention to a mouth he was finding increasingly fascinating. “I’m not sure I’ll stay in Vancouver.”

  “You think you might go back to Europe?”

  “Possibly.”

  Why did he care? he wondered, ticked off by the stab of dismay he felt at the thought of her living half a world away. He’d known her barely twenty-four hours, for Pete’s sake—just long enough to know she wasn’t his type. Not really.

  “To do what?”

  “Work, of course.” She toyed with the last bite of cheesecake on her plate. “My dream is to open my own restaurant one day, but it’s no easy business to break into. More aspiring restaurateurs wind up broke or bankrupt within the first year of operation than just about any other enterprise. So, the more experience I bring to the job, the better my chances of succeeding.”

  “Won’t leave you much time for marriage and all that stuff.”

  “Oh, I’ll manage—when the right man comes along.” She finished off the cheesecake and smiled mischievously. “Who knows? I might get lucky and find someone who shares my ambition, and we’ll open a restaurant together.”

  “You want children, as well?”

  Her eyes darkened with sudden grief. “I thought I did—until Angela was stolen. Now, I’m not so sure. If my baby were to disappear…”

  He reached across the table and trapped her fingers. “Don’t let the actions of one madman take away your dreams, cookie. Men like Thayer are the exception, not the rule.”

  “I hope so.”

  He liked the feel of her hand lying trustingly in his. He liked it too much. Don’t play with fire, Sullivan! Someone’s going to get burned.

  “Time to move,” he said, abruptly breaking the contact. “If I sit here much longer, I’ll fall asleep. I’ll settle up what we owe and—”

  She reached into her purse. “Let me pay.”

  “Don’t give me an argument, Linda,” he said, unaccountably out of sorts suddenly. “I’ll send you a bill when I’m done with the case. Meanwhile, go powder your nose, or something. And don’t take long.”

  They crossed into Canada just after ten that night. By then, she could see the exhaustion in the slump of his shoulders.

  “In view of the time,” he said, following her directions through the city and over the Lion’s Gate Bridge to the North Shore and West Vancouver, “maybe I’ll take you up on the offer of a room, just for tonight—as long as your mother won’t mind.”

  “She won’t. In fact, she’s expecting you.” She pointed ahead, to the quiet lane curving left from Marine Drive. “Turn here. Our house is at the end, facing the water.”

  “What do you mean, she’s expecting me?”

  “I phoned her from the restaurant in Gig Harbor. See the white garage doors just beyond the lamppost? Pull in next to them.”

  “You’re kind of sneaky, you know, going behind my back like that,” he said. “It makes me wonder how far I can trust you.”

  But she heard the smile in his voice and knew he didn’t mind that she’d outfoxed him this one time. In fact, he sounded relieved, and small wonder. He’d been driving for nearly ten hours, not counting stops, most of it on the freeway and too much of it in heavy traffic.

  “Every bit as much as I trust you,” she said, leading the way along the path to the house. “We’re in this together, remember? Watch your step. The lighting’s not too good along here.”

  Her mother met them at the front door. As she made the introductions, Linda saw, for the f
irst time since Angela had disappeared, a tiny flicker of hope amid the anxiety in her mom’s eyes.

  “We’re very grateful to you, for coming all this way to help us,” she said, shaking his hand. “Linda tells me you’re the best at finding lost children.”

  “Linda is too kind,” he replied, slipping her the evil-eye behind her mother’s back.

  There were sandwiches and tea waiting, and a fire in the living room to ward off the chill of the onshore breeze.

  “We want to do whatever we can to help, Mr. Sullivan,” her mother said, pouring a cup and passing it to him.

  He smiled, and touched her shoulder with a kindness Linda hadn’t suspected in him. “You can begin by calling me Mac. Mrs. Carr.”

  “Only if you’ll call me Jessie,” she said. “I’m so glad Linda found you. With you in charge, I feel very hopeful that I’ll soon have my family together again.”

  “You do know it might take some time and that I can’t—?”

  “I have a feeling it won’t. I think you’ll be more than a match for Mr. Thayer. I think he’ll be sorry he ever tangled with you.”

  There was no missing the strain in his smile. “Optimism is good, Jessie, but please save a little strength in case…we run into any snags. It doesn’t do to be overconfident.”

  She wasn’t having any of that, though. “If Linda thinks highly enough of you to bring you here, I know my faith won’t be misplaced. But I can see I’m making you uncomfortable, so I won’t belabor the point further. Tell me instead about the book you’re writing. Is it going to be a bestseller?”

  They chatted idly for another half hour, but although Mac was charming and attentive to her mother’s questions, Linda sensed the tension in him and was glad when Jessie announced, “With you on the job, Mac, I do believe I’ll get a decent night’s sleep for a change, so if you’ll both excuse me, I’ll leave you to unwind from the journey and take myself off to bed. Linda, I’ve put Mac in June’s room, since it’s not being used right now. The bed in there’s a lot more comfortable than the pull-out sofa in the study.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. You’re very kind,” he said, standing up and folding the hand she held out to him in both of his. “Sleep well, and we’ll talk in the morning.”