Daisy rubbed a comforting hand against the small of his back. “C’mon,” she urged. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I know you’re furious, but I’d really like to avoid a shoot-out on a public street if the thugs are still around. Innocent people could get caught in the cross fire.”
“Yeah.” He drew a couple of deep breaths to get his emotions under control. “Let’s go home.”
Jacobsen shifted impatiently from one foot to the other as he looked over at Autry. “So, what are we waitin’ for?” he demanded. “Let’s go get ’em.”
Autry was torn. Coltrane and the blond who’d bested Jacobsen were exactly where they’d set them up to be. He knew Jake was frothing at the mouth to pay Coltrane’s hired muscle back, and she was all decked out in a dress, which could only slow her down. Conditions were about as favorable as they were going to get.
And yet…
Their pigeons looked pretty damn cozy. They’d clearly spent the night together in the hotel, and he had a feeling Douglass could use that in some way.
“C’mon,” Jacobsen growled.
“We aren’t gonna do it.”
“What?” His partner swung around on him. “Are you fuckin’ nuts? Why the hell not?”
“Where would it get us, Jake? We’ve already tossed the car—we know it’s clean. Coltrane’s not likely to be carrying the prints on him.”
“So we’ll beat the shit out of him until he tells us where he’s hiding them.”
“No. We’re gonna play it smart this time. Coltrane’s gotten pretty tight with his bodyguard. Let’s take that information to Douglass—and see what he wants to do with it.”
Mo watched Reid sit down across the dining room table. He was dressed in his conservative banker’s pinstripes; only his rep tie had yet to be tightened; the knot was yanked down between the first and second buttons of his shirt. He returned her gaze across the polished mahogany, his hazel eyes level and his mouth unsmiling, and she thought he looked like a stranger.
An exciting stranger.
She shifted in her seat. Where on earth had that come from? It was ridiculous, preposterous…
And true. The Reid she’d fallen in love with and married was an easygoing man, quick to laughter and slow to anger. Though their relationship had been strained for the past few years, that hadn’t affected the inherent easiness that formed the basis of his personality. But the Reid looking at her now looked as if he’d be a harder sell entirely. He looked determined and somehow predatory. Sexual, even. As if he might sweep the china and silver from the table at any moment and have wild, uncontrolled sex with her on its surface.
Good grief. She pressed her thighs together. Clearly it had been much too long since they’d had any kind of sex, let alone the wild, uncontrolled variety. She resisted the urge to pick up her linen napkin and fan herself with it. Instead, she sat up straight and raised her eyebrows at him inquiringly. This was not the time to be indulging in ludicrous adolescent fantasies.
“I’ve got something for you,” Reid said and reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket. He pulled out a small stack of checks and tossed them down on the table. They fanned out when they hit the highly polished surface, but he planted a fingertip on the top one to anchor them, then pushed them over to her side of the table.
“What is this?” She reached to scoop up the stack, sorted through them one by one, then looked up at him again, her heart beginning to pound. “Reid? My God. This is—”
“About half of what you need. A few of my loanees came through for me.”
Exactly the way he had said they would. Just once it would be nice if you’d have a little faith in me. She heard his voice in her head yet again. Apparently, he had followed up on the phone calls that she’d blown off as useless. Either that or his deadbeat school chums had come through for him just as he had said they would.
She looked across the table at him. “I…I…I…” She cleared her throat. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say, ‘You were right, Reid. I was wrong.’”
A laugh exploded in her throat. That sounded like the old Reid, but he still wasn’t smiling. “You were right, Reid. I was wrong.”
“Now take off your clothes.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Just kidding.”
“Oh.” Too bad. She realized with surprise that she desperately wanted to get naked with the man across the table.
“Please pass the sausage before it gets cold.”
She did so, as well as the fruit platter and the basket of toast she’d prepared. As they dished up their food, all was silent except for the sound of cutlery against china. Reid took a couple of bites and then set his fork down on his plate.
“Is my tux home from the cleaners?”
“Yes.” She looked at him askance.
“Good. If you’ve got anything on your calendar for Friday night, clear it off. We’re going to the Whitcomb gala.”
She looked at him in surprise. “The one for J. Fitzgerald Douglass?” Usually Reid would rather contract the Black Plague than attend a mad-crush social event such as that promised to be.
“Yeah. I expect several of my old buddies to be in attendance. One or two that I’ve already left messages for, as well as several that I haven’t gotten around to contacting. It’s time to remind the first group I mean business and to let the second know their payment is overdue.”
Mo set down her fork also. He looked so tough and competent, and longing rose up inside of her as she gazed at him across the table. “Reid.”
“We’re going to get the rest of the money you need,” he assured her coolly and picked up his fork again. “Then you and I are going to sit down and talk about our marriage.”
17
THEY were less than a mile from the carriage house when Nick suddenly ordered the cab driver to pull over to the curb. Thrown forward by the cabbie’s prompt compliance, Daisy peeled herself off the back of the front seat and raised an eyebrow at Nick, who had climbed out of the car and turned to lean back in.
“Come on,” he commanded impatiently and extended a hand to help her out of the cab.
The look on his face made it clear she shouldn’t hold her breath waiting for an explanation, so she scooted across the seat and got out.
“Keep the meter running,” Nick told the driver. “We won’t be long.”
Daisy resisted the drag on her hand that urged her to follow in his wake like a good little soldier. Instead she stood her ground, forcing him to stop. Shaking her gown back into place, she looked up at him. “You want to tell me what the heck is going on, Coltrane?”
“I’m cranked and I need a distraction to help me work it out,” he said. He pinned her in place with the intensity of his eyes. “But there’s a limit to how many times I can nail you without making you sore.”
“For heaven’s sake, Nick.” Heat flared in all those places he’d trained to expect pleasure, and she felt it throbbing fiercely in her cheeks.
He looked down at her and smiled for the first time since he’d seen the wreckage of his Porsche. “Just stating the facts, ma’am. Except I should have said ‘make love.’” He ran a fingertip over the bridge of her nose. “I don’t have anything scheduled this afternoon, and that means I’m going to have to pace myself with you. So that leaves…videos.”
“Videos?” She looked at the storefronts and saw that they were, indeed, in front of a video store.
“You know—little movies you watch on your TV? Lots of cars and buildings exploding, people getting blown away in gloriously gory Technicolor?”
“My, doesn’t that sound ducky.” She grimaced but slipped beneath his arm as he held the door open for her. “How about a nice calming classic instead? The Sound of Music, maybe.”
“Oh, yeah, that’ll work out my aggressions. Next you’ll be suggesting one of those artsy subtitled foreign films.”
“Nah. I’ve never particularly cared for reading my movies.”
&n
bsp; The store was deserted at that hour of the morning, but the young woman behind the desk stopped in the midst of checking in a stack of returned videos to stare at them. Her jaw ceased masticating her gum midchew.
“What?” Daisy stared the girl down. “Don’t all your patrons come in dressed like this?”
“Um, no, ma’am.”
Daisy’s head reared back. “Ma’am?” she whispered in horror.
Nick tugged on her arm. “Come on. The meter’s running.”
She strode along in his wake, but not without shooting a last, malevolent look over her shoulder. “She called me ma’am, Nick. My mother is a ma’am.”
“It’s not an insult, Blondie. The girl’s just being polite. Consider it a sign of respect.”
“Respect, my ass. It’s a sign of age.” She peered at her reflection in a piece of chrome shelving as they whizzed past. Granted, she didn’t look nearly as good as when Benny had fixed her up. But she was pretty sure she didn’t look any older than she had yesterday.
He stopped in front of a shelf and pulled down an empty video box. “Now, this is a classic.”
“The Abyss? Ooh, it’s got Ed Harris in it. I like him.” She took the box from him and flipped it over to read the back copy. “Nick, it’s science fiction!”
“Yeah, but you’ll like it. It’s got lots of female-friendly stuff in it.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Define female-friendly.”
“You know, love stuff.” Her eyes must have grown downright dangerous because he quickly amended, “Did I say love stuff? I meant chick-empowerment stuff. Now you pick one.”
“I bet I know where I can find something male-friendly.” She dragged him over to the cartoon section.
“Very funny. You going to actually pick something, or are you going to leave it all up to me?”
“Fat chance. Like I want to spend the afternoon watching exploding cars or women with grossly augmented boobs.” She walked over to the classics and checked out the titles. “How about Harvey? Or Friendly Persuasion, maybe.”
He leaned to study her selections. “My choice is rabbits or geese?” Shrugging, he straightened. “You’re right. This was a dumb idea.”
“I never said that.”
“Yeah, well, you’re right anyway. Let’s go home. I’ll go back to Plan A.”
“I know I’m going to regret this, but I’ll bite. What’s Plan A?”
“That’s where I spend the afternoon ruining you for other men.”
She had an awful feeling he’d already done that, and her chances of getting out of this relationship with a whole, unbruised heart were growing slimmer by the hour. That didn’t stop her from angling her chin up at him. “I don’t know how to break this to you, Coltrane, but your ego is immensely larger than your di—”
He clamped a hand over her mouth. But he grinned down at her and some of the shadows fled from his eyes. “Miss Parker, please. If you can’t say anything nice, at least have the decency to be vague.”
She pulled his hand away. “That’s very cute, Nick. Did you learn that at the Thumper School of Charm?”
“No, I’m pretty sure it was at a survival training course for the ever-fragile male id.” He jerked his thumb at the video shelf. “Make your selection. If we don’t get a move on, our cab fare’s going to rival the national debt.”
Clouds had begun to roll in from the ocean by the time the taxi dropped them off, and the temperature had dropped a good fifteen degrees. Daisy went straight to the bedroom to change into a sweater and jeans. When she came out, Nick had taken off his tux jacket and was on the phone at the breakfast bar, reporting the damage to his car. She listened as he finished the conversation with the police department, then dialed his insurance company.
He was tense when he joined her on the couch a few moments later, and the shadows were back in his eyes. She tossed aside the magazine she hadn’t really been reading and swiveled to face him, hugging her knees to her chest. “Are you okay?”
“No.” He yanked off his bow tie and started working the studs out of his shirt. “I’m hacked off all over again. Those goons wrecked my car for no good reason, my insurance company is probably going to raise my rates, and I’m being persecuted by a man everyone else considers a—” He cut himself off and stared down at a pearlized stud that refused to slip free of its hole. “This freakin’ shirt isn’t helping. Who the hell invented these fasteners, anyway?” Curling his fingers around the plackets, he pulled roughly with both hands, threatening the hand-sewn buttonhole that hadn’t released its stud quickly enough, as well as those still fastened below it.
“Easy,” she said softly and rolled onto her knees in front of him. She brushed his hands away and eased the last few studs free. Then she rose up to push the shirt off his shoulders and down his arms.
As it fell to the couch behind him, he stared at her with eyes that burned like blue flames. “Wonderful. And to top it all off, I’m acting like an idiot.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Nick. It’s been a stressful morning. You’re entitled to a little temper.”
“Ah, man.” He framed her face in his hands. “I love you, girl.” Then he bent his head and kissed her.
Her heart smacked up against the wall of her chest, where it throbbed in hard, heavy beats even though she knew perfectly well that he didn’t mean love her love her. It was a figure of speech. He’d hadn’t meant it as if he were in love with her, or anything.
Which was fine; that was exactly the way it should be. Theirs was strictly a physical relationship. And a temporary physical relationship at that.
The warmth wrapping itself around her heart was simply generated by the presence of shared body heat on a chilly spring day.
She told herself that several times as he undressed her and stretched his warm, hard length out on top of her. She tried to keep it in the fore-front of her mind as he made tender, careful, slower-than-molasses love to her. She clung desperately to it as he rocked her into sweet oblivion, whispering, “I love you, Daisy. Love you, love you, love you,” as he drove her over the precipice into a place that was hot and pulsating and reverberated with the shuddered sighs of satisfaction.
Satiated right down to the bone, she found it difficult to think coherently, let alone erect an armor of attitude around her. So she lay quietly in Nick’s arms, and he held her for a long time before he finally sat her up and tucked her into the corner of the couch with an afghan around her. He braced his long hands against the arm and the back of the couch to cage her in and stared down at her. “Ah, man, Daise.” Bending his elbows, he pressed a soft kiss to her lips. “Thank you. I think I might actually be able to cope now.”
See there? she told herself. It was sex talk. Nothing but sex talk. Something in his expression, though, some tenderness or amusement as he smiled down at her, made her shift uneasily. But before she could run it to earth and interrogate it until it gave up all its secrets, he’d scooped up his discarded tux and padded naked from the living room.
He was back a few minutes later, his feet bare, wearing an old pair of jeans and pulling a faded navy sweatshirt over his head. By then she’d decided that the less said, the better. The smart money said everything would be back to normal tomorrow, so what was the point of borrowing trouble today?
Finger-combing his hair out of his eyes, Nick went straight to the kitchen. A minute later the sound and smell of popcorn popping wafted down to her. Daisy rose up on her knees and turned to watch him over the back of the couch. “What can I do to help?”
“Get the video ready. You can fast-forward through the coming attractions.” He glanced over at her. “What would you like to drink?”
“A Coke, I guess.”
“I’ve got beer, if you’d rather have that.”
“Not for me, but you go ahead. Any kind of cola will be fine.” She was still on the job, no matter how much he tried to confuse her into thinking this was a date.
A few minutes later, he carried over a
tray and lowered it for her to pick up the icy can of pop and a glass full of ice. While she popped the pull tab and poured, he set his long-necked beer bottle down on the trunk and grabbed up a big bowl of buttered popcorn and a stack of napkins. Then he dropped down next to her. Gesturing for her to spread the afghan over both of them, he set the bowl in her lap, picked up the remote to activate the video, and settled back as the movie he’d selected began, draping his arm over her shoulders.
Daisy settled against the solid warmth of his side. She picked up her drink and tangled fingers with him when they both reached into the bowl of popcorn at the same time. But her gaze didn’t leave the television; she was already drawn into the story unfolding on the screen.
She would kiss a snake before she’d admit it, but she found herself enthralled by the movie’s love story. She assured herself it was strictly due to the heroine, who was unexpectedly neither a wimp who depended upon the hero to save her sorry rear or one who allowed him to walk all over her. Instead the heroine strode into the first scene in kick-butt mode and didn’t seem to care if people liked her or not. Daisy strongly suspected that Nick had been jerking her chain when he’d made that crack about female empowerment, but in truth the heroine took care of business even though she had problems of her own, and Daisy liked that very much.
She also liked this: being with Nick, lounging around passing an afternoon watching videos. It caught her by surprise, in part because never in a trillion years would she have pegged him as the type to be content with such low-maintenance entertainment. She always thought of him in conjunction with pricey wines, stylish clothes, and sophisticated company. Someone who dined out more often than not and used his home mainly as a place to change for the next event.
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