Jeez, would you listen, he thought. Cook, butler and baby-sitter, all rolled into one. He blamed the woman. She had no business treating him as if he were a lifelong friend. He wasn’t. He was a man with a mission, one that wasn’t going to endear him to her once he got down to brass tacks.
She reached up and set the can of fish food on a shelf, throwing her prominent bosom into even more prominence. Joe tried not to stare, but it wasn’t easy. He felt a crazy combination of lust and protectiveness streak through him, gone almost before he was aware of it. It wasn’t a feeling he welcomed.
Hell, it wasn’t even anything he recognized.
The baby hiccuped, reminding him of his mission, and he turned away, grateful for the distraction. “Listen, Fatcheeks, I need to talk to your mama, so be a good girl and give us a break, will you?”
The nursery was a nice shade of yellow, not too pale, not too brash. The white crib was obviously secondhand, but in good condition. There was a table, a chest of drawers and a lopsided wicker rocking chair, all painted white. She’d done a nice job of building her nest, he’d hand her that, especially if she’d had it all to do alone.
She was right behind him. “What do you think?”
He said it was nice, because she obviously expected it. One thing he’d noticed about her—she soaked up compliments the way a bone-dry field soaked up rain. As if she hadn’t heard too many.
“Is she wet? Do I need to change her? I’m not sure when I need to feed her again, but the nurse wrote down some instructions, and—”
“Sophie. Slow down.” She was twisting her hands. “She’ll let you know, all right? When she needs changing or wants to nurse, she’ll let you know. Babies have a way of communicating these things.” At least he hoped they did. “Now, come on into the kitchen and settle down while I make us some lunch.”
She looked kind of embarrassed when he mentioned nursing. As if he’d never seen a woman’s breasts before. Not hers, but hell, he was pushing forty and she was no spring chicken, herself. Judging her now, he figured her for about thirty-five, but he could be off a few years. She had a mature body—a body some man had done more than just look at. There was something about her face, though, about the way she looked at him, with those big, guileless gray eyes, that made him want to forget the damned jade.
But he’d promised Miss Emma. Sooner or later he was going to have to bring up the Ch’ien Lung, and the longer he put it off, the tougher it was going to be.
Damn Donna! He’d gone easy on her that day she’d called him because she’d been crying so hard he could barely make out what she was saying. And because he’d always been a sucker for his sisters’ tears. They were his baby sisters, after all. They’d gone through a lot together, even though they weren’t all that close anymore.
The arrangements had all been made. The museum had offered to send somebody after the stuff, but Donna had wanted to keep it over the weekend before she took it in to be photographed for the catalog. They had an old set of photographs, but they were pretty dog-eared and the quality wasn’t too great.
As it turned out, Donna had actually wanted to show the stuff off to a man she’d been seeing, who’d expressed an interest. An antique broker by the name of Rafael Davis.
According to her story, he’d waited for her to fall asleep—which was the first Joe knew that his sister had a new live-in lover—and then he’d cleaned her out and skipped town.
She hadn’t discovered the theft until morning. Then, instead of calling the cops to report it, she’d called Joe. Brother Joe, ex-cop, who had bailed her out of trouble more than a few times. The jerk had done a job on her. Missing were two expensive cameras, a diamond-and-emerald ring, Miss Emma’s jade collection and Rafael Davis, alias Richard Donaldson, alias David Raferty.
Twenty years ago, maybe even ten, the creep might’ve gotten away with it, but communications were too good these days. Even the smallest departments were coming on-line. That was how Joe had found out about the woman in Amarillo, who’d signed over her life’s savings to a securities broker named Rick Donaldson, thinking he was going to invest it for their future. Instead he’d walked off with her money and a small Andrew Wyeth watercolor.
In Arkansas, he’d bilked a widow out of her late husband’s insurance money, claiming he’d invested it in a house for them to live in after they were married. He’d taken her three-karat wedding ring out to be cleaned and remounted for her, and that was the last time she’d seen him.
All Joe could figure was that either women were criminally dense, or the guy was incredibly good. Or both. Donna had two college degrees and was working on her third, not to mention a lot of experience with men, all of it bad. Every time one of her marriages broke up, she swore off men, but it never lasted. She’d been fleeced just like all the rest.
He and Sophie ate in the kitchen, which suited Joe just fine. He needed a cozy, casual atmosphere to put her off guard. He planned to work his way around to the subject, even though he’d half decided to put off the hard questions until tomorrow.
“Salt?” she asked, and he shook his head.
“I shouldn’t. It makes my ankles swell, but just this once I’m going to celebrate. I might even make some chocolate pudding. Did you know that nursing mothers can take in a lot more calories and not gain weight?”
He murmured a response while he framed his first question. “Sophie, do you know what a fence is?”
Her gray-green eyes widened. “Certainly I know what a fence is. You’re not going to tell me I need a security fence, are you? Because I can’t afford—”
“Not that kind of fence. The kind I’m talking about is—”
“Picket. There used to be one out front, but it fell down. I cleaned up the last few sections after I moved in. I’m saving them to use on a play yard.”
Joe reached down and massaged his bad knee under the table. “I’m an ex-cop, not a landscape artist. A fence is street slang for a receiver of stolen goods.”
“I knew that. But why—? Oh. This is about Rafe, isn’t it? I was afraid of that.”
She was afraid? Now, that was interesting. “Rafe Davis. Is that what he called himself when you two hooked up?”
She bridled at that, and he warned himself to slow down. He had plenty of time. As much time as he needed. She wasn’t going to sell anything, not while he was here to prevent it. And she wasn’t going to wiggle off the hook, either, because he had her right where he wanted her.
A fleeting image of a long, golden body stretched out in a rumpled bed, golden hair in a tangle over the pillow, and a pair of Spanish-moss-colored eyes gazing up at him all soft and unfocused, flickered across his mind and was quickly snuffed out.
“Rafe and I...we were...well, I’m not exactly proud—”
That was as far as she got. From the room at the end of the hall came the baby’s cry. Sophie nearly tipped over her chair racing from the room, with Joe one step behind her.
Dammit, mam you were that close!
They never got back to it. By the time Iris had nursed, cried, belched, cried some more and gone through three sets of drawers, her mama was practically in tears. “Do you think she wets too much? How will I know when she’s had enough to eat? Nobody ever told me that nursing would hurt, but I think I might be getting blisters. Do you think that’s possible? The nurse said I should—well, anyway, it’ll probably be all right once I get the hang of it.”
Joe was slightly embarrassed, and from the looks of her, so was she. He didn’t have any answers, but the longer he hung around, the more questions he was piling up. Such as why any man who prided himself on being halfway civilized would look at a brand-new mother and think the salacious thoughts he’d been thinking.
Sophie and her baby settled into the wicker rocker, the baby howling, Sophie singing snatches of something that was mostly la-la-la and a few dum-dums. She looked harried and helpless, and Joe, who had never been known as a pushover, didn’t have the heart to push her about the jade again.
Tomorrow, he promised himself. Tomorrow he’d get to the bottom of the matter, take whatever she had left and leave her to get on with her life. He had a life of his own he’d walked out on, one that was still pretty much up in the air. A guy didn’t just end a career that spanned half a lifetime and walk away without leaving a few crater-size gaps. He was still at the restless stage, trying to make a definite decision about whether or not to go ahead with his plans to start a security business. To a single man pushing forty, a steady diet of hard work no longer seemed quite as attractive as it once had.
Four
“‘They called it downsizing, but I’m pretty sure it was more personal than that. There was some talk and all—I mean, Rafe used to hang around the bank a lot while he was waiting for me to go to lunch, and then, after all the unpleasantness came to light...”
Unpleasantness. The lady had a talent for understatement.
“Do you know how hard it is to fire anyone these days?”
Joe did. He helped himself to another slice of toast and wondered how any business could get away with firing a pregnant, single female unless she’d been caught red-handed robbing petty cash, looting the retirement fund and harassing every male in sight. Maybe not even then. “So you were downsized. What happened next?”
“Since my rent was paid up through the end of the month, I gave notice at the apartment and started looking for another job and a place to stay. Not many people wanted to hire a woman who was going to have to take maternity leave in a few months, but I can’t really blame them for that.”
Neither could Joe. He blamed the bastard who’d gotten her in this fix and walked out on her. If it was Davis, he was already beyond the reach of the law. If it was some other lowlife, he ought to be strung up for crow bait. But that wasn’t what he’d come back to accomplish today. “So how come you sprung for a house instead of renting a couple of rooms? Isn’t that a pretty big commitment for a single woman with no visible means of support?”
Loaded question. He waited for an answer. Her eyes had a way of going slightly out of focus when she was concentrating. He’d noticed it before. He’d picked up on a lot of things about her in the brief time he’d known her, which, in terms of all they’d shared, was a hell of a lot more than just a chronological few days.
“As it happened, I came into some money. I know this real estate agent—she lived in the apartment across the hall? Anyway, she told me all about this house she had listed that I could lease with an option to buy, and about equity. It’s not like pouring rent money down a hole with nothing to show for it. Owning a house is an investment for the future, and besides, living in the country is cheaper than living in town.”
Smart agent. Joe wondered if she’d happened to mention incidentals like property taxes, insurance and the cost of a new roof. He’d already discovered the reason none of the second floor rooms were being used. “Yeah, sure,” he said, but instead of picking up on his sarcasm she went on to detail her plans for a garden and a freezer and raising chickens. He had a feeling those plans of hers were about all she had to hang on to, which was why she liked to talk about them.
Before he could work the conversation back around to the money she’d “happened to come into,” they heard what Joe was coming to think of as “the call of the wild.” Three walls away and she could tell when the baby’s breathing rate changed.
She’d already started selling off the jade. Severance pay would be a month’s salary, at best. Hardly enough for a lease and an option, even on a down-at-the-heels fixer-upper like this.
It had to be the jade. How much of the collection had she already sold? More to the point, how the hell was he going to get it back? Repossess her house? Hell, it wasn’t even hers yet.
Hardening himself for what he had to do, Joe finished his coffee, clasped both hands over his head and stretched, then carried his dishes to the sink. He listened to the small, homey sounds coming from the nursery down the hall. Mama noises. Baby noises. The sound of a drawer opening and closing. He’d deliberately refrained from joining her at feeding time. There was a limit to the intimacies a man and a woman who were practically strangers should share.
To keep him on course, he went out to the truck and placed a call to his grandmother. He’d thought about waiting until he had something concrete to report, but he worried about her. Physically, she’d recovered pretty well from the small stroke she’d had last winter. Mentally Miss Emma still had a ways to go.
“Hi, sweetheart, did I interrupt anything important?”
“I was just lying down. Are you on your way home? Did you find it?”
“I found it all right, but there’s a slight hitch.”
She said, “Oh.” Just that. It wasn’t like his grandmother not to be interested in everything that went on around her. The last time he’d called, Donna had said she was sleeping half the day. Missing church. According to his sister, the elderly were prone to depression.
Joe didn’t know about that, but he did know his grandmother. She might be eighty-three on the outside, but inside, Miss Emma was ageless. There was only one woman in the world who’d ever been able to crack his shell and touch him where he lived. His mother had never done it. She’d been too busy making life hell for his dad. His ex-wife, Leeza, hadn’t even tried.
He’d never been a match for his grandmother, though. Miss Emma had had his number right from the start, when he’d gone to live with her, a chip the size of a redwood stump on both shoulders.
“The baby takes up a lot of time right now. Trying to teach her the difference between night and day—you know how it is.”
“I only had the one. Your father. It doesn’t look like any of his offspring are going to do their duty by the family.”
Joe started sweating, and it wasn’t entirely the heat. Pressure did that to a man. “Look, why don’t you call the museum and tell them we’re back on schedule again, give or take a couple of pieces. I’ll let you know as soon as I find out which ones are gone.”
He almost hoped she’d kick up a fuss about it, but she didn’t say a word. She’d been looking forward for nearly a year to seeing the collection installed at the museum with a placard reading, Collection of Jonathan Joseph Dana. Now she’d even lost interest in that.
The crazy thing was that he could still remember all the grief she’d given the old guy over that same collection while he was alive. “Why can’t you take up fly-fishing or womanizing like any normal, reasonable man?” she’d demanded the time he’d blown eighty grand for a chunky little jadeite tray. Jonathan had launched into one of his rambling discourses about dynasties and legends until Miss Emma had whacked him down to size again. It was Dana oil money he was spending, after all, not that that had cut any ice with Miss Emma. For ninety-eight pounds of blue-haired old lady, she packed a pretty mean wallop.
Feeling older than the hills himself, Joe stared down at the phone in his hand and thought about the two most influential people in his life. Whatever he’d amounted to, he owed it to his grandparents. They’d taken over after his parents had been killed back when Joe was eleven, Donna two and Daisy three years old. His parents had been on the verge of a long overdue divorce at the time.
Now, some twenty-seven years later, Daisy was in the process of splitting up with her third husband. Donna, also between husbands, was currently on the wagon, but she was studying too hard and driving Miss Emma crazy.
Joe had gone through a career, a marriage and his own battle with the bottle. Through it all, there’d been one constant in his life. His grandmother. Miss Emma. Jonnie—Joe’s sisters had called him Grandjonnie—had been there, too. It was Miss Emma, though, who had been the North Star, the gyroscope that had held them all on course until one by one, they’d left the fold and gone out into the world to screw up their lives.
Joe sighed. His knee hurt. According to the last weather report he’d heard, there was a line of squalls headed this way, the leading edge of a tropical depression. He wasn’t loo
king forward to it. He ached in wet weather.
So he went back inside, tiptoed down the hall to the nursery and looked in. Sophie was rocking the baby, her eyes closed, her head tilted back on a pillow she’d stuffed behind her neck.
He was tempted to scoop them both up and carry them to bed, and if that wasn’t enough to scare the hell out of a single guy who’d sworn off women in all but the most temporary circumstances, he didn’t know what was.
Back in the kitchen he opened one cabinet after another, glancing at the contents and then shutting the door. The broom closet offered no more than a ragbag, an ironing board and a collection of cleaning equipment. He frisked the ragbag and felt like a fool for doing it. Not that he’d expected to find anything there, but with women, you never could tell. He’d talked to one woman who’d had a diamond necklace stolen from a toilet tissue roller.
“Did you ever think of putting it in the safe?” he’d asked her.
“But that’s the first place a robber would look,” she’d said, as if amazed at his naiveté.
She had a point.
Sophie called out from down the hall. “Joe, would you bring me a wet towel from the bathroom?”
“Sure, hang on.”
First he had to find a towel. Then he had to wet it. Then he had to brace himself to walk in there again where she was waiting. His boots made a gritty sound on the bare hall floor as he retraced his steps. Holding a hand under the wet towel to keep it from dripping, he shouldered open the door and stood there. She was still right where he’d left her, seated in the rocker with Iris asleep at her breast. For the sake of modesty, she’d draped a crib sheet over herself, but it would take more than a square yard of rabbit-printed flannel to dull the image that etched itself permanently on his mind in that single moment.
Look What the Stork Brought (Man of the Month) Page 4