THE COMEBACK OF CON MACNEILL

by Virginia Kantra

  But her eyes were wide and wary, her face as beautiful and remote as the moon. He wanted to throw back his head and howl.

  Yeah. Like that would reassure her.

  "No flavours," he said.

  "What?"

  He turned around. "No mocha-Swiss-almond-decaffeinated stuff, okay? Just regular coffee."

  She smiled faintly, and something eased between them, so that he caught himself smiling reluctantly back.

  "I'll see what I can do," she promised.

  * * *

  Ruth Ann Minniton nudged the edge of her plate and frowned apologetically. "I'm sure it's very nice, dear. It's just not what I was expecting."

  Val knew that. In fact, she was counting on it. Removing the offending plate, she offered a smile in return.

  "Of course. Miss Ruth Ann. Why don't we let Doralee take this back to the kitchen for you, and I'll ask Steven to make you something else."

  "Anything wrong?" a cool, deep voice inquired behind her.

  Con.

  She turned slowly. Just for an instant, at the sight of him, how big he was, how dark he was, there in her restaurant, her heart thumped in her chest. And then she got a grip. The last thing she wanted—this morning of all mornings, with their relationship on shaky new footing—was to lose it the minute the man walked into the room.

  "Oh, nothing," she said breezily. "Just a little problem with today's side dishes."

  He prowled forward, confident as a lion presented with a nice hunk of antelope. "What kind of problem?"

  Doralee, sliding by to refill table five's iced tea, paused to top off Miss Minniton's glass. "Somebody decided to replace all our sides with french fries today," the waitress said. She arched her eyebrows. "You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

  Con eyed Val warily. "French fries?"

  She squelched a bubble of guilt. Mr. Business Solutions needed to learn he didn't have all the answers. "You told me to try it."

  Doralee picked up her pitcher. "And the customers are not happy."

  "Don't you worry, Doralee," Val said. "Mr. MacNeill told me to send any complaints to him."

  Con narrowed his eyes at her. So he remembered. Good.

  "It's not that I don't like french fries," Ruth Ann contributed in her soft, plaintive voice. "I'm just not in the mood for them today."

  "Did you order fries?" Con asked.

  "She didn't need to. Wild Thymes provides a side with all its lunch entrées," Val said.

  Ruth Ann fluttered her fingers in appeal. "It's just not what I was expecting."

  Con moved smoothly to take her plate from Val, his eyes meeting hers in brief acknowledgement. "I think I understand." He flashed his Big Bad Wolf smile at Ruth Ann, making half the women in the dining room sigh with envy. "When you come here, you expect something different."

  Flattered by his attention, Ruth Ann confided, "That's it. I like that pasta salad. I didn't think I would, but I do. And that thing she does with the basil and potatoes? That's good."

  "I like that myself," Con said. He slid the plate onto an empty table. "Let me see what's in the kitchen. And the next time you're in—" he pulled an order pad from the front pocket of Val's apron, scribbled something and presented it with a flourish "—lunch is on us."

  The elderly woman beamed and clutched the slip of paper. "Ooh, well, really… How lovely."

  Val stood by while Con shed his cool Yankee charm over the dining room and Ruth Ann preened and cooed. Finally, she picked up the rejected plate and carried it off to the kitchen.

  Con followed her.

  She ducked under his arm, extended to hold the door. "Free lunches?" she murmured, looking at him sideways.

  "It's good public relations."

  "It's expensive public relations."

  "You can't put a price on client goodwill."

  Val set the plate down on the long prep counter and pulled open the door to the walk-in refrigerator. "We may have to. I've got four tables with complaints, two that sent their meals back and one that up and left because fatty foods offend her. Who's going to pay for all this goodwill?"

  "I am."

  She dumped a tray of gingered carrots—prepared ahead of time for last-minute substitutions—on the counter and turned to face him. "Is that in your job description?"

  He regarded her coolly down his not-quite-straight nose. "I like to provide full service."

  Yes, he did. Memories of the night before assailed her: his devastating thoroughness, her needy response.

  Swallowing, she replied, "Well, you may have to. Goodness knows I can't afford to."

  "I'm aware of that," Con said stiffly.

  She frowned. She'd intended to tease him, to remind them both that she was still in control of her restaurant and herself. But there was a set to his mouth and shoulders that worried her. "What's wrong?"

  He glanced around the kitchen, at Ronnie shaking flour into the chugging mixer, at Steven turning vegetables on the grill.

  "We can go into it later."

  "Go into it now," she said. "They can't hear us."

  "Don't you want to wait until you're less … distracted?"

  "For your information, it's only men who can't work and listen at the same time. Women are used to doing more than two things at once. We're genetically programmed for it or something."

  A corner of his mouth quirked, but the smile didn't touch his eyes. "Pretty sexist."

  "Coming from you, I'll take that as a compliment." She dished up. "So, what happened at the bank?"

  "Nothing."

  "I don't appreciate being kept in the dark, MacNeill."

  "I'm not keeping you in the dark." Frustration edged his voice. "I'm reporting what I found. Nothing. Nada. Zip."

  Unease prickled her skin like a chill. She put Ruth Ann's plate up on the counter for Doralee to collect and re-covered the carrots with plastic wrap. "What sort of thing were you looking for?"

  "Evidence. Some kind of proof that someone diddled your accounts. There isn't any. Only the one unjustified debit, which Cross corrected."

  "Rob corrected it?"

  "After I called him on it. Remember? The teller mis-added your receipts, and his department didn't catch it. Hey, mistakes happen."

  She pulled a bowl of peppers toward her and began to gut them to go on the grill. "That's what you said when you took over adding the daily deposits."

  "And that's why. But when I went back to the bank today, a lot of the original receipts from your restaurant that should have been with the cash-in tickets were gone. Missing. That tipped me off. And I got even more suspicious when I saw that for more than half the days they're missing, you had lower-than-average deposits." Con leaned against the counter, crossing his arms against his chest. "What I can't figure is whether Cross is covering up bad bookkeeping or outright theft."

  She was confused. "You mean someone withdrew money from my account?"

  "No. That would leave a trail. This is even simpler. Like taking money from the till. What I'm thinking is someone kept out cash when you made your deposits."

  "Could Rob do that?"

  "Sure. He had the means. But then, so did anyone at the bank with access to your deposit bag." Con's eyes were bleak. "What I can't nail down is when he had the opportunity. No one remembers the vice president of the proof department playing teller in the lobby."

  Tension rolled from him like steam off ice. He'd staked his bonus, his job and his future on proving that her money problems were not her fault, and he had no hard evidence.

  Val set down her knife. "Donna," she said suddenly.

  "What?"

  "Maybe Rob had help. Ann told me her husband was cheating on her with Donna from the bank."

  Con lifted an eyebrow. "One of the tellers? That would certainly provide him with the means. I'll talk with her tomorrow."

  He didn't sound hopeful. She didn't blame him.

  "Of course, we've still got the problem of motive," he added. "Cross is a bully and a jacka
ss, but it's hard to see what he hoped to gain by screwing you."

  Val concentrated on making perfect strips of peppers, like slashes of colored confetti. "Money?"

  "Could be. He got any expensive habits you know about? Gambling? Drugs?"

  "No. Nothing like that." She squelched her distaste. "He is having an affair."

  "Yeah, well, unless his girlfriend charges for the kinky stuff, I don't see him needing an extra twenty thou a year for that."

  Val bit her lip and was silent.

  "If there were something else…" Con's fingers drummed an impatient tattoo on the counter. "Does Cross have a problem with his wife working at your place?"

  Val bent her head over the cutting board. "I don't know. He wouldn't let her accept a salary, but he never objected to her coming to the restaurant. He encouraged her, actually."

  "Why, do you think?"

  She shrugged. She'd been too grateful for Ann's liberty to question it. "It was a … connection."

  Con's eyes narrowed. "Are you telling me that after all these years Cross is still carrying a torch for you?"

  The notion made her queasy. "No. Oh, no. The opposite, in fact. He dislikes me. But he doesn't like letting go. And we were nearly engaged once."

  "Yeah, well, I was engaged, and I can't imagine a less fascinating project than keeping up with my ex-fiancée." He looked briefly surprised by the discovery before he refocused on her. "Come on, Dixie. Help me out here. Why would Cross want to put the squeeze on you?"

  Across the kitchen, the mixer thumped. The range fan clicked and buzzed. Val's pulse thundered in her ears. She felt boxed in between the refrigerator and the worktable, trapped between reluctance to resurrect her teenage ghost and the knowledge that Con wasn't going to stop. A rational man, he would seek the reassurance of facts, looking for answers, picking her responses apart.

  She positioned the knife over the cutting board. Her knuckles on the handle were nearly white.

  "Because I got away," she said.

  From the corner of her eye, she could see Con watching her, his casual pose at odds with his almost unnatural stillness. Beneath her knife, the peppers glistened, red and yellow and green. Her stomach almost heaved in protest.

  "Explain." The single word rang between them like a pot dropped on a hard tile floor.

  She drew a deep breath, steadying her voice and the blade. "Because before I left for New York, Rob tried really hard to make me stay, all right? He was my boyfriend, remember. Three years older than me. He figured he had the right to stop me. He figured he had the right to do anything he wanted."

  Con never moved. But the very quality of his stillness changed. He froze as cold and solid as a glacier, and anger emanated from him in waves as chill as the air that rolled from the refrigerator. Standing in the warm, close kitchen, Val felt goose bumps prickle along her arms.

  "You said he never bit you," Con said.

  "He didn't."

  She hadn't made it necessary. She'd only said "No" and "Stop," and once, she was pretty sure, "Please don't."

  That was one of the hardest things she'd had to face and overcome since, that "please." Because "stop" and "no" hadn't been enough, and she hadn't fought Rob hard enough to make it necessary for him to hit her to get his way.

  "I was stupid," she said. "We'd been arguing. He'd been drinking. I should have known better than to get in his car."

  Con expressed his opinion of that in one tight word. "Maybe trusting yourself alone with a jerk is bad judgment. But forcing a woman against her will is a felony."

  She was stunned by his swift understanding, by his immediate support. Tears pricked her eyes. And then he ruined it.

  "I'll kill him," he said, very quietly.

  She shivered. "No. I've dealt with it. I'll deal with him."

  "You haven't dealt with it. The bastard is still alive." She put up her chin. "And so am I. I'm not claiming victim status. I won't be defined by something that happened to me nine years ago."

  "Nine?"

  "Years ago. It wasn't even really…" But she'd spent too many years working through the trauma to lie. "It's ancient history," she finished firmly.

  "So, you were, what? Eighteen?"

  "Seventeen."

  He pushed away from the side of the refrigerator, radiating suppressed violence. "I'll kill him."

  "You will not." She slammed the knife down into the board.

  The sound made Steven turn around. Con scowled at him, and the cook turned hastily away.

  Val lowered her voice. "I'm not letting you turn this into some macho demonstration of don't-mess-with-my-woman. If Rob is abusing his position at the bank, we need a long-term solution."

  "I'll bury him," he said through white, even teeth. "That's a permanent solution."

  "It's not a solution at all." She struggled to take charge. Healing was learning to be in charge again. "We need something we can take to my father and the police. What happened to me is only relevant to the extent that it sheds some light on motive."

  "It's damn relevant to me."

  Val didn't like his assumption that she was still somehow a victim. She felt him snatching control of what had happened to her, relegating her to the needy, brutalized girl who'd fled home nine years ago. She was beyond that.

  "Well, that's too bad. This isn't about you. This is about me, and I've put it behind me."

  He froze. There was a savage look in his eyes that was almost like hurt. But his voice when he spoke was soft and sneering.

  "Fine. That makes things real dear. I'm not supposed to get involved in something that's 'about you.' But what about your friend Ann? What about the next woman Cross decides to abuse? Am I allowed to get involved then?"

  Her hands were shaking. She hid them in her apron. "You're misunderstanding me. I appreciate what you've done for Ann. What you're trying to do for me. But does it really make a difference to us, to you, something that was over nine years ago?"

  "Hell, yes, it makes a difference."

  He might as well have socked her in the jaw. Her head snapped back. Her eyes burned with tears. She'd wanted to think—she'd fooled herself into thinking—that because Con had met her as the woman she'd become, he wouldn't be concerned with who she'd been: a frightened teen running from what her parents would think, running from what the town would say, running from what Rob insisted were her only options…

  Because Con had given her choices, because he'd respected her decisions, Val had imagined one episode of coerced sex with an angry high school boyfriend wouldn't make a difference to him when he looked at her now.

  Who was she kidding?

  Of course it made a difference.

  "Val, I…" Ann Cross rounded the bank of shelves and stopped dead in the aisle. "I'm sorry. Am I interrupting?"

  "No," Val said.

  "Yes," Con snapped at the same time. Ann flinched, and he visibly clamped a lid on his temper.

  "No," he corrected himself. He treated her to a dose of the patented MacNeill smile, half-strength but still remarkably potent. "First day on the new job, right? You go on ahead. I've got work to do." He leveled a look at Val, the smile fading.

  "We'll talk," he warned her. "Later."

  She fought the sick lurch of her stomach. She could hardly wait.

  * * *

  Chapter 14

  «^»

  "Come on," Con ordered. "We're getting out of here."

  Val straightened stiffly from wiping down a lunch table, one hand to her aching back. The dining room was empty. Steven had already clocked out, and Ann had gone home—back to the shelter, Val corrected herself. Con braced open the swinging kitchen door, alert and impeccable in pressed khaki pants and a crisp blue shirt that matched his eyes. Val almost cried with frustration. She was dog-tired and dirty, in no shape to go a couple of rounds with the Yankee contender and in no mood to be pushed around.

  She brushed her hair from her face. "And going where?"

  Threading his way through the tab
les, he took the rag from her hand and tossed it on a nearby serving cart. "My brother's for dinner. They're expecting us around five."

  She didn't need his pity invitation. She could feed herself. She could take care of herself. "I didn't agree to dinner at your brother's."

  "Sure you did. Yesterday, in your office." He got behind her and tugged at her apron strings, putting her braid over her shoulder.

  He was being nice again, she thought crossly. It made him harder to resist. "When you got back from Boston, you said."

  He turned her around and lifted the apron over her head. "Yeah, well, I called my sister-in-law, and they're free tonight."

  She pulled down the apron to get a better look at his face, sure she'd been set up. Con's expression was just a little too straight to be innocent. And then his mouth crooked. Not innocent at all. But she felt herself softening, anyway.

  "Please?" he coaxed. "You're going to love them."

  She frowned, annoyed at the way her heart responded to his persuasion after his caveman act that afternoon, irritated by her worry that she would somehow fall short in his eyes, in the eyes of his family. She couldn't even impress her own mother.

  "But are they going to love me?" she muttered, wadding up the apron between them.

  "Relax." His thumbs rubbed over her shoulders before he released her. "It'll be fun. You need the night off."

  She needed something. And what did it matter, what the MacNeills thought of her? Once Con went back to Boston she would never see these people again. Funny how that thought failed to soothe her.

  At least if they were at his brother's, Con wouldn't be prowling the streets hunting for Rob and looking for a fight or quizzing her on her past relationships.

  "I have to go change," she announced.

  "Are you asking for my help?"

  She ignored the lick of excitement she felt at his suggestion and tipped her head to one side. "When did you say we were expected?"

  He laughed. "Five o'clock. No time, then. Go on. I'll wait."

  She hurried upstairs to dress and then wasted precious minutes scowling at the contents of her closet. So what did you wear to meet the family of a man who dressed like he'd stepped out of a glossy ad page in GQ? She finally settled on a long full flowered skirt, a skinny white ribbed top with narrow straps, silver hoops and silver bracelets and a peacock feather earring.