What could she say to him? “Come back?” She’d already asked him to stay, and he’d turned her down cold.
He turned the corner and walked out of sight.
Ripley felt as if her heart had dropped to the floor at her feet and if she wasn’t careful she’d step on it. Just as surely as Joe had stomped all over it just now.
Was she a little slow on the uptake or what? She’d been so consumed with the Bowman case she hadn’t even stopped to examine what was happening between her and Joe. She absently ran a hand down her face, surprised to find tears clinging to her cheeks. She remembered him trying to talk to her earlier, when they had returned to her apartment. Recalled the somber expression he’d been wearing since before then. What had he been thinking? What had he wanted to say?
She didn’t know what was worse. That she didn’t know. Or that she would never know.
She sank to the floor, her back against the wall beneath the window, mindless of the spray of rain the wind blew in every now and again.
One thing she did know was that for the first time in her life, she’d fallen in love with a guy. Hard. Kissing asphalt hard. She’d said and done things to and with him she’d never done with another man. She waited to feel ashamed. Instead she felt a pain the size of Missouri spread slowly across her chest.
Had she really been that shortsighted not to notice until it was too late the signs that she loved Joe? Or had she simply been too afraid? Had she poured so much of her courage into her career that she didn’t have any left over for him? For love?
Some private investigator she was. Oh, sure, she’d done a bang-up job on the Bowman case. But when it came to her personal life, she couldn’t tell the difference between great sex and full-blown love. And she’d just let the best thing in her life walk right out that door.
She remembered what Polk had once told her. That he hadn’t met a woman who lived up to his idea of one. She questioned that wisdom. In fact, the more she considered it, the more she thought it was just so much bull. It wasn’t that the idea was better. It was that he’d probably spent so damn much time on his job, he hadn’t paid attention to what was standing right in front of him.
And here she’d gone and made the same stinking mistake.
15
TWO MONTHS LATER, Ripley leaned back in her scratched and dented office chair and lifted her feet to prop them on the desktop. The spring in the chair threatened to dump her onto the floor. Grabbing the edge of the desk, she righted herself.
To add insult to injury, her mentor and coconspirator Nelson Polk was watching her from the other side of the rented office space, his bushy gray eyebrows hovering over his amusement-filled eyes. “Careful there. You don’t have disability insurance yet. You just opened this place. Be a shame to have to close it so quickly.”
Ripley settled for sitting back carefully and folding her hands over her stomach. So she was in jeans and a sweatshirt rather than a wrinkled old suit and overcoat, but what mattered was how she felt. And she felt like a private investigator through and through. From the green and gold lettering she’d splurged on for the front window announcing that Ripley Logan, Private Investigator, had arrived, to the newspaper clippings she had framed and hung on the wall to her left, her dreams had come true.
Her mood dampened considerably.
Well, almost. She hadn’t known she wanted that other dream, so it didn’t really count, did it? A grainy picture from the St. Louis Times and Tribune caught her eye. It was a shot of her and Joe coming out of the bus station, Joe holding a newspaper over her head as rain pounded down on them. It was her complete rapture as she looked at him that made her heart skip a beat.
Okay, so maybe things hadn’t completely turned out the way she would have liked them to. She got the job but lost the man. But at least she’d had him for a little while, which was more than a woman like her should expect. Right?
She made a face. What a crock that one was. That’s exactly what the old Ripley would have thought. The Ripley who whined about paper cuts and filing and the general miserable state of her life. A woman who hadn’t gotten a lot out of her love life because she hadn’t expected much from it. Now… Well, now she demanded more. In her professional life, she’d lived by two philosophies—put everything on the line and let the dice fall where they may. Thankfully, they’d given her a winning combination until now. Unfortunately, she wasn’t so brave when it came to her personal life.
But she planned to change that, as well.
She cleared her throat, watching Nelson fix a filing cabinet on the other side of the large room. He slid the drawer in and out, then picked up the screwdriver again.
After Joe left, she leaned on Polk more than she ever had before. Thankfully she’d never again seen him in the state he’d been in the day she’d sobered him up and he’d told her where the locker was. In fact, she was beginning to suspect he’d put the drink away for good a few weeks ago.
She couldn’t be completely sure what had caused him to drink himself into a stupor that afternoon, but she guessed the young man she’d seen him with the other day had something to do with it. His son? She suspected so. He only had one, and she knew from what he’d told her during one of their many conversations that he hadn’t seen the boy since he was three years old. His showing up after so many years would be enough to send anyone diving into a liquor bottle. It also appeared to be a catalyst for him to stop.
Of course, she didn’t think the Bowman case had hurt any, either. At the bus station when he’d helped apprehend Christine, she didn’t think she’d seen Polk so alive. So alert. And then changes began occurring little by little in his everyday life. Gone were the tattered, smelly clothes, replaced with clean new clothes she’d helped him shop for with the money he’d had stashed in a savings account but hadn’t accessed for years. He’d gotten a haircut, shaved every day and had moved into a boardinghouse not far from the office. She’d thought she’d be doing him a favor when she hired him to work part-time at the office. The truth was, he was doing her a favor. She’d had no idea how to handle the avalanche of clients that had come knocking after the press coverage of her involvement in the Bowman case. She was turning people away.
“Nelson?”
“Hmm?” He looked up from the filing cabinet.
“Do you ever wonder if you let the business run you instead of you running the business?”
He squinted at her. It was hard to believe that a short time ago he’d been little more than a park drunk who could play a great game of chess and had tons of stories about his P.I. adventures. “What’s that again?”
Ripley fingered a file in front of her. It was bursting at the seams. “I just wonder if you ever regret not giving as much attention to your personal life as you gave to being a P.I.”
“Every day I open my eyes.”
She didn’t say anything. She nodded, then absently opened the file in front of her. A picture of Joe Pruitt virtually jumped out at her.
Okay, so maybe she hadn’t completely let him go. While physically he was no longer a part of her life, she’d made him a part of it by scrounging every last bit of information she could on the college basketball player turned entrepreneur. She cringed as she remembered introducing him as a shoe salesman. From what she had gathered from news pieces on his success, that would be akin to his calling her a bike messenger.
She turned over the promotional photo she’d obtained by contacting his PR department and looked through the various news clippings she’d compiled. From posing with sports stars even she recognized to hosting charitable events, he was a man unfamiliar to her. Sure, he looked the same, but the Joe she knew couldn’t have been more different from this man.
She turned over a press clipping and stopped to stare at another one. It was the last one she’d collected before calling a halt to her efforts a month ago. From the society pages of the Minneapolis Star, it showed Joe with a pretty brunette at some event or another. A formal one that spotlighted Joe in a t
ux and the woman in something sexy and shimmering. The columnist predicted future wedding bells for the couple, Joe a self-made man, the woman from a successful, wealthy Minneapolis family.
Ripley predicted the end of her mooning over a man she’d let slip right through her fingers. At least she hoped it would end.
“Go after him.”
She blinked several times then stared at Polk. He’d finished with the filing cabinet and was putting a fern on top of it. “What?”
He grinned, and she knew he wouldn’t repeat himself. They both knew very well that she’d heard him.
“Mail call.” Nelson opened the door and collected the morning delivery from the mailman.
Ripley sat up and accepted the small pile of mail from him. She’d only been in the office a month, so she wasn’t expecting much. Water bill, gas bill, telephone bill, a letter from the Grand Bahamas…
She turned the envelope over, then over again. Nothing to indicate who the envelope was from. Just a postmark. She checked the address. Sure enough, it was directed to Ripley Logan, Private Investigator.
“What is it?” Nelson asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She opened the middle desk drawer, starting when the drawer nearly fell out of its track and into her lap. She freed her letter opener and slid a neat opening into the envelope. Blowing between the flaps, she turned the envelope upside down and watched as a yellow slip of paper the length and width of the envelope drifted down on the air, then landed smack dab in the middle of her desk.
She leaned closer for a better look. It was a cashier’s check…made out for ten thousand dollars.
Ripley nearly swallowed her tongue.
“Well, if that isn’t a nice chunk of change,” Polk said, lifting a coffee cup she hoped was filled with only coffee or else she might be tempted to down the contents.
“Um, yeah.”
The question was, where had it come from? She was almost afraid to touch the check. Merely looking at it, she felt like she was breaking the law. She slid the letter opener under the right-hand corner and gave a flick. The check flipped to lie face down. The initials NB were written right in the middle, along with a smiley face.
Nicole Bennett.
“Oh, boy. She did get the diamonds.”
“What? Who?”
Ripley stared unseeingly at Nelson, then slowly brought him into focus. “Nicole Bennett.”
Polk grinned and took one of the mismatched visitors’ chairs in front of the desk. He didn’t have one problem with his chair when he propped his feet on the corner of the desk. “Smart cookie, that one.”
Ripley blinked at him. Smart cookie had to be the understatement of the year. The brunette had played them all like a fine-tuned guitar, making it appear that she had unwittingly stolen from another thief, leading them on a wild-goose chase to Memphis to get them out of St. Louis, then setting up the original thief with the skill of a professional. Unfortunately, the dead pawnshop owner probably didn’t find the whole fiasco amusing. But from what Ripley had read about the initial robbery in New York, the Memphis man hadn’t been Christine Bowman’s first or only victim. Two security guards had been shot and killed in the heist, a third paralyzed for life.
Ripley sat back and stared at Polk. “What should I do with it?”
“What do you mean what should you do with it? You should cash it, of course.” He grinned at her, showing the result of recent dental work. “And give me a raise.”
“But it’s blood money.”
“Blood you had no hand in spilling, and neither did Nicole Bennett.” He sighed and glanced at the wall where an FBI artist had drawn three different composites of the mystery woman in question. “All thieves should be as savvy as her. Commit victimless crimes.”
Ripley sat back and shook her head, still staring at the check. “There’s no way I can cash this.”
“Take the money, Ripley. You earned it.”
Her breath caught in her throat, her gaze flying to the man who’d spoken from the doorway.
Neither she nor Nelson had heard him come in. Checks of this amount probably had a tendency to do that to people.
“How are you doing, Joe?” Nelson got up, walked over to the stud in athletic shoes and shook his hand.
Joe’s gaze strayed from Ripley’s face to consider the older man. He blinked several times. “Nelson Polk?”
“One and the same.” They dropped hands then Polk glanced at her. “I think I’ll just go…run that errand now.”
“Errand…right,” Ripley repeated dumbly.
The door closed behind him. Peripherally she saw him pause in front of the glass window, indicating she should proceed. Do something. Then he threw his hands in the air and continued down the sidewalk.
“Um, hi,” Ripley said.
Forget chair springs. Joe’s grin nearly knocked her chair legs right out from under her. He sauntered to the front of the desk. “You should take it, you know. The money.”
She finally forced herself to blink.
“After all, you never did get paid the rest of your fee.”
“Yes, but the total would never come to this much.”
“Then consider it a bonus.”
A thought occurred to her. “You…you wouldn’t happen to be behind this, would you?”
“Me?” He seemed to understand what she was asking. “Oh, God, no. But I’m thinking that maybe I should have done something.”
So Nicole really had sent her the check. And Joe Pruitt was really standing in front of her looking more delicious than ever.
Her gaze flicked over him. Gone were the white shirt, tie and slacks. In their place were a pair of gray sweatpants and a dark blue T-shirt that brought out the color of his eyes. In fact…
“You didn’t run all the way from Minneapolis, did you?” she asked.
His chuckle did funny things to her stomach. “No.” He looked around the office, then his gaze stopped on something on her desk. After a long moment, Ripley realized it was the file she’d compiled on him.
She smacked it closed and shoved it into a desk drawer.
“Just some…” She wasn’t sure what to say. They both knew what the file was.
His grin widened. “Actually, I’m living in St. Louis now.”
Forget the chair legs, Ripley nearly fell clean off the chair. “What? When? How long?”
He motioned toward her drawer. “Had you kept up on your information, you would have known it was a month ago.” He cleared his throat. “About the same time you opened the doors here.”
He knew she’d opened her own agency? He’d moved to St. Louis? And he hadn’t contacted her?
“You’re confused.”
“Um, yes, I am. How—why haven’t you tried to contact me before now?”
The grin disappeared, and that serious expression she’d learned to fear came back. “I could ask why you didn’t pursue me to Minneapolis.”
“If you’d asked, I’d have told you. Because I’m a coward.”
His eyes practically devoured her, as if she’d said the one thing he’d needed to hear most.
He crossed his arms over his wide chest, drawing attention to the sweat stains. He looked as if he’d been jogging. The idea that he’d been running by her office for the past month without her knowing it made her feel suddenly dizzy.
“Actually, there’s a specific reason I stopped by now.”
She searched his eyes. “Oh?”
He nodded. “You see, I want to hire you to help me find someone.”
“I see.” She tried to hide her disappointment. She’d thought he’d stopped by to see her, and instead he was in need of her services. She shakily pulled her yellow legal pad in front of her and grabbed a pen. “Who?”
“Me.”
She slowly looked up.
He shifted from one foot to the other. “You see, there’s this guy I used to know.” His voice dropped to a low murmur that skated over her skin. “This guy…w
e’ll call him Joe. And Joe, well, he used to be pretty satisfied with his life. He’d accomplished more than either of his parents had ever expected of him, built a successful business from the ground up, and generally enjoyed what he had—which, from a material standpoint, was a lot.” His gaze swept everywhere but over her as he spoke. “Then one day he met this woman.” He finally looked at her. “We’ll call her Ripley.”
Her heart dipped to her feet then bounded up again.
“And she…well, she turned everything upside down. She made down look up. She made white look black. And she made Joe realize that he’d never really been happy with what he had. She showed him that he’d merely settled. Taken the road well traveled.
“This woman, Ripley, well, one day, after some of the most incredible sex Joe had ever had, she asked him what he would like to do if he could chose to do anything in the world. You see, he didn’t answer her. Because to do so would be to open a door that could reveal something he didn’t want to know.
“Then he left her, Joe did, even though it ripped his heart out to do so. He thought that if he just went home, got back into the same routine, everything would be fine. He wouldn’t have to think about that question, the mind-blowing sex or the woman who had given him both.
“The only problem is, there was no going back. No matter how hard Joe tried, he couldn’t forget the incredible woman who had swept into his life, this Ripley. It took him a month to figure out that he probably never would. He’s got a hard head, this Joe.”
Ripley stared at him, spellbound.
“So Joe named his secretary CEO of his company headquarters in Minneapolis and not only answered that question Ripley had once asked him, he pursued it. He’s now in St. Louis and is first assistant basketball coach at Washington University in St. Louis.”
Ripley didn’t quite know what to say. So she said nothing.
“And now Joe would like to know how the woman, this Ripley, feels about everything he’s just told her.”
How did she feel? Ripley searched her heart and her mind. She felt like the most important woman on earth for having done something to deserve the man in front of her. Like she must not have totally screwed up for him to have come back to her.
Private Investigations Page 18