High Tide
Page 14
“And how would you know what I was? And what business is it of yours anyway?”
“You exit and I’ll still be accused of something I didn’t do. Remember that Hudson named me his heir too.”
At that Fiona sat down hard on the chair by the bed. “I see,” she said softly. “I see.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he began. “I meant—”
“It’s all right,” she said, interrupting him. “It’s good to know where I stand. After all, I broke your alligator and—”
“You want to cut out the feel-sorry-for-Fiona crap?” he snapped. “From where I’m standing, we have a job to do together and that’s the only way it can be done—together. We don’t have to like each other.” He held up his hand before she could speak. “Or worse, if we do like each other, I think we should keep our hands to ourselves.”
“Oh, so I guess I was the one who pulled innocent you onto the bed. You should write that down on your pad and tell it to your attorney. ‘Fiona tried to seduce me.’”
Ace came around the bed and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Damn it! You didn’t try to seduce me. You don’t have to try anything! You’re a beautiful woman; you’re interesting; you’re intelligent; you’re … you’re …” He let go of her, and Fiona fell back onto the chair.
Taking a breath, Ace took a moment to calm himself. “Okay, so maybe I am cold. You can call me what you will, but what you and I are going through now isn’t real. We’re isolated; we have only each other; so of course we’re attracted to each other. In a physical sense, that is. But in a greater sense, we couldn’t be more mismatched.”
He was looking at her as though he meant for her to understand his thinking without his saying another word.
“Go on,” she said. “I want to hear what you have to say.”
“You and I come from two different worlds. You’re a city girl, and I’m country through and through. I’m …” As he looked at her, there was a tiny smile at the corners of his lips. “I’m this century’s biggest male chauvinist.”
“Pig,” she finished for him. “MCP. Male chauvinist pig.”
“Right there. That’s the attitude that sets us apart. Do you know why I’m marrying Lisa Rene?”
“No, but please tell me; I’m fascinated.” Her voice was heavy with sarcasm.
He gave her a tight-lipped look. “Because she wants the life I want. And because she’s the most opposite of me that I could find. She is as outgoing as I am reclusive. She’s as friendly as I am—”
“Taciturn?”
“Right. And I like the life I’ll have with her. She has no ambitions past wanting to be a wife and mother. I like the idea of having a wife and kids to go home to.”
“You are a throwback! No career woman for you, right? No woman who spends her day at corporate headquarters and leaves the kids with a nanny, right?”
“Exactly.”
“Sounds like you’ve planned yourself a very boring life.”
“And I guess you and Jeremy have your life perfected.”
“I am not engaged to him, but—”
“But you’d say yes if he asked.”
“Of course,” she snapped. “He likes a woman to be more than a pair of long legs.”
Ace sat down on the edge of the bed, looking at her for a moment, and when he spoke, he was calm. “We have just established that, outside of a basic physical attraction that would happen between any two normal people, we don’t like anything that the other stands for. You can’t abide men like me, and I still think women should stay in the kitchen. Are we agreed on this one point?”
“You know, through all of these last days I’ve wanted to know more about you, but when I do get to know you, I find that there’s very little there to like.”
“Exactly.” He took a breath. “So now that we’re agreed on some basic issues, I suggest that we do our job as quickly as possible and separate. You will return to your life, and I will—”
“Return to your cave. Or is it your eyrie above the real world?”
“Wherever it is, it works for me. So, are we agreed? No more of this.” He motioned toward the bed. “I want to be able to face Lisa when I get out of this mess.”
“Suits me,” she said, “but what about tonight? There’s only one bed.”
“I’ll have a bed sent up and put in the living room. Now, I think we should get some sleep, and in the morning I want you to make a clearheaded decision about what you want to do. Maybe you should think of all this as a business deal with nothing personal in it.”
“Great with me,” she said. “So maybe we should start by getting some sleep. You want to leave my bedroom?”
“Of course,” he said, then got up and walked out of the bedroom, closing the door behind him.
And once he was in the living room, he leaned against the door and closed his eyes for a moment. She’d swallowed it, he thought. He couldn’t believe it, but she’d swallowed it.
Twelve
Ace walked away from the door and went to a cabinet, opened a door, and looked at the selection of liquor there. He poured himself a triple shot of bourbon, then took the glass to the window to look out.
She had believed him, he thought. And her anger had put the steel back into her spine.
Ace had let her see the newspapers, but what he hadn’t let her see were the reports that Michael had sent to him while she was in the shower. It was one thing to see the situation from the point of view of smirking newscasters but another to see it from the lawyers’ point.
So far nothing had been found as a reason for Roy Hudson to leave his worldly goods to Fiona and Ace. The detectives could find nothing. His brothers and cousins had men working around the clock. Records were being checked, people were being questioned, but nothing, absolutely nothing, could be found.
And Ace knew that if he and Fiona turned themselves in, they didn’t stand a chance of going free. Because of Eric’s statements and the fact that they’d been in the same hotels at the same time, on three separate occasions, it was assumed that they had planned Roy’s death. And they both stood to inherit what could be millions.
The only chance that either of them had of going free was to find out what was hidden inside Fiona’s memories, for Ace had a firm belief that it was something about her father that was behind everything.
But how did he ask her to risk so much? How did he keep her from collapsing as she had today when she heard that that bastard Garrett had tried, judged, and condemned her without so much as hearing the facts?
The only answer Ace could come up with was anger. If he could keep Fiona angry, she wouldn’t feel defeated. Hadn’t he seen that when she was angry, she had the willpower of half a dozen men? It was anger that had made her able to run across razor-sharp plants to escape the gunman. Fear made her freeze up. Bad news frightened her and made her withdraw into herself. But anger made her move. Anger gave her courage.
So anger it was, he thought, then took a deep drink of his whiskey.
Too bad the anger had to be at him, because, truth was, she was beginning to grow on him.
At that he looked down at his glass and smiled. Well, maybe she was getting to him more than he wanted to admit. She did have an ability to make him laugh, and that was unusual in most females. In fact, she could make jokes under some pretty rotten circumstances.
And she was courageous too, he thought. Maybe she was a little slow at realizing certain things, like the fact that someone was shooting at her, but she had faced the bullets with bravery. Sort of.
He smiled. And then there was her innocence. The thought of that made him chuckle aloud, then he looked toward the closed door and listened. He wouldn’t want her to hear him laughing.
For all that Fiona liked to think that she was a big city hardnose, she was about as innocent as they came. For one thing, it was as though she had no idea how beautiful she was. To her, making herself up to look like an old movie star was a joke. But when he’d first seen her,
with those dark eyes, dark hair, that red mouth above a cleft chin, he …
He broke off his thought and looked out the window.
“You wanted her,” he whispered aloud, then took another drink. But then “wanted” didn’t quite cover it, did it? What man wouldn’t want a six-foot-tall sultry goddess?
But there was more involved than just lust, he thought, and remembered how much she’d hated that cabin of his uncle’s. Ace hadn’t been there in years, and he’d been shocked at how badly the place had deteriorated. If they’d tried to live inside the mound of a dung beetle, they would have had a cleaner time of it than in that shack.
But Fiona had pitched in and cleaned, and after her initial shock, she’d made jokes. In the end, she’d made it a pleasant evening for both of them. How many women could have done that? he thought. Lisa would have been complaining about her nail polish being chipped.
At that thought Ace finished his whiskey. He had been intending to marry Lisa Rene in just a couple of weeks. If he didn’t go to jail for murder, that is.
Turning away from the window, he looked at the couch. It was plenty big enough to sleep on, and he’d better get his sleep because tomorrow they had to start searching. Searching for what, he didn’t know. Nor did he know how they were to start looking.
All he was sure of was that if he was going to succeed, he was going to have to keep Fiona furious at him. As he settled down on the couch, he closed his eyes, and the image of Fiona in the tub, raising one of her long, long legs came to him. Furious, he thought. Yes, indeed. Furious.
Thirteen
“Good morning,” Fiona said brightly when Ace opened the bedroom door. She was up and dressed and sitting at the little desk across from the bed, and when Ace returned from the bathroom, she smiled at him.
“All right,” he said warily. “I’ll bite. What’s happened?”
“Nothing,” she said, still smiling.
Ace gave her a narrowed-eyed look. “What are you up to?” He walked to the desk and saw that she had written on every piece of paper from the drawer. Besides using all the stationery, she’d scribbled all over the room-service menu and on the inside of the binder that held the directory of hotel services.
“I’ve decided you’re right,” she said.
At that Ace groaned. “When a woman says that, I know I’m in for it.”
Fiona’s face changed as her eyes brightened with anger. “I’ve been up most of the night, and I’ve been telling myself that you couldn’t possibly be as horrible as you say you are, but here you are proving me wrong.”
“I like to please,” he said, then sat down on the foot of the bed. “Make any decisions yet?”
“I don’t like the way you did it, but you’re right: we can’t turn ourselves in or we’ll never get out. Is that your opinion too?”
“Pretty much. So what have you been writing?”
“Trying to figure out what we know and what we need to find out.”
“And?”
Before she could speak, there was a knock at the door in the living room. In a movement faster than Fiona could breathe, Ace leaped up, grabbed her arm, and shoved her out onto the tiny balcony. “Say nothing no matter what happens,” he said, then shut the door on her.
Fiona stood outside on the balcony, seesawing between rage and terror as she heard voices inside the room. Would she hear shooting at any minute? Should she be inspecting the drainpipes for possible escape routes?
“It’s all right,” Ace said, sliding the door open. “It’s my cousin.”
Fiona kept her head turned so only Ace could see the look she gave him. She was going to have a talk with him. He could not be allowed to thrust her in and out of rooms whenever he felt like it.
“How do you do?” Fiona said, stretching out her hand to shake the man’s hand as he rose from the living room sofa. A heavy-looking briefcase was on the floor beside his feet. “So good to meet a relative of … Paul’s.” The man was very good looking, shorter than Ace and heavier built. Fiona thought he looked like a longshoreman next to Ace. Even their hands were—
She stopped that thought. “What have you found?” she asked, sitting down across from him.
The man was looking from one to the other as Ace sat down by Fiona. “I’m Michael Taggert, by the way,” he said. As he spoke, he put a thick stack of papers on the coffee table. “I’ve had a thorough search done on Roy Hudson, at least as thorough as can be done in so short a time.” Michael looked at Fiona. “Hudson and your father, John, went on a fishing trip together some years ago.”
“To Alaska,” Fiona said under her breath. “Yes, he wrote me about it. A dreadful trip as it rained the whole time and they got to do no fishing.”
“Right,” Michael said. “Our guess is that during the time the men spent together, your father told him about you. Maybe Hudson felt sorry for Smo … er, ah, John’s daughter.”
“Go ahead, call him Smokey. It seems that everyone else did.”
Michael reached into his briefcase. “Just to make sure that we’re talking about the same man, is this your father?”
Even before she touched the photo he held out to her, Fiona’s hand was trembling. It was a picture she’d never seen before, but then she’d seen few photos of her father. She owned only four, and they were back in her apartment in New York. This was a picture of her father standing in front of a tent with Roy Hudson, and they were holding up empty fishing poles and laughing.
As she looked at the picture, Fiona realized that what she’d not wanted to believe was true: there was another side to her father than the one she knew. She’d never met this man in the picture. This laughing man with a week’s growth of beard was not the elegant gentleman who took her and her friends to French restaurants.
“Yes, that’s my father,” Fiona said quietly, then handed the picture back to Michael. “But all that proves is that he knew Roy Hudson. I can’t imagine that my father painted such a sad picture of his little orphaned daughter that Hudson would feel he needed to leave me all his worldly goods.”
“Especially not one as old as you,” Ace said thoughtfully.
“We can’t all be eighteen-year-old cheerleaders,” Fiona snapped at him.
When Michael blinked at her odd statement, Ace said, “Lisa.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Michael said, then looked away for a moment. “Basically, I came to say that we can find nothing except this trip to link your father with Hudson. And we can’t find anything at all to link you and Ace, or Ace to Hudson, or even Ace to Smokey.”
Michael took a breath. “Therefore, I came to say that it’s the opinion of all of us that you two must turn yourselves in.”
“Someone must have known my father,” Fiona said, acting as though she hadn’t heard Michael’s last sentence. “Someone must have an idea what my father did for that awful man.”
“She means Hudson,” Ace said, looking at his cousin. “Is everyone still saying that Hudson was a dear, sweet man?”
“The teddy bear,” Michael said. “He’d led a boring life, and until he came up with the idea of the show Raphael, no one ever noticed him. But once he wrote that show and put that little local TV station on the map, everyone loved him.”
“I didn’t!” Fiona snapped, then saw the way the two men looked at each other. She stood. “Oh, no you don’t. Don’t you two start thinking that I disliked him so much that I killed him.” She looked at Michael. “I dislike your cousin much, much more than I ever disliked poor old Roy Hudson yet I haven’t killed him.”
When Michael looked at his cousin, Ace was leaning back on the sofa and smiling.
“Women often dislike Ace,” Michael said solemnly. “Tell me, was it his obsession with birds or just his lack of dazzle that did it for you?”
At that Fiona sat down by Ace on the couch and leaned toward Michael. “Both,” she said. “He twists my head around to make me do what he wants me to do.”
“Sounds like him. My wife says—”
“There isn’t anywhere to go,” Michael said. “There’re no clues about anything. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“You mean that our only alternative is to give ourselves up to the police?” Fiona said quietly.
“I’m sorry, but it looks that way. We’ve done everything that the Montgomery mon—” Michael broke off at a sharp look from Ace. “Anyway, we’ve done what we can. Look, here are the reports, and you can read them if you want. Maybe there’ll be something in them that rings a bell.” He said this last to Fiona. “Oh, and I nearly forgot. I got videotapes of some of the Raphael episodes that were shown locally in Texas. I haven’t seen them, but I heard that the show was awful.”
“Bad? Then what’s all the hoopla about?” Ace asked.
“Beats me. But Frank saw the tapes and he said they were disgusting, nothing but a bunch of wastrels. A sort of Three Stooges become pirates, is what he said.”
“That would be ironic if the show is shown nationally and it’s a flop,” Ace said.
“Then the estate he left us wouldn’t matter because there wouldn’t be any money,” Fiona added.
“Exactly,” Ace said, looking at her.
Michael cleared his throat to bring their attention back to him. “Why don’t you two spend the morning here and this afternoon—”
“We’ll let you know,” Ace said, cutting him off; then he stood. “You hear anything else, let us know.” He was dismissing his cousin.
“Sure,” Michael said, looking in his briefcase to see if he’d missed anything. “I’ll call you in a couple of hours.”
“Right,” Ace said, then walked Michael to the door, and when he returned, Fiona was already reading the bio of Roy Hudson.
“Nothing!” Ace said as he threw about fifty pages onto the coffee table, then kicked them when they went spilling.