by Beverly Bird
“You’d have to cancel whatever plans you have for tomorrow.” He watched her face. “You never did say what they were.”
Tara waved a quick hand. “It’s okay. I don’t mind. And you already said you weren’t going to Savannah.”
Christmas in New York, he thought. Why not? He told himself she hadn’t maneuvered him into this one. But even if she had, he realized he didn’t mind.
“Then let’s go, darlin’. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”
Chapter 13
For a woman who loved to pack—she’d brought at least five changes of clothing to his condo, Fox thought—Tara was in and out of the rubble of her apartment in less than half an hour. Fox made himself as comfortable as possible on the single cushion on the sofa while she went into the bathroom to hunt up unbroken toiletries from the mess on the floor.
Then she landed, breathless, at the front door. “Okay. I’m ready.”
Fox stood. “I’ll just need to call Rafe and bring him up to speed on this.”
“Why didn’t you do it while I was packing?”
“There wasn’t enough time.”
She narrowed her eyes fast. “Do it in the car then.”
“Easy, darlin’. New York’s not going anywhere and I won’t change my mind if you don’t get me on the road ten minutes ago.”
“But we don’t know how late Petro Acosta might keep his store open on Christmas Eve. We should get there as early as possible to be on the safe side.”
That was only half of it, he knew. The sooner they left Philadelphia on this little odyssey, the sooner it would be just another December day. They’d already encountered carolers downstairs in the lobby. She’d thrown a handful of change at them so abruptly and frantically one of the girls had jumped in alarm.
He let her lead the way into the hall and she stayed ahead of him to the elevator. Inside, she went stone still, just as she had on the ride up. This time he caught her hand and squeezed it.
“I hate that, you know,” she muttered.
He raised a brow. “What?”
“When you know what I’m thinking.”
He wanted to take credit for it and couldn’t. It was a no-brainer. “Twenty-four hours ago you could have been killed in here. Coming back to it would give anyone a moment’s pause.”
“Do you know I can still smell him? His breath was like rotten mushrooms. And his voice was all scratchy and raw.”
Fox nodded. The elevator dinged. Even if it weren’t the gentlemanly thing to do, he would have let her be the first one off.
She paced across the lobby ahead of him. He caught up with her in time to open the door for her, then they were back at the unmarked and heading north around the college. Fox took his cell phone out as he drove.
“Kate,” he said warmly when his partner’s wife answered his call. He felt the impact of Tara’s gaze as it riveted on him and he smiled to himself. Yes, she was definitely the jealous type.
He took the phone away from his mouth briefly and slanted a look her way. “Rafe’s wife.”
“I don’t care.” Tara shrugged. “I thought it was another nickname for Cornelius.”
Fox winced. Sooner or later, he thought, he was going to have to come clean about the C. In the meantime, he turned his attention back to Kate. “Is Rafe available?”
“He’s not home yet. He’s going over the stolen weapons list to cull out any .357s that might have left that bullet in the tree last night. He says to tell you he doesn’t hold out much hope though. Which kind of makes me wonder why he felt compelled to do it today. If he makes my Yorkshire pudding turn by being late, I’ll kill him.”
“Yorkshire pudding?” Fox said hopefully.
“Where are you?” she asked. “Why don’t you join us? Rafe said that it didn’t seem like you were going south this year, and we have plenty.”
His mouth watered. He looked at Tara. “She wants us to join them for dinner.”
Tara shook her head hard. That wild look came back into her eyes.
“Save me some,” he said into the phone again. “I’m heading for New York.”
“New York? Whatever for?”
“To talk to a man about a pretty red rock.”
There was a beat of silence from Kate. “On Christmas?”
“Not to worry. A good time will be had by all.”
“All? Oh! Tara Cole is still with you!” She sounded delighted. “How’s Belle?”
“Now what in the world does one have to do with the other?”
“You’ll figure it out eventually. Wait! I’ve got a grand idea! Are you on your cell phone? I’ll call you right back.” She disconnected before Fox could respond.
“What was that all about?” Tara asked. “You didn’t talk to Rafe.”
“He’s off somewhere ruining Kate’s pudding.”
They turned onto Fox’s street. The Shelby was back in his driveway. “Now isn’t that pretty?” His voice vibrated with pleasure.
“The shop delivered it back to you?”
“Someone was probably just looking for an excuse to drive it.” He left the unmarked in the street and went to the Mustang, lovingly inspecting every inch of the new window. There were women who’d die for a greeting like that, Tara thought.
Not that she was one of them.
His phone rang. She watched him as he answered and something odd happened to his expression. He was almost grinning, but not quite. He reminded her of a Cheshire cat. Tara got out of the unmarked as well.
“What?” she demanded when she joined him at the Mustang.
He put the phone back in his pocket. “I’ve got us a place to stay.”
“In New York?”
“Of course in New York. Unless you’d rather go to Savannah to visit four sisters, three husbands and seventeen kids.”
She worked it out, discounting the one who apparently didn’t have a husband. “Your sisters have an average of five and a half children apiece? You Southerners are a prolific breed.”
“Not quite. Brigid brought two back from Ecuador. My parents adopted them. She’s not the marrying type.”
“What was she doing in Ecuador?”
“Chasing a monsoon.”
“That doesn’t sound like a Southern belle.”
He grinned. “Brigid fights it. She does, however, make a mean pecan pie when she forgets herself. Are you going to come inside or wait out here?”
“I’ll wait in the car,” Tara said quickly.
He did enjoy her reactions, Fox thought. She’d be thinking that if she waited outside, it might hurry him along. He wondered if she knew how transparent she was, how that heart on her sleeve glowed bright. “It’s as cold out here as a hangman’s heart,” he pointed out.
“I’ll be fine.”
“Just the same.” He went to his mailbox and took out an envelope. He opened it and tossed a set of keys her way. “Fire up the engine, turn on the heat and lock the doors. There’s an extra service revolver in the glove box.”
Tara blanched at the implications of that. She nodded faintly and watched him go to the door. Her heart did odd things in her chest. He always had a thought for her comfort. Always. And the way he moved… He reminded her of a panther, she thought, all deadly and seductive grace. But she already knew he was as quick as a blink when it was necessary. When someone shot at them, for instance.
A giddy laugh worked up in her throat. She went back to the unmarked and grabbed her bag, carrying it to the Mustang. She shoved the key into the ignition and set the heat to blast. Then she hugged her jacket tighter and slouched down in her seat.
It was sensory overload, she decided. An emotional blitzkrieg. For nearly two weeks now her heart had been yanked one way then the other. There’d been so much to feel. It was the only reason she was suddenly waxing poetic over the way Fox Whittington moved.
Ten minutes later he came out of the building again and her stomach curled in on itself. He opened the car door and tossed a gym bag into the
back seat.
“You never did mention where we were going to stay,” she said as he got behind the wheel.
“Didn’t I?”
“No.”
The car rolled out of the driveway. “Well, you’ll just have to trust me then.”
She worried about it all the way to the New Jersey state line. He was up to something, she thought again, but there was no way in hell she was going to ask him to turn the car around.
Fox watched her doze as he gunned the Mustang up the New Jersey Turnpike. It was midafternoon but traffic was surprisingly light. He imagined that many people were already tucked in with family and friends for the holiday.
He waited for the ache.
He had not missed Christmas in Savannah in eight years. Only the December he’d made detective had kept him north through the holidays. A case had been breaking and he’d known that it would mean a promotion. He’d spent most of that week with a burning ember in his gut, resenting it.
No matter what he’d said about Connie’s hellions, he missed the kids already in a way that pulled at his heart. Brigid would be home this year, too, and that was a rare thing indeed. But…there was no ache. He realized that he was pretty much content with the way this Christmas was turning out.
A lot of that was Kate’s doing.
Until she’d mentioned she had a friend with a place in New York, Fox had forgotten that she’d once been roommates with Gabriel Marsden’s wife. That man, too, had been a cop before metamorphosing into a true crime writer with a lot of good things to say. He’d lived in New York before he’d married Shawnalee Collins. In the way of true love, Marsden had uprooted himself and moved to Philadelphia when they married. A writer could write anywhere as long as his heart was in place. But the couple had kept his penthouse apartment in Manhattan.
Fox glanced Tara’s way again. Was his own heart in place? Was that why the farther he drove in the opposite direction from Savannah, the more he relaxed? He waited for the memory of Adelia to shift inside him and elbow his conscience a little for the betrayal. Nothing happened. He’d never expected that a wounded hellion with a spill of unruly dark hair might make him forget his first love, one that had haunted him through most of his adulthood.
Tara wasn’t anything he’d ever thought he’d wanted. She was Yankee to her bones. She was fast, sharp, prickly. She was also lonely, hurt and afraid. She was all the things that engaged his mind and she did quite nicely at engaging his body as well. Thinking about it, his blood stirred predictably. He wanted to pull over to the side of the road, wake her and taste her again. He wanted much more than that, but he wanted it on his terms. He just wasn’t at all sure what those terms were anymore.
He knew he could have her tonight. It wasn’t arrogance; he was simply a man who accepted what was, whether it was pleasant or painful. And what happened between him and Tara when they touched was very pleasant indeed. He’d felt the way everything inside her had surged into him twice now. And if he prompted, if he wanted, he knew they would both take it the rest of the way tonight. As long as he let her believe it was no big thing. If he let her believe it was sex, just sex, they would have a wonderful Christmas in New York.
She could hide behind that, he reckoned. But he wasn’t sure he would be content with it. Fox shifted in the driver’s seat uncomfortably. What did he want out of this relationship? He wasn’t sure, but it seemed very important that he use the time of this drive to figure it out.
“Are we there yet?”
Fox nearly drove onto the shoulder of the road at the unexpected sound of her sleepy voice. “Not unless you’ve got a hankering to spend the night in Newark.”
Her throaty laugh touched his skin. “Hankering? Where do you get these words?”
“They were learned at my mama’s knee.”
He felt her shift beside him, pulling herself up in the passenger seat. Fox decided that it was very, very important not to glance her way right now. Because if she looked soft, rumpled from her nap, with that wild hair all over her shoulders, then it might not matter what name he put to making love with her after all.
“I dreamed,” she said suddenly. “I dreamed of mine.”
She was speaking of Letitia. He waited for her to go on.
“I should have known, Fox. All those years—four years—while I was fighting Stephen over the ruby, I knew my mother would never just will it away from me. I knew there had to be a reason. But…I never guessed. She never said she was sick.”
“She was probably a lot like you.” He felt her gaze snap to him. “If you were dying, I don’t think you would be eager to tell the people who’d be hurt the most by it. You’d do without their comfort, their support. You’d go it alone.”
She hugged herself and tried to make light of it rather than concede that he was starting to see straight into her soul. “Maybe it’s the Gypsy in my spirit.”
“They moved on whenever trouble caught them.”
“Always trying very, very hard not to care about what they left behind.”
“But you care.”
“Not when I don’t want to.”
And that, he thought, might be the first outright lie she’d told him. He turned the car into the Lincoln Tunnel.
“You won’t like it here,” Tara mused when they exited onto West Forty-Second Street.
“On the contrary. I love it.”
“In small doses, maybe.”
He started to argue, then he realized it was true. He wouldn’t want to live here. Still this dose was just about right.
As he turned north, his blood began pumping with the tempo, the fractiousness, the sheer arrogance that was New York. A panhandler nudged elbow-to-elbow with a Salvation Army Santa at the corner of Forty-Seventh, both of them jostling for the same quarters. A cab cut him off near Fifty-Second. A woman in a mink was being kissed passionately by a man in torn, dirty clothes on Sixty-First.
And everywhere, no matter where he looked, there was Christmas. This city seized the holiday with both hands, Fox thought. A garish white snowflake showed in a high apartment window, blinking on and off in the dying light of the day, out of sync with the red lights that trimmed the glass. Everywhere there were people, moving fast, looking frantic, gathering bright red shopping bags with each stop they made.
He turned east across Central Park.
“Shouldn’t we stop at the jewelry store first?” Tara asked. “Liam Bradstoe said it was on the lower east side.”
“We can’t stroll in on Petro Acosta and pin him into a corner, demanding that he drop the whereabouts of a major-size ruby into our hands. That’s not how this is done.”
“If he’s got the Rose, why not?”
“Liam never said he had it.”
“Liam never said he didn’t.”
“Have you ever heard that phrase about bees and honey? When we get where we’re staying we’ll call Acosta first. We’ll pave the way to see him and in the meantime, we’ll think of a very good reason why we’d want to purchase a very big, very red, very notorious rock, even if it’s by illicit means.”
“Then we might not see him until tomorrow!”
“Not likely. It’s Christmas.”
Her heart slugged. “He’s a crook. That won’t matter.”
“Even crooks celebrate holidays.”
“You want to wait until Monday?”
He had every intention of making sure they did. “Darlin’, we’ll see him as soon as we can.”
It was a promise with an edge. Tara didn’t like it. Then again, she thought, what choice did she have? Fox stopped the car in front of a virtual skyscraper. “What are you doing?”
“Putting you up in sublime comfort. I hope.”
“Sublime?” She didn’t know where her laugh came from. She hadn’t meant it to happen. She was too upset about the delay. “You missed your calling. You should have been a writer.”
“Actually, it’s courtesy of one that we’re here.”
“Who?”
“A guy named Gabriel Marsden. It’s his apartment.”
She frowned then she put it together. “The one whose first wife was murdered a few years ago? I remember something about a Broadway producer and Marsden went underground with a beautiful blonde to flush him out.”
“That’s the one.”
“Really? No way!”
“Ah, darlin’, for all your sophistication, you’re impressed.”
“Damned right I am.”
He laughed and it felt good. She grinned, too, until a doorman in a Santa Claus costume came to open her door. Then Fox watched her smile freeze.
This, he finally realized, wasn’t just a few lonely holidays since her mother had died, leaving her with no family to go to. It was nearly a lifetime of looking in windows at other people’s joy. It was a lifetime of being left outside in the cold.
“Come on, let’s go in,” he urged her. “I’m hungry.”
She got out of the car but she paused to look up at the monolith building. “Call Acosta first. Then we can order some take-out.”
“Fine with me.” But it wasn’t going to happen that way, he thought. “Come on, let’s see how the rich and famous live.”
They got the key from the security desk. Kate had promised that Shawnalee would call ahead and arrange it. The elevator rose seamlessly and fast to the penthouse apartment and Fox hit the switch for recessed lighting in the ceiling as they entered a long, marble foyer.
“Oh,” Tara murmured. “No, turn them off.”
He’d already done it. He’d seen the long wall of windows as well.
In the gathering dark of the apartment, New York came alive beyond the glass, all glittering light. Tara went that way, her heart skipping with the sheer beauty of it. The view was electrifying. It caught her at the throat and made her stop breathing for a moment. “It’s fantastic.”
“If you think this is good, Kate made it a point to mention the master bath.”
Tara’s eyes jolted to him briefly then she took off down the hall. When she found it, she let out a peel of laughter. She would never use this, she thought. She wouldn’t dare. But then, really, who would know? A low-flying aircraft? An angel floating by on its way to heaven? The acre-sized marble tub was surrounded on three sides by floor-to-ceiling windows. It was seventeen stories above the city. It had jets. It had candles. It had a wine bucket.