by Debra Dixon
Gabe cleaned up the broken glass and spent the rest of the afternoon surfing a computer information network. He learned a few things about Emily Quinn that made him feel better about her chances. If ice skating had had such a thing as a photo finish, then that was how close she’d come to two Olympic golds. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.
She never quit though; she just kept trying. Even after the accident and her parents’ death, she went back to the rink. Only that time the fairy tale ended for good. No amount of grit or determination could change the nerve damage to her ankle.
When he finished on the computer, Gabe shut it down, hoping the woman still had some of that grit. She was going to need it. Shaking off a feeling of uneasiness, Gabe resisted the urge to call Marsha Jean and check on their progress. They knew the plan. They’d call if there was a problem. Despite Marsha Jean’s flip attitude, she was trustworthy.
Instead of dialing, he made himself check the weather report and inventory his booze supply. This time of year the roads were as liable to close as not. He couldn’t afford to be cut off from his supplier with less than a full stockroom when the storm hit the following night. Quiet crowds turned ugly when a bar ran out of liquor.
However, booze would be the least of his worries if the storm got bad enough to close the roads. The real problem would be getting Emma out of town. That morning’s chat with Willis had changed his plans. Originally Gabe intended to stall Emma until he heard from Patrick. Not anymore.
If he didn’t hear soon, all bets were off. The clock was ticking, he could feel it. That troublesome sixth sense was bothering him, poking him, tapping him on the shoulder, and telling him to get the hell out of Dodge.
Three days, Gabe promised himself, and then Emma disappeared.
Besides, he thought with gallows humor, three days would be plenty of time for Emma to finish cleaning his entire apartment. The woman lived to clean. When he’d come out of the shower that morning, the sparkling kitchen appliances had almost blinded him. He caught himself smiling at the memory as he hauled a case of beer from the back to reload the cooler before the first customers straggled in.
He didn’t need or want a maid, but cleaning his house seemed to give Emma some sense of having evened the score, a sense that she was paying him back for the roof over her head. In her place he’d have done the same thing. He hated charity. Didn’t mind giving it, just hated taking it. Hated debts. She appeared to share the same opinion.
Accordingly, he and Emma had worked out a system. She pretended his place was a pigsty desperately in need of cleaning before the health department condemned it, and he pretended that he didn’t care whether or not it ever got clean. She didn’t have to say thank you, and he didn’t have to say you’re welcome.
Which was good. Because they’d barely exchanged two dozen words once he’d gotten out of the shower. Emma stared at his clean-shaven jaw for a long time, got pink across her cheeks, and muttered something about getting dressed to go with Marsha Jean.
The next thing he knew she was in that shapeless gray sack she called a habit—sans veil. But it wasn’t the habit that irritated him. It was the red silk panties and matching bra he knew she wore beneath the habit. The thought of her underwear was enough to make him reconsider his plan to change her looks. Emily Quinn couldn’t leave the apartment.
Yep, keeping her confined and wearing red silk undies with only him for company had definite possibilities. All of them foolish.
So he had shooed her out the door with Marsha Jean. That was hours before. By now it was too late to change his mind about anything. The deed was already done. Customers were drifting into the bar.
Sunday nights were usually slow but profitable for Gabe. He opened at six P.M. and closed at eleven. Served more brain grenades—beer—than anything else. The crowd was never more than a dozen or so people at any one time, and quiet for the most part. Tonight was no exception; he could handle the bar business and Emma too. Especially since Clayton Dover and Sawyer Johns hadn’t worked up the courage to show their faces around the bar yet.
A couple of strangers mixed in with the familiar faces. That wasn’t unusual either, but tonight every stranger was a threat to Emma’s safety. These strangers were drinking hard liquor and asking no questions. A good sign. They behaved like ordinary men trying to drown their sorrow in private, but he watched them all the same.
Beneath their heavy winter coats they wore loose jackets, loose enough to easily conceal a weapon. Since Gabe couldn’t pat them down without arousing suspicion, he made it his personal mission to know when and how deeply they breathed.
A half hour later Gabe checked the clock for the third time. He didn’t like it. His waitress was overdue to make an appearance. And so was his sweet little “cousin” from Indiana, who’d come all this way for the big family reunion.
No sooner had he reached for the phone than Marsha Jean came sauntering in with a big grin and a sad story about car trouble. “Oh, Gabe! I am so sorry, but that vicious car battery of mine decided to poop out just as I was leaving the house! I had to call a neighbor to give me a jump.”
“I told you last week to get a new battery,” he said as calmly as he could.
“And I told you to give me a raise.” She winked at him as she tossed her purse under the counter and shrugged out of her coat. Tonight’s T-shirt announced STUPID PEOPLE SHOULDN’T BREED.
“How are the kids?” Gabe asked, but meant something entirely different. “I’m going to have to make a point to see them.”
“Soon.” Marsha Jean understood him perfectly. She grabbed a bar towel and tucked it in her jeans. “They’re changing so much, you wouldn’t recognize them from day to day!”
“Good.”
“Sometimes I don’t recognize them myself. Like today, when we heard a rifle shot.” She paused, gauging his response to that little tidbit before she continued. “It turned out to be some hunter, but it scared the little girl to death. Heck, her scream almost scared me to death.”
Shooting a glance quickly around the bar, Gabe lowered his voice. “She okay?”
“Oh, yeah. She’s fine. Now. A little vague on why she reacted that way.” He could tell that his waitress wasn’t a bit happy about being kept in the dark, but a customer wandered up to the bar. Marsha Jean reverted to code. “You know how a mother worries. I was hoping you would tell me something to make me feel better.”
“I doubt it.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. Then it’s tit for tat.” The blonde sighed and turned to the three guys now sitting at the bar. “Lord! It’s like a morgue in here,” she pronounced with enthusiasm. “We need some music! Let me just go fix that. I think something with a nice, slow beat is what we need. And, Gabe, I think Angus needs a refill.”
Absently Gabe handed a Mexican beer to Angus Deady, who catered to the tourist trade by running raft trips down the Wenatchee and Klickitat rivers. The early nasty winter had pretty much shut him down, and he liked to drown his sorrows in foreign beer. But Gabe’s mind wasn’t on his customers and their troubles. It was on the two strangers and the dangerous payback gleam he saw in Marsha Jean’s eyes.
She was mighty pleased about something all of a sudden, and he assumed she was keeping a secret of her own. For the next fifteen minutes she avoided him, making sure to put her orders in and pick them up while standing next to Angus. That way Gabe couldn’t ask her any questions, and she could snicker to her heart’s content.
Just as he considered dragging her into the stock-room to demand an explanation for that damned grin, the new and improved Emily Quinn walked through the front door. Even before she let the worn-out green parka slide off her shoulders, he knew this incarnation was a far cry from the nun. There were some similarities, like the holier-than-thou blue jeans, but overall the woman looked like she’d fallen from grace a long time before and real hard.
“Gabe!” she said, loud enough to get everyone’s attention, and set down a small battered suitcase. Whispe
red conversations around the bar stopped as his customers swiveled to get an eyeful.
That was part of the plan, but the hello-throw-me-down red sweater and the appreciative whistles from the crowd were not. Neither was his reaction. Every muscle in his body went on alert, and he was ready to pound every man who so much as noticed Emma’s obvious attributes. Of course, those attributes were hard to miss in that sweater.
Oblivious of it all, Emma shook out the new, sexy, and shaggy mop of streaked honey-blond hair that came just below her shoulders. Gabe realized that if he didn’t do something soon, he’d have to beat the guys off her with Jeffie’s baseball bat. He threw a bone to his pride by silently insisting that his concern for Emma was only natural given his role in this mess. He was supposed to be protecting her, keeping her out of the limelight. With the drooling idiots falling all over themselves to get a date, how long would it be before one of them recognized her and ruined everything?
He glanced at Marsha Jean, who batted her eyelashes and looked as innocent as a newborn babe. As he passed her, he paused long enough to say under his breath, “I wanted average, dammit. Average looks, average hair, average clothes.”
“Then maybe you should have given me average to work with,” Marsha Jean whispered back, laughing.
“Emma!” Gabe forced out as cheerfully as he could. They’d decided that for the time being Emma would be the least confusing name for her to answer to, and for him to remember.
He didn’t even realize he was scowling until she backed up and said, “Whoa, Gabe! I know it’s been a long time, but aren’t you the least little bit glad to see me?”
One of the guys in the crowd yelled, “If he’s not, I sure as hell am, baby doll!”
Even Angus cheered up long enough to agree with that sentiment, pounding his bottle on the bar. “I’ll buy you a beer to prove it! Barkeep! A beer for the lady!”
A second later Emma had her pick of drink offers. But Angus’s offer to take her for a river ride she wouldn’t forget was the last straw. Gabe decided there was only one way to put a stop to this infantile innuendo and macho posturing. So he walked right up to her, grabbed her around the waist, and kissed her in front of God and everybody.
Emily’s world tilted and all of her carefully rehearsed lines went sliding off into oblivion. She’d expected an awkward family-reunion-style peck on the cheek, but not this. As always, the first touch of his lips and breach of his tongue brought the flutter of panic, excitement, and pleasure that started deep in her belly. Her arms went around his neck of their own volition, and then she felt herself lifted up as Gabe caught her to his chest. Almost before he’d begun, he stopped, but the stunned silence around them was witness to the fact that this had been no ordinary kiss.
The wolf whistles and catcalls started as he set her on her feet.
“All right, Gabe!”
“The iceman cracketh!”
The last comment jolted Emily back to reality. This intense kiss in the middle of a crowded room was totally out of character for the man who never revealed himself or lost control. Amid the commotion she whispered, “What was that all about?”
“Change of plans,” he told her as he bent over to retrieve her parka from the floor. Somehow during the kiss, Emily had lost her grip on it as well as reality.
“Thanks for the warning! What are we supposed to be now?” she inquired politely as he handed it to her. “Kissing cousins?”
“A shame Marsha Jean didn’t make over your mouth,” he observed congenially, and turned to the crowd. Gabe dropped an arm protectively over her shoulders. “All you boys can put your water pistols back in your pockets. This is Emma Gabriel, my ex-wife. As you can see, we’ve had some trouble getting used to the ‘ex’ part.”
“Actually, it was the marriage part that we had trouble getting used to,” Emily volunteered, getting into the spirit of the moment. Gabe was not impressed with her help.
He picked up her suitcase and circled her waist, cinching her close, possessively. If he’d had the words “property of Christian Gabriel” tattooed across her forehead, his message couldn’t have been clearer. For the slow learners, he added, “Maybe if we keep practicing we’ll figure out how to do this relationship thing right. Now, if you’ll excuse us, I’ll get her settled in. Upstairs. Marsha Jean! You’ve got some dry customers over here.”
The way he hauled her around through the crowd toward the stairwell door, Emily decided he had more than enough upper-body strength to have been a pairs skater. However, he rated a big fat zero in the grace department. For the sake of the plan she smiled and simpered and generally let him have his Neanderthal moment until the EMPLOYEES ONLY door closed behind them.
When they were alone in the dark, she elbowed him as hard as she could and was rewarded with an “Uff.” Turning on him, she kept her voice down but the anger was obvious nonetheless. “What the hell do you think you are doing, telling everyone that I’m Emma Gabriel?”
“I’m doing you a favor. Being my ex-wife will keep the boys from getting any ideas about getting cozy.” He set the suitcase down on the first stair.
She gaped at him and pulled her sweater down to cover the waistband of her jeans. “What business is it of yours who I get cozy with anyway? It’s not like I’m really your ex-wife! And that’s another problem! How many ex–Mrs. Gabriels are there? Seeing as how I’ve been married to you, I should at least know which number wife I am.”
“You’re it.”
“Really?” she asked, startled. Somehow she had expected Gabe to have a real ex-wife or wives. Like Patrick, who had spoken fondly and with regret about his two failed marriages, both shipwrecked by the demands of his navy career and the long separations.
“Really,” he repeated. “You’re it. So calm down. This little alteration in the plan was necessary because you and Marsha Jean got carried away. Tonight’s experiment was to see if we could pass you off in a safe setting. Now, how long do you think it would take before one of those lumberjacks recognized you while he was hanging all over you, looking into those damned green eyes, listening to you talk, trying to get a date?”
Emily backed up a step, surprised that he knew her eyes were green. The stairwell was too dark for him to see the color, which meant he’d noticed and remembered. Before she let herself get too warm and fuzzy, she reminded herself that Gabe was trained to be observant.
Back on the attack, she said, “Gabe, you were the one who said to forget the glasses.”
“That’s because it’s obvious they don’t belong to you. They’re too big for your face, and you squint in them. You’re supposed to look normal. The whole point of this charade was for you not to call attention to yourself.”
“And I thought the whole point of this little charade of ours was for me to interact with people and see if your customers would recognize me! Well, so far—in the five seconds you gave them to look at me—they haven’t!”
He didn’t argue, but disapproval leaked from every pore in his body, filling the air around her.
“Okay, Gabe. Out with it. You’ve got something you want to say, so just say it, and we can get back to the bar before Marsha Jean sends a search party.”
Silence reigned as Gabe struggled with a response. “I don’t like it.”
“Don’t like what?” she asked instantly, assuming the worst. “Is someone out there?”
“No.”
In a rush she let out the breath she’d been holding. “Then what?”
“I don’t like it. That’s all. I don’t like the way you look. I don’t like the way they look at you.”
Exasperation began to get the best of her, and she had to struggle to keep her voice low so she couldn’t be heard in the bar. The customers thought they were upstairs putting away her things or— Emily didn’t want to contemplate what people thought she and Gabe were doing.
Dragging herself back to the conversation, she reminded him, “This whole game was your idea. If you will recall, I was happy with the
nun’s habit!”
“You were supposed to be my mousy little cousin from Indiana.”
“Right. Old clothes, tacky makeup, and a bad haircut. We did our part. I don’t look like me. Not at first glance. I’ve never worn a pair of blue jeans with a hole in them in my life. When I can afford colored contact lenses, it’ll be even better.”
“You look like you were poured into those jeans.”
“That’s because I was! I had to lie down on the bed to zip the damned things up. They must be a boy’s cut ’cause all of me doesn’t fit in here the way it’s supposed to.”
Gabe didn’t need to have that particular fact pointed out. “Surely you could at least have found a sweater the right size!”
Emily snorted. “Look, Gabe. I didn’t pick out these clothes. You’re the one who told Marsha Jean how small I was, while I sat right in your living room telling her that I was bigger than I looked. If you get my drift. But neither of you bothered to listen to me. I guess you thought I was being falsely modest. Or maybe you thought you knew best because you’d handled the merchandise! So now we’re both stuck with these clothes.”
Grabbing the doorknob, Emma gave him one last point to ponder before she pulled it open. “Have you taken a look at the size of your hands lately? They’d make almost anything look small. I think you need a new yardstick, buddy. And I need a drink. I’ve had one helluva day.”
With that parting shot, she walked back into the smoky bar and left Gabe wondering if he’d created a monster. He followed her out, trying to ignore the sway in her nicely rounded hips. Unfortunately, Gabe felt compelled to single out a few of his patrons for stern looks when their eyes strayed to Emma’s chest for too long.
Since the previous night’s fight had obviously made the town’s gossip hotline, none of them seemed willing to risk his displeasure or a confrontation. The offending parties became suddenly engrossed in the labels of their beer bottles or in lighting cigarettes. A couple of them even had the good sense to get up and move in the other direction.