A Bride Before Dawn

by Sandra Steffen

  Noah couldn’t remember when he’d had this much fun. He admitted that Lacey was right. This may not have been a typical second date, but it was one he would never forget. It wasn’t easy to take his eyes off Lacey, and hadn’t been since he’d arrived three hours ago. She wore flip-flops and faded cutoffs and a tank top the color of ripe peaches. She’d been wearing a shirt over it when he’d gotten here. It was one of those little feminine numbers, so thin it was practically transparent with pearly buttons and little dots all over it. She’d taken it off about the same time he’d peeled off his T-shirt.

  Three teenage girls ran by, giggling. Two of them had long hair. Only one was a brunette and her hair was extremely curly. Lacey and Noah watched them, committing their appearance to memory. So far their stakeout hadn’t produced any young women with long, straight brown hair.

  When Noah had spoken to Sam on the phone, the P.I. said private investigation work was ninety-eight percent sitting still. “Trust me, the other two percent makes all the boredom worth it.”

  Noah hadn’t been bored. The fact that he’d had fun painting steps was a testament to the company he was keeping.

  When they finished eating, he touched the steps with his fingertips. Deeming them dry, he went up and retrieved his shirt. He pulled it on, then stood looking down at the alley. Lacey was donning her shirt, too.

  She’d worn her hair up today, fastened near the top of her head with a shiny clip. As the afternoon turned into evening, more and more tendrils had escaped, curling at her nape and around her ears. Her face was shiny, and there was a smudge of dirt on her shorts. She’d looked beautiful last night in that dress. She looked just as beautiful today.

  He started down the steps toward her.

  “Is that ‘Moon over Miami’?” she called out of the blue.

  His attention had been so intent upon her he hadn’t noticed the song wafting from a passing radio. Every time a car went by the entrance of the alley, its radio blasting, they’d tried to name the title of the song. It had been Lacey’s idea. She could make a game out of anything.

  She’d seen their second date’s potential from the beginning. There were so many things he was discovering about her. She’d always been a stickler for washing her hands. Until he’d watched her eat her pizza with a napkin wrapped around her pointer finger, he hadn’t realized just how germ-phobic she was.

  And she knew something about everything. She was the one who’d told him that new owners were reopening the Orchard Hill Theater. She’d spoken about a grant the city had been awarded for a beautification project that included sprucing up the town’s sidewalks, storefronts and alleys.

  Noah agreed that the steps looked better with a coat of paint and the flowers, but the real beauty back here was Lacey. There wasn’t anything about her he didn’t like. Even her stubborn streak was adorable. Marsh and Reed would have called it the blush of a new relationship. In reality, theirs was the blush of an old one.

  Gearing up for step three, he met Lacey at the bottom of the stairs, on her way to the trash can underneath them. Since her hands were full of the empty pizza box, napkins and paper drink cups, he went with her and removed the trash can’s lid.

  “What would you be?” he asked.

  She looked up at him in the near darkness, a little furrow forming between her eyes. He wasn’t surprised that she had no idea what he was talking about. What surprised him—and humbled him—was that he’d never asked the question before.

  “Earlier you said if you could be anything in the world, you wouldn’t be a barkeep. What would you be?”

  He could see the pleasure his interest brought her. Since the clip was sliding from her hair, she whisked it out and shook her hair down. “I would be a professional photographer. I started photography classes in Chicago.”

  Of course that was what she wanted to be. He remembered the first time he saw her walking to school, her hair short and her jeans tight, a chip on her shoulder and a camera around her neck. She never knew it, but he’d had his eye on her for a long time.

  “Now it’s your turn,” she said. At his blank look, she added, “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

  From out of the blue, he heard himself say, “My grandfather was a well witcher. And now I think I’d like to kiss you.”

  When Noah was a kid, he’d seen his grandfather find an underground spring using two divining rods he’d fashioned from pieces of wire. Somehow the electromagnetic field flowing through the water was transmitted up through his grandfather’s body and out his hands, causing the rods to cross.

  Until Lacey reached up and touched his cheek with the tips of three fingers, slowly letting them trail to his mouth, Noah had never understood the concept of electromagnetism. Her touch changed that. Electricity arced from her body to his, buzzing in places indirectly connected.

  “A well witcher, really?” Her smile was sexy as hell. “The kissing part I already knew.”

  With his heart thundering in his ears and his desire kicking into overdrive, he covered her slender hand with his. Slowly, he dragged it from his lips to his chest. He wanted her to feel what she was doing to his heartbeat before he’d even kissed her.

  Her lips parted in the most enticing manner. He swooped down and covered them with his. At that first melding, his heart reared up, then settled into a rhythm that grew stronger with every beat.

  The staircase made their little refuge feel secluded. The shadows made it intimate. But it was the touch of his mouth on hers that made it feel like heaven.

  Lacey felt Noah’s arms come around her, felt herself being drawn up, folded into his embrace. Heat radiated from the entire length of his body, branding every inch of her body that came into contact with every inch of his.

  She went up on tiptoe, diving into a frenzied kiss. She didn’t know how he did it, how he made every kiss feel different than the last one. This kiss was rough and possessive, a wild mating of mouths and heat and hunger. As far as second dates went, tonight had been astoundingly wonderful. As far as kisses went, this one was off the charts.

  Need shot up between them, the need to open her mouth and deepen the kiss, the need to stroke, retreat and stroke again, the need to look back at where they’d been and look forward to where they might go. More than anything was the need to savor Noah’s heat, his passion, right here, right now.

  Savor, she did. He kissed her, and she let him. She kissed him back, until she didn’t know where she left off and he began. It was amazing. It was heady. It melted her from the inside out.

  It might have gone on forever, had a sound from up above not penetrated her consciousness. She heard a little scrape of wood against wood. It almost sounded as if a window was being opened. She was still kissing Noah, her lips apart, their bodies in tune with a dance they hadn’t experienced in more than a year.

  The sound of wood scraping against wood came again. This time it was followed by a thud.

  Noah must have heard it, too. His lips stopped moving against hers, and he held perfectly still.

  The hollow thud of feet landing on the ground ten feet away severed the kiss in one fell swoop. She and Noah jerked apart and turned their heads. They saw the woman at the exact instant she saw them.

  They all froze.

  The young woman recovered first. She spun on her heel, dark brown hair nearly reaching her waist billowing like a curtain as she went.

  “Wait!” Noah untangled his arms from Lacey’s and started after her.

  He saw her cut between the tavern and the store next door. He darted in after her, his breathing ragged, his eyes trained on the svelte creature pulling farther away. The space between the buildings was so narrow that his shoulders occasionally touched the bricks on either side as he ran. The walkway was lit only at the ends. Here in the center, he could barely make out the shape of the woman up ahead.

  He was a fast runner. She was faster. Part gazelle, part acrobat, she scaled the wrought-iron gate that blocked the entry from Divis
ion Street, then bounded to the right without looking back. He went up the gate, too. From the top, he searched for a young woman with waist-length brown hair.

  The Orchard Hill Theater had just let out, and throngs of people milled about the sidewalk. His gaze darted in every direction, but she seemed to have disappeared among them.

  He jumped from the top of the gate. Landing lightly on his feet, he made a quick sweep up one side of Division Street and down the other. He didn’t find her between buildings, in doorways or porticos. She might have literally disappeared.

  It was no wonder Lacey called her Houdini. Like a siren or a forest sprite, she slipped out of buildings and scaled fences and seemed to disappear into thin air. The famous magician had used smoke and mirrors and a cape, and had taken the secret for his astonishing escapes with him to his grave. This girl’s only cape was her long brown hair; her smoke and mirrors were her speed and agility. She had no assistant to wave her arms and draw the crowd’s attention, no props or publicity. Her secret remained a mystery. And so did her identity.

  Noah took a different route back to the alley, back to Lacey and to what was turning out to be a very unusual, though invigorating and interesting, second date.

  Chapter Nine

  When Noah returned to the alley, Lacey was sitting on the steps. She stood as he sauntered closer and, with a lift of her eyebrows, asked him a silent question. He answered just as silently with a shake of his head. Their mysterious Houdini remained at large.

  The alley was losing its heat to the darkness and the stars their brightness to the blue haze of the mercury lights nearby. Many of the same people she’d noticed going toward Division Street earlier had already come by again in the opposite direction. As the murmur of voices grew distant, she and Noah returned to the place the young woman had been.

  “I found something interesting,” Lacey said, holding out her hand.

  She showed him something that resembled a credit card. Taking it from her fingers, he held it to the light. “A bus pass?”

  She nodded. “It’s a prepaid bus pass. It must have fallen out of her pocket when she was climbing down.”

  “We don’t know who she is,” Noah said, handing the pass back to her. “We don’t know where she came from, why she’s here or where she’s going, but apparently she’s riding the city bus to get there.”

  Lacey peered up at the second-story window. “Now we also know how she’s getting in and out of the tavern.”

  “What’s up there?” Noah asked.

  “Nothing much. The upstairs is a big empty loft. My dad always talked about converting it into another apartment, but he never did.”

  “What’s in the room directly below the window?” he persisted.

  “The storage room. Why?”

  Two stragglers wandered through the alley. Lacey and Noah took note of them out of habit as they passed. After a moment of quiet deliberation, he went to his truck and opened the passenger-side door. He rifled through the glove compartment, and returned with a slim flashlight. Sliding it into his back pocket, he said, “Did you get a good look at her?”

  “I did.”

  “So did I. How old would you say she is?” he asked.

  Lacey looked up at Noah’s profile. He was studying the galvanized pipe that ran up the side of the building to the roof. It had been cut off six feet above the ground and capped years ago. It no longer served as a downspout, but the girl must have used it to climb up and down.

  “She looked seventeen or eighteen to me. Not more than twenty,” Lacey said.

  “That’s what I thought, too.” A bead of perspiration trailed down the side of his face. His breathing was almost back to normal, though, his mind seemingly on the puzzle he was trying to solve. “She isn’t Joey’s mother.” He said it so quietly he might have been thinking aloud.

  Lacey felt her eyes widen. “Did you think she might have been?”

  He was looking at her now. The moon and stars were competing with the mercury lights, but they were no competition for the glint in Noah’s eyes as he nodded. “Her arrival coincided with Joey’s, but the women Marsh and Reed are looking for are both over thirty. Something doesn’t add up.”

  He wiped his hands on his jeans. Rubbing them together, he gave her a smile he reserved for situations involving risking life or limb or both, then reached high and grasped the pipe with both hands. He pulled himself up until he had a toehold, scaling the brick wall inches at a time. He gripped the pipe between his knees and ankles, reached out with one hand and carefully raised the window.

  There was a victorious smile on his face when he looked down at Lacey. She gasped when he slipped, but he quickly regained his footing. It must have taken a great deal of concentration and agility to throw his left leg over the windowsill.

  Before he could duck inside, she said, “You still think there’s a connection, don’t you, between the young woman we saw and Joey’s mother?”

  Balancing on the window ledge fifteen feet above the ground, he could have been an outlaw of old, his hair shaggy, his jaw darkened by a day-old beard, his golden-brown eyes delving into hers. “I believe in coincidence less and less every day,” he said.

  This wasn’t the time or the place to discuss his philosophy regarding destiny, and yet she got the distinct impression he was including her in his statement. She had to admit that she felt energized by the idea that maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that she was back in Orchard Hill and Noah was back in Orchard Hill. Maybe there really was a method to the universe’s madness.

  “I’ll meet you inside,” he said.

  “It’s a date.”

  He looked down again and said, “I think it’s time to proceed to step three.” His voice was rich and sincere, but there was something lurking behind his grin, something unknown but not quite hidden.

  On the brink of that precipice that was the rest of her life again, she ran up the newly painted stairs for her key.

  Lacey had the back door open and the lights on inside the tavern when she heard footsteps overhead. The sound led her to the storage room where her father used to keep boxes of peanuts and pretzels, and crates of whiskey and scotch, and untapped kegs of beer. The shelves were crude and empty now, and all that remained was a leftover wooden crate and another whiskey barrel like the one she’d planted flowers in earlier.

  A ceiling tile jiggled, and then it was being lifted away from above. The next thing she knew, Noah was lowering himself feetfirst through the opening.

  He dropped lightly to the floor, brushed himself off and turned toward her. “It’s hot up there. I’m not surprised she prefers it down here. She let herself downstairs through this ceiling tile, but she was using two windows to get in and out of the building, this one and one on the east side of the building. She may run like the wind but your Houdini left footprints that were easy to follow.”

  “Did she leave anything else?” Lacey asked.

  “Nothing that I could find. Where’s this bedroll she’s been sleeping on?”

  She led the way from the storeroom to the back corner of the tavern. They both hunkered down at the far end of the pool table. The sleeping bag was still there but the snacks were gone.

  “Tell me why you think she has something to do with Joey’s arrival on your doorstep.” She spoke quietly, reverently almost.

  Resting his forearms on his thighs, Noah said, “It’s just a hunch.”

  “What connection could she have to your situation?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, but the timing is right. As I said, it’s just a hunch.”

  “You don’t think she’ll come back here again now, do you?” she asked.

  “You know her better than I do. What do you think?”

  They both stood up slowly.

  A little taken aback by the fact that Noah seemed to understand Lacey’s affinity for her guest, she said, “Whoever she is and whatever she’s doing in Orchard Hill, she’s street-smart. She won’t want to risk getting caught. I
almost wish we hadn’t seen her. At least then she would be safe. Where will she sleep now?”

  “You said it yourself,” Noah replied. “She’s street-smart. She’ll find a safe place. If my hunch is right, and her arrival is somehow connected to Joey’s, we haven’t seen the last of her.”

  The idea chased Lacey’s melancholy away. She couldn’t explain it, but she felt a kinship with this unknown and mysterious young woman.

  She shook out the sleeping bag. Folding it neatly, she left it on top of the pool table and added the bus pass, just in case the girl returned for either one.

  Noah went to the storage room. Standing on an old crate, he slid the ceiling tile back into place. Lacey turned out the lights. They went out together, and she locked the door.

  The wind had picked up, ruffling the collar of her airy shirt and sifting through his dark brown hair. He’d surprised her so many times today. It began when he’d offered to paint her steps, and continued when he’d asked to take that silly personality quiz, when he’d raced after her Houdini and when he’d climbed up the brick wall.

  He surprised her again when he took her hand, and held, just held it. “I should go,” he said. “Marsh and Reed are going to want to hear about our encounter with your Houdini. Madeline and Riley have invited all of us up to Traverse City for Sunday dinner tomorrow. I want to tell Marsh and Reed about tonight before they leave. I’m sure they’re going to want to talk to Sam Lafferty.”

  “You’re not going to Madeline’s?” she asked.

  “I have something more important to do tomorrow.” His voice had taken on a sleepy huskiness that didn’t necessarily mean he was sleepy again.

  “More important than visiting your sister?” Lacey noticed her voice had grown a little husky, too.

  He inched closer, his hand still cradling hers. “After everything my baby sister has been through, believe me, she’ll understand that what I’m planning for tomorrow needs to be my top priority.”