But he hadn’t done any of that. And because of it, they might never be able to stay together. You betrayed my trust, she’d said Wednesday night. Once you’ve done that, you can’t expect it to come as easily the next time. Maybe not even at all.
Even if he’d had a good reason? he wanted to ask. Even if his life had been at stake? But of course, he couldn’t ask her that, not yet. Even if he could, he was afraid of her answer. A lot of people had good reasons for things they did, but that didn’t make their actions any more acceptable to the people they let down. Mary Katherine well might understand why he’d left the way he did, but it might not change a thing, beyond maybe giving her some small satisfaction that he hadn’t wanted to go.
He was about to touch her, to brush her hair back from her ear to see what response a whisper and a kiss or two might bring when, from somewhere outside the bedroom, came the annoying ring of his cell phone. At home he kept it on the nightstand, alongside his pistol. Last night he’d left both with his clothes, scattered somewhere around the front door with her clothing.
He slid away from her and out from under the covers, then followed the noise to his trousers, where the phone was clipped to his belt. The number was familiar—the guard shack at the Queen. “What’s up, Jimbo?”
“Thought you’d like to know that Paulie Baker turned up.”
“Where?”
“He drifted into a snag about twenty miles downriver. Had a bullet hole in the back of his head. It wasn’t a pretty sight.”
“Oh, God.” Chance closed his eyes, swallowed hard. He knew Ianucci was a dangerous man. Hell, he ran two multimillion-dollar enterprises—the Queen and the money-laundering operation. He had to be dangerous. But with all his crimes, this was the first time murder had become a part of the picture. “Any chance at all it’s not related to what happened last week?”
“There’s always a chance, son. Just not much of one. The guy was quiet, well-liked. Lived alone. If he drank or did drugs, he did that alone, too. Never missed a day of work until now, never had any run-ins with the law. He was about as clean as any casino dealer ever gets.”
Chance swore long and low, then took a deep breath. “Does Mr. Ianucci know he’s been found?”
“He arrived at the Queen about ten minutes ago. Ebert was maybe two minutes behind him. Stopped long enough to tell me to call you and tell you they want you in five minutes ago.”
“Tell him I’m on my way.”
“Give sweet Mary Katherine a kiss before you leave.”
Chance’s grip tightened around the phone. “What makes you think…?”
“Her car’s still in the parking lot. I tried to call you at your place and there wasn’t an answer. You’re one lucky man.”
Sometimes, Chance thought. And sometimes it seemed the only luck he had was bad. “I’ll see you in ten minutes.”
“And a foolish man, if you can say goodbye to Mary Katherine in less than ten minutes. Later, partner.”
Chance hung up, swore again, then went to collect his clothes. He gathered Mary Katherine’s while he was at it, then went to the bathroom to get dressed. He used the extra toothbrush he knew she would have in the medicine cabinet, then deliberately left it in the holder next to hers.
He was halfway to the door when he realized he had to leave a note. On the pad next to the phone, he scrawled a couple of words, tore off the page and crumpled it, tried a couple more and crumpled them, too, then tried again. The final note didn’t say what he wanted, but it would do for now.
He was halfway to the door a second time when she spoke. “Old habits are hard to break, I guess.”
Feeling guilty as hell, he stopped abruptly, then turned to face her. She stood in the bedroom door, the sheet draped around her. Her shoulders and arms were bare, except where her incredible hair tumbled down, and most of one long, shapely leg was exposed where the sheet fell open. She looked…hell, like some sort of Greek goddess. The goddess of lust. Of temptation. Of love.
He stared at her a long time before he finally got his voice to work. “Oh, angel, if you could get Sara to let you work looking like that, every man on board that boat would be in love with you.”
“I’m not interested in every man on the boat.” Gracefully, unconsciously seductively, she came a few feet closer, stopping beside the kitchen counter. The sheet slipped dangerously low over one breast, and his mouth went dry, but she caught it, eased it back up. “Leaving without a word?”
“I left you a note.”
Following his nod, she picked up the notepad. Emergency at work. I’ll be back soon as I can. Without a change in her expression, she laid it down again, then picked up the discarded pages, smoothing them flat. They all bore the same short message. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Then something changed on her face—became softer. Sweeter. More beautiful than ever. He closed the distance between them with three strides, pulled her close and fiercely kissed her. Then, before she could say anything, before she could tempt him, he left.
The Queen’s parking lot was deserted except for Mary Katherine’s car, Ianucci’s and a few others. Chance traded his usual distant-back-row space for one right up front, then stopped briefly at the guard shack.
Jimbo checked his watch, then gave him a disappointed look. “You’re a stronger man than me. I couldn’t have left her so quickly.”
“It wasn’t easy.” But then, it never was.
“They’re waiting in the office. Bubba’s with them.”
Their dirty cop friend. Chance smiled thinly. Just what he needed this morning.
Ianucci’s office was on the California Deck, a large suite with a hell of a view, but no one was interested in looking this morning. Ianucci sat behind the desk, Clyde Ebert in one of the two chairs opposite. Cliff Dunigan was leaning against the wall, Bubba was shuffling a deck of cards at a table, and the assistant casino manager, a man by the name of Lawrence, stood nearby.
Casey, the casino manager, hadn’t been invited to the meeting. Her job was overseeing the casino and nothing else—strictly legit. The less she knew about the rest of Ianucci’s business, the better.
“I assume Jimbo told you our missing dealer has turned up,” Ianucci said as Chance sat next to Ebert. “Unfortunately.”
It was particularly unfortunate for Paulie Baker, Chance thought. All the way from Mary Katherine’s, he’d been thinking about Jimbo’s comment that, whether Baker was guilty of cheating or merely of making someone think he was cheating, either way he was guilty. And he’d kept wondering whether his murder was merely bad luck or whether it was connected to the Queen and who was truly the guilty party here. Now he took a stab at finding out.
“Bodies dumped in the river generally do surface,” he said mildly. “Unless they’re attached to something to keep them under.”
Both Ianucci and Ebert looked at Dunigan, whose scowl intensified and took on a defensive air. That answered one question—or two or three.
“Wasn’t there another way to handle this?” he asked, careful to sound as if he cared only from a murder-is-bad-for-business point of view.
Now everyone’s attention was on him. Snidely, Ebert asked, “Developing a sensitive stomach, Reynard?”
Before he could respond, Ianucci silenced them with a gesture. “He had become a problem, and problems must be resolved before they become bigger problems.”
And the fact that the problem involving Paulie Baker wasn’t his doing was inconsequential. Guilty either way.
The discussion continued, ranging from the public relations aspect of the murder to satisfying Baker’s family with a generous payoff to the possibility that he hadn’t been the first to find a way to skim profits, and required little from Chance but his attention. Finally, Ianucci dismissed everyone. Chance was rising from his chair when the boss looked at him. “Stay.”
He sank down again. Once the others were gone, Ianucci offered him a cigar before lighting his own. Chance
refused.
“Is Clyde right?” Ianucci asked. “Are you losing your taste for this business?”
“I never had a taste for killing people.”
“It bothers you?”
“Yeah, senseless death bothers me. It won’t take too many incidents like this to put the Queen under a microscope. We have a lot of enemies out there, Mr. Ianucci. If people connected to us start turning up dead, they’ll put us out of business.” He hesitated a moment, then asked, “What was the point in killing Baker? So he was accused of cheating. You have proof that he wasn’t.”
“Actually, we have proof that he was.”
“But Ebert told me—”
“What we told everyone. Only he and I—and now you—know the truth. Paulie was stealing from us, and we took care of it, and the next dealer who’s tempted will think twice about it.” Abruptly, Ianucci changed the subject. “That new girl—the one you gave a ride to last night…”
Chance wasn’t surprised that the boss knew about that. Monitoring the video-only cameras mounted in the parking lot was part of security’s job. “Mary Katherine Monroe.”
“Yes, that’s the one. She asks a lot of questions.”
A cold chill snaked Chance’s spine. “What kind of questions?”
“Curious ones. Whether our games are honest. How someone—a dealer, not a player—might cheat. Whether we have many incidents like the one involving Mr. Baker.”
“She…she’s a schoolteacher,” he said lamely. “She comes by her curiosity honestly.”
“Perhaps you should point out to her that it’s perfectly acceptable—indeed, even desirable—for some questions to go unanswered.”
Chance had to swallow hard before he could get an answer out. “I’ll do that, sir. Will there be anything else?”
“No, you can go. If you pass Clyde on your way out, tell him I want to see him.”
With a taut nod, Chance left the office. He passed on the message to Ebert, waiting twenty feet down the passageway, took the stairs three at a time and then forced himself to keep a normal pace down the gangplank.
Jimbo came out of the guard shack with his clipboard to mark the time next to Chance’s name. “Learn anything new?”
Though he wanted nothing more than to get in his car and get back to Mary Katherine’s so he could find out what the hell was going on, Chance stopped, forcing his nervous energy into his clenched fists. There was no point in appearing overly anxious to get away to anyone watching those damn surveillance cameras. “Oh, yeah. Dunigan did it, and everyone knew except me.”
Jimbo gave a low whistle. “Should be interesting listening to the tapes.”
Chance nodded. While Ianucci had cameras mounted in the parking lot, as well as all the public areas of the Queen, he had voice-activated bugs planted in most of the private areas. In the months he’d been working aboard the riverboat, he’d taped thousands of hours of conversation—but none so chilling, or so damning, as the past half hour. “I’ll see you later. I’ve got business to take care of.”
“Yeah, sure. Business with big brown eyes and legs as long as the river.”
Though he didn’t feel like grinning, Chance managed to pull one up from somewhere. “Mary Katherine’s not business, son. She’s pure pleasure.” And, this morning, business, too. The most important business of his life.
After Chance left, Mary Katherine tried to go back to sleep, but found it impossible. Her bed smelled of him—heavens, her body smelled of him—and she couldn’t get the image of him as he was leaving out of her mind. The boots, the black trousers, the once-starched, now-limp white shirt, the shoulder holster…and the gun.
He’d looked dangerous…and sexy as hell.
As she showered, she wondered what the Queen’s emergency was. As she dressed, she wondered if he really would come back as soon as he could, or if that was just something he said to women the morning after.
Though it was nearly noon, she had breakfast—a toasted raisin bagel with a bottle of water—at the kitchen counter, with the four notes spread out in front of her. The first one she’d read, the final one he’d written, didn’t matter, but the other three… Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Those three touched her in ways she didn’t need to be touched.
When the phone rang, it startled her into guiltily scooping up all four notes, then she silently berated herself. It wasn’t as if the caller could see that she was mooning over wrinkled slips of paper. Still, she slid them into her pocket for safekeeping as she answered the phone.
“Mary Kat?” her grandfather said. “Is that you?”
The guilt magnified, because other than a few questions and a lot of watching, she’d all but forgotten his reason for her being there. In nearly two weeks she’d learned nothing…except that she was still tremendously susceptible to Chance’s charm. That he was still the most incredible man she’d ever met. That she was well on her way to either the heartbreak-to-end-all-heartbreak…or the happily-ever-after she’d always dreamed about.
“Hey, Granddad. How are things in Jubilee?”
There was impatience in his voice that he had to take the time to answer her question. “Nothing ever changes here. You know that. What have you learned?”
“You know it’s not that easy, Granddad,” she warned. “I can’t just go around asking people if they’ve ever seen any cheating on board the Queen. I have to take my time.”
“Take your time? I don’t have all the time in the world, you know. I’m an old man—an old man who’s lost his life savings thanks to some scoundrel on that riverboat.”
Mary Katherine smiled faintly. There was a better than even chance that the only scoundrel involved in the losing of his money was the one she was talking to at that very moment. “Tell me something, Granddad. How in the world did you even get on board the Queen in the first place? You’re not exactly their typical customer.” Part of Jimbo’s job was to steer the small-time gamblers to the other casino a short distance downriver. Too bad he hadn’t steered Paddy away. Then she wouldn’t have come here, wouldn’t have run into Chance again, wouldn’t have had that fabulous sex last night.
Too bad? Oh, no, not at all. Too sad would have been more like it.
“I went as Judge Edwards’s guest,” he replied in a haughty tone. “He’s a regular there, and he said it was a fine, reputable gaming establishment.”
“And you took his word for it.” She rolled her eyes. “Judge Edwards, the man you always said was lucky to be on the bench because it was the only thing keeping him from behind bars. The man whose legal career was distinguished by the untold ways he found to twist, deviate and subvert the law. The man who retired at the age of forty-five on so many family fortunes that he could burn a pile of hundred-dollar bills every day and never miss them. Oh, Granddad.”
When he finally spoke after a moment’s silence, there was a wounded tone in his voice. “Mary Katherine, I swear I was cheated. I don’t know how, but I swear… Aw, you don’t have to believe me. No one else does. At the market yesterday, Cleve Thompkins said I couldn’t win a hand of poker if I was the only one playing and dealt to myself off the bottom of the deck. And over at the old folks’ center, they said I ought to go play bingo with the kids because that was about my speed in games of chance. And your aunt Mildred said that maybe it was time for me to go live in the nursing home since I’m obviously not responsible to handle my own affairs.”
“No one’s sending you to a nursing home, Granddad,” she said firmly. “You always said Aunt Mildred’s just a sour old woman and Cleve Thompkins is an idiot. What they say doesn’t matter.”
“It’s what everyone’s saying, Mary Kat, and it does matter. Have you even tried to find out something?”
She felt a flush of guilt because she’d devoted so little time to her primary purpose for being there. It was just difficult to think about proving something that she didn’t believe deep down could be proven when there was so much more on her mind. “I’ll try harder, Granddad, but I hav
e to be careful not to rouse suspicion. That’s why I got the job for the whole summer.”
“Well, as long as you don’t get caught up in having so much fun that you forget all about your poor old grandfather.”
Poor old grandfather? She choked back a snort. Though he’d lost his money, Paddy O’Hara would never be poor, and no matter how old he got, he was never going to act it. “I won’t forget, Granddad.”
After another few moments she got off the phone, promising herself she’d make more of an effort, starting her very next shift…then forgot Paddy altogether when a knock sounded at the door.
It was Chance, and he looked…unsettled. That was how he made her feel, too. Awkwardness swept over her. She didn’t know where to look, what to do with her hands, how to stand or whether to sit or what to say. She settled for sliding her hands into the deep pockets of her dress, and felt the rustle of notepaper. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The notes gave her the courage to meet his gaze.
“You came back,” she said softly. “I guess some habits can be broken.” At least, temporarily. She opened the door wide enough for him to come in, then closed it behind him. “Is everything all right at the Queen?”
He removed his black coat, drawing her attention to the shoulder holster once more. It was still sexy, but she’d give almost anything if he wasn’t wearing it. If he wasn’t working a job that required a gun. If he wasn’t working for a dangerous man.
When he saw the focus of her gaze, he shrugged out of the holster and laid it on the chair underneath his coat. “Since you’ll hear about it at work this evening, I’ll tell you now. Paulie Baker, the dealer who disappeared last week, was found this morning. Murdered.”
“Oh, my God. Why? Who?” She tried to swallow, but her mouth had gone dry. “Was it because of what happened?”
For a moment he frowned at her, then he gave an exasperated shake of his head. “You have an active imagination, don’t you, angel? Maybe in your schoolteacher world the best way to get some screwup out of a union-protected, tenured position is to kill them, but in the real world, it’s easier. We just fire them.”
Who Do You Love? Page 19