Beckett's Convenient Bride

by Dixie Browning

  Jeff frowned. He fingered his handlebar mustache. “Guess it wouldn’t hurt none. ’Bout yea high.” He held a hand up to his shoulder. Five-six, Carson interpreted. “Lots of hair, kind of brown with some red in it. Gray eyes, freckles. She’s a real nice lady and a hard worker.” The guy was on a roll, so Carson let him talk. “Smart woman. Good-looking, too. She walks most everywhere, but you might see her car around. Hard to miss it. Old VW Beetle painted orange with black spots on it. Did the paint job herself,” he added admiringly. “I had me one, same year, back when I was in high school.”

  Carson had learned a long time ago that a lot more information could be gained by allowing a witness to ramble on at his own pace than by asking specific questions. He’d take it all in and sift through it later when his head wasn’t threatening to explode. Right now, he needed coffee, food and another handful of aspirin.

  Having evidently decided that Carson wasn’t a threat to anyone, the proprietor shifted his weight onto the other foot, apparently settling in for a lengthy visit. “I tried to talk her into selling it, but she said it was like family. Even gave it a name. Ladybug. Got one o’ them whatchacall vanity plates on the stern. Kitskids. Writes kids’ books, but she don’t have no kids of her own, not s’far as I ever heard of. Hey, Bambi, Kit ever mention any family to you?”

  From across the room, the pretty waitress with black acrylic nails shook her head. “Less you count all the strays she collects. Kit feeds any critter that don’t bite back.”

  By the time Bambi brought over a steaming bowl of Hatteras-style chowder and a tuna sandwich thick enough to choke a mule, Carson had lost his appetite. What had seemed a short-term deal on his to-do list was turning out to be a real headache. Literally.

  “This guy said to give you this.” Bambi held out the scrap of paper. “Certified hunk. If you’re not interested, how ’bout I try my luck?”

  Kit had come in early to ask Jeff how to find the sheriff’s office. It was probably located in the county seat, wherever that was. She could have called and gotten directions, but having made up her mind to do her duty as a citizen, she needed to show up in person and get the whole thing over with before she lost her courage.

  “Here? You mean someone came to the restaurant looking for me?” It took a moment for the impact to sink in. “Did he—did he say what he wanted?”

  The redhead shrugged. “You, I guess. Said he was a friend of the family. He asked a whole bunch of questions about where you lived and when you were coming in. Jeff told him you’d be in at the regular time. Hey, you okay? You didn’t eat none of that crab salad last night, did you? Jeff told you it was for the critters. He made it up a couple of days ago, and crab don’t keep.”

  Ignoring the question, Kit asked anxiously, “You didn’t tell him where I live, did you?” Not that he couldn’t find her easily enough. There weren’t that many houses in Gilbert’s Point.

  “What, me tell a stranger something like that? No way, hon.” She snapped her chewing gum. “Good-looking, though, if you like the type.”

  Kit didn’t ask what type. She really, really didn’t want to know. The thought that someone could find her so easily was scary enough. The old church was several miles from Gilbert’s Point. Maybe she shouldn’t have panicked, but after more than two hours, her heart still hadn’t settled down. If she’d done the right thing and gone in instead of just calling nine-one-one, the sheriff could have done his job by now and she wouldn’t be jumping at shadows.

  On the other hand, if she turned herself in now and offered to tell everything she’d heard—which wasn’t all that much, really—the sheriff would want to know why she hadn’t come forth immediately. Then she would have to tell him her name and it would get in the papers and her grandparents would see it, because Chesapeake was just over the state line in Virginia and everyone in the area read the same papers and listened to the same news stations.

  And then her grandparents would demand that she come live with them, with all that implied, and she couldn’t, she just couldn’t. If and when she mended that particular fence, it would be because she wanted to, not because they demanded it. She owed it to her mother’s memory not to get sucked down that particular drain.

  Meanwhile she was going to have to stop reading romantic suspense. Her imagination was active enough, without adding fuel to the fire.

  By the time he left Jeff’s Crab House, Carson knew he wasn’t going to finish the job that day. His headache had backed off to a dull throb, but his eyes burned, his throat felt raw and every muscle in his body ached. The bones that had been broken ached twice as much. All he wanted at this moment was to crawl into bed and sleep for a year, but if there was a hotel in the immediate vicinity, he’d missed it.

  He sneezed, grabbed his head to keep it from flying off his shoulders, and muttered, “Thanks for sharing, McGinty.”

  He was on his way out the single road leading to Gilbert’s Point when he saw the little orange VW barreling after him. Black spots. Sort of like a ladybug on steroids. Shoving his personal problems into the background, Carson wondered if the lady could be following him. Had he let slip the fact that he intended to hand over ten grand while he was asking questions?

  He didn’t think so, but then, he wasn’t operating at peak efficiency.

  There couldn’t be more than one black-speckled orange VW in a place this size. Slowing, he looked for somewhere to pull over. The Landing Road was little more than an old cart trail that had been brought up to minimum standards with a few loads of marl and oyster shell, with drainage ditches on both sides. No place to pull over—barely enough room to pass.

  Five minutes. He’d give her the spiel and hand over the goods. Then he could go somewhere and die with a clear conscience. The way she was kicking up dust, she was evidently eager to catch up with him before he got away.

  He slowed, stopped and pulled on the parking brake. They were near the intersection of Landing and Waterlily Roads, but so far as he could see, theirs were the only two cars on the road. This shouldn’t take long, Carson promised himself.

  Good thing, too, he added. He’d just run flat-out of juice.

  Opening the door, he got out, steadied himself for a moment, and waited until she came to a halt a few feet from his rear bumper. Then, levering himself away from the support of his dark green SUV, he headed her way.

  His legs were shaky. Maybe he should have eaten his lunch, but by the time he’d been served, food hadn’t seemed all that great an idea.

  He was within ten feet of the hand-painted VW when he saw her roll up her window. She locked her door, then leaned over and locked the passenger door.

  Well, hell. What now? Find the nearest hollow tree, leave the goods there, then write and tell her where to find it? If she wrote kids’ books, she might be into kids’ games.

  Tough. She’d picked the wrong player this time.

  He was still trying to figure out an approach when she rolled her window down an inch and shouted for him to move his car, then rolled the window up again.

  Move his car? Had he missed something? It occurred to him that she might not have gotten the message that he was looking for her. In that case, maybe she wasn’t trying to catch up with him, but just wanted to pass. Thought he was a tourist, maybe, watching a flyover of cormorants.

  Okay, so what now? Try to reason with her through a layer of steel and glass? Put yourself in the lady’s place, Beckett. She’s alone, she finds herself being accosted by a strange man. Reason enough to be spooked, right? The world was no longer a safe place, if it ever had been. Who knew that better than a cop?

  The women of his family knew better than to stop if ever a stranger tried to flag them down. They’d been taught to lock all doors and pass the buck by calling the highway patrol. In this case, he was the next best thing, only she had no way of knowing it.

  Feet spread apart to keep him from reeling, Carson held up both hands, palms out, in the universal sign of peace. “Hey, I’m one of the goo
d guys, lady.”

  Cautiously, she inched her window down and peered at him suspiciously. From where he was standing—aside from the eyeball assault of color: orange car, red hair, purple dress or whatever she was wearing—she appeared to be a damned fine-looking woman.

  Irritated as hell, but a looker.

  Make that angry, he corrected a moment later when she lowered the glass another two inches.

  Make that scared. In fact, terrified would not be an overstatement.

  Well, hell. What now? This wasn’t in the script. Under any other circumstances he’d have walked off and let her go unreparated, or whatever the proper term was. His whole body ached like a boil. He was running on fumes. And dammit, he hadn’t come all this way to leave the job unfinished.

  Taking two steps forward, he said, “Look, for both our sakes, let’s get this over fast, all right?”

  Slowly, he reached inside his buckskin jacket, planning to hold out his badge to reassure her.

  “Noo-o-o!” she screamed. “Just get out of my way!”

  Wrong move. He held out his hands again as if to prove he was totally harmless. Evidently the message failed to get through. She gunned the engine. The Beetle jerked forward. Carson tried to leap out of the way, but his reconstructed knee wasn’t up to the job. It buckled, and before he could catch himself, he went down, his head in a tangle of weeds bordering a blackwater ditch.

  She backed up and slammed on the brakes. She was out of her car in an instant, wild auburn hair flying around her face, purple shirt flapping around long legs covered in a pair of tie-dyed tights.

  She was wielding a tire-iron in a way that was anything but reassuring. “Open your eyes,” she demanded in a quavering voice.

  No way, lady. I’m safer playing dead.

  She crept closer. He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping she’d be convinced and leave him alone. Nothing in the genealogist’s chart had indicated a strain of insanity in the Chandler genes, but then the lady genealogist hadn’t gone into any personal detail.

  “You’re not dead. I saw your eyelids twitch. I hardly even touched you.”

  She hadn’t touched him at all, but only because he’d jumped out of the way just in time. She hesitated, but he could hear her breathing. She was still looming over him with that damned tire iron. The right tool in the wrong hands could be lethal.

  “Darn you, open your eyes!” she whispered fiercely. By then she was so close he could feel the heat of her body, feel her breath brushing his face. “I barely touched you, you can’t be dead,” she declared.

  He was having trouble regulating his breathing. It would be just his luck to have a sneezing spell. He felt her knees press against his side, felt the soft pressure of cool fingertips on his throat, then on his chest.

  Yeah, I’m alive, he was tempted to tell her. Keep on touching me like that and I’ll show you just how lively I can be, headache or no.

  Fat chance. He was fighting on too many fronts to take on one more. She smelled like…cinnamon? Apples?

  Something equally innocuous…and equally tempting.

  She touched his forehead and jerked her hand away. He wanted her fingers back. They were cool, soothing, and God, he needed that. What the hell was he supposed to do now? None of this was in the script. If he opened his eyes or even so much as twitched a muscle, she’d probably cold cock him with that damned tire iron.

  “You’re alive, I know you are. I don’t even see any blood, so you can’t be seriously hurt. But while you’re down I just want you to know that I didn’t see anything, not one blessed thing, so you don’t have to worry about me. Just because my car happened to be in the parking lot, that doesn’t mean I saw what you did. I was on the other side of the cemetery. I couldn’t even hear what you were fighting about.”

  Breathing through clenched teeth, Carson mentally assessed the damage. He was winded, but probably in no worse shape than before. Unless he slid into the ditch and drowned. If she didn’t stop pressing her knees into his side, that was a distinct possibility.

  What the hell was she talking about? A cemetery? Fighting? She sure as hell had seen him.

  “Well,” she said tentatively. “I probably shouldn’t leave you here in case another car comes. Besides, you’re blocking the intersection.”

  Tentatively, she picked up his hand and tugged. He felt something tickling his cheek and hoped it wasn’t alive, because the last thing he needed on top of everything else was an infestation of chiggers.

  “Look, I know you’re not unconscious, I can tell by the way you breathe.”

  He could have told her that his breathing would be a lot more convincing if she weren’t so close…and so damned female. Were pheromones considered hormones? His were supposed to be out on sick leave.

  He could sense her studying him as if he were something under a microscope. Thank God he wasn’t armed. Sometimes he carried when he was off duty, but not when he was this far out of his jurisdiction. Besides, this wasn’t that kind of a case. Hadn’t started out that way, at least. But who knows, with a crazy woman…

  “I didn’t hit you that hard. I didn’t even feel a bump,” she said defensively.

  He didn’t know what to say, and so he said nothing. If his head weren’t hanging lower than his feet, he’d have been content to stay right where he was for the foreseeable future.

  On the other hand, with a crazy woman feeling him up…

  Get your hands off my body, lady, that’s private property you’re invading.

  Her hair hung down and tickled his face. She was muttering under her breath, something about a gun. What the devil was she talking about? She didn’t even know he was a cop—they’d never got that far in the introductions.

  Kit was looking for his pistol. He had to be wearing one, because why else would he be wearing a leather coat on a day like this? As long as you stayed out of the wind, it felt almost summer.

  Had he had it in his hand when she’d hit him? If so, it could be anywhere, even in the ditch—although she hadn’t heard a splash.

  The murder weapon. Oh, my blessed mercy!

  She had to find it before he came to and hold it on him until she could get help. Yell for one of the men on the wharf to call the sheriff.

  Being able to hand over his gun as evidence would make up for not giving her name when she called, but first she had to find it. One side of his coat was caught underneath his body, and so she started, carefully patting him down. His body was hot. Hot, hard and…

  Squatting beside him, she leaned over and slipped her fingers under the other side of his coat. Right-handed men wore their guns on the left side, didn’t they? And vice versa?

  She had no way of knowing which handed he was. Some men shoved their guns into the back of their belt, but he was lying on his back and he was too heavy for her to roll over.

  And then her fingers touched something that felt like leather. Too flat to be a gun or a holster…

  Frowning, she managed to ease it out of an inside pocket. “A badge?”

  “Satisfied?” His voice sounded like iron grating on concrete.

  She gasped and dropped the badge, scrambling backward and trying to look as if she hadn’t been caught with her hands in places they had no business being. “Look, whoever you are, we’re going to have to move you, else you’ll slide into the ditch and drown, but don’t try any funny business, because we’re being watched.” She had no idea whether or not the men working on the waterfront a few thousand feet away were paying any attention, much less whether they could actually see what was going on. “So don’t think you can get away with anything.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it,” he rasped. His eyes were still closed. She didn’t know whether to trust him or not.

  “Can you move?” She leaned forward on her knees again and studied his face, which was hardly reassuring, but then at this point it would take the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to reassure her.

  “Can you open yo
ur eyes?”

  No way, lady. As long as he didn’t open his eyes, Carson told himself, he could pretend this was all a bad dream. All of it…the purple banshee, the smell of cinnamon and apples, the babbling testimony—those cool hands pawing over his body.

  Don’t try any funny business? What was she, a comic book character? There was nothing even faintly funny about any of the past forty-eight hours.

  He groaned, and the woman caught her breath.

  Man, I don’t need this complication, Carson thought tiredly. She clutched his hand and gave a few experimental tugs. If he had a lick of sense he’d have crawled on his knees, climbed back in his car and hightailed it out of here the minute he realized she was criminally insane.

  If I had a grain of sense, Kit thought, I’d have left him where he fell and got hold of the sheriff, and let him send for an ambulance. And while she was at it, she could have mentioned that they might want to bring along handcuffs, because the man sprawled out beside the road was probably a murderer, never mind that he had a badge inside his jacket.

  Or she could call nine-one-one again, report a man down at the intersection of Landing and Waterlily Roads and then drive up to Chesapeake. Her grandparents might not approve of her, but they wouldn’t want anything awful to happen to her.

  Oh, it would make the papers, all right. The churchyard murderer hit by a car driven by the only witness to the crime.

  On the other hand, if she left him here, he might lose consciousness and slide down the ditch bank and drown.

  “What am I going to do about you?” she whispered. “I’m tempted to—”

  He opened his eyes then, and Kit found herself staring down into the bluest eyes she had ever seen. More cobalt than cerulean, she thought fleetingly, but darker now with what could be pain.

  “Are you…all right?” she asked hesitantly. Merciful saints, the man was on a mission to shut her up permanently, and she was worried about his health?

  She studied him carefully. His eyes were closed again. He was breathing heavily, as if he were in pain. She didn’t know if he’d lost consciousness or not, but she needed another look at that badge, and this might be her last chance. The thing could have come from a toy store, for all she knew. Probably had.