Why didn’t the girls borrow clothes from your sister or your mother and cover themselves?
Mike looked surprised, then smiled, then he laughed. “What a very, very good question. Maybe they liked my father and my brothers starting at them in open-mouthed admiration.”
Still grinning, he rolled off of her and stood up. He stretched and yawned, with Samantha’s eyes never leaving his body, especially when his shirt pulled up and exposed his bare stomach. Did he have any idea what he looked like when he did that? she wondered.
Abruptly, he stopped yawning and looked down at her, as though he knew very well that she was watching him. “That’s your story for tonight. You wouldn’t like to change your mind about…you know?” He nodded toward the empty side of the bed.
Sam shook her head no.
Then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he bent to kiss her lips. But Samantha turned her head away. When she looked back at him, he was bending over her, staring at her.
“Sometimes you remind me of those high school girls that you take out to drive-in movies. You go out one night and spend the whole night kissing and, after hours of work, finally getting your hand under her blouse. The next time you go out you think you’re going to work on her skirt, but instead, she makes you start back at square one: She won’t even let you kiss her.”
In spite of herself, Samantha giggled. She could easily imagine Mike as a randy high school boy.
“Tell me, Sam, did the boys have to start over again with you with each date?”
When she didn’t answer him, he handed her the pad and pencil. I never had a date in high school, she wrote.
Mike had to read her sentence three times before he looked up at her in disbelief, then taking the pencil from her he wrote, Have you ever been to bed with any man other than the jerk you were married to?
She didn’t want to answer his question. Why a jerk? she wrote.
“He lost you, didn’t he? Any man who’d do that has to be stupid.”
Samantha laughed, then punched his shoulder. He was lying; he was flattering her, but still, having someone call her ex-husband a jerk pleased her.
“How about a goodnight kiss? Nothing more than that. I’ll keep my hands on your shoulders. Trust me. I promise.”
She wasn’t strong enough to say no to kissing Michael, especially when he was looking at her like that. As he leaned on the bed, a hand on each side of her hips, she gave him a tentative nod, and he sat down on the bed again and put his hands on her upper arms. Slowly he brought his lips to hers.
With each kiss, she experienced wonder that something could be so lovely. As he’d done today, he didn’t force her or try to leap on top of her. She began to sink into his kiss, began to trust him as she slumped back against the pillows, her eyes closed, her body relaxed.
“Good night,” he said softly, and Samantha almost wished he wouldn’t leave.
Getting off the bed, he turned off the light switch and went down the hall.
He asked her to trust him and she was beginning to, but, she thought as she snuggled down into the covers, would he trust her?
It had taken two days, but she had made her decision: She was going to look for her grandmother.
16
“I am going to look for my grandmother.”
Samantha and Mike were in the bedroom of her apartment. She had slept downstairs in his bed, but early this morning, before she’d heard him stirring in the bedroom next door, she’d come upstairs to get dressed. When she’d come out of her bedroom, Mike had been standing in the living room, waiting for her. He thought she was getting ready to go with his cousin Raine to Maine, and it had taken all her courage to tell him that she wasn’t going, she was staying here in New York with him.
Pretending he didn’t hear her, Mike didn’t even bother to answer. “Montgomery will be here any minute. All of them are punctual, so he won’t be even a minute late. I bought you some chocolate chip muffins for the trip, because if I know the Montgomerys, they’ll feed you something like broccoli and carrot soufflé. Maybe I ought to call Kaplan’s Deli and get you a couple of pastrami sandwiches and a six-pack of beer. Beer’s nice on a trip, and—”
“Mike,” she said softly, “stop pretending you didn’t hear me. I’m not leaving. I’m going to look for my grandmother.”
“Like hell you are,” he said, grabbing her tote bag in one hand and her elbow with the other.
“I am not leaving. And that’s empty.” She nodded toward the tote bag.
“No problem. When you get to Connecticut have Montgomery stop and buy you whatever you need. Better yet, wait until you get to Maine.”
When Mike wouldn’t release her arm, she did the only thing she could think of: She sat down on the floor. “I’m not leaving here and I’m not going to Maine. I am going to remain in New York to look for my grandmother.”
Putting his strong hands on her upper arms, Mike lifted her. When Samantha remained rigid, he set her on the edge of the couch.
“Samantha,” he began.
“It’s no use trying to think of what to say to make me see your side of it. I have made up my mind.”
Several emotions crossed Mike’s face, then he sat down heavily beside her. “I’ll close the house if I have to, then you won’t have any place to stay.”
“Fine. I’ll rent another apartment.”
Mike gave a grunt then a lopsided grin. “And who’ll take care of you? The doorman? Sam, you’re so terrified of New York you haven’t even gone around the block by yourself. How do you expect to find your grandmother without me to help you? And I’m going to refuse to help you.”
Turning her to face him, he took her hands in his “Look, sweetheart, in any other instance, I’d love to have you with me, but this is dangerous.”
She raised one eyebrow. “Men’s work?”
He squeezed her hands. “Don’t give me that women’s lib crap! I’m not talking about who does the dishes, I’m talking about life and death.”
“And what makes you think you’d make a better detective than me? You’ve been researching for two years, and I’ve found out more in a few weeks than you have.”
Mike nearly choked on what he wanted to say. “Found out? You call the bruises on your neck ‘finding out’?”
She tried to pull her hands away, but he held them tightly. “She is my grandmother, she was involved with a hideous man, and my father wanted me to look for her.”
“Your father had no idea his mother was involved with gangsters—at least not real gangsters. Today gangsters sound kind of cute, and besides, your dad thought his mother ran away because of love.”
“And why do you think she ran away?”
Mike put his nose nearly to hers. “Money. Murder. She knew something. It could be a million reasons—maybe three million reasons—but none of them are good, which is why you are going to Maine where it’s safe.”
She took a deep breath. There was no way in the world he was going to change her mind, but on the other hand, she wanted to stay in his house. It was comfortable here; the garden was pretty; it was a nice location. And, well, okay, she was rather familiar with Mike and if she did ever again need help—which of course she wasn’t going to—he did have rather fast reactions.
“Mike,” she asked, “why are you researching this man?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “The truth. I want the truth, not one of your lies, no matter how sweetly you tell it.”
Releasing her hands, he stood up and walked to the window. “For my uncle Mike,” he said, then turned back to her. “Remember when Doc said that Scalpini’s men shot a lot of innocent people in the nightclub?”
She nodded.
“My uncle Mike worked there. He danced with the women whose husbands and boyfriends were too fat to dance, and he was on the dance floor when Scalpini’s men arrived. He took thirty-two bullets below the waist.
“Thirty-two,” she whispered. “And he lived?”
“Barely. It
was touch and go for a long time, but he not only lived, he learned to walk on crutches. He and my grandfather were in the navy together and Mike saved Gramp’s life, so when Mike needed help, Gramps gave it. He brought Uncle Mike to Chandler, hired the best medical people, and helped him get well. Uncle Mike lived in a little house behind ours.”
“And he was your friend?”
“The best of friends. Sometimes a person can get lost in a family the size of mine, but Uncle Mike always had time for me. He never lost patience with me, and he always took my side in any scrape—even when I was in the wrong.”
“He sounds like a nice man.”
“He was.”
Looking up at him, she saw the sadness in his eyes and knew they shared something, this loss of people they loved. “And you want to bring justice to Doc because of what was done to your uncle Mike?”
“Something like that.”
“Do you realize that if Scalpini hadn’t shot Mike, you’d probably never have met him? In my case, my family was already formed, we were happy, but something that probably had to do with that night in 1928 broke my family apart. Don’t I have a right to know what happened? To know what made my grandmother leave?”
He went to sit by her again. “Of course you do. I’ll call you every day. I was going to anyway, but—”
“Were you?”
“Was I where?”
“No. Were you planning to call me every day?”
He gave her a look of disbelief. “You don’t think I was going to send you into a town full of Montgomerys and not have daily contact with you, do you? Do you think I’m a fool?”
“And what would we talk about? Doc?”
Laughing, Mike reached out to touch her hair. “Sometimes, Sam-Sam, I think there are parts of your education missing. What do all boys and girls who have the hots for each other talk about for hours at a time?”
Turning red, Samantha looked down at her hands. It was the first thing he’d said that made her actually consider going to Maine. She recovered herself. “I am going to remain here and look for my grandmother,” she said firmly. “And anything you—”
She quit talking because Mike had put his hand behind her head and drawn her mouth to his. He kissed her with such hunger that Samantha could feel herself beginning to tremble as she put her hands on his ribs, feeling the thick pad of muscle there.
“Don’t you think I want you to stay here? Don’t you think I love having you here with me? You’re the only person besides your father who’s shown any interest in my biography. My dad nags me about finishing my dissertation so I can get a doctorate. But for what? I don’t want to teach and I don’t want to work in an office somewhere. My brothers laugh at me and talk about my ‘old gangsters.’ Sam, maybe I don’t want to do this biography just for Uncle Mike. Maybe I want to do it for myself because it’s so difficult for me. In college, math was easy, too easy, but spending days alone in a library, up to my neck in falling-apart old books, then some girl in a short skirt walks by and she’s got a rear end on her that…”
He grinned. “Anyway, writing has been a challenge, and I get distracted easily, but it hasn’t been much fun until you came along. You sit with me and type my notes and we talk about things and I can bounce ideas off of you and—” Lifting first one hand then the other, he kissed her palms. “And sometimes you let me kiss you. It’s been great, Sam, really great.”
“And it will continue to be great,” she said, squeezing his hands in hers. “Mike, we can work together on this. I like libraries; I like—”
“Yeah, and I like having you alive.”
She pulled away from him. “You’re going to lose this one. I am going to remain in New York and I’m going to search for my grandmother. As far as I can see, you have two choices: One, I stay here in this house with you and we look together, or two, I move to another apartment and I look by myself.”
“This is too serious, Sam. This is too dangerous. Why are you doing this? We can drop this now and from the looks of him, Doc will be dead in a few years, then we can—”
“But that’s just it, Mike,” she said enthusiastically. “Don’t you see? If Doc is still alive, then my grandmother might still be alive.”
“That doesn’t follow.”
She looked at him hard. When she’d first met him, he’d been able to tell her lies and keep secrets from her without her detecting his deception, but now he couldn’t. Right now there was an insincerity on his face, a tightness about his mouth that she was beginning to recognize. “You’re holding something back,” she whispered. “I can see it in your eyes.”
Mike got off the couch, but Samantha put herself in front of him. “What do you know?”
“Nothing,” he said angrily, turning away from her.
“Michael Taggert, if you don’t tell me what you know I’ll…I’ll…”
“What?” he asked in disgust. “What else can you do to me? Put your life in jeopardy? Blackmail me? Run around in front of me in white shorts and T-shirt and yell rape when I touch you?”
“I’ll kiss Raine Montgomery,” she said. “I’ll date him. I’ll go out with him every night. I’ll—”
Turning on his heel, Mike started to leave her apartment.
She caught his arm. “Mike, wait, please. Can’t you understand? What if you found out that your uncle Mike wasn’t dead, after all? Or that there was a chance that he may not be dead? Wouldn’t you do everything you could to find him? To see him just one more time before he was gone? My grandmother is eighty-some years old, I don’t have time to wait. Please tell me what you know. Please.” Putting her hand up, she touched his cheek.
He caught her hand and kissed her palm. “Sam, you do something to me. You turn me into a kid again.” He took a deep breath. “Your father told me that as of two years ago your grandmother was alive.”
Samantha checked herself in the mirror in the foyer, making sure her clothes were straight and that her hair was arranged the way the hairdresser had taught her, then she put her purse on the narrow table and made sure that she had her new credit cards and cash. When she couldn’t think of another thing to check or anything to do that would enable her to postpone what she planned to do, she put her hand on the doorknob, straightened her shoulders, and opened the door.
She was going to go out into New York all by herself. This time she was going farther than just around the block; this time she was going to spend the entire afternoon in the city by herself.
After locking the door behind her, she started down the stairs. This morning Mike had told her that her grandmother was alive as of two years ago. He’d explained that two years ago her father had received a postcard from his mother, and it was the card that had made David Elliot decide to try to find his mother. The postcard had been simple, saying only that she loved him, had always loved him, and that she hoped he’d forgive her. At the bottom, it had been signed “Your mother.”
At the time he’d received the card, Dave had had his accounting office to run and couldn’t so much as take a vacation to New York, but immediately upon receipt of that card he’d started making preparations to take an early retirement so he could search for his mother.
Then, by a stroke of luck, fate, kismet, joss, or whatever one wanted to call it, six months after he’d received the card, Mike had appeared at his door and asked if Dave’s mother had once had an affair with a gangster by the name of Doc.
That simple meeting had started a friendship that had eventually resulted in Dave turning the guardianship of his daughter over to Mike. “Ownership,” Samantha had muttered when Mike had told her the story.
“Some ownership,” Mike answered in mock weariness. “The deed’s kept in a safe deposit box.”
Mike had been very upset at Sam’s telling him that she was planning to remain in New York, and she suspected that he had every intention of keeping her out of everything that he was planning to do. Knowing that he blamed himself for the murder attempt, she guessed that he planned t
o not allow her out of his sight, and his best way of controlling her was by keeping facts from her.
After their confrontation of this morning, she’d gone downstairs and seen Mike’s gym bag by the front door, letting her know that he had obviously been planning to go to the gym after she left for Maine. When she asked him about the bag and his plans, he’d stubbornly said he was staying home with her. It had taken some fast talking on her part to persuade him to leave the house and go on his planned trip to the gym. She had to get him out of the house, because something he’d said was bothering her. Mike had said that she couldn’t help him research because she was too afraid of New York to so much as leave the block.
What he had said was true, and Samantha knew she had to screw up her courage and get out into the city. After all, she couldn’t spend her life hiding in Mike’s town house, or for that matter, she couldn’t spend her life hiding behind Mike. After—if—they found her grandmother, she would have to leave the city and Mike. How could she ever think of living alone if she was too frightened to leave the house?
Now, Mike was at the gym and Samantha was going out all alone into the maw of this notorious, noisy, dirty city full of strangers. No gladiator facing the lions had been more afraid than Sam was at this undertaking; no St. George facing the dragon had more misgivings than she did.
She walked down Sixty-fourth Street, breathing a sigh of relief when she crossed the street and no one had yet held a gun or knife to her throat. When she crossed the wide expanse of Park Avenue, which seemed to be mostly residential, she headed toward Madison, her head down, her courage screwed to the breaking point.
For the first two blocks she was so afraid that she didn’t look at her surroundings, but by the time she neared Madison, she noticed uniformed doormen smiling and tipping their hats to her. Tentatively, she smiled back at them—at least they didn’t look like muggers or drug dealers.
Sweet Liar Page 18