by Jane Graves
“Wine?” John said.
“It was on the floor of the front seat. A bottle of Shiraz.”
“Never saw it.”
“It probably rolled under the seat. I want it back.”
John sighed. “How about I just give you ten bucks and we call it even?”
“Ten dollars?” Darcy said. “Are you kidding me? It’s a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine!”
“Two hundred dollars? Who in his right mind pays two hundred dollars for one bottle of wine?”
“A person with discriminating taste.”
“Who loves to throw away money.”
“You clearly know nothing about the finer things in life.”
“I know the value of a buck. Doesn’t get any finer than that.”
“Don’t worry,” Tony said. “I’ll get the wine for you.”
“Why, thank you,” she said, giving him a pleasant smile. “I do believe you’re one of the sweetest men I’ve ever met.”
Tony grinned at John. “You hear that, John? I’m sweet.”
“Just get the damned wine, will you?”
Tony gave Darcy a wink, grabbed a set of keys, and headed out the door. She turned and gave John a look that could have curdled milk. “Is there a single ounce of gentlemanly behavior inside you at all?”
“Sure there is. And it all comes pouring out the moment I encounter a lady.”
“You’re still mad because I outsmarted you and grabbed that key. Maybe it’s time you got over that.”
“Actually, I got over that about the time I drove off with your car and left you standing in the middle of the street.”
“How does it feel to take a car away from a woman who has nothing left in the world?”
“So you’re sticking to that story, are you?”
“It’s the truth.”
“Your husband actually sold your house while you were on a vacation?”
“Yes.”
“You came home to other people living there. That’s hard to believe.”
“Not when he practically gave it away.”
“Your address was in west Plano. High-rent district. And now you’re living with your parents in a trailer park?”
“With no money, what else am I supposed to do?”
“Then you don’t have a job?”
She lifted her nose a notch. “Since I’ve been married, I haven’t had to work.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.” He grabbed a garment bag, slung it over the handle of the biggest suitcase, then took the handle of the next smallest one and headed for the door. Darcy just stood there.
“What are you waiting for?” he said. “Porters and limo drivers don’t generally happen by this way, and I’m only making one trip.”
She gave him a dirty look and grabbed the carry-on bag and another bag with wheels, and they went to the parking lot. The only car there that wasn’t his or Tony’s looked as if it was on its last leg.
“Nice ride,” John said.
She unlocked the trunk. “It’s your fault I have to drive it.”
“Steal it from a junkyard?”
“No, stealing would be your thing. If you must know, I borrowed it from my father.”
“So what did you do to your father to warrant a punishment like this?”
“Just put my luggage in the trunk, will you?”
He’d just finished loading up the car when Tony came around the corner of the building and handed her the bottle of wine. “Here you go, sweetheart.” He looked at the car, wincing painfully. “Yours?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“For the love of God, John. Nobody should have to drive a heap like that. Give her back her car, will you?”
“So you’d like to make up her back payments?”
“Uh . . . no.” He turned to Darcy. “Sorry.”
She smiled at him. “You’re still a very sweet man.” Then she shot John a look that said, And you’re not.
“I’m real sorry about what your husband did to you,” Tony said. “What are your plans now?”
“I’m not completely sure,” Darcy said. “But I’ll manage.”
“That’s going to be a tough thing to do with no job,” John said.
“Some people work hard,” she said smugly. “Other people work smart.”
“I’m surprised you’re interested in working at all.”
“If you are,” Tony said, “we have a job opening here.”
John whipped around. “No, we don’t.”
“Yeah, we do,” Tony told Darcy. “John fired our clerk yesterday.”
“Well, thank you so much for thinking of me,” Darcy said, showering Tony with that glowing smile again. Then she turned to John, and the glow vanished. “But I’m afraid the management here is a little overbearing for my taste.”
“I’m quite sure it is,” John said. “And you couldn’t handle the job, anyway.”
“Handle what? Picking up a phone and saying hello? Pulling open a file cabinet and stuffing folders into it?” She made a scoffing noise. “I can’t imagine the person who couldn’t handle it.”
“Well, in that case,” he said with a deadpan expression, “the job’s all yours.”
“And I’ll take you up on that,” she said, “the day hell freezes over.”
With that, she circled around, got in the passenger door of that god-awful car, and shimmied over to the driver’s seat. It was a hard thing to pull off gracefully, and John had to admit she did a pretty good job of it.
Tony grinned. “She’s one of a kind, isn’t she?”
That was the understatement of the century.
John watched as she stuck her nose in the air and motored out of his parking lot, that crappy old car gasping for every inch of ground it covered. As much as she drove him nuts, he couldn’t help being curious about how she was going to pull herself out of the hole her husband had dug for her. It would be an interesting thing to watch. From a distance, anyway. Wearing body armor. With a weapon in each hand. And his brain on full alert.
No matter how beautiful she might be, behind that pretty face was a woman who could turn any man’s life upside down before he even knew what hit him.
That man was infuriating.
Darcy fumed most of the way home, wondering how she’d had the misfortune not only to have her husband leave her penniless, but then to have a man like John Stark pop up to make life hell for her. Thank God she finally had her luggage back, which meant that from now on, Lone Star Repossessions would be nothing more than a very bad memory.
It was time to concentrate on other things, such as where Warren was and how she could get back some of the money he’d taken away. She still couldn’t fathom why he’d disappeared the way he had. While their relationship had never been overly warm, they’d never been hostile to each other, and taking everything they had and leaving was just about as hostile as it got.
She’d met Warren when she went to work for the big manufacturing company where he used to be an accountant. He had just made the leap to upper management about the time he divorced his wife of twenty years.
But it wasn’t until he and Darcy had been married for several months that she realized the extent of his midlife crisis. Sometimes she’d see him looking in the mirror when he thought he was alone, checking out the hairline and the wrinkles and the love handles, and an aura of quiet desperation would fill the air around him. Warren always seemed to have the sense that time wasn’t just marching on but was running wildly around him in ever-tightening circles, closing in on him until escape was impossible.
Ironically, right now Darcy was feeling the same way. Was that why he had left? Because she wasn’t the fresh young woman he’d married? Because she was no longer enough compensation for the way he felt about himself?
And if that was true, would any other man be interested in her?
As that sickening feeling took hold, Darcy let herself entertain the fantasy that one of her mother’s theories was actually true. Mayb
e Warren really did have that brain tumor. It had made him go a little crazy, but in a few days he would find his way home, they’d get him a little chemo, and everything would be right with the world again. When she arrived at her parents’ house five minutes later, though, a sense of impending doom overcame her.
A police car was parked at the curb.
She pulled Gertie up behind it and killed the engine, then went into the house. Her mother was talking to a detective from the Plano Police Department.
“Mom? What’s wrong?”
Lyla grabbed Darcy’s arm, her face ghost-white. “Brace yourself, Darcy. Something terrible’s happened. It’s . . . it’s Warren.”
It’s true. The brain tumor finally caught up to him, and they’ve found his body.
But the detective quickly relieved her of that crazy scenario by offering her an even crazier one. As it turned out, not only had Warren cashed in everything he and Darcy had, an IRS audit at Sybersense Systems revealed that a few days before Darcy had returned from Mexico, he’d embezzled three hundred thousand dollars.
And now he’d skipped the country.
Chapter 5
Darcy already knew her husband was a no-good, deserting, asset-grabbing jerk. But the last thing she’d expected was that he’d turn out to be a criminal.
The detective questioned her at length, trying to find out if she might have any idea where Warren was, but his questions only muddled her mind and made the situation seem even more surreal. They’d discovered that Warren had substantial gambling debts, which gave him all kinds of motive to embezzle. Worst of all, as a chief financial officer of a major corporation, he had the knowledge to successfully hide any money that hadn’t gone to loan sharks, which meant that Darcy would probably never see a dime of it again.
At least she had her answer now. Put quite simply, Warren was a lousy gambler who amassed a huge amount of debt and was reluctant to have his knees broken. But she had news for him. If she ever saw him again, his knees would be the least of what she’d break.
Darcy spent the rest of the day with her head in a murky cloud of disbelief. As evening approached, she was ready to dive headfirst into a glass of alcohol. She thought about opening the bottle of Shiraz Tony had rescued from her car, but now the wine she might have once had with Chinese takeout seemed more valuable than gold.
Instead she chugged some Wild Turkey with her mother, then sat like a zombie in front of a NASCAR race with her father while her mother did the TV Guide crossword puzzle. At ten o’clock, Darcy stumbled to bed in a haze of lower-class mediocrity.
The next morning she was shaken from sleep by late-morning sunlight bursting through the window, the kind that turns pupils into pinpoints and aggravates the hell out of a tears-and-bourbon headache. Pepé was standing on her stomach, staring down at her like a child whose alcoholic mother has been tipping the bottle again. She pulled him down to the bed, turned on her side, and cuddled him against her.
She wished she could lapse into a coma so she wouldn’t have to face the day. But sooner or later she had to get out of this bed and do something, though she didn’t have a clue what. The urge to draw a warm bath and haul out the razor blades had passed, but in its place was a scary little ball of nerves that felt permanently stuck in her stomach.
She had no money and no means of getting any. No man on the horizon willing to step into Warren’s shoes. What was she going to do?
Finally she pushed the covers away and sat up, the blood vessels in her temples on the verge of exploding. She shuffled to the kitchen and fed Pepé some of the unrecognizable animal parts in a can that her father had found, left over from a few months ago when Duke the Wonder Dog had gone to the great duck hunt in the sky. Pepé wolfed down one plateful of it and looked up for more. Darcy sighed. Her dog was so nondiscriminating sometimes that she wondered if he really was hers or whether puppies had been switched at birth.
Darcy pulled out a chair and plopped down at the table, feeling like Raggedy Ann in the midst of a major depressive episode. And that depression took an even bigger nosedive when her mother showed her the business section of the Dallas Morning News.
SYBERSENSE EXEC EMBEZZLES $300,000.
“Now the whole world is going to know about it,” Lyla said, puffing away on her Virginia Slims as if the Surgeon General had never weighed in on the issue. “You married a criminal, Darcy. How could you have married a criminal?”
Darcy wanted to beat her head against the table. “He wasn’t a criminal when I married him.”
“Maybe he was. Maybe he just hid it really well all these years.”
“Mom—”
“Forget it. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that the detective said you’ll never see any of that money again, so it’s time to start thinking about what to do now.”
“She might consider getting that job we talked about,” her father said.
“Clayton, will you shut up about that? Now that Warren is gone for sure, she needs more than a paycheck. She needs another husband.”
“She doesn’t need a man to take care of her.”
“You’re right. She doesn’t. As long as she doesn’t mind eating out of a Dumpster.”
Thanks, Mom. I need a horrible image like that to haunt me twenty-four hours a day.
“First things first, Darcy. Put yourself together. You’ll feel better. No woman feels good when she looks like hell.”
Darcy wasn’t sure she’d feel good if she didn’t look like hell, but it was worth a shot. Forty-five minutes later, she came back out to the kitchen, her hair dried and her makeup on, and wearing a print skirt, a knit top, and her Claudia Ciuti sandals. Her mother gave her a once-over.
“That skirt’s really not your color.”
“It’s a print skirt, Mom. Which color isn’t me?”
“All of them. Are you hungry?”
Darcy poured a cup of coffee. “No, thanks.”
“No. You should eat something.” Lyla opened the pantry door. “Let’s see . . . I have some bagels—no, wait. They’re a little green.” She moved some stuff around. “Oh. Here are some Pop Tarts. And some instant oatmeal. And one of those muffin mixes with the dehydrated strawberries.” She searched through the shelves a while longer. “And some Froot Loops.”
Dumpster-diving was looking better all the time. “Pop Tarts, I guess.” Flavored rubber between two pieces of cardboard. She couldn’t wait.
Lyla shoved two Pop Tarts into the toaster, then went to the kitchen sink to put some dishes into the dishwasher.
“Oh, my God!”
Darcy just about spilled her coffee. “What?”
“Will you look at that! A limousine!”
Darcy rose and looked out the window over the sink. Sure enough, a sleek black limo sat at the curb.
“What do you suppose it’s doing here?” Lyla said.
“I don’t know, but somebody’s getting out.”
“It’s a woman,” Lyla said. “At least I think it’s a woman. She’s coming this way!”
There were three sharp raps at the door. Darcy opened it and came face-to-face with a short, compact woman wearing a black shirt, black jeans, black boots. Her dark hair was cut in a short, utilitarian style, and she wore not a speck of makeup or a single piece of jewelry. She held her hands behind her in military-ready fashion, looking at Darcy with a grim, almost lethal expression.
“Yes?” Darcy said.
“I’m looking for Darcy McDaniel.”
“I’m Darcy McDaniel.”
“Mr. Bridges would like to speak with you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Jeremy Bridges.”
Darcy blinked with surprise. She knew that name. He owned Sybersense Systems, the software company Warren worked for, along with about a dozen other companies. He was one of those computer wonder boys who had turned a tiny software company into a huge conglomerate, going from ordinary citizen to multimillionaire in a very short period of time. She’d asked Warren once what he
was like and had gotten two words in response: young and eccentric. That hadn’t been much to go on, so Darcy wasn’t quite sure what she was in for now. But with her mother all but shoving her out the door, it looked as if she was going to find out.
Darcy followed the woman down the stairs and across the yard. The woman opened the rear door of the limousine. With the tinted windows, at first all Darcy saw inside was black. She climbed inside and sat down, and when she turned to face the man on the seat beside her, she got the shock of her life.
This was Jeremy Bridges?
He lounged against the opposite door, his arm along the back of the seat, wearing a pair of khaki shorts, a faded Hawaiian shirt, and flip-flops, holding a bottle of Corona against his knee. A lock of sandy brown hair fell carelessly across his forehead, and a day’s growth of beard darkened his cheeks and chin. Interventions by a hairstylist, a wardrobe consultant, and a sommelier were definitely in order.
But wait a minute. This couldn’t be him. She knew Bridges was in his late thirties, and this guy looked like a college kid who’d rented a limo with his buddies to go for a joy ride.
“Hi, Darcy,” he said. “I’m Jeremy Bridges.”
Darcy blinked. Blinked again. Impossible. “Uh . . . hello, Mr. Bridges.”
“Jeremy. You don’t mind chatting with me for a minute, do you?”
Soft Texas drawl. Pleasant smile. Disarming manner. Those things should have put her at ease, but they didn’t. Anytime reality didn’t meet expectation, she always went on guard.
“No,” she said. “Not at all.”
Then Darcy realized the woman who’d summoned her had climbed into the limo behind her and was sitting on the seat across from them. Jeremy nodded in her direction.
“Darcy, this is Bernadette Hogan.”
Darcy swallowed hard. “Hello.”
A curt nod was her only acknowledgment. Who in the world was she? Business associate? Relative? Prison parolee?
“Bernie is my bodyguard,” Jeremy said.
Darcy blinked. “Bodyguard?”
“We’ve had a few incidents. Too many nutcases out there think kidnapping a rich guy is a great moneymaking opportunity.”
“Well,” Darcy said, trying to sound cordial, “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of a woman acting as a bodyguard before.”