by Jane Graves
“Now, hold on. I may have done a little entering, but there was no breaking. I told you I had a key.”
“It doesn’t matter if you had a key or not! If it isn’t your property, you have no authorization to enter it!” He paced away a few steps, running his hand through his hair. “I don’t believe this. I just don’t believe—”
“Wait a minute!” Darcy said. “Larry won’t know I didn’t have authority to take it. Won’t he just figure the repo man finally caught up to him?”
John whipped around. “No. You don’t know deadbeats. They always know their rights. And they can’t wait to use them against you.”
“So . . . what are we going to do?”
He strode back to her, his eyes narrowed angrily. “Listen to me, Darcy. The only reason there’s a ‘we’ here is because my name is on the truck. If I knew of a way to save my ass without saving yours, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
Darcy hoped he didn’t actually mean that. Then again, judging from the way steam was blowing out his ears, maybe he did.
“Did anyone see you take the car?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. The garage has an alley entrance.”
John looked at his watch. “It’s almost four o’clock. Do you think Larry will be home yet?”
“I doubt it.”
“Is the repossession order in the truck?”
“Yes.”
He climbed behind the wheel, then looked down at Darcy. “Get in.”
The last thing Darcy wanted was to be in a small, closed-in space with a large, angry man. Especially when that man was John. “Uh . . . whatever you’re doing, do you really need me?”
“You’re not weaseling out of this. If something goes wrong and I end up going down for this, you’re going down, too.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“The only thing we can. Put the damned thing back.”
Darcy sat quietly in the cab of the tow truck as John drove to Larry’s house in miserable, abject, screaming silence, gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles whitened. Okay, so he wasn’t happy about this. She could see his point. But all they had to do was put the car back, and everything would be fine.
John pulled the tow truck to a halt a few doors down from Larry’s house. “Go get the key and open the garage door,” he told Darcy. “I’m driving around to the alley to wait for you. Now move it.”
Darcy scrambled out of the truck’s cab, circled around the house, and walked to the flower bed beside the front porch, where she grabbed the key from the rock. She let herself into the house, and a minute later she opened the door leading from the utility room to the garage and hit the button for the garage door opener.
The moment the door was up, John unloaded the Corvette back into the garage, shooting Darcy several scathing looks that told her that even when the car was back in place, this issue wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.
“I’m going to pull back into the alley,” he told her as he opened the driver’s door to get back into the truck. “You go put the key back. And for God’s sake, make sure nobody sees you.”
Darcy nodded. As soon as John pulled away, she lowered the garage door again and made her way back through the house. When she reached the front door, she stopped to peer out the peephole to ensure nobody was standing on the front porch.
All clear.
She slipped out the door and went to the flower bed, where she bent over to retrieve the phony rock. She had just returned the key and slid the compartment closed when she heard a voice behind her.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Darcy whipped around to see a woman standing on the sidewalk. At first it didn’t dawn on Darcy who she was, but the baby stroller she was pushing, the mom clothes, the suspicious look on her face, and the fact that Darcy was three doors down from where she used to live finally jogged her memory. The last time Darcy had seen this woman, she was calling 911 and having her escorted out of her house.
“I asked you what you’re doing,” the woman snapped.
“Uh . . . nothing.”
“Nothing? Why are you digging around in Mr. Howard’s flower bed?”
Darcy couldn’t think of a single thing to say. All she could do was stand there with her mouth hanging open, which undoubtedly made her look every bit as guilty as she was.
“You’re not supposed to come back to this neighborhood. The police told you that.” The woman dove into a diaper bag and pulled out a cell phone.
“What are you doing?” Darcy asked.
“Calling the cops.”
“No!”
As Darcy hurried down the sidewalk to stop her, the woman reached her other hand into the diaper bag, pulled out a canister, and held it up. “Stay away!”
Darcy screeched to a halt. Pepper spray? Was she kidding?
Okay, so Darcy had acted a little insane the day she lost everything. But she hadn’t actually attacked anyone, had she?
Using her thumb, the woman poked the cell phone in her other hand. Three buttons: nine, one, and one.
“Wait!” Darcy said. “Don’t do that! I wasn’t doing anything wrong! I swear I wasn’t!”
“You went crazy in my house. Then you were told to stay away. Now you’re back, acting suspiciously. That’s reason enough for me to call the cops.”
Darcy sensed she wasn’t going to convince this woman that this wasn’t a job for the Plano PD, which meant it was time to get out of there.
She spun around and took off, circling the side of the house and sprinting into the alley. She ran up to the tow truck, yanked open the passenger door, and climbed in.
“Darcy?” John said. “What’s the matter?”
She slammed the door. “We need to get out of here.”
“What’s going on? Did somebody see you?”
“John, let’s go.”
“Darcy? What happened?”
“John—”
“I swear to God, if you screwed this up—”
“Hey! Do you want to deal with the cops?”
John’s eyebrows flew up. “Cops? Hell, no!”
“Then drive!”
John had no idea what was up, but the last thing he wanted was to come face-to-face with the police. He hit the gas and drove to the end of the alley, then made a right onto Thornberry. He’d driven about a block before they met a police car coming the opposite direction. He gave the cop a casual wave of his fingertips and kept on driving.
“Darcy,” he said, talking through clenched teeth, “what happened back there?”
“Nothing, really,” she said nonchalantly. “Everything’s fine.”
“The cops showed up! Everything is not fine!”
Darcy rolled her eyes and started in on the story, and the more she talked, the closer John came to blowing his stack.
He’d always prided himself on his remarkably even temper. When he was a cop, nothing bothered him, because he never took anything personally. He could take down suspects, listen to their sob stories or their foul mouths, shrug his shoulders, and call it a good day’s work. It had taken the woman sitting beside him to make him lose his cool, and he wasn’t sure if he’d ever find it again.
“But we got out of there before the cops showed up,” Darcy said brightly. “So no harm done, right?”
He glared at her. “No harm done? Are you kidding me?”
“Well, nobody’s in jail, are they?”
“That’s what you call ‘no harm’? That we weren’t both arrested?”
“Hey, I didn’t know that woman was going to happen by. And as far as taking the car in the first place, it was just a beginner’s mistake. If you’d shown me how to do it right, I wouldn’t have done it wrong.”
“You weren’t supposed to do it at all!”
“I was just showing some initiative. I thought employers liked that.”
“What I like,” he said sharply, “is an employee who keeps her hands off my tow truck.”
Darcy r
olled her eyes. “You sound just like my father. What is it with men and their trucks, anyway?”
“You stole mine!”
“Stole it? I can’t steal it. I work for you.”
“You were not authorized to drive it. And you sure as hell weren’t authorized to repossess a car with it. How did you even know how to use the tow truck?”
“Tony showed me how.”
“He what?”
“Don’t be mad at him. He didn’t know I wanted to learn how to do it myself. I just . . . you know. Acted curious.”
And Tony couldn’t resist those fluttering eyelashes. He was definitely a dead man.
John braked at a stoplight. “I ought to fire you for this.”
“No,” Darcy said, looking a little panicked. “Now, there’s no reason to do that. My being a clerk has nothing to do with this. I’m doing a good job with that, aren’t I?”
“Yes, you are. But—”
“If you fire me, you’ll be without a clerk all over again. And you know how hard it is to find decent employees.”
John thought about Rona and the alphabet. God, he couldn’t take that again.
“If you fire me, you’ll have one less person to order around. And you know how much you like to do that.”
He gave her an admonishing look, then followed it up with an angry glare, because he had no intention of giving in.
“I need this job, John.” She paused, looking pitiful. “Do I still have it?”
Get tough. Take no crap. She’s a nutcase. Fire her now, before she drives your business right into the ground.
But now she was looking at him with a plaintive expression, silently pleading with those gorgeous green eyes, and he felt himself waver. What was it about this woman? Hadn’t she messed with his mind, his business, his life enough already? Why would he even consider letting her stay?
Because he was a sucker. A sap. A spineless jellyfish of a man whose good sense went right out the window when he looked at a beautiful woman. What other explanation could there possibly be?
“John . . . ?”
“Yes! Okay! You still have a job!”
“Thank you.”
“A clerk job. But it comes with a warning.” He pointed a finger inches from her nose. “If you even look in the direction of my tow truck again, you’re a dead woman. And it won’t be one of those pretty murders, like closed head trauma or a quick strangulation. There will be blood, and there will be violence. By the time I’m finished with you, the guys in Homicide will have to do DNA testing to ID your body. Do you hear me?”
Darcy made a face. “Good Lord. Leave it to a former cop to come up with a threat like that.”
“Do you hear me?”
“Yes, John. I hear you.”
The light changed, and he hit the gas. “How in the hell did you get it in your head to do this, anyway?”
“I told you before. I need to make more money.”
“You wouldn’t need more money if you learned to live within your means.”
“My means right now allow me to live with my parents, drive a beat-up car, and eat Taco Hut burritos.”
“There are people worse off than that.”
“I have nothing but the clothes I took with me to Mexico. That’s it. Unless you want me showing up at work in a swimsuit in the next few days, I have to buy some more clothes.”
“Borrow some from your mother.”
“Right. She’s three sizes bigger than I am.” As if size were the only consideration. “I need an advance on my salary.”
He looked at her skeptically. “How much?”
“At least five hundred dollars. A thousand would be better.”
“For clothes?”
“Yes. And even that won’t buy much.”
John opened his mouth to say something else, only to shut it again. A thousand bucks for a clothes-shopping trip? That was ridiculous. There was only one way this woman was ever going to learn the value of a dollar. And once she did, maybe she’d get the idea of quick money out of her mind and keep her hands off his tow truck.
When they arrived back at the office, he opened the driver’s door and got out of the truck. “Come with me.”
She scrambled out the passenger door, hurrying to keep up. “Where are we going?”
“I’m taking you clothes shopping.”
She grabbed his arm. “Wait a minute. You’re taking me shopping?”
“That’s right. I wouldn’t put it past you showing up to work in a swimsuit just to make a point. You do that, and I never will get Tony to leave the office.”
“You’re giving me an advance against my salary?”
He thought about it for a moment, then said, “Nope. I’m buying.”
“You’re buying? As in, spending your money to buy me clothes? What do you want in return?”
He paused. “Nothing.”
She eyed him warily. “I don’t have to pay you back?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Take it or leave it. It’s up to you.”
By the way her eyes shifted back and forth suspiciously, he knew she smelled a rat, but in order to go shopping right now, she’d probably eat a rat.
“I’ll take it,” she said.
Chapter 10
As John drove his SUV down Central Expressway in the direction of Collin Creek Mall, Darcy couldn’t shake the feeling that he was up to something. Not that she minded men buying her things, but John was the last man she’d expected to do that, particularly after what had just happened.
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Still, men like him wouldn’t be caught dead in a women’s clothing store. If by some wild stretch of the imagination they ended up with a woman at a mall, they hung out in Radio Shack or supersized something at the food court. It was a fact that men who got dragged to malls owned more small electronic devices and had more clogged arteries than anyone else on the planet.
“Hope your credit card is warmed up,” Darcy said.
“All I’m spending is a hundred bucks.”
Darcy slumped with dismay. So that was why he appeared to be so generous—because he was actually being a tightwad?
“Then what’s the point of shopping at all? I need more than a pair of cheap shoes.”
“Oh, you’ll get more than that. Much more.”
He slowed the car, then veered off the freeway onto the service road.
“You got off too soon,” Darcy told him. “The mall is two exits away.”
“Nope. This is the right exit.”
“Now, John. You might be able to find every sports bar and hardware store in the city of Plano, but when it comes to shopping malls, I’m the one who—”
That was when she saw it. Looming like a giant gray monster on the horizon, surrounded by a sea of compact cars, soccer moms, battered shopping carts, and screaming kids. John turned into the parking lot, and Darcy’s mouth dropped open.
“You’re taking me shopping at Wal-Mart?”
“That’s right. Damn fine store. If it doesn’t have it, you don’t need it.”
“You don’t understand. I need clothes. Not waffle irons and garden tools.”
“That reminds me. I need some line for my weed eater.”
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“No. I really do need some line for my weed eater.”
Darcy looked back at the building, her mouth dry with dread. The closest she wanted to get to this place was to daydream about marrying a cultured descendant of Sam Walton’s—one who’d had a prominent place in his last will and testament.
John pulled into a parking space and killed the engine.
“I’m not going in there,” Darcy said.
“You know, if you’d bought normal clothes all these years and saved the rest, you wouldn’t be in this mess right now.”
“Define ‘normal.’”
“Jeans. T-shirts. Stuff like that.”
&nbs
p; “I have jeans and T-shirts.” Had, she reminded herself. Had. Her whole life was past tense.
“Uh-huh. Jeans that look like Levi’s, but because of some initials sewn onto the hip pocket, they cost a hundred bucks.”
“A hundred bucks? You’re insulting me.”
“I think it’s time you learned the value of a dollar.”
“So you’re taking it upon yourself to show me?”
“That’s right. A buck goes a whole lot further here than it does at the Galleria.”
“How about a compromise? Collin Creek Mall is right down the street.”
“Yeah? And how far would a hundred bucks go there?”
Further than at the Galleria, but not by much. Damn.
John got out of the car, circled around, and opened her door. Putting his forearm on the roof, he leaned in.
“Time to get real, sweetheart. You’re broke, you have no clothes, and I was serious about the swimsuit thing.”
“I am not shopping in that place.”
“Fine. Maybe Neiman Marcus is having a shoe sale. You can buy one for your left foot.”
“What if somebody I know sees me in there?”
“Then they’re as broke as you are. Now, come on.”
She rolled her eyes and got out of the car. John took her by the arm and led her into the store, as if he expected her to bolt at any moment.
“Why is there a cop at the front door?” she asked.
“Because they’re expecting you to shoplift.”
Once they were inside, Darcy’s nose was hit with a bizarre combination of aromas: Popcorn. Garden chemicals. Big Macs. Something was very wrong when all three of those could be inhaled in the same breath. And children were everywhere—running down the aisles, sitting in strollers and screaming, or playing games of whiney emotional blackmail to score supersized boxes of Milk Duds.
John led her past the costume jewelry and the vinyl handbags to the women’s clothing department. It was even more horrifying than she’d anticipated. She’d never seen so much cheap polyester in her life. And flowers. The bigger the clothes, the bolder the print. What was that all about?
She picked delicately through a rack of cotton shirts. At $4.99 apiece, she could take ten of them and blow only half her budget. Unfortunately, one was one too many.