by Sylvie Kurtz
If someone caught him between assignments and asked him, point-blank, “What do you want?” he wasn’t sure he could answer. Now, in the middle of a job, he suddenly wanted it all to be over. He wanted the time he’d never had to figure out the man behind the mask he wore. Because the job sure as hell hadn’t given him much satisfaction. All he’d done hadn’t saved Carlotta or Bianca. As many scum-bags as he’d put in jail, there were just as many left outside, multiplying faster than rabbits.
“It’s the last one.” The truth jerked him to his feet. Before he accepted another undercover assignment, he needed time.
Bianca turned her hope-filled gaze toward him, but said nothing.
“I took this job to pay for Cheshire.”
Her gaze cranked back to the fountain. Her lower lip swallowed her upper one. “Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
She turned, resting her rear against the lip of the cement fountain. Her hands curled tightly around the decorative border. “I miss you.”
“I miss you, too, kiddo.” He hugged her, then walked her back toward the brick building. “There’s only two months till school’s over.” One way or another, this operation would be over by then.
Maybe then he could give Bianca the security she needed. Maybe then she’d see that drugs weren’t the answer to her hurts. He was good with his hands and knew his way around an engine. These past months working on bikes had become kind of a meditation.
Then he thought of Rory. Why? That didn’t make sense. She was just another female with expectations he could never live up to.
“Do you know what they had us do yesterday?” Bianca said as they reached the brick walkway.
“No, what?”
“They had us climb Mount Monadnock. Five hours! Do you know there’s still snow up there?”
“But the view was worth it.”
“Yeah,” Bianca said reluctantly and rested her head against his shoulder as they walked. “It was worth the trouble.”
“So are you.”
The beeper at his belt vibrated. He glanced at the number. Mike. Time to shed one skin and fake the next.
WHEN RORY CLIMBED the stairs to collect Hannah from Penny’s apartment, Ace still occupied a large chunk of her mind. Physical attributes had never bowled her over before. She much preferred gentle and sophisticated to arrogant and in your face. So what was it about him that had her looking forward to their next encounter, inevitable sparks of irritation and all? An outlet, she decided as she walked into Penny’s apartment. When she was sparring with him and concentrating on how much he irked her, she didn’t have to feel the anxiety over Felicia’s disappearance eating away at her.
Hannah was contentedly playing with Jordan, Penny’s son. Sun poured through the picture window, highlighting the children surrounded with toys on the cozy braided area rug. Penny offered her a cup of coffee. Rory hesitated, then agreed. What was it like to be a widow at twenty-one? What was it like to live in a town where the man who’d killed your husband had you baby-sitting his daughter? Rory had questions, and questions needed answers to soothe away their prickly brambles.
Jordan started fussing, reaching for the chunky car whose bumper Hannah was gumming. As if it was as natural as breathing, Penny handed Rory her coffee, lowered herself to the carpet, sitting cross-legged, and rather than mediate a truce between the two children, she used distraction worthy of a sleight-of-hand artist to draw a smile from her son.
“You’re good with children.” Rory sat in the bentwood rocker and set it in motion. She found she was envious of Penny’s ease.
The brunette flipped her long ponytail over her shoulder and shrugged. “They’re good kids.”
“Still. I feel like I’m all thumbs with Hannah.”
“It’s different when they’re yours.”
Rory somehow doubted it would be different for her. Her maternal instinct was the size of an ant. Something Felicia had often thrown in her face. “Hannah’s not yours.”
“Well, she practically is. She and Jordan were born a week apart and I’ve taken care of Hannah since she was a newborn. Haven’t I, Hannah-girl?”
Hannah turned to the sound of Penny’s voice and gave her a big, wet smile. Penny beamed at her in return. She had a girl-next-door, fresh-scrubbed look that inspired trust. She wore no makeup and dressed for comfort. What you saw was what you got. No artifice. The complete opposite of Felicia who tended toward chameleon.
“You were close to Felicia?”
Penny separated a town’s worth of roly people into two piles and pushed one toward Jordan and one toward Hannah. Both diapered babies eagerly filled their fists with the plastic people. They stuffed them in their mouths and banged them against the round-edged coffee table, the wheeled caddy of wooden blocks and fat cars in all shapes and sizes. All the while Penny executed a toreadorlike dance, keeping the children happy and safe while seeming to let them do as they pleased. “We went through birthing class together.”
Alone? Rory couldn’t see Mike sitting on the floor, urging Felicia to pant. When had Penny’s husband died? Before or after his son’s birth? “I’m glad she had you.”
Penny opened her arms for Jordan who was crawling onto her lap. Not to be outdone, Hannah whined for her share of Penny’s attention. She held both babies who proceeded to tug on her hair, on the buttons of her cardigan and on the lacy trim of the shirt beneath.
“I don’t mean to be indelicate,” Rory started. Unfortunately subtlety wasn’t her forte. “But why would you care for Hannah knowing Mike is responsible for your husband’s murder?”
Penny’s head snapped up. “How did you know?”
Rory shrugged. “Seems people around here are willing to talk about anything except Felicia.”
Penny wrapped a finger around one of Hannah’s curls and gently released it. A weight seemed to draw down the corners of her mouth. “What happened isn’t Hannah’s fault.”
“Still. How can you live here with all the reminders?”
Penny’s shoulders spouted up, then shuted down like an elevator with a cut cable. Gaze far away, she cuddled Jordan, who leaned into her chest and yawned. “I was born here. I grew up here. My family’s here.”
That was Felicia’s reason, too, for staying in New Hampshire after their parents’ murder. This was what she knew, and she didn’t want to leave it behind. Rory couldn’t leave fast enough. She hadn’t wanted to stay where every turn in the road could spring an unwanted memory. She’d wanted fresh and new and totally different.
Rory shook away the shawl of sadness trying to settle on her shoulders. “You were in the motorcycle club, too?”
“A foolish girl thing to do.” Penny gave a short, sharp laugh. “A small town can be boring, and teenagers crave excitement. After I met John, I decided boring was exactly what I wanted. A boring life with a husband who came home every night and three or four kids. I didn’t ask him to give up his bike, you know. He wanted that life, too. Jordan, he changed everything for us.” She shrugged and tipped her head to one side. A sad smile flowered and faded. “We had a perfect year together.”
“What happened?”
“A big, huge mistake.” She swiped at her eyes.
“I’m sorry.” Rory wished she knew how to soothe. It seemed all she ever did was rub people the wrong way. The image of Ace popped into her mind. She brushed it away, but not before she wondered how things could have worked out between them without the tug-of-war over finding Felicia. “How come Felicia didn’t leave Hannah with you when she left?”
“Jordan was spiking a fever that day and I couldn’t keep anything down him, so I had to run him to the emergency room. It was Mom’s day off, so Mom offered to look after Hannah.”
“Candace is your mother?” Rory could not image sour-faced Candace as anyone’s mother.
“Yeah, I know, she looks more like my grandmother, but she tried for years to have a kid before she finally had me.”
“Did your mother mentio
n anything about Felicia that day? If she was upset? How she acted? What she said? Anything at all?”
Penny distracted Hannah’s bats at Jordan by opening a book with thick pages. “She said Felicia looked upset and scared. She knew Mike was behind it because they’ve been having problems since Felicia got pregnant.”
“Problems?” Felicia had made it sound as if the pregnancy was the best thing that had happened to their relationship. Denial, or another masking change of color?
“He wanted Felicia to abort the baby.”
“Ah.” Poor Felicia. She’d gone through all this emotional upheaval alone. Hannah shrieked when Jordan snagged the book from her grasp. Penny reached into a bucket beneath the coffee table and brought out a second book for Hannah. No, not alone. Penny would have helped her.
“She wanted to quit the club,” Penny said.
“Mike wouldn’t let her?”
“He kind of depended on her to deal when she worked.”
Oh, this wasn’t good, not at all. Felicia a drug dealer. Rory drank the last of the coffee and wished for more. Not that she needed any more the way her nerves were jangling, but it helped her concentrate. And she needed to concentrate on facts. Facts would get her answers. Emotions would just cloud everything. “What else did your mother say?”
“Felicia said something like, ‘If you don’t see me again in an hour, it probably means I’m dead.’ She wanted Mom to call you so you’d take care of Hannah.”
Dead? No. There was no body. There was no evidence of foul play. Dead was too final. She wasn’t ready to let Felicia go.
“Felicia thought the world of you.”
“Somehow I very much doubt that.” The expression getting along like cats and dogs was invented for their stormy relationship. All Rory had to say was white and Felicia would spit back black. The subject or the situation didn’t matter. The last thing Felicia wanted was to be anything like her big sister.
“She admired your strength,” Penny said,” the fact you knew what you wanted and you’d gone after it, made it happen. Until Hannah, she was just…lost.”
“She loved Hannah.”
“More than anything in the world.”
Enough to put herself in danger? Enough to disappear? Enough to die?
Chapter Six
Ace spotted about a dozen Sons, plus a few familiar faces from clubs friendly with the Sons, milling about the field beneath Gable’s Orchard. Most attendees were not affiliated with any outlaw gang. Here, in the tents set up in rows, recreational riders could find a little bit of everything from used transmissions, engines and tires to clothing, music and jewelry. Everything was on the up and up—at least on paper. Ace had already seen a couple of firearms sold without the legal waiting time. He suspected some hot jewelry was mixed in with the clean stuff. There were a few cops walking the aisles of tents—more for show than anything else.
By the time he saw Rory wheeling Hannah past the rows of cars and banks of motorcycles by the orchard on the hill, he was deep in conversation with a surgeon about classic motorcycles. The doctor was rebuilding an Ariel Square Four. Maintaining one of those meant shelling out serious cash, and the doctor was doing so joyfully. Ace didn’t have the part he wanted, but steered him toward a shop he thought might.
He didn’t alter his position or falter in the conversation he was having with the doctor, but his gaze tracked Rory’s progress down the row of white tents toward Mike’s booth. His body hummed with an odd anticipation that he told himself was more like a thorn jammed under a fingernail than lust. Too short, he thought. Too skinny. Too damn prickly.
She pushed Hannah around the folding banquet-type table, spread with motorcycle parts, toward the sheltered side of the Fletcher Automotive tent. She ignored him as well as he was ignoring her. Yet he could have told anyone who’d asked the exact color of the shirt she wore under her librarian’s tweed jacket, the track of each curl of hair around her face, the shape of every finger on her hands.
The doctor left. Hannah pumped her body up and down and squealed for freedom from the seat belt keeping her trapped. As soon as she spotted him, she reached for him. Her sweet face and natural sunshine were contagious. He took her in his arms while Rory juggled with the stroller, diaper bag and sack of toys she’d brought along. His gaze lingered on the denim stretched over Rory’s backside as she bent to spread a quilt over the patch of grass. Nice package. One he wasn’t going to open.
Not in this lifetime.
“Did you bring dinner?” he asked, suddenly irritated about the treacherous path of his attention. Why had Falconer saddled him with this responsibility? Didn’t he already have enough on his plate?
“Well, hello to you, too.” Rory reached beneath the stroller and brought out a plastic bag she placed none too gently on the table.
“Dish it up.” Hannah laughed as she gripped a handful of his hair and tugged on it with surprising force. He shifted the baby to one side. She patted his cheek with her chubby hand.
“Serve yourself.”
Taking the bandana from his pocket, he distracted Hannah with a game of peek-a-boo that had her laughing like a doll. “My hands are full.”
The expression on Rory’s face said she’d much rather throw the meal in his face than serve him. That was better. That he could handle. He didn’t want to think of her as soft and sexy. Or needy. He’d had more needy women than he wanted in his life.
Then came a click, a change so sudden, he could feel her tamp down her temper and stuff it deep inside her. Not good. One day she’d explode. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be around when that happened. With slow, methodical care, she unpacked the plastic dish and dug through the grocery bag for a fork and a stack of napkins.
“Have you done a background search?” She reached for Hannah. Hannah fussed until he handed her the bandana and she continued her game with Rory.
Resting the fork momentarily against his lips, he silently urged caution. Then he dug into the pasta salad dotted with flakes of albacore tuna, cherry tomato halves and chunks of mozzarella. Swallowing tone and timbre so his voice wouldn’t carry, he chided her. “I see you’ve been reading that P.I. book.”
She mimicked his hushed tones. “There’s nothing wrong with gathering information.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about.” It was what she’d do with whatever she found that caused him sleepless nights. That and her amber eyes so full of questions and heat. Definitely a lethal combination.
Her gaze took in the crowd. He could almost feel the questions stacking up inside her like plastic building blocks. Did she have to analyze everything she saw, heard…felt?
“How many cows do you suppose it took to provide the leather walking around this place?” she asked. But damn if her face didn’t wear a different question.
He shoveled the cold pasta into his mouth and all that did was feed his irritation. Leaning his backside against the table, he sidled close to her. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.” She blew out a long sigh.
Everything was a tall order. One he couldn’t fill. If he had all the answers, he wouldn’t be here. He’d be…well, somewhere else, looking for answers to other questions. Maybe they weren’t so far apart after all.
“What did the investigation turn up?” She set Hannah on the quilt and spread toys around her.
Keeping his voice low against curious eavesdroppers, he stabbed a cherry tomato half. “On who? It’s a big case, Rory. The task force has interviewed hundreds of people.”
She swallowed hard and twirled a rattle on Hannah’s busy box. “Hundreds?”
Maybe Rory’d finally realize that Felicia was just one small piece of a very big puzzle. “Hundreds.”
She beeped the plastic horn. Hannah giggled and batted her hand at the accordionlike horn. “Mike.”
Ace put aside the salad, raked a hand through his hair and decided to give her the short version. He crouched beside her, sizing up faces as they paraded by the boo
th. “Mike’s a tough guy with a tougher background. With guys like him, hatred of authority—any authority—is bred in. A nine-to-five job wasn’t ever going to cut it, so he made his own path. But even bad guys have their standards. He prides himself on keeping the streets of Summersfield clean. He has to believe his stuff won’t reach kids, especially with Hannah around.”
Protectively, Rory reached for the baby and cradled her in her lap. She shook her head, her voice soft and intimate. “I don’t understand what Felicia sees in him.”
“She sees what he projects—the illusion of freedom.” The illusion of a strong male who would take care of all her problems. His own mother had fallen prey to the same trap over and over again.
Rory was quiet for a while, steering Hannah’s attention from toy to toy. Somewhere in the direction of the stage at the other end of the rows of tents came the twang of guitars warming up. Competing waves of frying burgers and spun sugar wafted on the breeze. The buzz of people buying and selling grew thicker. He sold a kickstand and two headlights.
Quiet from Rory, he’d learned, was much more dangerous than her running off at the mouth. So was thumbnail-chewing. And with her face hidden by the cloud of her hair, he couldn’t see in which direction her thoughts were driving.
“Is there any way I can see his file?” Rory lifted her face to him. He didn’t like what he saw there. Tears would’ve been easier to handle than this raw exposure of soul.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Not to mention it would add bad investigative procedure to his list of sins.
“Maybe I could see something there that you missed. Maybe something Felicia mentioned will jar a memory.”
“No.” He wasn’t going to budge, no matter how thick and sweet the molasses look in her eyes became. “We’re still investigating.”
“Nobody wants to talk. You can’t have turned up much. It feels as if nobody cares.”
She was right. No one could afford to care for one cog when a whole wheel was at stake. He sat on the lone card-table chair, and crossed his ankles and his arms. The crowd ebbed and flowed by the booth. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but patience is our best tool. A tiger like Mike isn’t going to change his stripes overnight.”
