Laura and the Lawman

by Shelley Cooper

  She applauded. “Very good.”

  “You’re wrong, you know.”

  “I don’t think so. You going to try to make me change my mind?”

  “Is that possible?” he asked.

  “Only one way I can think of.”

  “And that is?”

  “Have a relationship with a woman that lasts longer than a date or two.”

  “And who do you propose I have that relationship with?” he returned. “You?”

  Chapter 9

  “M e?” Her voice came out a high-pitched squeak.

  “Yes, Ruby. You.”

  Laura’s heart fluttered like the wings of a bird preparing for its first solo flight. Her powers of speech also took wing as a host of emotions swept through her. She couldn’t begin to identify half of them, but the top two were plain enough to decipher: dismay and a terrible, traitorous longing.

  It served her right. She was the one who had taken the most pleasant conversation they had ever had, and—because it had aroused emotions in her she didn’t want to deal with—turned it into a challenge. Michael, she knew, would no more back down from that challenge than would Ruby.

  “Makes sense, don’t you think?” he went on, seemingly unaware of her inner turmoil. “I mean, if you wanted tangible proof that I can sustain a relationship for a certain period of time, it would be a whole lot easier for you to verify that proof if you were the woman I had the relationship with. Don’t you agree?”

  He had to be joking. Yes, that was it. Michael was just pulling her chain. He was paying her back for her eagerness to pursue a topic that he’d admitted gave him discomfort. But when she searched his face for the teasing gleam in his eyes and the uncontrollable upward twitch of his lower lip, he stared straight back at her, his expression deadly serious.

  And when she racked her brain for the flip response that Ruby would make to such an outrageous suggestion, it wouldn’t come.

  “Now you’re trying to make me uncomfortable,” she said. And succeeding admirably.

  “I might be,” he agreed. “Then again, I might not.”

  She should have known better. Each time she tried to turn the heat up under him in an effort to make him squirm, she was the one who inevitably wound up on the burner. The better question to ask herself was, Why did she feel such a need to see him squirm?

  Subconsciously she knew the answer, but she wasn’t ready to face it on a conscious level. Not just yet.

  Standing, Laura began gathering up her lunch fixings and shoving them hurriedly into the brown paper bag. “Would you look at the time? We’d better get back to work if we don’t want to lose all the ground we made up this morning.”

  “I never took you for a coward, Ruby.”

  She froze with one hand inside the paper bag. When she looked over, his gaze hadn’t moved from her.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you started this, you have the guts to finish it.”

  He was right, damn it. She was Ruby O’Toole, and Ruby didn’t back down without a fight. She sank back into the chair, her back rigid, and folded her arms tightly across her middle.

  This time his lips did twitch. “Glad to see you’re keeping an open mind.”

  She forced herself to relax. “You really think you can do it, don’t you? Have a relationship with a woman, I mean. A real relationship.”

  “I really do.”

  “By relationship, I don’t mean sex,” she felt compelled to explain.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “What I’m describing is a meeting of the minds, a true sharing of thoughts and goals, hopes and dreams.” She paused. “Time spent together. Talking only.”

  “I’m aware of that, too.”

  “A lot of time, Michael.”

  “How long?”

  She shrugged. “A year.”

  “I’m game. Are you?”

  The man was impossible. “You can’t be serious.”

  “What if I am?”

  He sat there expectantly, as if waiting for her to agree with him. “You’re forgetting one thing,” she said.

  “You mean Joseph,” he supplied.

  “Yes.”

  “Forget about Joseph.”

  “I can’t.”

  Folding his arms on the tabletop, he leaned forward. “We’re two of a kind, Ruby, you and I. Haven’t you realized that yet? It might be interesting to see what would happen if we joined forces.”

  Was this another calculated risk on his part? If he couldn’t get her to form a working alliance, maybe he could get her to form a romantic one. Behind Joseph’s back? What did he hope to accomplish by doing that?

  “Thanks for the offer, but I’m not interested.”

  He stared her down. “You’re a terrible liar.”

  To a woman who was living a lie, whose very life depended on everyone else believing that lie, Michael’s words were not exactly music to her ears.

  “Why would I lie to you about that?”

  “Maybe you have something more important at stake.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like your illusions.”

  “What illusions?”

  “That you’re better off with Joseph.”

  “As opposed to who?” She forced a laugh. “You?”

  “Yes, me, Ruby. Are you going to sit there and tell me you don’t enjoy our little…interactions?”

  He was right, she admitted. She did enjoy them. Even when he made her mad enough to spit. They were a guilty pleasure, like the chocolates she craved once a month.

  “Face it, Michael. If I took you up on your invitation, you’d run for the hills.”

  “You’ll never know unless you try. I already told you I was game.”

  “And I already told you that I’m quite happy with things the way they are, thank you.”

  There was nothing teasing or lighthearted about the way he regarded her. As a teenager, she’d seen the same look of concern on her parents’ faces just before they’d launched into one of their lectures on life’s hard-earned lessons.

  “Maybe, for once in your life, Ruby, you should be with a man because you enjoy interacting with him, instead of being with him because you want the security his money can buy.”

  She was Ruby, Laura reminded herself. She had to respond the way Ruby would. “Joseph is a very attractive man. Any woman would want to be with him.”

  “He’s old enough to be your father,” Michael pointed out.

  “He’s only forty-eight.”

  “And you’re, what, twenty-eight? The symbolism isn’t lost on me. Most wealthy men tend to be older and more established. Father figures.”

  He’d figured Ruby out. How long till he figured Laura out, too? That thought didn’t bear thinking about.

  She stared mutinously at him. “What do you want from me, Michael?”

  “The truth. Just the truth, Ruby. That you find me as attractive as I find you.”

  Her pulse leaped, and her breathing grew erratic. It took an effort of will not to look away. “All right, if that’s what you want. You’re an attractive man. I’d be a fool not to notice. But if you’re looking for anything else, it just isn’t going to happen.”

  “Because of Joseph,” he stated.

  This was exactly what Joseph had wanted. This was why he had thrown them together. Ruby would have had no compunction using Michael’s admitted attraction for her to get what she needed from him. But Laura couldn’t. She just couldn’t. There were certain things she just wouldn’t do. For any job.

  “Yes.”

  “Because of the things he can give you? The things I can’t?”

  “Yes.”

  His mouth drew into a tight line, and a nerve pulsed in his temple. “What if things changed? What if I could give you all the things Joseph can and more? What then?”

  Laura drew a long breath. “That’s a big if, Michael.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he replied.
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br />   Ruby, Laura was sorry to say, would be fickle and amoral enough to switch alliances without a second thought. But in this case, Laura couldn’t allow her alter ego to do so. She had a job to do, and that job depended on Joseph’s trust in her. She wouldn’t let anything jeopardize that. Not even a reluctant attraction that Joseph himself had sanctioned.

  “I think, Michael,” she said slowly, “that you and I would be a huge mistake.”

  Antonio closed his journal and placed it in the secret compartment in his suitcase. It had taken him a long time to record the events of the day. He did this with every case he worked. Often the very act of putting into words what had happened, without any corresponding emotion to cloud the issue, helped him find a break in a case.

  He knew exactly what he had hoped to find tonight: evidence that he wasn’t losing his edge. But the facts didn’t lie. It was all down on the page, in blue and white. He had let his emotions get the best of him, to control his actions, something he had never permitted before. “Before” meaning before he met Ruby.

  Turning the lights off, he lay back in bed and cradled his arms beneath his head. When his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he watched the play of shadows across the ceiling.

  All in all, he acknowledged, it had been a lousy day. First Ruby had scared the life out of him when he’d thought she’d disappeared. Then, when he had gotten a little too much into character and forgotten he was talking to a woman, she had made him blush. She had followed that embarrassing demonstration by analyzing his love life and declaring it lacking. The coup de grâce had been her assertion that, no matter how attractive she found him, she would never want him enough to leave Joseph, even if he could offer her everything Joseph could and more.

  And he, poor, stupid fool that he was, was still totally besotted by her. He knew what she was, and still he wanted her. He admitted it now. There was no use denying it any longer.

  Just as there was no use denying he had pushed things too far. He had started out trying to pay her back for the anxiety she’d caused him, and things had escalated from there. He had been totally out of control when he’d tried to get her to admit he wasn’t the only one struggling with feelings he didn’t want to have. So much in his life of late was make-believe. Was it so bad to want just one little thing to be out in the open for both Ruby and him to see? There was, in the final analysis, only so much a man could take, and he had definitely reached his limit.

  All the justifying in the world wouldn’t change the fact that he was teetering on the edge of blowing this whole operation. He had to get control, and he had to do it now.

  On the bright side, his ineptitude had served a purpose. In a very roundabout way, he had taken a step toward achieving his objective. He had planted the seed that he and Ruby form an alliance, either financially or romantically. Now he just had to sit back and see if that seed would take root and grow. He didn’t delude himself that, just because he was besotted by her, she would automatically turn into the woman he wanted her to be. Ruby was a person who looked out for number one first. She would do whatever it took for her to stay on top, even if it meant choosing Michael over Joseph.

  The question Antonio had to answer was, given his feelings for her, what would he do in the unlikely event she took him up on either offer? There was only one correct answer: his job. He would do his job.

  Still waters run deep. The phrase his mother had been so fond of echoed in his mind. At first meeting, he never would have thought it would apply to Ruby. But now he knew better. She was not the woman she wanted the world to think she was. Far from it.

  Who was Ruby O’Toole? Antonio wondered if he would ever really know. She was definitely an enigma. Sometimes she seemed like two different people. There was the Ruby who, without a hint of makeup on her face, sat cross-legged and barefoot on a park bench, sketching the local scenery. Then there was the Ruby who seemed to care solely about showing off her legs and figure, and who was a practiced flirt.

  The Ruby who was unable to hide her intelligence and the depth of her knowledge fascinated him. The Ruby who put money and physical appearance before all else irritated the hell out of him. Both Rubys turned him on more than he had ever believed possible, something he was determined to ignore from this point on. Better to focus on the question of how Joseph was receiving and distributing drugs and to put her totally out of his mind.

  One thing was certain. She wasn’t lying awake, obsessing about him. His gaze traveled to the connecting door and the faint light that seeped beneath its lower edge. Or was she?

  Antonio raised himself up on his elbows and listened to the silence. It was after midnight, and he hadn’t heard a peep from her room for a couple of hours now. Was she lost in the Joads’ efforts to escape the dust bowl, or had she fallen asleep while reading?

  He wished he felt relaxed enough to read. So much for putting her out of his mind.

  An hour passed while he pounded his pillow and tossed and turned in a futile effort to sleep. Every time he looked at the door, the light still burned.

  At one-fifteen, he started pacing. At one-thirty, he silently opened his side of the connecting doors. At one forty-five, he placed his ear to Ruby’s door and listened. There was no sound; no muted television volume, no rustling of bedclothes, not even the turn of a page.

  Acting on an urge he felt powerless to resist, Antonio silently picked the lock and slowly pushed the door inward. As he had anticipated, she was fast asleep, the bed sheets pulled securely beneath her chin. The Grapes of Wrath lay firmly closed on the bedside table, which meant she hadn’t nodded off while reading. As far as he could tell, for the second night in a row, Ruby had deliberately snuggled down under the covers and closed her eyes with every light still blazing.

  Her back was to him, her figure curled in a fetal position, her brown hair a wild tangle on the pillow. She looked impossibly small and vulnerable. As he stood in the silence, watching the even rise and fall of her shoulders, every protective instinct he possessed roared to life.

  Why did Ruby sleep with the lights on? And why did he feel a compulsion to climb into bed beside her and cradle her close? The urge wasn’t even remotely sexual, but instead a desire to protect her from whatever demons obviously haunted her dreams to the point where she didn’t feel safe sleeping in the dark.

  Quietly, before he made an even bigger fool of himself, or found himself arrested for breaking and entering, as well as being a Peeping Tom, Antonio closed and relocked the door. Then he went back to bed.

  “You seem tired,” Ruby said.

  Tired wasn’t the word for it, Antonio thought. Wiped out was more like it. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, he’d been up for eight hours, and still he felt as exhausted as he had when, after a paltry two hours’ sleep, he’d jerked awake to the shrill ringing of his alarm.

  Since he couldn’t look at her without recalling how slight and vulnerable she had appeared in her bed, he concentrated on the full-length Victorian cheval mirror he was evaluating.

  “Do I? I guess I didn’t sleep all that well last night.”

  After spending the bulk of the day on the second and third floors of the Bickham mansion, they had finally made their way to the attic. Antonio was doing his best to keep his distance from Ruby, a feat made much easier due to the sheer size of the room.

  The downside was it was hot and stuffy, and he was forever stifling a sneeze from all the dust on the air. Though they’d flung open several windows, there wasn’t much of a breeze to cool things down. Antonio could feel his T-shirt clinging uncomfortably to his chest.

  He chanced a glance at her. It hadn’t taken Ruby long to shed her jacket. At present she knelt in front of an old steamer trunk, seemingly oblivious to the streaks of dirt coating her hands and knees, as well as her pale-blue sleeveless silk dress. That was one outfit Joseph would definitely have to replace. He hoped it cost a fortune.

  “What about you, Ruby? How did you sleep?”

  “Me?” Glancin
g over her shoulder, she shrugged. “Like a rock. To tell you the truth, Michael, I haven’t slept so soundly in ages.”

  Since he couldn’t recall when he’d slept less soundly, her confirmation of what he had already known only served to worsen his sour mood. Her unflagging cheerfulness hadn’t helped matters, either. She’d kept up a steady stream of idle chatter all day. If yesterday’s events had had any impact on her, he certainly couldn’t tell.

  “No dreams?” he asked.

  “None that I can remember.”

  At least now he could rest assured that a niggling suspicion of someone being in her room wasn’t lurking in the back of her mind.

  “Lucky you,” he muttered.

  “You say something?” she called, her head back in the trunk.

  “Just talking to myself.”

  “Oh, wow,” she said a minute later, sitting back on her heels.

  “Find something?”

  Standing, she dusted herself off, then held up a bundled sheaf of letters for his inspection.

  “What are they?” he asked.

  “Letters Vincent and Serena wrote to each other.” She riffled through them. “They’re dated 1942 through 1945. They have to be from the time Vincent served in World War II. What a great find.”

  He couldn’t see what she was so worked up about. “They’re just letters. No one cares about them. They’re not worth anything, Ruby.”

  “You’re wrong,” she disagreed. “A historian, particularly one compiling a biography about either Serena or Vincent, would be highly interested.”

  “Interested or not, if Joseph does include them in the auction, I can’t see them bringing more than fifty dollars, and even that’s a stretch.”

  She stood her ground. “You and I both have seen worthless items go for outrageous sums because bidders got caught up in auction fever and didn’t know when to back down.”

  “True. But I can’t imagine that happening here.”

  She closed the lid of the trunk and sat down on top of it. “They’re the history of a relationship, Michael. As such, they’re priceless. Want to read them with me?”

  The excitement in her voice was unmistakable, as was the quickening of his pulse. “Why would I want to do that?”