"Go ahead and tell him. She was my contact. I don't play around on the job."
"You do play around, though," Helen said, suddenly serious. "You never take women seriously."
He shrugged. "I don't dare. I'm not made for a pipe and slippers and kids. I like traveling and dangerous work, and the occasional pretty blonde when I'm not on stakeout."
"Pity," she sighed, smiling up at him. "You'd look nice covered in confetti."
"Who'd have me?" He grinned.
She had to bite her tongue to keep from mentioning Tabby's name. She'd done that once, and he'd gone right through the ceiling. He hadn't seen Tabby since New Year's Eve, when he'd gone with Helen to see about their parents' house in a small Washington suburb called Torrington. Tabby's father had died two years before, but she was still living in his house. It was next door to the Reeds. Nick had never discussed what happened when he and Tabby had talked one night while they were in Torrington, but it had caused him to bristle at the mention of her name ever since.
"The renters have moved out of Dad's house, you know," she said suddenly. "I can't fly back there and take care of it this time. Can you?"
His face hardened. "Why can't you?"
"Because I'm engaged, Nick," she said, exasperated. "You aren't. You're due for a vacation anyway, aren't you? You could kill two birds with one stone."
"I suppose I could," he said reluctantly, and his eyes darkened for an instant. Then he looked over his sister's head and his brows shot up. "Here comes the boss. Better vanish, before you become another statistic on the unemployment rolls."
"I wish you were on a roll. Filleted!" She chuckled.
He sauntered off, leaving her to Dane.
"Problems?" Dane asked, his eyes going from Nick back to Helen.
"Not a single one, boss," she assured him. "Nick and I were only discussing food."
"Okay. How about the Smart investigation?"
She grimaced. "I need one piece of information I can't dig out," she said miserably. "I can't get anybody to talk to me about Kerry Smart's brief stint with the FBI."
"Didn't you ask your brother? He has contacts over at the FBI office."
"That's why I'd like him filleted on a roll," she said sweetly. "He won't call anybody."
"Well, I can't order him to," he reminded her. "Nick's very secretive about his FBI days. He never talks about that period of his life. Perhaps he doesn't want any contact with the agency."
"I guess. Well, I'll trudge over to see Adams. He used to have one or two confidants."
"Good."
"How's our Tess, and the baby?"
"She's great, and the baby never sleeps. The doctor says he will one day," he added wistfully. "Meanwhile, it's just one more thing we can do together—sitting up with baby."
"You know you love it," she reminded him.
"Indeed I do. I could live without breathing much easier than I could live without my family."
"And there you were, a confirmed bachelor." She shook her head. "How are the mighty fallen!"
"Watch it," he threatened, "before you become redundant."
"Not me, boss. I intend to be even more valuable than Nick, if you'll just give me a few days off to work for the FBI so that I
HAVE SOME CONTACTS I CAN USE WHEN I NEED THEM!" she said
loudly, so that Nick heard her. But it didn't work. He made her a mocking bow and went out the door.
"One day, he'll deck you, Reed," Dane mused. "Sister or not, he's all for woman's lib. Equal opportunity, even in brawls, was how he put it."
"That's how I trained him," she said, tongue-in-cheek, and got a laugh for her pains.
"I'll tell him you said so."
"God forbid!" she said with a mock shudder. "You can't imagine what he told Harold the other day about what I did when I was two."
"You'll have to make sure he and Harold don't meet too often."
"That's what Harold says!" she confided mischievously.
She got her things together and wished she had the time to go and see Tess and the baby. But now that Tess had married Dane and they had a child of their own, it had put some distance between the two women. They still had lunch together occasionally, but Tess was closer to her friend Kit than she was to Helen.
Helen went to see Adams, who actually did have a contact in the FBI office. He made one telephone call and got her the information she needed.
"Quick work! Thanks!" she said enthusiastically.
He cleared his throat. "If Harold isn't treating you to pizza I'll buy you a beer," Adams offered. "Just casual, you know. I know you're engaged."
She smiled. He was nice. Big and burly and a little potbellied, but nice. "Thanks, Adams," she said sincerely. "Rain check?"
"Sure," he said easily. He grinned and went out the door. He always seemed to be by himself. Helen felt a bit sorry for him, but he was the kind of man who got attached to people and couldn't let go. She was afraid of that kind of involvement. Well, with anyone except Harold.
"So, what did you talk to Adams about?" Nick asked from behind her as she went out the door.
She gasped and then laughed. "I didn't hear you!"
"Of course you didn't," he said pleasantly. "I'm a private detective. We're trained to sneak up on people without being noticed."
"Really?" she asked, smiling. "I didn't know that."
He glared at her. "Nice to know you love me. What were you doing over there," he gestured toward Adams's now-deserted desk. "Warding off Adams?"
"No! I like Adams."
"Sure. I do, too, but he's a tick. If you ever get him attached to you, you'll have to stick a lighted match to his head to make him let go."
She burst out laughing. "You animal!" she gasped.
"You know I'm right. He's not a bad dude, all the same."
"Neither are you, once in a while."
"Get what you needed?"
She nodded. "No thanks to you," she said.
He shrugged indifferently. "It's no bad thing to teach you to be self-sufficient. I won't always be around."
The way he said that worried her. "Nick..." she began.
"I'm not dying of something," he said when he saw her expression, and he smiled. "I mean I'm getting restless. I may be moving on sometime soon."
"Wanderlust again?" she asked gently.
He nodded. "I get bored in the same place."
"Go home," she said. "Take a vacation. Relax."
"In Washington?" His eyes widened. "Funny girl!”
"You'll find a way. It's a quiet street. No drug dealers, no shoot-outs. Just peace and quiet."
"And your friend Tabby right next door," he said icily.
"Tabby's dating a very nice historian at her college," she told him, enjoying the way his eyelids flickered. "I think it may be serious. So you won't have to hide from her while you're there."
"She wasn't dating anybody when we were there earlier in the year," he said. He sounded as if he thought she'd betrayed him.
"That was then," she reminded him. "A lot can happen in a few months. Tabby's twenty-five. It's time she married and had kids. She's settled and has a good job."
He didn't answer her. He looked hunted. He felt hunted. So he changed the subject without appearing to be evasive. "Did you get your information from Adams?" he asked her again.
“Yes. I had to have it to finish my case," she said. "Dane was just asking me how far I'd gotten earlier. The client needs the background information. He hopes it may help him avert a court case."
"I see." His fingers traced a teasing line down her nose. "I don't suppose it occurred to you that I might have a damned good reason for not wanting to talk to people I used to know at the agency?"
Her dark eyes searched his curiously. Her handsome brother had bone structure an artist would love—from his high cheekbones to his straight nose and perfectly chiseled masculine mouth.
"You're staring. And you haven't answered me," he said.
"I was just thinking wha
t a dish you are," she said with a grin. "You look just like Dad. No wonder women threaten to leap off buildings when you throw them over. You never talk about the time you spent with the FBI, and I never knew why. I thought maybe you missed it."
"Sometimes I do," he confessed. "Not often. But it's never a good idea to open up old wounds. Sometimes they bleed."
"Yes," she said absently, "I suppose so."
"All right. Have a sandwich with me and we'll talk about what we're going to do with the house. I'm tired of renting it out. Too much hassle. I want to talk to you about selling it."
"Sell our legacy?" she burst out.
He sighed. "I figured you'd react that way. Come on. Let's eat. We can fight over dessert."
He took her to a nice seafood restaurant. She'd been expecting a hamburger, and she paused self-consciously at the door, nervous in her old black skirt and black-and-white checked blouse, her hair loose and unkempt.
"Now what's the matter?" he asked impatiently.
"Nick, I'm not dressed for a place like this," she said earnestly. "Can't we go someplace less expensive?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"A fast-food place," she explained. "Plastic cartons? Paper sacks? Foam cups?"
"Nonbiodegradable litter." He frowned. "No way. Come on." He took her arm and forcibly led her inside. He chuckled as he seated her, very elegantly, at a table. "I hope you aren't really that mad for pizza. They don't serve it here."
She smiled. "Harold and I are sort of tired of it, if you want the truth," she confessed as he sat down across from her. The table had a burning red candle in a glass chimney. The lighting was cozy, like the atmosphere with its classical music playing unobtrusively overhead.
"I like service," he said. "Old-fashioned service, and good food. They have both here."
Even as he spoke, a slender blonde paused beside the table and presented them with menus. Her eyes lingered on Nick's face while he ordered coffee, to give them time to decide on a choice of entree.
"Thanks, Jean," he said warmly.
The woman smiled back and with an envious glance at Helen, went on her way.
"She likes you," she said.
"I know. I like her, too. But that's all it is," he added, his face very serious as he met Helen's curious stare. "Stop trying to play matchmaker. You only complicate lives."
He sounded incredibly bitter. "Are you trying to tell me something?" she asked quietly.
"You threw me together with Tabby at that New Year's Eve party the last time we were home. You didn't mention that you'd told her I flew all the way from Houston just to take her out."
He hadn't talked about this before. She felt guilty and apprehensive at his tone. "I didn't think it would hurt," she began.
He cut her off. "She had some crazy idea that my feelings had changed and I wanted a relationship with her," he said curtly, his eyes accusing. "I wasn't expecting it and I overreacted. She cried." His face went harder. "In all the years we've known Tabby, I've never seen her cry. It really got to me."
Helen knew Nick well enough to guess what happened next. "You lost your temper," she guessed.
"I told you, I wasn't expecting it. One minute she was telling me about some new find they were studying in the anthropology department, the next she was off on a tangent about the future."
"The punch was spiked," she said. "I didn't know. I poured her two cups of it."
"I finally figured out for myself that she was three sheets to the wind, but that sudden burst of affection knocked me off balance," he replied. He rammed his hands into his pockets and looked uncomfortable. "I panicked. Tabby's a sweet woman, but she's not my type."
"Who is?" she challenged. "You make confirmed bachelors look like old married men. You could do a lot worse than Tabby."
"She could do a lot better than me," he countered. "A little cottage with a picket fence isn't what I'm saving up for. I want to sail around the world. I want to go exploring. In the meantime, I like being an investigator, even if this job is beginning to wear on me."
"Tabby's an investigator, did you know? She searched for the solutions to ancient mysteries. That's what anthropologists do—they discover the cultures of ancient civilizations and how they worked."
"No two-thousand-year-old mummy is likely to sit up in his sarcophagus and pull a gun on her, either," he argued.
"Probably not," she conceded. "But digging for the truth is something you both like to do."
He ran an angry hand around the back of his neck. "I didn't like hurting her that way," he said abruptly. "I said some harsh things."
"Well, that's all in the past now," she reminded him. "She's dating someone and it sounds serious, so you won't have to worry about any complications while you're deciding what we should do about Dad's house."
"I suppose not," he said, but he wasn't looking forward to seeing Tabby again. His treatment of her wore on his nerves, and she wasn't going to be pleased to see him. Tabby, like Nick himself, deplored losing control. Her lack of pride was going to hurt her as much as Nick's sharp words, and she wouldn't like being reminded of their confrontation any more than he did.
"It will be all right," Helen said gently.
"Your favorite saying. What if it isn't?"
"For goodness' sake, think positively!" she chided. "Buy a plane ticket and go to Washington."
"I guess I will. But I still have my doubts," he said.
Two days later, with Dane Lassiter's blessing, Nick was on his way down Oak Lane to his father's old house in Torrington.
It looked just the same, he thought as he wheeled lazily along in the rental car. The oaks were a little older, as he was, but the street was quiet and dignified, like the mostly elderly people who lived on it.
His eyes went involuntarily over the flat front of the redbrick home where he and Helen had grown up. There were blooming shrubs all around it and the dogwood and cherry trees were green now with their blossoms gone in late spring. The weather was comfortably warm without being blazing hot, and everything looked green and restful. He hadn't realized before just how tired he was. This vacation was probably a good idea after all, even if he had fought like a tiger to keep from taking it.
It was Friday, and not quitting time, so he didn't expect to see Tabby at her family's house next door. But in his mind's eye, he saw her—long brown hair down to her waist and big dark eyes that followed him everywhere as she walked by the house on her way home from school. She was tall, very slender, with curves that weren't noticeable at all. That hadn't changed. Her hair was in a bun these days, not long and windblown. She wore little makeup and clothes that were stylish but not sexy. Her body was as slender as it had been in her teens, nothing to make any man particularly amorous unless he loved her. Poor Tabby. He felt sorry for her, angry at Helen because she'd engineered that meeting at New Year's Eve and made Tabby think he cared about her.
He did, in a sort of brotherly way, mainly because that was how he'd always interpreted Tabby's attitude toward him. She'd never seemed to want a physical relationship with him. Not until New Year's Eve, anyway, and she had been intoxicated. Perhaps this colleague she was dating did love her, and would make her happy. He hoped so.
Life in a garret wasn't for him. He was already thinking about applying to Interpol or as a customs inspector down in the Caribbean. A tame existence appealed to him about as much as drowning.
He pulled into the driveway of his father's house and sat just looking at it quietly for a long time. Home. He hadn't ever thought about what it meant to have a place to come back to. Odd, with his need for freedom, that it felt so wonderful to be in his own driveway. Possession was new to him, like the feeling of emptiness he'd had since the Christmas holidays. Loneliness wasn't something he'd experienced before. He wondered why he should feel that way, as if he were missing out on life, when his life was so full and exciting.
As he unlocked the front door and carried his suitcase inside, he drank in the smells of wood and varnish and
freshener, because he'd had a woman come in and clean every week since the house had been vacant. His parents' things were neatly kept, just as they'd been when he and Helen were children. Nothing changed here. The smells and sights were those of his boyhood. Familiar things, that gave him a sense of security.
He scowled, looking toward the banister of the staircase that led up to the three bedrooms on the second floor. His long fingers touched the antique wood and fondled it absently. Selling the furnished house had seemed the thing to do. Now, he wasn't sure about it.
As the day wore on, he became less sure. The power had been turned on earlier in the week, and the refrigerator and stove were in good working order. He found a coffeemaker stashed under the sink.
He went shopping for supplies, arriving home just as a small blue car pulled in next door.
He paused on the steps, two grocery bags in one powerful arm, watching as a woman stepped out of the car. She didn't look toward him, not once. Her carriage very correct, almost regal, she walked to the front door of her house, inserted the key she held ready in her hand, and disappeared out of sight.
Tabby. He stared after her without moving for a minute. She hadn't changed. He hadn't expected her to. But it felt different to look at her now, and it puzzled him. He couldn't quite determine what the difference was.
He went inside and started a pot of coffee before he fried a steak and made a salad for his supper. While he was eating it, he pondered on Tabby's lack of interest in his presence. She had to have seen the car in the driveway, seen him go to the door. But she hadn't looked his way, hadn't spoken.
He felt depressed suddenly, and regretted even more the wall he'd built between them at New Year's. They were old friends. Almost family. It would have been nice to sit down with Tabby and talk about the old days when they'd all played together as children. He didn't suppose Tabby would want to talk to him now.
After he'd finished his meal and washed up the dishes, he sat down in the living room with a detective novel. The television wasn't working. He didn't really mind. It was like entertainment overkill these days, with channels that never shut down and dozens of programs to choose from. The constant bombardment sometimes got on his nerves, so he shut it off and read instead. Nothing like a good book, he thought, to cultivate what Agatha Christie's hero Hercule Poirot called the "little gray cells."
Books By Diana Palmer Page 112
