Angus's Lost Lady

by Marie Ferrarella

  He sifted a lock of her hair through his fingers. The silkiness ate through a layer of his resistance. Something flickered in her eyes before she drew back. Desire? He didn’t know if it was worse to hope it was—or pray that it wasn’t.

  “What did you want to talk to me about?” he asked.

  It wasn’t easy, but then nothing had been since she had woken up in that alley. Nothing, except being here with Angus and Vikki. But she didn’t really belong here, no matter how much she wanted to.

  She rose, suddenly restless, and began to pace around the sofa. “I can’t stay here indefinitely.”

  Was that her pride talking? Or something more? In either case, Angus knew she didn’t have the resources to go anywhere. Watching her circle around like a sleek cat in a cage, he kept the concern out of his voice.

  “A week is not indefinite.”

  “Closer to two,” she corrected. She couldn’t continue taking advantage of him like this. It wasn’t fair. And she would become too accustomed to being here. Too accustomed to seeing him each morning. The longer she stayed, the harder it would be to go.

  It was hard already.

  “Okay, closer to two,” he accepted. “Still not indefinite.”

  Torn between what she felt was right and what she wanted, Rebecca turned and looked at him. “And what comes after two weeks?”

  “Fifteen days?” he hazarded.

  A smile twitched her lips, defusing the moment. “Don’t make me laugh.” But she already was. “I’m being serious.”

  Shifting, he perched on the arm of the sofa. She’d stopped pacing and he caught her hand in his. He ignored the warning signs that went up within him—the warning signs that told him he’d missed his chance to keep things from becoming even more complicated than they were.

  Maybe a little complication was good for the soul. And besides, he was still in control of things. Nothing to worry about.

  “I like it when you laugh. And you’re hardly The Man Who Came to Dinner, Becky.” An appreciative smile curved his mouth as he let his eyes drift over her. It didn’t matter if she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt from a discount store. Clothes loved her. “For one thing, you’re the wrong gender. For another, I just enumerated a few of the ways you’ve found to ‘repay’ me. You’ve even managed to do the impossible and organize my office and my home. Hell, you’ve got me eating vegetables, and Vikki doing math. That alone should buy you a month.”

  He saw the look that entered her eyes. No matter that her memory was in limbo, she wasn’t a woman who accepted a free ride. Though it got in the way right now, he couldn’t help but admire that.

  “I understand that this situation is making you edgy, but you don’t have a choice,” he said softly. “There’s nothing you can do but wait it out. Why not do it in surroundings that have become familiar?”

  He was making sense, she thought. Sense for her, but not for himself and his daughter. There was no way around the fact that she was putting them out. “And what? You’ll go on sleeping on a sofa while I’m taking up your bed?” It just wasn’t right.

  He shrugged casually. Amusement entered his eyes. “Unless you have another arrangement in mind.”

  And then he approached her protest seriously. “If the sleeping arrangements make you uncomfortable, we could take turns. You can have the sofa once in a while. I’ll even throw in a hair shirt for you to sleep in.”

  He was trying to make her feel better about it. Her resolve softened a little. Her heart already had. “Maybe we can skip the hair shirt.”

  Good, she was coming around. For a moment, she had him going. Angus paused, trying to come up with something that would soothe her chafing conscience.

  “Would it make you feel better if I called you my secretary and had you officially working at the office?” It was the only solution that occurred to him on such short notice.

  “Secretary?” she repeated.

  She said it as if it were a foreign word. “You know, answer the phone. Update any files that might have fallen in the cracks and eluded your sweeping purge.”

  It had taken her three days to clear away the folders and type them onto the hard drive. He’d been amazed at how fast her fingers flew over the keyboard. Concert pianists had nothing on her dexterity. And she’d been right—the office did look larger without files strewn all over it.

  But it also seemed smaller for having her in it. He was just going to have to find a way to deal with that.

  “How about office manager?” she suggested. “That has a nicer ring to it.”

  So, she was ambitious. Angus added ambition to the list of personality traits he was mentally tallying. A very savvy lady was being pieced together, though the title she’d chosen seemed a little out of line. “The only thing you’d have to manage is the files—and me.”

  The way he said that, the way he was looking at her, generated an aura of intimacy. More than anything, she wanted him to hold her, to kiss her again. But the moves—whatever they were going to be—had to be up to him.

  She smiled. “You could be a handful, given the right situation.”

  If he didn’t know better, he would have said that she was... He cocked his head, studying her. “Why, Becky, are you flirting with me?”

  Nervousness, warm and delicious, skittered through her, a long-legged spider on a slippery floor. “I don’t know, am I?”

  There was a sweet vein of innocence amid the sensuality. He might have been able to resist one, but not both. He was being reeled in, Angus realized, as helpless as a fish being yanked out of the water. It didn’t immediately occur to him to resist.

  “Yeah,” he told her, “you are. And I’m a sucker for a brazen woman.” He looked down into her eyes, wanting nothing more than to take her into his arms and kiss her. But if he did that, there would definitely be more.

  So he kept himself in check.

  His voice softened. “So, is it all settled? No more talk about wrapping up your belongings in a scarf, putting it on a stick and striking out on the open road?”

  She didn’t want to run away, not from the only things she knew. It was just him she was thinking of. “If you’re sure I’m not in the way.”

  He couldn’t resist saying, “Well, you are that, but only in the nicest possible way.”

  She had that to keep her warm, she thought. Rebecca turned down the covers on the sofa. “I’ll take the sofa tonight.”

  He knew she was going to say that. There was no point in trying to talk her out of it. “And I’ll prop two chairs against the doorknob.”

  “To keep me out?” she asked in surprise.

  He’d already crossed to the bedroom, putting distance between them. When you weren’t sure how to contain the fire, it was best not to strike a match. “No, to keep me in.”

  As he closed his door behind him, Angus had a clear understanding of the way the early Christian martyrs must have felt. Sacrifices—even for all the right reasons—were hell.

  Chapter 11

  Angus felt good.

  There was nothing like the satisfaction of wrapping up a case, of knowing that there was money in the checking account and that, for a while at least, there would be no wolf at the door. Not only had he taken care of Angela Madison’s problem to the lady’s overwhelming satisfaction, but he had also managed—on the heels of that case—to bring two other investigations to a timely end.

  At the moment, the only outstanding case he had concerned Rebecca, and if he wasn’t in a complete hurry to see that wrapped up—well, Angus felt he couldn’t be entirely faulted.

  He really liked having her around.

  She had, as of this morning, turned her attention to the state of his accounts, or lack thereof. He was the first to admit that his system was not the garden-variety type that kept accountants happy and sane, but it worked for him. When he remembered to make entries.

  After writing his final notes to himself on the surveillance he’d completed for a data corporation, Angus closed the
folder and rocked back in his chair, content just to watch Rebecca for a while.

  He would have done better by her, he lectured himself, if he spent less time gazing at her and more time looking into leads that might yield some information about her identity.

  That was just the trouble. There weren’t any leads. At least, none that he could come up with, and he had tried. It was as if she’d been born, fully grown, barely two weeks ago. No one had seen her previous to the time she had stumbled out of the alley. No one had heard gunfire. Of course, given the area and the fact that there had been a fire going on at the time, that wasn’t surprising.

  He’d even tracked down the number of the fire company that had been out there that evening, hoping someone might have noticed something—a man hanging back in the shadow of the parking structure, perhaps. It was a thousand-to-one shot and it hadn’t paid off. Everyone had been too busy with the fire and with keeping civilians back to notice.

  Biordi had suggested running her picture in the local paper. Angus had vetoed that immediately. There was always a chance that whoever had been shooting at her might see it, too. If it hadn’t been a random mugging—if it was someone who had wanted her dead—Angus didn’t want to risk making her a target again.

  So here she sat, with her life on hold, organizing his accounting system as if doing so was really important to her. Try as he might, he couldn’t detect a trace of bitterness in her. No self-pity and no hopelessness. She bore up and went on.

  Rebecca whatever-her-last-name-was was one hell of a rare woman.

  It was a thought that had occurred to him a lot in the last fourteen days.

  The desire to be close to her brought him to his feet. He crossed to her, giving in to an impulse he had been weighing all morning. “Would you like to get away for a while?”

  She’d been concentrating so hard, she hadn’t heard him. Rebecca glanced up, a bemused expression on her face.

  “I am away,” she reminded him. “Away from everything I supposedly know.” Frowning, she held up an entry he’d made when he obviously had other things on his mind. “Is that a three or an eight?”

  It took him a minute to decipher his own writing. “It’s a zero.” Or at least he thought it was.

  But he had more important things on his mind. Taking the ledger from her, he closed it and set it aside. Her protests fell on deaf ears. “And I mean getting away the traditional way. For the weekend,” he explained.

  All morning—ever since last night’s phone call actually—he’d been mentally listing the pros and cons that went along with his question. The con column was longer. The pro one carried more weight. And he knew what, deep down, he wanted. What wasn’t good for him, or her.

  So he went with his gut instinct. “The phone call I took last night was from Mrs. Madison.”

  The sympathy was instant and full-blown, coming from a region she had yet to uncover. “Was she very upset about the photographs?”

  Angus shook his head, amazed that Rebecca could feel so much for a woman she didn’t know. Was there something there, in her past, that caused her to unconsciously empathize with the Madison woman’s situation, or was it just that she had a heart as great as Yosemite?

  He would have felt better if he knew for certain that it was the latter.

  “No, she was upset about her husband, but that was when she’d first discovered he was being unfaithful.”

  Angela Madison was not a woman who took being crossed lightly, either in business or in love. Especially not in love. The fact that she was rich due to a late husband’s nest egg and her own business acumen, and looked twenty years younger than her age, just made her that much more formidable. Her young stud of a husband should have realized that before he ever agreed to rendezvous with the tasty little tart with whom he’d been immortalized, Angus thought

  “Mrs. Madison was thrilled about the photographs. So thrilled,” he elaborated, “that she wants us to have a free weekend away at the casino she owns in Tahoe.”

  “Us?” As far as Rebecca knew, Mrs. Madison didn’t know she existed.

  Angus grinned. He’d taken a liberty, but he figured he was entitled. “Well, me, really,” he admitted. “But she said accommodations were for two.” And there was no one else other than Rebecca that he wanted to complete that number.

  As much as she wanted to say yes, there was someone else to consider. Someone else who wouldn’t take kindly to being left behind. “Don’t you think you should take Vikki instead of me?”

  Her thoughtfulness struck an appreciative chord within him, but Vikki was the last person he wanted to bring with him to the casino resort.

  “I’m trying to wean Vikki away from that kind of life. Taking her to a resort built around a casino might dredge up too many memories she might not be up to dealing with yet.” His smile was intimate. “While taking you to one might just stir some up.”

  She could feel a host of little nerves executing a series of jumping jacks up and down her body. “How do you figure that?”

  He actually did have a sound basis for inviting her to the resort, but it just hadn’t been the first thing that had prompted him to extend the invitation. It had come in a distant second.

  “If you’re relaxed,” he said, toying with a strand of her hair, “who knows? Things might suddenly come back to you. Just like cooking and working on the computer did.” Angus glanced around his office. “And being compulsively neat.”

  Taking exception to his evaluation, and feeling a bit unnerved by his touch, she extracted her hair from his fingers. “I am not compulsive.”

  He could argue that, he thought genially, but he let it go, simply saying, “To me, anyone who hangs up his clothes is compulsive. I don’t even recognize my bedroom anymore.” The bed was made each morning. There were no clothes on the floor or draped over every available surface in the bathroom. And toilet paper was even on the roll instead of sitting on the floor.

  “You don’t recognize your bedroom because you haven’t been in it for two weeks,” she pointed out, “except for last night. And even then, you spent only a few minutes there before going back to the sofa.”

  There seemed to be no end to his chivalry. Even after agreeing to take the bed, he’d come out to tell her that he’d gotten used to sleeping on the sofa and that he’d wanted to switch back.

  It was a lie, of course, but such a sweet one. Even the man’s lies were endearing. With each day that passed, Rebecca was more and more afraid that whatever life she’d left behind couldn’t be as good as the one she was now enjoying.

  A part of her, she realized, no longer wanted to find that lost identity. She liked being Becky far too much.

  Angus was still waiting for her answer. Or maybe just for the right answer—the one he wanted to hear. “So, how about it?” His eyes coaxed her to say yes. “Will you come to Lake Tahoe with me?”

  It wasn’t in her to say no. Not because she wanted to remember the past, but because she wanted to remember the present. A present she was sharing with him.

  Very slowly, a shy smile took possession of her lips. Just as he wanted to take possession of them, he thought, watching the smile progress until every part of her seemed to be caught up in it.

  “All right,” she finally agreed. “Like you said, who knows what kind of memories might be stirred up?”

  Yeah, who knows? Angus knew that he was already stirred up, and they hadn’t even gone anywhere yet.

  It was a step he hadn’t wanted to take, a step that left him vulnerable.

  But no more vulnerable, he reminded himself, banking down his rage, than it made him having her alive.

  There were no options left, no avenues open. If she was dead and no one had discovered her body, it made no difference.

  If she was alive, he needed to know. Needed to find her.

  And to do that, he needed help.

  Before the others discovered the error and made the trail end with him.

  He picked up the receiver a
nd dialed. Angela Madison, they discovered when they arrived at the lavish Paradise resort, was a generous woman when she was happy. And from all appearances, she was very happy. She’d left instructions for the second-best suite in the resort to be set aside for Angus and his guest. The first was always reserved for any reigning celebrity or politician who might be visiting.

  It didn’t matter. Second best was far better than anything Angus had expected. Seeing the light in Rebecca’s eyes as she surveyed their quarters was worth every minute of the three-hour trip over winding roads that it had taken to get here.

  “This is second best?” Rebecca turned a full three hundred sixty degrees in the huge room. The suite, complete with a sitting room, looked to be the size of Angus’s apartment. “First must be a palace.”

  “Very nearly,” the bellhop told her. After setting down their suitcases, he moved to the bay window and opened it to give them a spectacular view of the lake. “You can see the Sierras from here.”

  Paradise was a good name for the resort, Rebecca thought, crossing to the window. The view, unobstructed by any signs of civilization, made her feel as if she were standing on the edge of eternity.

  Angus dug into his pocket as the bellhop passed him on his way to the door. The latter shook his head, refusing the bill Angus produced.

  “Oh, no, sir. Mrs. Madison would have my head.”

  Angus had a feeling that his declaration wasn’t that far from the truth.

  “She specifically called to say that everything is on the house, including the service.” He’d reached the door before he remembered to add, “Oh, there are chips set aside in your name at the casino. We hope you enjoy your stay with us.” With that, he closed the door.

  “Enjoy it? I’m beginning to hope she adopts me,” Angus murmured.

  But he was only kidding. This was the kind of life that had attracted Jane—the excitement of enormous amounts of wealth passing from person to person, and perhaps, by proximity, to her. Money, other than for necessities, had never had much of an allure for him.

  This weekend would have translated to a hefty bill if they had been paying. Rebecca turned to look at Angus. “She really liked those photographs.”