by Sandra Brown
"Naturally the first person we called this morning was Susan Young," Sage informed him, dropping into a vacant chair at the table.
"Oh terrific," Lucky mumbled.
"She was mighty p.o.'d when—"
"Sage," Laurie said warningly.
"I didn't say it. I just used the initials."
"It still sounds so unladylike."
Rolling her eyes, Sage turned back to her brother. "Susan wasn't too thrilled to find out you'd stood her up at dinner to go tomcatting."
Lucky muttered a curse, careful to prevent his mother from hearing it over the sizzling sound of frying bacon. "I forgot to call her."
"Well," Sage said importantly, twirling a tawny strand of hair around her finger, "you'd better be thinking up a sympathetic story, because she is steamed." Pinching her light brown eyes into narrow slits, she made a sound like steam escaping the tight lid of a kettle.
"We have much more to worry about than Susan's jealousy," Chase said.
"Besides," Laurie added, carrying a plate of food to the table, "Lucky's affairs are no concern of yours, young lady."
Lucky attacked the plate of food. After a moment he realized that the sound of his fork scraping across his plate was the only noise in the kitchen. He raised his head to find them all staring at him expectantly.
"What?" he asked, lifting his shoulders in a slight shrug.
"What?" Chase repeated more loudly. "We're waiting for you to tell us where you were, so that if the badge-toting guys in the dark suits and opaque sunglasses come asking, we'll have something to tell them."
Lucky glanced back down into his plate. The food no longer looked appetizing. "I, uh, spent the night with a lady."
Sage snorted as derisively as Lucky had when Pat Bush had called Dovey that. "A lady. Right."
"What lady?" Chase asked.
"Does it matter?"
"Ordinarily not. This time it does."
Lucky gnawed on his lower lip. "Y'all don't know her."
"Is she from out of town?"
"Yeah. She was the, uh, the one Little Alvin was hitting on."
"You picked up a stranger at the place and spent the night with her?"
"Well, who are you to get so righteous, Chase?" Lucky shouted, suddenly angry. "Before Tanya came along, you weren't above doing the same damned thing."
"But not on the night one of our buildings was torched!" his brother shouted right back.
Tanya intervened. "Chase, Lucky didn't know what was going to happen last night."
"Thanks, Tanya," Lucky said with an injured air.
"Oh, Lucky, that's such a foolhardy thing to do these days."
"I'm not stupid, Mother. I took the necessary precautions."
Sage grinned, her eyes twinkling wickedly. "Aren't you the good Boy Scout. Do they give merit badges for taking 'the necessary precautions'?"
"Shut up, brat," Lucky growled.
Thanks to Tanya, Chase had reined in his temper. Sparks often flew between the two brothers, but the grudges lasted no longer than the temper flare-ups. "Okay, all you need to do to clear yourself is get the woman to vouch for you."
Lucky scratched his stubble-covered jaw. "That might be tricky."
"Why? When she tells the authorities that you spent all night with her, they can eliminate you as a suspect and start tracking down the real arsonist."
Chase, believing their dilemma had been resolved, started to stand. Lucky pointed him back into his chair. "There's a slight problem with that, Chase."
Slowly Chase lowered himself back into his seat. "What problem? How slight?"
"I, uh, don't know her name."
* * *
"You don't know her name?"
"No, sir."
This day would go down in Lucky's private annals as one of the worst in his life. His head still felt as though it had a flock of industrious woodpeckers living in it. His vision was blurry in the eye that had connected with Little Alvin's fist. Every muscle in his body was screaming at the abuse it had taken. He was suspected of setting a destructive fire to his place of business. Everybody, including members of his own family, was treating him like a leper because he'd spent the night with a woman he couldn't identify.
And he had thought yesterday was bad. According to their expressions, neither the sheriff and his deputies nor the federal investigators believed him any more than his family had that morning.
One of the investigators turned to Pat Bush. "You didn't get her name at the scene of the fight?"
Pat harrumphed. "No. It occurred to me later that I had failed to, but there didn't seem any need for it at the time. She wasn't interested in pressing charges."
A skeptical 'hmm' was the agent's only response. He turned to Lucky again. "Didn't you think to ask her her name?"
"Sure. She told me it was Dovey, but—"
"Would you spell that please?" The request was made by another agent taking notes in a spiral notebook.
"Spell what?"
"Dovey."
Lucky blew out a breath of exasperation and looked toward Pat Bush for assistance. The sheriff's terse nod merely indicated that Lucky should go along with the ridiculous request. Lucky succinctly spelled the name.
"At least I think that's right. She registered at the motel as Mary Smith of Dallas." He snapped his fingers and raised his head hopefully. "Listen, the clerk there will remember me."
"He does. We already checked."
Earlier Lucky had provided the investigators with the name of the motel on the interstate, located about midway between Milton Point and Dallas. "Then why the hell are you still busy with me? If I've been cleared, why aren't you out looking for the guy who burned our building?"
"The clerk could only testify to seeing you this morning," the senior agent informed him. "He didn't see you going into the room last evening. And even if he had, he couldn't vouch for your staying there all night without leaving."
Lucky glanced at his brother, who was leaning against a battered army-green metal filing cabinet in Sheriff Bush's office. Lucky shook his head as though to say that this was a lost cause, and he was tired of playing cops and robbers by their rules.
Meeting the agent's cold stare, he arrogantly asked, "Do you have any physical evidence connecting me with this crime?"
The agent shifted from one wing-tipped shoe to the other. "The exact cause of the fire hasn't yet been ascertained."
"Do you have anything linking me with that fire?" Lucky repeated.
Backed against a wall, the agent replied, "No."
"Then I'm leaving." Lucky came out of his straight chair and headed for the door.
"You'll be under surveillance, so don't even try to leave town."
"Go to hell," Chase told the agent on his way out, following his brother. "Lucky, wait up!" he called as he emerged from the courthouse a few seconds later. Lucky was already at the curb in front of the official building with his hand on the door handle of his car. He waited for Chase to catch up with him.
"Can you believe this crap?" he asked, angrily jutting his chin toward the first-floor office where the interrogation had taken place.
"It's crap, but they're serious."
"You're telling me," Lucky muttered. "The hair on the back of my neck is standing on end. I had enough of jail the night we got arrested for knocking down old man Bledsoe's fence. It was an accident! How the hell were we supposed to know his thoroughbred mare was in that pasture? Or that she was in season?"
Chase peered up at his brother from beneath his heavy brows, and, together, they started laughing. "He went nuts when that jackass raced in there and mounted her. Remember how he was jumping up and down and yelling? Never laughed so hard in my life."
"We stopped laughing the next morning when Daddy came to pick us up. As I recall, he didn't say a single word all the way home."
"The drive from town to home never seemed so long," Chase agreed. "We had all that time to fret about what our punishment was going to be. But you kn
ow," he said with a mischievous wink, "that mare's offspring was the ugliest damn mule I've ever seen."
They laughed together for several moments, remembering. Eventually, however, Lucky sighed as he slid his hands into the rear pockets of his jeans and leaned against the fender of his car.
"We've had our brushes with the law, but never anything like this, Chase. They haven't got a damn thing on me, so why am I so scared?"
"Because being accused of a felony like arson is scary. You'd be a fool if you weren't."
"In deference to the ladies in our family, I hope it doesn't become necessary, but a DNA-matching test would prove that I had sex in that motel room."
Chase winced.
"Right, it makes me squeamish too," Lucky said bitterly. "But even though lab tests would prove that I was there, they wouldn't prove that she was, or that I didn't leave at some point during the night, drive back here, set the fire, then return by daylight and make certain the clerk remembered me."
"The only one who can establish your alibi is the woman." There was an implied question mark at the end of Chase's statement. Lucky looked chagrined. "It wasn't as sordid as it sounds."
"Sounds pretty sordid, little brother."
"Yeah, I know," he admitted on a sigh. "Look, I chased her down because she hightailed it out of the place without even thanking me for saving her from those two slimeballs. Made me mad as hell. I caught up with her at that motel and talked myself into her room.
"By that time, I was feeling the effects of Little Alvin's punches. A few shots of whiskey had made me woozy. I lay down on the bed. I think she got to feeling sorry for me then, 'cause she cleaned the knife wound and got an ice pack for my eye. I fell asleep."
"I thought you had sex."
Again Lucky looked at something besides his brother's inquisitive face. "Sometime during the night I woke up," he said quietly. "She has this really incredible dark red hair. And her skin is so creamy, translucent, you know." Suddenly he yanked himself out of the self-imposed trance and frowned at his own susceptibility. "She was classy, Chase."
"Then what was she doing causing a stir at the place?"
"Damned if I know. But she wasn't your ordinary barfly, willing to grant sexual favors in exchange for a few drinks. Not a party girl. If anything, she was uptight and … and … bossy. The kind of woman I usually avoid like the plague."
"You'd have done well to avoid this one."
Lucky was reluctant to agree. For some reason he hadn't yet had time to analyze, he wasn't sorry about the night before. Nor did he think it would be his only encounter with Dovey, or Mary, or whatever her name was. The consequences of their night together had got him into more trouble than he'd ever been in. That was saying a lot. But inexplicably he didn't regret it. At least not as much as the situation warranted.
"So what's your plan?"
Chase's question pulled him out of his reverie. "To find her."
"How, if you don't even know her name?"
"I'll start at the place and work forward from there."
"Well, good luck."
"Thanks."
"If you need me, you know where to find me."
"I'll be glad to help you and the boys with the cleanup," Lucky offered.
"We can't start until they've finished their investigation. God knows how long that'll take, because they're sifting everything through a fine-tooth comb, looking for evidence. All you could do is what I'm doing, and that's standing around twiddling my thumbs.
"No, your time will be better spent clearing yourself. The insurance company isn't going to pay us one red cent until we've been exonerated." Chase squinted into the sunlight. "Any ideas who might've done this?"
"My first guess would be Little Alvin and Jack Ed."
"Revenge?" Chase chuckled. "From what I've heard, you made Little Alvin sorry he was a man."
"He deserved it."
"Pat thought he might be a suspect, too, but he's got a whole tribe of Cagneys swearing that Little Alvin was playing cards with his brothers all night."
"With an ice pack on his crotch?"
Again Chase laughed. "Remind me never to get you really mad at me." His expression turned serious again. "Which I'm likely to do by saying this."
"What?"
"It might be a good idea to go see Susan Young. Her daddy's already called me twice today demanding to know what's going on."
Lucky swore. "You're right. I'd better get over there and smooth her ruffled feathers. We need to stay in good with the bank now more than ever. Besides, I truly did do Susan dirty by standing her up last night."
"And making it public knowledge that you spent the night with another woman." Chase eyed him speculatively. "She must've been some redhead."
Refusing to be baited, Lucky settled into the driver's seat of his convertible and turned on the motor. "In ten or twenty years we'll be laughing about this the way we did about Bledsoe's mule out of his thoroughbred mare."
* * *
She padded into her kitchen and opened the refrigerator. As expected, it was empty. One of the hazards of living alone was a bare cupboard. It was less of a hassle to do without food than to prepare meals for one.
The thought of going grocery shopping on her return to Dallas early that morning hadn't been very appealing. Instead, she'd driven straight to her condo and, after taking a long, hot bath to relieve her soreness, had gone to bed.
There she had stayed most of the day, telling herself she needed the rest after her ordeal. Actually she had dreaded the moment of accountability to her conscience for what she had allowed to happen the night before. There was about half a cup of skim milk in the bottom of the carton. Sniffing it first to make sure it hadn't soured, she poured it over a bowl of Rice Krispies. They were so old, they barely had any snap, crackle, or pop left in them, but they would line her empty stomach.
She went into the living room, curled into a corner of her sofa, and reached for the TV's remote control. It was too late for the soaps and too early for the evening news. She was left with reruns of syndicated sitcoms.
In one, the male lead had dark blond hair and a mischievous, I'm-up-to-no-good grin. She quickly switched to another channel, unwilling to have anything remind her of the stranger she had spent the night with … been intimate with … made love with. The thought of it made her hand shake so badly she had to set the bowl of soggy cereal on the coffee table or risk spilling it. She covered her face with her cupped palms.
"Dear Lord," she moaned. What in the world had caused her to behave so irresponsibly? Sure, she could list a million excuses, starting with her emotional state yesterday and ending with the gifted way that man had kissed her when he drew her out of her dark loneliness and despair into his strong, warm arms.
"Don't think about it," she admonished herself, picking up the transmitter again and vigorously punching through the channel selector.
She had derided women who were susceptible to handsome faces, brawny physiques, and glib come-ons. She had thought she was smarter than that. She was far too intelligent, discerning, and discriminatory to fall for a pelt of gold-tipped chest hair and heavily lashed sky-blue eyes. His charm had melted her morals and feminist resolve. Lucky Tyler had succeeded in touching her where no other man ever had—her heart, her body.
Mortification made her whimper. To stifle the sound, she pressed her fingertips against her lips, then explored them tentatively, feeling the whisker burns. She had discovered those sweetly chafed places on her breasts, too, during her bath. They had brought back tantalizing sensations that swirled through her midsection.
When she had tried to sleep, squeezing her eyes tightly shut, she recalled the tugging motions his mouth had made on her nipples. Her lower body contracted with a pleasurable ache whenever she remembered that first, sweet piercing of her flesh, then the strength and depth of his penetration.
Now she crossed her arms over her lower body and bent at the waist in the hopes of eradicating both the mental and physic
al recollections. They made her hot. They made her want. They made her ashamed.
Lust for a total stranger? In a cheap roadside motel? What a stupid thing to have done! How reckless! How wrong! How unlike her! But she hadn't exactly been herself yesterday, had she? Before one could pass judgment on her, one would have to understand the state of mind she'd been in twenty-four hours ago. One would have had to experience the same cruel rejection, traverse the same bleak corridors, feel the lingering sense of suffocation even after escaping those corridors.
One would have to experience the sense of futility and defeat she had felt upon learning that sometimes even making supreme sacrifices wasn't enough. Having reached the devastating realization that someone's love, or even gratitude, couldn't be won, she'd been at her lowest.
Enter Lucky Tyler—as gorgeous as an angel and as delightful as one of the devil's favored children. He'd been funny and sexy and needful.
Perhaps that had been his main attraction. He had needed her, fundamentally and simply, a man needing a woman. She had desperately needed to be needed. She had responded to his need as much as she had to the transporting caresses of his hands and mouth.
"Oh sure. Right," she muttered to herself impatiently. Rationalizations came a dime a dozen, and none was going to be sufficient justification. It had been a foolhardy thing to do, but she had done it. Now she had to come to terms with it.
Thank heaven she had had the foresight to use a phony name and pay in cash when she checked into the motel. He couldn't trace her. Could he? Had she overlooked something? In her haste to leave that morning had she left behind a clue that would lead him to her if he had a mind to find her?
No, she was almost sure she hadn't. As far as Mr. Lucky Tyler was concerned, she was totally anonymous. Only she would ever know about last night, and she would forget it.
"Starting now," she averred as she left the sofa. Giving the belt of her robe a swift tug, she moved into the spare bedroom that served as her office at home. She switched on the desk lamp and her word processor, slid on a pair of reading glasses, and sat down in front of the terminal.
Work had always been her salvation. Other people relied on alcohol, drugs, sports, sex, to forget their troubles and make life livable. For her—except for last night—nothing worked like work itself. Besides, she had a deadline. Once she got a clear screen on her computer, she referred to her notes and began typing. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. She wrote well into the night, as though the devil were after her … and rapidly closing in.
