Perfect Romance

by Duncan, Alice

  She then found herself dangling, and wished she’d given more thought to trajectory. With a little more effort, she managed to scoot along the top of the fence, hand over hand, until her feet barely touched a bush beneath her. Then, holding her breath and praying she wouldn’t break anything, she let go of the fence.

  It was a prickly bush. Fortunately, it didn’t sport any actual thorns, the prickles having mainly to do with broken twigs, and she managed to disentangle herself without sustaining too many scratches. Thank God for gloves. Too bad no one had invented a glove for one’s face.

  Once she’d gained entry to the estate grounds and brushed herself off, Loretta engaged her flashlight only long enough to take her bearings. She knew where she aimed to search once she figured out where she was in the overall scheme of things.

  She heard a dog bark and nearly suffered a spasm. She hadn’t recalled that Tillinghurst owned dogs. Were they guard dogs that were only released at night? Were they trained to attack intruders?

  Lord, she wished she’d remembered to have Marjorie ask Tillinghurst about his estate’s security measures. It would have been perfectly within the supposed scope of their visit.

  But Marjorie would probably have fumbled the question. Loretta had grave doubts about Marjorie’s overall effectiveness as a collaborator.

  Malachai Quarles would make a good partner in crime, she imagined, if he could only be persuaded that the cause was just. Unfortunately, he had an incredibly thick head when it came to seeing things Loretta’s way, curse him.

  She stood still for what seemed like an hour at least, before deciding that the dog wasn’t a threat to her. Its bark faded and stopped, and Loretta guessed it was outside Tillinghurst’s gates. Thank God. She wasn’t sure what she’d do if Tillinghurst used, say, a bull mastiff to ward off intruders. She’d end up a doggie snack, is probably what she’d do. The notion held no appeal, and she vaguely wished that she hadn’t read The Hound of the Baskervilles so many times.

  As she began wading through bushes and trees, making a terrible racket and wishing she’d chosen a less thickly planted area, she contemplated Malachai Quarles with rancor. If he weren’t so stubborn, she wouldn’t have to risk herself this way. She could have left it to him to explore his partner’s estate. But no. Malachai Quarles seemed intent upon thwarting Loretta at every turning in the road, blast the man.

  Wouldn’t he be surprised when she told him where Tillinghurst had hidden the stolen artifacts?

  Another bark sent her thoughts flying through the air like dandelion fluff. Again, Loretta paused, trying to determine where the bark had come from. She couldn’t. Not only was it so dark as to confuse her sense of direction, but fog had begun to creep in through the iron railings of Tillinghurst’s massive fence and blur the edges of her sharp wits.

  The wretched estate was starting to resemble the castle of an evil king in a Gothic romance novel, and Loretta, whose sensibilities were exquisite, although she endeavored to keep them under control most of the time, was feeling an increase of her heretofore slight nervousness. Just because the place looked ghostly in the foggy night, didn’t mean it was haunted. There were no such things as ghosts.

  There were such things as guard dogs, fog or no fog.

  Loretta gave herself a hard mental slap and, sucking in a deep breath, only slightly fog-laden, she commanded herself to keep her wits about her. It would do nobody any good if she panicked. Loretta Linden, she reminded herself, was not the panicking kind.

  That being the case, and since she heard no more barks, she crunched forward through the bushes, wishing she could stride. She felt much more like herself when she was striding through the world with vigor. This creeping about was for a personality less inclined to take charge than hers. Marjorie was the creeping-around type, not Loretta.

  She nearly wept with relief when she finally maneuvered herself out of the underbrush and onto a paved driveway. At least she thought it was a driveway. Allowing one more tiny flick of her flashlight, she saw that she was right, and that she only needed to walk another hundred yards or so to be in the area where she believed her success might lie.

  As quietly as possible—she was glad she’d worn rubber-soled shoes for this evening’s work—Loretta traversed the drive to a building sitting several yards beyond the back of Tillinghurst’s mansion, almost hidden by thick bushes and a tall hedge. Slowly, she edged around the building, searching for the door she’d espied right before Captain Quarles had thwarted her first search.

  Ah. There it was, looming large and black before her.

  Loretta wished she hadn’t thought the word loomed. Loomed was such a . . . a dangerous word.

  Well, never mind. She’d found what she’d been looking for: a recessed area that, during the day, was shaded by thick bushes. If she hadn’t inspected them during her first visit, with Marjorie, to Tillinghurst’s estate, she’d never have discovered, behind the prickly hedge, steps leading down to a door. That door must open into a room underground, and it was so well hidden that Loretta couldn’t think of a better place to hide stolen loot.

  That being the case, she tiptoed down the stairs until she stood before the door. Silently, she tried the knob. Locked. Disappointing, but not unexpected. Feeling with her hands, she tried to determine if there was a window in the door. There wasn’t. She muttered a soft, “Damn,” under her breath.

  Her heart nearly jumped out of her chest when, from the other side of the door, she heard a whispered, “Cap’n? Is that you, Cap’n Quarles?”

  Loretta was halfway up the stairs before she recalled that she’d probably just found what she’d been looking for, at least in part. Swallowing her heart and pressing on her chest to keep it where it belonged, she edged back down the stairs. Her nerves were still jangling when she put her lips close to the keyhole and whispered, “Jones?”

  A voice responded, “Cap’n?”

  “Are you Jones?” Loretta tried again.

  The voice said, “Is that you, Cap’n Quarles?”

  Curse the man! Why wouldn’t he answer her question? A tiny bit louder, Loretta said, “Are you Mr. Jones? Mr. Percival Jones?”

  A pause ensued. Loretta was about to bolt up the stairs again when the voice said, somewhat pettishly, “The name ain’t my fault.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Malachai sat in his hotel room, his feet propped on an ottoman, and a feeling of incompleteness bothering him. He ought to be perfectly content, and he knew it.

  Here he was, relaxing in the most magnificent surroundings he’d ever inhabited, in a first-class hotel, with a fire burning in the grate and a lively city right outside waiting to clasp him to her bosom. He’d bought himself a stack of books so that he could catch up on his reading—treasure recovery didn’t leave a man with much time to fritter away—and he’d been looking forward to an evening to himself.

  More, he’d assured his future absolutely and beyond doubt. If anything should give a man a feeling of contentment and completion, it was that. This latest expedition, even though some of its fruits had gone missing somewhere, had capped a career that was revered in ship-recovery circles. He’d made his fortune beyond any chance of doubt, and he was looking forward to settling down at last.

  Security. He loved that damned word. So few people understood or appreciated it, probably because they’d had it from birth. Only someone who’d grown up like he had could value security the way it ought to be valued.

  So why wasn’t he able to get lost in Chesterton’s latest Father Brown mystery story? Why did he feel the faintest bit itchy, sitting here in luxury and comfort?

  Why the devil did visions of Loretta Linden keep plaguing him, confound it?

  “Damn her,” he muttered without a care for Chesterton’s sleuth in holy orders. “The damned woman drives me crazy.”

  What really drove him crazy was remembering her in her beautiful garden, with that green thing slipping from her shoulders, and her amazing dark hair carelessly piled on top o
f her head, and her huge chocolate-brown eyes sparkling at him as she decried the world and its failures.

  When they’d first met, he’d believed that he’d met women like her before: women who crusaded for causes they knew nothing about and who would shrink from actually touching a poor person or a person with some hideous disease. He’d been wrong about her. Loretta not only got right down in the gutter with the people she wanted to save, but she even served them soup.

  Malachai grinned. Soup, hell. When she saw an injustice being perpetrated, she went after it with her handbag. His grin dried up when he remembered her bruised flesh.

  Damned woman had no sense. She had brains, he guessed, but she possessed the common sense of a gerbil. She needed somebody to take care of her, damn it, whether she knew it or not. And she didn’t know it, of course.

  She’d swear until she was blue that she didn’t need anyone or anything and that she could take care of herself, but she was wrong. Malachai had seen proof of it more than once, the first time being on the very night they’d met. If he’d been a shade more impulsive, Loretta Linden would be dead now.

  Impulsiveness wasn’t one of Malachai’s weaknesses, however. He’d overcome any tendency in that direction as a boy, when he’d learned that being impulsive generally led to switches being applied to the backs of his legs by those rotten nuns.

  Nuns. The mere thought of them made him shudder, even all these years later. He’d discovered long since that most nuns weren’t mean like that, but he still had no use for the Catholic church. It bothered him some that Loretta’s precious soup kitchen was affiliated somehow with nuns, although he tried not to let it.

  He picked up his book once more and swore at himself to pay attention. No sense thinking about Loretta, even if she was the most aggravating female in the universe. Besides, he’d see her again tomorrow.

  That notion soothed his irritated nerves a little bit until he realized there was no reason for it to do so. Of all the women in the world, Loretta was the only one he’d met thus far in his increasingly long life who was guaranteed to ruffle his calm. Therefore, the notion that seeing her should sooth his nerves vexed him. He thumped Father Brown on his engagingly illustrated rump and frowned into the fire. Nothing about his reaction to Loretta Linden made sense to him, and he didn’t like things that didn’t make sense.

  He hadn’t pursued this line of thought to its conclusion when—fortunately, because it was an unprofitable one—he was interrupted by a peremptory knock at his door. Pulling off his reading glasses and thrusting them at the chair-side table, Malachai squinted at the clock on the mantel. Who the devil could be knocking on his door at seven minutes past midnight on a Thursday?

  Muttering, “Christ, what now?” he rose from his chair, made sure his dressing gown’s belt was tied, and shambled to the door. Prepared for just about anything from Derrick Peavey to one of Peavey’s Moors in full fighting regalia, he flung the door wide, his mouth open to ask whoever had knocked his business. The words died on his lips.

  “I found it!”

  Malachai gaped at Loretta, who stood before him in the most outlandish outfit he’d ever seen on a woman; with her hair frowzy, windblown, full of what looked like twigs and leaves, and with a cloth cap sliding sideways over her ear; her cheeks scratched; the knees of her trousers—her trousers?—ripped out; one sleeve of her flannel shirt torn half off her shoulder; and with a smile a mile wide on her face.

  “Great God in a gun boat, what happened to you?” he bellowed.

  Her smile shrank considerably. “I said,” she said, “that I found it.”

  “Found what?” Taking a quick look up and down the hall, Malachai didn’t wait for her answer. Shooting out a hand, he grabbed Loretta by one scruffy arm and yanked her into his room.

  “Ow! Unhand me, you brute!”

  He did. Slamming his fists on his hips as soon as he’d slammed the door, and with his heart battering against his ribs like a Gatling gun, he glowered down at her with all his might. “What the hell have you been up to now? Dammit, Loretta, what the devil are you doing out on a night like this dressed like that?” He swept one arm out in an all-encompassing gesture. “You look like a damned wharf rat!”

  “Don’t swear at me.” As if she felt that was weak, she went on indignantly, “I told you I’d find it, and I found it!”

  “Found what? Are you talking about the damned treasure?”

  “Of course, I’m talking about the treasure!” Her face began to flush with rage. “What else would I be talking about?”

  “I have no idea.” Fearful lest he grab and kiss her, Malachai turned abruptly and stomped to a table which the Fairfield Hotel had conveniently stocked with a tray, glasses, and several bottles. He grabbed the first one, which purported to contain cognac, and slopped some into a glass. Picking it up, he carried it to Loretta. “Drink this.”

  “I don’t need spirits!”

  Losing the battle with his temper, Malachai set the glass down with a crack and picked her up. Her eyes went huge and she gasped, but he didn’t give her time to make words. Rather, he shook her as if she were a rag doll.

  “I swear to God, Loretta Linden, if you’ve been out to Tillinghurst’s estate on your damned crazy quest dressed like that, I’ll turn you over my knee and paddle you until you howl!”

  After her head stopped bobbing, Loretta returned his glower with one of her own that was as intense, if not quite as large, as his. “Put me down. And what do my clothes have to do with anything?”

  He complied, more gently than he thought was warranted, but not wanting to do her any injury. Any further injury. Obviously, she’d sustained injuries already tonight. Scarcely able to pry his jaws far enough apart to push words out, he said, “Why are you in trousers?”

  Because she didn’t seem to want to obey his wishes, he took the option out of her hands, picked her up once more, and deposited her on the lavish sofa in front of the fireplace. With a swipe of his hand, he grabbed the glass containing cognac and held it out to her. She took the glass, probably because it was the only way to get his fist out of her face.

  “Drink it,” he commanded.

  She sipped and made a face. “It’s awful, and I don’t need it.”

  Feeling slightly less likely to explode, Malachai took a chair opposite the sofa. He noticed that Loretta’s legs weren’t long enough for her feet to rest on the floor. With another swoop, he snagged the ottoman and shoved it in front of her. She frowned, but, probably understanding that to object would be fruitless, she rested her feet on the ottoman. She was wearing rubber-soled shoes, Malachai noticed. They were the kind people called tennis shoes, he thought, although he wasn’t certain.

  Because he feared that if he used too many words, they’d get away from him and form sentences he’d regret, he said shortly, “Explain yourself.”

  “I was trying to explain myself when you—” She broke off suddenly, perhaps because she saw Malachai’s jaw bulge as he ground his teeth. “There’s no need for such anger, Captain Quarles. I came here to tell you that I was right all along, and that Mr. Tillinghurst is the villain. He stole your precious artifacts.” She sat back against the sofa cushions, a smug expression on her face.

  All at once, Malachai thought of something that nearly made him gasp aloud. “How the devil did you know which room was mine?” A sense of impending doom pervaded his body and soul. If this meddlesome woman had asked at the front—

  “I asked at the front desk, of course.”

  Malachai buried his face in his hands. Impending, hell. Doom had come upon him as surely as it had the Lady of Shalott.

  “There’s no need for hysterics, Captain,” Loretta said shortly, for once correctly understanding the cause of his upset. “No one knew it was me. I, I mean.”

  He allowed one of his eyes to peer through his fingers. There she was: Doom personified. And she was telling him there was no need for hysterics. “I suppose we can find a justice of the peace somewhere.” His
voice, he noted, carried none of the turmoil he felt. That was something, anyway.

  Her eyes narrowed, and she looked at him as if he were the one in the room who was crazy. “Whatever in the world do you want a justice of the peace for? What we need is a police battalion.”

  “To marry us. I can’t perform the service for myself, I don’t think.”

  Her mouth dropped open and her eyes, which had been little suspicious slits, opened wide. “To what?”

  Deciding to face his fate head-on, Malachai straightened in his chair, lowered his hands from his face, and frowned at the woman who had ruined his life—and who sat there as serenely as if she hadn’t done it.

  In his most bitingly sarcastic voice, he said, “In case it has failed to register with you, Loretta Linden, by the time the sun rises this morning, the entire city of San Francisco will know that you, a single woman, visited my hotel room in the middle of the night, without an escort of any kind. You made sure the news would get out when you asked at the front desk for the number of my suite. Therefore, in order to salvage your honor—your honor, mind you—I will do the gentlemanly thing and marry you. If I were less honorable, I’d let you swing on your own.”

  She’d begun to sputter before he’d come to the end of his declaration, but Malachai forged on relentlessly. If there was one thing he was really good at, it was overpowering his opponents by the force of his personality. “If you think I’m going to allow you to tarnish my reputation as an upstanding man in the city in which I plan to settle down, you’re even more of an idiot than I took you for.”

  “I—I—”

  “And furthermore, I don’t believe for a minute that William Frederick Tillinghurst stole the artifacts, but if he did, why the devil didn’t you go and tell it to the police instead of me? I doubt even you could compromise an entire police department!”