The Honeymoon Assignment

by Cathryn Clare

  His damp hair had fallen forward into his face again. He pushed it back impatiently, and said, “You saved that kid, Kelley, not me. I was too busy just trying to stay afloat.”

  He looked frustrated at having to admit it, and once again Kelley couldn’t blame him. It was unsettling to feel such empathy for Sam, when she’d spent so much time trying to distance herself from him.

  “I saved him after you’d pointed out where he’d gone under,” she told him. “And you saved me last night, in case it slipped your mind already.”

  “If you hadn’t called my name—”

  She didn’t let him finish. “You see?” she said. “It took both of us to get out of last night alive, and both of us to help that boy this afternoon. We’re going to have to be partners in this, Sam, if we’re going to do it at all.”

  Something flared in his face at that, something that made Kelley take a step back into the relative safety of the open doorway. Sam reminded her of a penned-up stallion at times, so angry and wild and unpredictable that he was a danger to everyone, including himself.

  She knew why he was feeling that way now. The idea of being partners again was a terrifying one, given all they’d lost the last time they’d tried.

  But it was tantalizing, too, to think of matching her wits and her strength with his again. She held her breath, waiting for his answer, refusing to let him hide behind that stubborn silence this time.

  When he finally spoke, he didn’t sound pleased. He sounded resigned, and cornered, and frustrated.

  But he wasn’t saying no. “I suppose it makes sense,” he said, slowly. “Unless one or both of us decides to leave.”

  “Are you thinking of leaving?”

  “Hell no.” There was a slight gleam in his eye as he met her glance, catching the challenge in her words.

  “Well, neither am I. So we might as well put our heads together on this thing.”

  It was a poor second best to what they’d once shared, Kelley knew. There wasn’t a chance on earth of recapturing the kind of starry-eyed, anything-is-possible partnership they’d had when they’d first known each other. They both knew too well now that anything was possible, including the kind of loss that Kelley wasn’t certain she could survive a second time.

  But what Sam was telling her, as he gave her a slow nod and ushered her out of the bedroom toward the welcome smell of coffee in the main cabin, was that at least he wasn’t going to shut her out anymore. He was giving her a chance to redeem herself, a chance to use the hard lessons she’d learned from everything that had gone wrong three years earlier.

  And at the moment, that was all Kelley could imagine asking him for.

  You can do this, Sam told himself.

  It didn’t matter that his whole arm was shaking or that his shoulder felt as though someone had kindled a bonfire inside it. It was possible to push through physical pain. He’d done it before.

  And he could do it again now.

  He squinted into the afternoon light and raised Kelley’s pistol to shoulder height one more time.

  She’d kept the same gun, he noticed. He’d helped her buy it—“So romantic, Sam, helping your girlfriend choose her first weapon,” she’d teased him—when she’d first come to work for Cotter Investigations. It was a Smith & Wesson .38, a Model 52 that they’d been lucky enough to find in a pawn shop in Houston. The thing was accurate and reliable, a real peach, in Sam’s expert opinion.

  It was also heavy.

  He hadn’t actually fired a gun in a long time, and the three-plus pounds of metal at the end of his arm now felt like a ton. His muscles were quivering badly enough that the sights were a blur and there was no chance of him hitting the paper bulls-eye on the other side of the sunlit field.

  “Hell,” he said, and lowered his arm again.

  He’d slept like a baby last night. So had Kelley, apparently. They’d both been tired after their interrupted sleep of the night before and the adventures of the afternoon— and maybe, too, from the emotional highs and lows of being together again.

  At any rate, there had been no replay of the danger of their first night at Windspray, for which Sam was profoundly grateful. But that didn’t mean he’d forgotten that someone had nearly managed to kill Kelley right under his nose.

  He had phone calls to make and information to run down today. But he’d decided first to head over to the local gun club for some target practice. If their unknown assailant had plans for another attack, Sam wanted to be ready.

  There was only one problem.

  He couldn’t do it.

  He switched the weapon to his left hand and took a few long strides out onto the field, then back to the distance marker he’d been standing behind. With the toe of one sneaker, he scuffed the grass next to the white line painted on the ground. The fresh morning breeze kept blowing his hair all over the place, and he pushed it back, suddenly annoyed with the weather and everything else.

  He felt inadequate as bell, and he didn’t like it.

  He tried to remind himself of how good he’d gotten at the new specialty he’d made his own at Cotter Investigations. He’d mastered all the tricks of the financialinvestigation trade, and both his brothers agreed that there was nobody quite like Sam when it came to sniffing out bad money.

  He even found himself thinking about his dad, that charming con man, J. D. Cotter. J.D. had had a fine collection of inspirational sayings, left over from his days on the lecture circuit. The lectures had been genuine enough, although the hundreds of prepaid book orders J.D. had taken after his speeches had always gone mysteriously unfilled.

  The line that seemed to cover Sam’s current difficulty went something like, Son, ain’t nobody can tell you no if you don’t already have no in your heart.

  It was horse manure, of course, and J.D. had known it. But Sam found himself grinning, remembering how sincere his dad’s handsome face had always looked when he’d come up with one of those little platitudes.

  Wiley and Jack still couldn’t get past the memory of J.D.’s fast-and-loose conscience and even looser morals. But Sam had loved the old scoundrel. He still missed J.D. Nobody—until Kelley Landis had come into his life—had ever made Sam feel so alive, so special, so all-around good.

  His grin faded. He didn’t want to think about Kelley right now. He wanted to fire this gun and hit the damn target so he could go back to the cottage and do the work he was being paid to do.

  “All right, old man,” he muttered, shifting the pistol back into his right hand. “I’ve got yes in my heart at this very moment—let’s see what it does for me.”

  He didn’t give himself the opportunity to choke this time. He frowned hard at the target and raised his hand to shoulder height in one smooth motion. The breeze was blowing his hair into his eyes again, but he ignored it, keeping his gaze on the target across the field.

  As he squeezed the trigger, his whole arm started to shake as if Sam was nothing but a sideshow marionette and the devil himself was pulling the strings.

  And the bullet missed by at least a country mile.

  “Thanks for your note.” Kelley looked up from the laptop computer on the table as Sam came in the kitchen door.

  “Yeah, well, I thought it was the kind of thing a husband would do.”

  It hadn’t been flowery—Sam didn’t do flowery—but it had occurred to him, as he’d been going out the cottage door two hours ago, that Kelley might wonder where he was. He could see his own scribbled note on the round dining room table next to her elbow now: Gone out for a while, back by noon.

  Kelley had been out with Susan Gustaffson when he’d gone. Susan had invited her to work out at the health club again. If nothing else, this assignment was going to leave her in peak physical condition.

  Sam took a seat across from her now and reflected that there was nothing wrong with Kelley’s physical condition to begin with. She was wearing casual white trousers and a dark pink flowered sweater today, and the ensemble perfectly suited her long-
legged elegance and fair coloring. She’d pulled her honey blond hair back in a loose braid, but a few wispy strands, as usual, had pulled free. They were framing her high, gently curved cheekbones, making Sam’s fingertips ache with the urge to stroke the fine softness of her hair, her skin. She looked as calm, as composed as ever.

  You’re perfect, Sam wanted to say to her. You’re perfect, and I’m a wreck.

  Instead, he watched as she finished keying something into the computer, then asked, “Any luck with Susan?”

  “Lots.” Kelley pointed one slender index finger at the small screen in front of her. “Susan loves to talk about real estate. So it was easy to find out how much they paid for this place, and how much of a down payment they made, and how much their condo in Houston cost them.”

  “So you’ve been doing a statement of application of funds.” That was the quickest way to size up a suspect’s financial situation and spot any large, unaccounted-for amounts of money.

  “Right.” Kelley nodded and picked up a pencil, tapping the eraser end of it lightly on the tabletop. “It’s still fairly rough, but it seems to me that the year they bought this vacation property, there was a big bump in their income. I’m working on getting more accurate figures for their salaries right now.”

  “If you can’t get exact numbers, sometimes a professional organization—”

  “Will be able to provide ballpark figures. I know that.”

  Sam felt his stomach clench a little. She’d always been this way, he recalled—a quick learner, and just as quick to put her knowledge to work. She’d soaked up everything he’d been able to teach her, just as fast as he could come up with it.

  It was the ultimate irony that by letting her go too far, too fast, he’d scotched whatever chance at happiness they might both have had.

  “What about the bank in Cairo?” Kelley asked him. “Any luck there?”

  Sam had visited Cairo’s one and only bank yesterday morning and had spoken with the manager. The man was a nobody, in Sam’s estimation—a nervous, disorganized little character who already seemed to be regretting the week’s grace he had let Harold talk him into.

  “It’s just that we have so few business concerns here in Cairo,” he’d told Sam yesterday. “And really, the fortunes of the town could turn completely around if Mr. Price makes a go of this resort development. On the other hand, banking regulations are very specific, and—”

  Sam didn’t have a lot of patience for people who made up their minds and then changed them. He’d contented himself with asking to see the records for the Windspray Community’s accounts, which the manager had turned over to him willingly enough.

  Today, though, he had more specific questions in mind. He’d visited the bank again after his abortive trip to the firing range this morning, and this time he had found out something concrete from the anxious manager.

  “Well, many of the Windspray staff do have accounts with us, of course,” he’d said, in answer to Sam’s question. “Most of them are local people. Steve Cormier? Let me check. Yes, here he is. He opened the account at the beginning of the summer. And—well, look here. There’s one quite sizable deposit and then just a few withdrawals. No other activity.”

  “Cormier deposited ten grand when he first arrived, and nothing since then,” Sam reported to Kelley now.

  “Is that so unusual? He’s not being paid much to work here since he gets a free place to live,” she countered.

  “Then why does he need the ten grand? And where did it come from in the first place?”

  “Good question.” She wrinkled her brow as she thought about it. Sam wished he could smooth his thumb over that fair skin of hers, the way he’d done so many times before.

  One of the times he’d done it—their first night here, after they’d been shot at—he’d been courting death for both of them. Shape up, Sam, he told himself, and forced his mind back to the question of Steve Cormier.

  “That one-time lump deposit seems strange to me,” he said. “It makes me wonder if it’s a payment for something.”

  “Have you got any ideas how to find out?”

  “Well, for starters, I intend to talk to Steve Cormier again, on his turf this time.”

  “His cottage, you mean?”

  “Right.” He would ask to borrow a tool of some sort, Sam thought. And then he would see if he could lead the conversation toward photography, and the boxes Helen Price had said Steve Cormier had arrived with. Sam had spent enough hours in the Cotter Investigations darkroom back in Austin that he was sure he could tell a real photographer from a fake one after just a few minutes’ talk.

  “Any sign of Cormier’s job application form from Harold and Helen?” he asked.

  Kelley shook her head. “Helen was getting pretty irritated about it when I was over there. She says it’s absolutely the last time she’s letting Harold hire anybody.”

  “Well, I think it’s worth pestering them about. Cormier looks to me like he might be our man.”

  “I agree,” Kelley said, “with a side bet on Wayland Price.”

  “Anything new on him?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. He showed up as Susan and I were finishing up at the health club—he seems to have this sixth sense that tells him whenever there are women using the place. Fortunately for Susan, Jon came looking for her, so she had an excuse to leave and I got stuck with Wayland.”

  “I don’t like the way that guy looks at you.” Sam tried to stop the words, but they got past him.

  Kelley smiled at him, with the serenity that always seemed to find its way deep inside him. “There’s something poignant about Wayland,” she said. “He’s not very happy, underneath that slick act of his. And once you get past the flirtation, he seems genuinely eager to have somebody to talk to.”

  “Kelley.” Sam made his words as blunt as he could, to counteract the beguiling softness he could see in her eyes. “Attila the Hun would probably have softened up and started confiding in you about his problems, if he’d known you. You’re an easy person to talk to.”

  Hell, Sam knew that better than anybody. Within days of meeting him, Kelley had seemed able to look into his heart and see things buried there that no one else had ever noticed. He’d never forgotten the way it felt to have Kelley’s searching blue gaze turned on him with love and concern.

  But—

  “But try to remember the guy’s a suspect, all right?” he added. “You’re investigating him, not—”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  Sam hated the way the warmth in her eyes cooled at his words, but he wasn’t sorry he’d said them. It made him crazy just thinking about that night three years ago when she’d trusted her diplomatic skills too far.

  “And I did get some hard information out of Wayland, since hard information is what we’re after,” she added. “I asked him on the boat yesterday about the consulting work he’d done, remember? And this morning he brought me a list of companies he says he’s worked for. He kind of flourished it at me, like I’d issued him a challenge and he was taking me up on it.”

  Her brows drew together in a frown. “But here’s the really odd thing—when I called the companies to check up on Wayland, they all praised him to the sky. Said he was a great guy and knew the business inside out. It’s just about the last thing I expected.”

  “Hmm.” Sam drummed his fingertips on the table, then moved to stand behind Kelley’s chair. Quickly, trying not to let himself be distracted by the sweet scent of her recently shampooed hair, he keyed in a few strokes and pulled up one of the lists he’d copied onto the hard drive yesterday: a list of oil companies he’d pulled off a financial statement.

  “Look familiar?” he asked Kelley.

  She half turned to face him, ocean blue eyes wide with interest. “All the companies I contacted are there,” she said. “But how—”

  Sam flicked a finger at the screen. “Harold Price is on the board of directors for all these companies,” he told her. “Looks t
o me like the only work Wayland gets is through his daddy.”

  Kelley turned back to the list. “And that’s why he was getting such rave reviews,” she said.

  “Right. Nobody wants to offend the powerful Harold Price.”

  Kelley was frowning again as she pushed her chair back and stood up. “I can understand that,” she said. “I never met anybody as overbearing as Harold. And Helen, in that gentle way of hers, is just as forceful. When I tried to suggest—as tactfully as I knew how—that I thought we should check out Wayland’s finances, both of them hopped all over me.”

  Sam could imagine it. “Better you than me, sweetheart,” he said. “That’s the kind of scene where my inclination is to tell the client to get the hell off my back until I’m finished doing the job I was hired to do.”

  “It’s not as easy as that, Sam. You can’t just avoid your clients. They’re the ones who’re paying you.”

  He started to shrug, before his shoulder reminded him of several good reasons not to. “Half the time, the client is as much trouble as the criminal, and I’m getting too old to go looking for extra trouble,” he told her. “As my dad used to say, if you can see the steam rising off of it, you’re better to take the long way around.”

  For a moment he thought she was puzzling over what he meant, but then he realized it was something else that had caught her attention.

  “I’ve never heard you mention your dad before,” she said slowly.

  “I don’t talk about him much.”

  “Wiley says he was a real son of a bitch. Is that true?”

  Somehow it bothered Sam that his big brother had been talking to Kelley about their father. It wasn’t just what Wiley had said—J.D. had been a real son of a bitch, among other things. Then why was he feeling this sense of betrayal, as though something very private in his life had been invaded?

  Damn it, why were they talking about J.D. at all? It must be because Sam had just been thinking about the old buzzard, out there on the firing range.

  He didn’t want to get into this with Kelley. Nobody, not even Wiley and Jack, had ever really understood how Sam felt about his father. It wasn’t likely that Kelley Landis would get it, even if Sam chose to try to explain it to her.