by JoAnn Ross
From New York Times bestselling author JoAnn Ross comes a fan favorite tale about the lengths we go to for love!
Claren Wainwright is a runaway bride. Fleeing from her wedding, and the fiancé who never really loved her, she needs a place to lay low. So, she’s returning to her family home in Port Vancouver. The sprawling home is the perfect place to lick her wounds alone, except the infuriating Dash Mackenzie won’t stop popping up. Claren’s late uncle was involved in some dirty business, and Dash is determined to find out if Claren was involved. He’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, but he is prepared to put his heart on the line?
Originally published as The Knight in Shining Armor in 1992.
Midnight Runaway
JoAnn Ross
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
CHAPTER 1
DASH MACKENZIE HAD long ago come to the conclusion that there was nothing left in the world that would surprise him. That was before he saw Claren Wainwright racing toward him down the quiet, tree-shaded street of Seattle, Washington, the cathedral-length satin train of her wedding dress trailing in the dust behind her.
Vaguely amused, he drove past the formally dressed young woman, made a U-turn and pulled the rental car up alongside her.
She’d slowed to a swift walk. When she heard the sound of an automatic window rolling down, Claren glanced at the car, frowned, then, directing her gaze straight ahead again, walked even faster.
“Can I offer you a lift?”
“Thanks. But I don’t accept rides from strangers.” She didn’t slow down, nor did she look at him.
Her veil was a billowy white cloud, hiding her face from Dash’s view. Her stride was surprisingly lengthy, considering her lack of height, as if she was determined to make up in assertiveness what she lacked in stature.
“That’s wise,” he agreed. “But I’m not a stranger. Not really.”
Claren shifted her heavy, oversize tote bag from one shoulder to the other and wished he’d leave her alone. Hadn’t she already had enough trouble for one day?
“That’s what they all say.” She shot him a quick, irritated look. “If you’re that anxious to pick up a woman, why don’t you go downtown and try one of the hotels? The Sheraton, perhaps. Or the Hilton. They both get a lot of convention trade.”
“I realize that I’m a bit rusty on the logistics of picking up women,” Dash said. “But what’s the advantage of convention trade?”
“According to an article I read in the Hotelier’s Journal, there are a great many women who attend conventions to have wild flings with men they wouldn’t look at twice back home.”
“Fascinating.”
“Isn’t it?”
Although she refused to slow down, Claren couldn’t help noticing that his drawled tone was husky and undoubtedly appealing to most women. She might even find it alluring, if she was interested. Which she definitely was not.
“There’s a convention of female wrestlers in town this weekend,” she informed him briskly. “Perhaps you’ll get lucky.”
Nerve, Dash thought. The woman certainly had more than her share of that. “I think I already have.”
Claren stopped in her tracks, put her hands on her satin-and-lace covered hips and turned toward him.
She drew in a soft, involuntary breath as she found herself looking straight into a compelling, hard-hitting face with absolutely no softening features. His skin—tanned to a deep, rich mahogany—was stretched tight over strong bones, his nose was as sharp and as straight as a blade, his mouth was a harsh slash. His hair was as sleek and black as a raven’s wing.
He was wearing aviator-style sunglasses, which kept her from viewing his eyes, but Claren knew he was examining her. She shivered.
“This is ridiculous.” Claren shook her head, causing a few errant strands of wavy hair to tumble free from beneath the pearl tiara capping her billowy veil. “I don’t know why I’m even talking to you.”
Darcy had always called her beautiful. But now, as his gaze skimmed her face, Dash decided the older man had been prejudiced. Because Claren Wainwright wasn’t conventionally beautiful at all.
Her face was too narrow—all bones and hollows—and her chin, which she was presently jutting his way, was too sharp. Her lips were a shade too full, the set of her mouth blatantly stubborn.
Not that the woman was without feminine assets. Her complexion was incredible—a milky porcelain that painters love and most women curse. And her eyes! They were wide and thickly lashed, with all the forty shades of Ireland green swirling in their depths. At the moment those incredible eyes were spitting furious emerald sparks his way.
“Maybe you’re willing to talk to me because you don’t want to walk all the way to—” Dash paused. “Where are you going, anyway?”
“Good question.”
Now that he mentioned it, Claren realized she should have given more thought to her behavior. But escape had taken top priority.
“There’s always your uncle’s house,” he suggested.
That quiet comment earned her immediate attention. “How do you know about that?”
“Darcy and I are—were,” he corrected, “friends.” Keeping his eyes on her face, Dash stuck his hand out the window. “I’m Dashiell MacKenzie,” he introduced himself. “My friends call me Dash.”
Claren recognized the name immediately. Hadn’t it been scrawled at the bottom of the single-page document leaving all Darcy O’Neill’s possessions to his only living relative, Claren O’Neill Wainwright? Unable to stand still, when her nerves were still jumping around like a cat on a griddle, Claren lifted her snowy skirts and started walking again.
“You witnessed my uncle’s will.” It still hurt; Claren supposed it always would.
Dash kept the car at a crawl in order to keep the conversation going and wished he could see the legs hidden by that voluminous skirt. “Guilty,” he said. “Although at the time neither of us realized how soon he was going to need it.”
Ever since the day he’d gotten the news of Darcy O’Neill’s “accident,” Dash had wondered if Darcy had known a lot more than he’d been telling. Like the little fact that Darcy had gotten himself in more trouble than he could handle.
Claren glanced over at him. She wished she could see his eyes. “Seattle isn’t exactly around the corner from Jamaica.”
Her uncle, artist turned amateur archaeologist, treasure seeker and lifetime victim of wanderlust, had been living on the Caribbean island until just two short weeks ago. It was where he’d died. Although his body had not been recovered, his boat had been found abandoned six miles from the treacherous reefs surrounding the island.
Since several sunken treasure galleons dating back to the Spanish Armada were rumored to be in the area, and Darcy had been bragging about sunken hoards of silver and gold and jewels in every saloon on the island, authorities—accustomed to dealing with wide-eyed dreamers who chased the ghost ships resting on the ocean floor of the New World—had written his death off as yet another unfortunate drowning accident.
“So what could possibly be important enough to bring you all this way?” Claren asked.
“That should be obvious. I came to see you.”
A sudden light gust of wind blew the diaphanous veil against her cheek. She pushed the tulle out of the way with an irritated gesture. Dash could almost see the fiery aura of impatience shimmering around her.
“Why?”
She wasn’t going to be a pushover. For some reason he’
d take time to figure out later, Dash liked the idea that Darcy O’Neill’s beloved niece was more than just a pretty face.
“Because Darcy loved you. And because he talked about you a lot. And because I have a personal item of his I felt belonged to you.”
“You could have mailed it.”
“True. But then I would have missed your wedding.”
Vivid color—whether guilt or embarrassment, Dash couldn’t discern—rose in her cheeks. “There’s not going to be a wedding.”
Dash was curious, but decided he could wait for that little tale. “Too bad.”
Claren thought she detected humor in his drawled statement. She searched for a sign that he was laughing at her and was mildly frustrated when she couldn’t find it. “It was all for the best.”
“Whatever you say.”
A truck loaded with freshly cut logs came up behind them. The driver, a burly, sunburned man wearing a red-and-black-plaid shirt, rolled down his window.
“Hey, lady,” he called out to Claren, “is that guy hassling you?”
He was. But looking at the lumberman’s bulging biceps, Claren realized that if she told the truth, she’d be responsible for starting a brawl. Which, after the day she’d already had, was simply more than she could handle.
“No. Really, everything’s fine,” she said at the trucker’s disbelieving look.
He looked from her to Dash’s unreadable face, then back again. “You sure?”
No. She wasn’t. In fact, she was about as far from fine as she’d been for a very long time. But Claren didn’t feel like getting into an extended conversation with yet another stranger. Instead, she flashed the driver a reassuring smile.
“Positive. But thank you so very much for asking.”
Giving the pair one last curious look, the man pulled the truck around Dash’s car and continued down the winding road, headed toward the waterfront docks, taking the pungent scent of freshly cut Douglas fir with him.
“I know you said you didn’t want a ride, but it’s a long walk back to Queen Anne Hill,” Dash reminded her. “Especially in a wedding gown and high heels.”
A frisson of fear skimmed up her spine, and for an instant Claren found herself wishing she hadn’t sent the lumberman away. “How do you know where I live?”
“I told you, I was a friend of Darcy’s. He read me all your letters.”
“Oh.” Even as Claren admitted that made sense, she couldn’t keep the lingering suspicion from her voice.
“Perhaps these will vouch for me,” Dash said.
He held out a small photo album. Claren flipped through the pages, stopping when she got to a well-worn picture of a man and a young girl. The girl’s dress was a froth of white; the mass of red-gold hair under the short veil looked as if it had never known a comb. Cracks nearly obliterated the man’s features, but Claren didn’t need to see his face to recognize the picture.
“This was taken the day of my first holy communion,” she murmured. “Back in Ireland.” Her eyes grew reminiscent as bittersweet memories flooded over her.
“That’s how I recognized you. From the dress,” Dash explained at her questioning glance. “It’s a lot like the one you’re wearing today.”
Claren looked down, surprised by his perceptive comment. Her wedding gown was, indeed, fashioned along the lines of the remarkable dress her uncle had bought her from America so many years ago. Which, she supposed, explained why she’d fallen in love with the gown at first sight, despite the fact that its frothy romantic style—a style Scarlett O’Hara would have probably done murder for—was a distinct contrast to the starkly tailored clothing she usually favored.
“I suppose it is,” she murmured, flipping through the pages. The final photo was a picture of her uncle Darcy, taken in the company of another man. Darcy’s wild red beard was streaked with gray, revealing that this photo had been taken more recently. Although the eyes of her uncle’s companion were shielded by a pair of mirrored sunglasses that reflected a pair of palm trees, Claren would have recognized the unforgiving lines of his face and that deep cleft in the man’s chin anywhere.
“These only demonstrate that you knew my uncle,” she said. “It doesn’t prove that you were friends.”
Frustration warred with admiration. Dash recognized Claren Wainwright’s hard-headed attitude. Hadn’t he witnessed the same stubborn behavior from her uncle more times than he cared to count?
“How about this?”
Another car passed them, this one a sporty red convertible. The two teenage boys inside the car wolf-whistled as they roared by. Eager to be on her way, Claren snatched the envelope from his outstretched hand.
It was a letter, written in her uncle’s nearly illegible scrawl. It was, however, lacking Darcy O’Neill’s characteristically Irish, lavishly exaggerated, prose. The message was brief almost to the point of being curt, as if he’d been in a hurry.
My darling Claren,
If you’re reading this, it means that my luck has finally run out and I’ve bought a one-way ticket to Davy Jones’s locker. Dash might not be what you’re accustomed to, but he’s a good man. In his own way. Trust him.
Love, your uncle, Darcy
Claren glanced up at Dash. “Do you know what this says?”
“The envelope is sealed,” Dash pointed out. It was a problem he’d gotten around easily.
Once again Claren wished that he’d take off the damn glasses. His answer was less than candid—if only she could see his eyes. “He’s telling me to trust you,” she revealed. “What do you think that means?”
Dash had been asking himself that same question for the past two weeks, ever since the letter had shown up in his mail—along with another from Darcy, requesting he take the letter to Claren in Seattle—postmarked the day Darcy had disappeared.
“Perhaps he’s talking about letting me drive you back to your apartment.”
It was more than that. But whatever her uncle was referring to, Claren was in no mood to figure it out. “There’s no point in going there,” she informed him. “I sold the apartment and since it closed escrow two weeks early, I moved in with my aunt and uncle.”
Dash knew that. “Why not with your fiancé?” It was a question that had been bothering him for two weeks.
“Elliott felt that wouldn’t be proper.” Claren was surprised to hear herself reveal such a personal fact to a total stranger. “He was worried that people would talk.”
She frowned as she remembered how he’d gone on in great length to explain that openly living together could endanger his plans for a political career.
“If I wanted a woman badly enough to marry her, I damn well wouldn’t let her sleep at some relatives’ house,” Dash said. “I’d keep her in my bed. Where she belonged.”
Before Claren could respond to that blatantly chauvinistic statement, he said, “Elliott, I take it, was to be the groom.”
Actually Darcy had told him all about Claren’s fiancé, and what he’d had to say was a great deal less than flattering. Dash, however, kept his knowledge to himself.
“Yes.” Claren sighed, trying to ignore how his statement about a woman’s place being in a man’s bed had made her blood hot. “He’ll probably never forgive me for embarrassing him in front of all those Byrds.”
A little voice in the back of her mind reminded Claren that Elliott had deserved it. But at the moment that didn’t make her feel any better about leaving three hundred wedding guests waiting in her aunt’s rose garden.
“Birds?”
“Byrds,” Claren corrected, spelling it out for him. “That’s his family. They all came.” Another sigh. “Hundreds of them.” She glanced back over her shoulder, as if expecting to see flocks of formally dressed individuals descending on her.
“You could always check into the Palace,” Dash suggested.
Seattle’s Whitfield Palace Hotel. Home of the advertising slogan, When Deluxe Will No Longer Do. Claren had worked at the hotel since her graduation fr
om University of Washington four years earlier—a year ahead of the rest of her class—starting out as a customer-relations liaison and swiftly working her way up to night manager.
“I quit my job.” Elliott hadn’t wanted his wife working all night while he was home alone. Claren, wanting to avoid yet another argument over the subject, had finally complied. Like a fool.
“I see.”
Claren had the strange feeling that he did and was grateful when he didn’t comment on what she suspected was a very wrong decision.
“It seems you’ve burned a great many bridges.” When Claren didn’t immediately answer, Dash said, “There’s always Darcy’s house.”
Her uncle Darcy’s house. That wonderful, sprawling place—which Claren had inherited—in the Victorian peninsula town of Port Vancouver. But there were strings accompanying her uncle’s inheritance. Strings that had made it impossible to accept. Until now. A reckless, enormously appealing idea stirred at the back of her mind.
“I put it up for sale,” she admitted.
Dash wasn’t surprised. “I told Darcy that’s what you’d do.”
Claren lifted a brow. “Oh?” The single word dripped with scorn.
There was a challenge in her tone that reminded Dash of her uncle. Right before Darcy’s fiery Irish temper would explode.
“To hear your uncle tell it, you have a pretty good life,” he said. “A prestigious job at one of the most luxurious hotel chains in the world, an apartment on pricey Queen Anne Hill with a view of Puget Sound, a recession-proof stock portfolio, a trendy European sedan and annual trips to Europe and Hawaii.”
“The car was a company car, the portfolio has suffered some rather demoralizing losses lately, I no longer have either my job or my apartment and the trips were all business related, reimbursed by Whitfield Palace Hotels. And how do you know so much about me, anyway?” Although she’d begun to relax, that question had her feeling uneasy all over again.
“I told you, Darcy talked about you a lot. Which is why I said it was crazy to think you’d toss all that away. Just for a house.”
