by Gina Wilkins
He reached for his bag. “Maybe there’s something in here you can wear.”
“Really, Blake, that’s not...”
He pulled out a black fleece sweat suit and a pair of white tube socks. “This should work,” he said in satisfaction. “The pants have a drawstring.”
Tara looked questioningly at the duffel bag. “Just what else do you have in there?”
He grinned. “The suit, shirt and tie I was wearing earlier, the shoes I wore with it, a couple of pairs of clean underwear, one more clean shirt, and some toiletries. It really isn’t a bottomless bag.”
She smiled faintly in return. “I was beginning to wonder what you’d pull out next.”
He lifted an eyebrow. Noting the glint in his bright blue eyes, Tara braced herself for a double-entendre reply, but Blake only tossed her the sweat suit. “You can change in the bathroom. I’ll call my friend.”
Tara nearly choked when she saw her reflection in the full-length mirror attached to the back of the bathroom door. Her hair was coming down in straggly wisps. Her formerly crisp dinner suit was wrinkled and there were bits of weeds and grass clinging to her skirt. Patches of bare leg showed through the rips and tears in her black panty hose.
Even her face looked different, pale and taut with violet smudges beneath her eyes. No wonder Blake had accused her of being dead on her feet. She looked like a zombie.
She took off her pearl necklace and tucked it into the right pocket of her jacket. And then she swiftly stripped off the dinner suit, tossed the shredded panty hose in the wastebasket, and donned Blake’s black sweat suit and white socks. Her thoughts strayed to the image of Blake wearing the same clothes and she blushed. But she had to admit that they were much more comfortable than her own, at least for now.
The garments were too big for her, of course, but the tight bands at the wrists and ankles took up the excess length and the drawstring kept the pants from falling down. Hardly a seductive outfit, she thought critically... but then, she wasn’t planning to seduce Blake, she corrected herself hastily.
The thought had never even crossed her mind.
Liar, a voice inside her head taunted. She ignored it.
Leaving her hair loose to her shoulders, and combing it with her fingers for lack of anything better to use, she opened the bathroom door and stepped out, her jacket and skirt folded over her arm.
Blake hung up the telephone just as she walked into the bedroom. He looked at her with a slight smile. “You look much more comfortable.”
Feeling a bit self-conscious, she nodded and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Yes, I am, thank you. Did you reach your friend?”
Something shifted in Blake’s expression. “Why don’t you lie down and get some rest,” he said, reaching out to pull down the spread on one of the beds. “We’ll talk later.”
Tara narrowed her eyes, staring at him intently. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing important.”
But he didn’t meet her eyes when he answered. Tara didn’t believe him. “You said you wouldn’t keep anything from me,” she reminded him sternly.
He sighed and looked at her. “Even if it’s something you really don’t want to hear?”
“Especially then,” she answered, and braced herself. “What is it?”
“My friend told me that a black sports car has been found abandoned at a motel in Marietta.”
“Yours?”
He nodded. “He said that the police are looking for the owner of the vehicle—a man who was registered at the motel as Bradley Hunter—for questioning in the art gallery robbery.”
“Is the car registered in your real name?”
He shook his head. “I have it on loan from a rental company in Atlanta. Bradley Hunter was the name I used when I rented it.”
“Do you ever use your own name?” she asked in exasperation.
“Not very often.”
She was too tired to pursue that particular oddity, considering what he’d already told her. “So, someone is trying to set you up as a robbery suspect. Maybe even a murder suspect.”
“It appears so.”
“Why?”
“Good question. I wish I had the answer.”
“Why hasn’t my name gotten out? We know they have it.”
“We know someone has it,” Blake corrected her. “We don’t know that the police do.”
She ran a weary hand through her hair, trying to find some logic in a situation that seemed to make no sense at all. “But why? If someone is trying to set us up, wouldn’t they want the police looking specifically for me?”
Blake reached down to lift her feet gently onto the bed. It was an indication of how tired she was that she didn’t resist when he eased her down against the pillows, much as he would a sleepy child. “We can talk after you rest,” he said, sitting on the edge of the mattress beside her.
“You haven’t answered my questions,” she reminded him, settling more comfortably into the pillows.
“I don’t know why your name hasn’t been released,” he answered. “Unless whoever is after us thinks you know something that may be helpful to them if they get to us before the police do. Or something that may be harmful to them if the police find us first.”
Tara raised an eyebrow. “But I don’t know anything,” she protested. “I’m the innocent bystander in this mess.”
“Believe me, I’m aware of that,” Blake said regretfully.
Tara closed her eyes—only for a moment, she promised herself. “We have to figure out what’s going on,” she murmured. “We have to do something.”
“We will,” Blake assured her. He leaned over her, bracing his left arm on the other side of her, and gently stroked a strand of hair away from her cheek with his right hand. He lingered, slowly tracing the line of her jaw with his fingertips.
Tara’s eyes flew open as she became suddenly aware that she was practically lying in Blake’s arms.
His face was very close to hers, his eyes focused on her mouth. He was looking at her the way he sometimes did in her fleeting daydreams. As if she was a woman a man like him could find interesting. Exciting. Desirable.
She found him all those things, of course. And more.
He was everything she’d never been.
For just a moment, she had a crazy, reckless urge to reach up, wrap her arms around his neck and pull him down to her. To redirect all the pent-up energy that still lingered from their harrowing evening. But years of scrupulously developed self-control overcame that imprudent impulse. She lay still, looking up at him, wishing things were different Wishing she was different.
After a moment, Blake drew back with what might have been reluctance. “Just get some rest, Tara. I’ll keep watch for now.”
It occurred to her that it had been a very long time since anyone had “kept watch” over her. She’d become accustomed to taking care of herself, to being totally on her own. Everyone she knew seemed to think she was too strong and tough and competent ever to depend on anyone else. It was an image she’d fostered, but one that had felt like a trap during the past two weeks.
It felt rather nice to have someone else take charge for a little while, she mused, her thoughts beginning to drift. To have someone else do the worrying and the planning for a change.
There weren’t many people she would have trusted enough to put herself into their hands.
Oddly enough, considering that she hardly knew him, she trusted Blake.
It was the last clear thought she had before she allowed herself to fall asleep.
IN TARA’S DREAM, the man was lying on the floor, bleeding, his eyes open and staring into hers. Silently, he begged her to save him.
She turned to run for help, only to find herself facing the senior partners of the Carpathy, Dillon and Delacroix law firm.
“Don’t just stand there gawking, Ms. McBride,” Mason Carpathy ordered her sternly, glaring over the rims of his ever-present half glasses. “Take care of this
situation.”
“But I don’t know how. I’m a lawyer, not a doctor.”
“A lawyer?” Carpathy looked at his colleagues, who all smirked. “Not a very good one. We fired you, remember?”
She shook her head. “But I—”
The man on the floor moaned, reaching out to her.
“Aren’t you going to help him, Ms. McBride?” Earnest Dillon demanded.
She turned to Lester Delacroix, the one partner who’d tried to defend her during her downfall, though even he had been forced to concede in the end that the longtime client who wanted her fired was more important than one young attorney. “Please, Mr. Delacroix. Help me.”
He regarded her with a mixture of sympathy and disappointment. “You wouldn’t listen to my advice before, Ms. McBride. Had you done so, you would still be employed. Why would you ask for my help now?”
“But this is different! Please, don’t make me—”
The man on the floor gasped, coughed. His eyes rolled back.
Carpathy scowled over his glasses. “You’ve let him die, Ms. McBride.”
“No, I—”
The other partners clucked and shook their heads. “Can’t you do anything right, Ms. McBride?” Dillon asked critically.
“But this wasn’t my fault,” she protested, feeling the tears streaming down her face. “Please, I don’t know—”
“You really are a failure, aren’t you, Ms. McBride?” Delacroix asked sadly.
Tara looked from the disgusted partners to the dead man on the floor. “But it wasn’t my fault,” she whispered, feeling so desperately alone. So terribly afraid. “I tried my best.”
“Failure.” The word reverberated around her. “You’re a failure, Tara McBride.”
Failure.
4
“TARA. Tara, sweetheart, wake up.”
Tara’s frown deepened as Blake’s voice invaded her dreams, but she didn’t immediately awaken. She murmured something else he couldn’t quite understand, sounding so distressed he wanted only to hold her and make the pain go away.
He touched her face, his hand not as steady as he would have liked. “Tara. Come on, honey, open your eyes.”
She opened her eyes, saw Blake leaning over her, and frowned. “Did you just call me honey?” she asked, her voice still hoarse from sleep.
His mouth tilted into a smile. “You were having a bad dream.”
She winced. “Did I say anything?” she asked, looking prepared to be mortified.
“Nothing coherent,” he assured her. “You just seemed restless.”
She ran a hand through her tousled hair and made a serious effort to wake up. “What time is it?”
He glanced at his watch. “Almost five.”
“Have you had any sleep?”
“Enough.” He studied her face, noting the lingering signs of strain. “Are you all right?”
She didn’t meet his eyes. “Yes, I’m fine. It was just a stupid dream.”
“Certainly understandable, after everything that has happened tonight. Would you like to talk about it?”
“No.” She answered a bit too quickly.
He nodded. “Fine.”
“I told you, it was stupid.”
“It’s okay, Tara. You don’t have to tell me if you’d rather not.”
She struggled to sit upright. Blake gave her a hand, scooting over to give her room to sit on the edge of the bed beside him.
“Have you come up with any theories about why this is happening to us?” she asked, her tone more brusque now. He could almost see her concealing her insecurities behind that tough-lawyer mask she’d perfected.
“Actually, I’ve been sitting here sort of recapping the evening,” he admitted. “From the beginning.”
“Sounds like a good idea. Maybe you could recap your recap for me.”
He hadn’t released her hand after helping her sit upright. He found himself unwilling to do so now. He laced his fingers with hers, letting their linked hands rest on the bed between them. And then he tried to concentrate on their conversation, rather than the feel of her soft palm pressed against his roughened one.
“Okay,” he said briskly. “We went to the art gallery following a call I received from someone who knew the names of my usual contacts at the insurance company, as well as the procedures the company usually follows to contact me.”
“Blake, have you ever considered getting counseling for this James Bond complex?” Tara asked with a dryness that amused him.
The corner of his mouth tilted up in a half grin. “I have to entertain myself somehow.”
She frowned at him, though he thought he saw an answering smile in her eyes. “Go on.”
“Right.” His cleared his throat and went on. “We arrived at the art gallery and we were approached at the McCauley painting by a man in a bad toupee, who seemed to be watching us very closely.”
He had suspected then that Botkin was the one who’d asked for the meeting, but he’d honestly had no sense that the man was in danger. Nor that Tara would be drawn into it, either, he thought grimly.
“At the time I’d been given,” he continued, “I waited in the men’s room for someone who never showed up. After a few minutes, I checked the hallway, then stepped into the main showroom to look around. When I came back, there was still no one in the hallway, but I heard a noise from the open door at the end of the hall. I had just looked into that office before I went into the showroom,” he added. “No one was in there then.”
“Which meant,” Tara mused, “that the man in the toupee appeared right after you left. And that the other man, the one who shot him and grabbed me, was right behind him.”
Blake nodded grimly. “I should have waited,” he muttered, disgusted with himself. “I should never have allowed myself to be distracted by—”
You. He bit off the rest of the sentence, making Tara look at him questioningly.
“Anyway, I shouldn’t have been so impatient to leave the gallery,” he substituted.
“Everyone makes mistakes, Blake,” Tara reassured him.
“That’s something you should keep in mind, as well,” he murmured. “But at least the mistake you made at the law firm—if, in fact, you made a mistake at all—didn’t get anyone killed.”
“And if you had waited in that hallway as you were supposed to, you might have been the one killed,” Tara reminded him. “It’s obvious that someone didn’t want you to have whatever information the man was going to give you.”
Blake rubbed his slightly bristly chin with his free hand. “All I was told was that it had something to do with the Willfort robbery.”
“And it was so important that Botkin was killed before he could give it to you.”
“That’s only a guess,” he cautioned her. “For all we know, he was killed by a jealous husband. Or someone who actually was trying to rob the gallery. It might only have been coincidence that you and I were there.”
“Do you believe that?”
He hesitated only a fraction of a second before shaking his head. “No. I’m not a big believer in coincidence.”
“Neither am I. So, apparently, I walked in just after the man was shot. The killer—whoever he was—grabbed me. He asked what the hell I was doing there.” Tara shivered a bit, obviously replaying the moment in her head.
Blake’s hand tightened comfortingly around hers.
“And then he asked what Botkin told me when I was kneeling down beside him. Not that I could have answered if I’d wanted to. The guy had his hand over my mouth.”
Blake’s hand jerked around hers. He twisted on the bed to look at her with a frown. “When you knelt beside him? But I thought you were grabbed the moment you walked into the office.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t see the other man at first. Maybe he hid when he heard me in the hallway.”
“Tell me everything that happened in that office.”
Tara didn’t look as though she wanted to relive those terrifying mo
ments, but she nodded. “I saw the man on the floor. I knelt beside him. And then he said...he said...”
“What?” Blake asked urgently.
“They knew,‘” she recalled slowly. “‘The paintings were...’”
Blake frowned. “The paintings were what?”
“I don’t know. That’s all he said, at least I think those were his words. It was difficult to understand him.”
“Nothing else?”
She shook her head. “That was it. The next thing I knew, I was being grabbed from behind. I got one good look at the man who grabbed me, the one who must have shot Botkin, but I didn’t say anything to him. He didn’t give me a chance. And then you came in.”
“‘They knew,’” Blake repeated in a murmur. “Who knew what? And the paintings he mentioned—was he talking about the paintings that were stolen from Jackson Willfort’s apartment? The ones scheduled to be put on display?”
Since Tara had no answers for him, she remained silent.
Blake stared thoughtfully at the wall in front of him, musing aloud. “Willfort originally purchased the stolen paintings from the Pryce Gallery. He buys most of the art for his private collection from Liz Pryce.”
“Liz Pryce?”
“Hmm. Liz Pryce owns the Pryce Gallery. She’s the wife of Avery Pryce.”
“Avery Pryce, the attorney?”
Blake nodded. “Right. The Avery Pryce, Atlanta’s premier barrister. He’s years older than his third wife. They’ve been married almost ten years. He set her up in the gallery almost immediately after they married. With his money and influence, she’s been very successful. Jackson Willfort is one of her most loyal patrons, which has gone a long way toward establishing her with the rest of the art-buying community.”
“How do you know all of this?”
He shrugged. “Someone called and said they had information about the Willfort burglary. I made a point to find out everything I could about the players before I got involved.”
“So Jackson Willfort bought a couple of paintings from the Pryce Gallery that he intended to put on public display. The paintings were stolen. Someone from the gallery knew something about that robbery that he intended to share with you, but, presumably, he was murdered first. What could he have known? Who is now in possession of my name and address, and what do they think I know that could be dangerous to them?”
