With one last glance in the mirror, Charlie said, “Nothing serious, I hope. I tried to find you, but you weren’t in the house.”
Ben glanced at his watch. Even with the time difference it was too late to call back. He’d like to think it was only a glitch in the paperwork. He’d misspelled a name or failed to cross all his t’s. He glanced up and said, “Yeah, sure—thanks, Charlie. Uh—you going out somewhere?”
The older man sighed and shook his head. “Ben, Ben, Ben—wake up and smell the flowers, boy. Life don’t last forever.” He closed the door quietly behind him, leaving Ben in a cloud of aftershave to ponder a few more imponderables. Like why I.A. would suddenly want to contact him. They’d grilled him thoroughly, going over and over every speck of evidence before he’d been allowed to leave Dry Creek. By that time, sick at heart and mad as hell, he’d felt like a traitor for turning in fellow cops he knew and liked and had once respected. He’d grilled steaks with several of the guys, even attended the christening of their kids.
But that was before he’d happened to see a couple of the older ones deliberately turn away at a critical moment so as not to witness a crime going down. Wondering what the hell had happened, he’d started to tackle them on it, but something had stopped him. That crazy sixth sense that warned an experienced cop when something was out of alignment.
Over the next few months he had quietly observed certain transactions taking place in dark alleys, in empty buildings—even on the damn country club golf course. That’s when he’d realized just how high up the ladder the rot went. Feeling like a traitor but knowing he had no choice, he’d gone first to I.A., then to the chief himself. He owed him that much and more.
“Figgered you had us made, boy. Always was a smart one, that’s why I hauled you out of that gang before you got in too deep.”
At fifteen, Ben had been running with a gang of jackers, doing body work—mostly disassembling and filing off VIN numbers. Another few months and he would have been in too deep. Alvin Mercer, called Mercy by those on the right side of the law, had taken his age into consideration and gone to bat for him.
What made it worse when Ben had confronted his mentor with indisputable evidence was that the chief hadn’t even tried to deny it. If anything, he’d seemed almost relieved. “Times a man goes along to get along, son, but it don’t pay. Nosiree, in the long run, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.”
So now here he was, an unemployed ex-cop, more than a thousand miles from home, taking a damned art workshop in an effort to catch some creep who was ripping off senior citizens by mislabeling a product.
Old habits died hard. Some never died at all. One of the last assignments he’d worked before pulling the roof down on his own head was the classic borrowed-bank-account scam. Working with a veteran officer—one who’d been clean, incidentally—they had set up the scene. Three days later the mark had taken the bait. This good-looking kid had approached Abbie, who was dressed in civvies and sitting in her car in the bank parking lot pretending to be adding up a deposit before going inside.
The perp had walked up and introduced himself and asked if she could help him out, explaining that he was new in town and his mama had just sent him a check to live on while he interviewed for jobs. Trouble was, he didn’t yet have an account and the bank wouldn’t cash his check.
Eight out of ten times the women fell for it. The perp would hand over the check, the woman would deposit it in her own account, withdraw the amount—usually a few thousand—and hand it over. A day or so later she’d hear from the bank that the check she’d deposited was no good. Not only was the account phony, the bank it was written on didn’t exist.
Ben had warned his grandmother against the borrowed-bank-account scam, but he’d been too late to warn her against investing her life’s savings in a bunch of pictures that were supposedly guaranteed to triple in value in a year’s time.
He’d smelled a rat as soon as she’d told him what she’d done. Just to be sure—hell, he knew as much about art as he did about toe dancing—he’d gone online and checked out a few things. Then he’d placed a call to an art teacher he’d met when her fifteen-year-old kid got in trouble for shoplifting.
Mona Hammond had summed it up for him. There were legitimate prints, several different types whose names he couldn’t recall—some of them extremely valuable, depending on the artist and the rarity. But if an artist painted a picture and then had copies made, then the copies were just that. Copies. Names and numbers scribbled on the margin didn’t change the fact that they were no more valuable than the knockoff Rolexes peddled on street corners.
“That’s not to say that some of them aren’t lovely,” Mona had told him. “But even when they’re printed on all rag paper using the finest quality inks, they’re still technically reproductions, copies of the original painting.”
“What about as an investment?” he’d asked, and she’d just laughed.
“No way, hon. I might buy one if I liked it and wanted to live with it, but then, that’s the best rationale for buying any art. I wouldn’t recommend buying one as an investment, though. So, when are you coming back home? We miss you here. Mike was asking about you just the other day.”
He’d told her his plans were still on hold and hung up, wondering just when his life had taken a turn for the bizarre.
Unlike Maggie, Ben hadn’t grown up with a save-the-world complex. Instead, he’d grown up on the streets of a small town that had started out as a farm community more than a hundred years ago and grown when a big manufacturer had moved in. He barely remembered his father, although he clearly remembered driving all the way to North Carolina with him in a pickup truck with a busted muffler to meet Miss Emma. Just him and his old man. He must have been about eight or nine.
It had been like dropping in on another world. They’d stayed about a week before heading west again. His father had been a long-haul truck driver, gone more than he was at home. One day he was gone for good. Just forgot to come home.
Ben’s mother hadn’t been much on discipline, either her own or her son’s. When she’d been arrested on a drug charge a year or so later, a social worker had called Miss Emma, who had paid his fare east. He’d stayed with her until his mother was released. A few years later when she’d skipped town with one of her boyfriends, Ben had stayed on in their trailer until it had been repossessed, then moved into an empty warehouse, which was how he came to get mixed up with the jackers.
If he hadn’t been bailed out by Alvin Mercer, a heavyset, soft-voiced cop who went on to become chief of police, he might have ended up doing hard time—or worse. Instead, he’d ended up going back to school and eventually wearing a badge.
Years later he’d been compelled to rat out his mentor and most of his friends on the force. God, he’d hated that! He happened to know Mercy had been trying to hang on until retirement, fighting prostate problems and a few other symptoms that had him pushing more pills than a backstreet dealer. Ben would like to think he’d done the chief a favor, but some days he still felt lower than pond scum.
He wondered what Maggie would say if she knew about him. About where he’d come from and what he’d done back in Dry Creek. He wondered if she’d consider him a traitor or just a guy trying to do the right thing in a situation that was neither all black nor all white, but too many shades of gray.
He finally drifted off, half-thinking, half-dreaming of a crime-fighting duo wearing midnight blue capes, uncovering scams and writing them up in comic book format.
Sometime in the night he roused enough to roll over, aware of the faint sweet, spicy scent and the sound of someone humming softly. At that point his dreams took a decidedly different track. Just after daybreak he woke drenched in sweat, his pulse pounding like a jackhammer. Charlie was snoring in the bed across the room. Without arousing him, Ben collected a handful of clean clothes and tiptoed down the hall to shower and shave before going in search of caffeine.
The first class wasn’t scheduled until
nine, but the new cooking team was already in the kitchen when he followed the tantalizing aroma of dark-roasted coffee. The pot was institutional size. A few hardened addicts would be drinking the stuff all day, but after the third reheating, Ben couldn’t handle it.
“Yes, ma’am, three strips if you don’t mind, and however you’re cooking the eggs this morning, that’ll be fine, too.”
The cook-of-the-day patted him on the shoulder. “Sit down, honey, I’ll have it for you in a minute.”
Breakfast and lunch were served in the kitchen; dinner in the dining room that also served as a gallery for Silver’s art and a few select pieces of student work. Ben was still musing on what it would have been like to grow up in a home with a mother who cooked breakfast and called him “honey” when Maggie wandered in, looking as if she hadn’t slept any better than he had.
Considering the part she’d played in his early morning dreams, Ben thought it was no wonder she was looking kind of used up. Wearing her clunky toering sandals with a shapeless blue dress that covered her down to the ankles, she still managed to look sexy as hell. Wet hair had left damp patches on the shoulders, as she hadn’t bothered to dry it, much less use those fat rollers and sticky sprays his last lady friend had used. Maggie’s hair, roughly the color of desert camouflage, usually looked like she’d stepped outside in the wind and forgotten to brush it when she came back inside.
On Maggie, it looked good. Everything about her looked good.
In his usual place at the end of one of the long kitchen tables, Ben remembered his manners and lurched to his feet. There was room to spare, but she bumped against his shoulder on the way past. “You’re blocking traffic,” she muttered, her voice gruff with sleep. “Where’s my mug?”
“Morning to you, too, sweetheart.” He sat down again, wondering what she’d do if he hauled her down onto his lap and stroked her until she purred. He might be tempted to try it if it weren’t for a room full of chaperones.
“Has Ann been in yet?” Maggie asked the woman who was lifting bacon from a fourteen-inch iron skillet.
“Lord, yes, she was in here when I came down to start the coffee. She’d already made herself some instant—I think she might’ve taken it upstairs.”
Aware of him with every cell in her body, Maggie ignored Ben as she poured herself a mug of coffee, diluted it with milk and added two spoonfuls of sugar. One mystery was solved, anyway. Last night when she’d gone to the room they shared, Ann had been nowhere in evidence. According to Suzy, she was up on the third floor doing office work for Perry to pay for the workshop. “Ask me, she’s not getting much for her efforts. I doubt if she’s spent more than five hours in class since we started.” Suzy had gone on patting moisturizer on her throat.
“I don’t know…that thing she painted yesterday looked pretty good to me. Better than Perry’s, anyway.”
Shrugging, Suzy had said, “So maybe we should change teachers. By the way, when are you going to stop hogging our cowboy? Perry won’t give me the time of day, so I might as well have some fun while I’m here if you’re not interested.”
Oh, Maggie was interested, all right. Which was not to say she intended to do anything about it.
That had been last night. Now, sipping her coffee, she tried to remember whether or not she’d answered. At the time she’d still been under the spell of that romantic, wisteria-scented fog, wondering what would have happened if the two of them had been alone instead of surrounded by fully half the class.
Disgusted, she dumped in another spoonful of sugar and reminded herself that, while imagination was a great advantage for a novelist, too much of the stuff could pose a danger for an objective journalist.
She stole a glance at Ben, caught him looking at her and lowered her flushed face.
Cool, Maggie—really cool.
Just then Perry made his entrance, pausing in the doorway to beam at his audience. “Morning, morning, morning! Remember the first day when I asked how many of you could touch your toes?” Without even looking around, he accepted the steaming pottery mug of coffee someone handed him.
General groans were heard. Several more people had wandered in during the past few minutes. “What is this, the inquisition?” asked a woman in a flowered muumuu.
“Methods, methods, methods,” Perry sang. “Loose, loose, loose!”
“Trick-y, trick-y, trick-y,” Suzy said, snickering just loud enough so that several people turned to look at her as she reached for a cup. She’d applied lipstick and eye shadow, but hadn’t bothered to brush her hair. On some women, Maggie thought rancorously, bed-head looked good.
Pointing at the far end of the long table, the instructor indicated a group of four women, all well past middle age, none with any noticeable degree of talent. “Remember yesterday when I told you that the object of art is not to copy nature, but to comment on it? To interpret what you see? A few of you seem to be having problems with the concept.”
“Does he mean we’re supposed to color outside the lines?” Maggie whispered.
“Maybe he should practice what he preaches,” Suzy replied. “You see the way he interpreted that old barn hanging in the front hall? He even painted the splinters in the wood and the shadows under the rusty nails. Might as well use a camera with a close-up lens if that’s the kind of interpretation he wants. Be a lot faster, that’s for sure.”
One of the cooking team set a plate on the table before him and Perry took his seat and applied himself to breakfast. “Thirty minutes,” he warned, fork poised over the mound of scrambled eggs. “Everybody be ready to make great strides today.”
Yesterday’s efforts were still spread out on the tables when the class straggled into the studio. Rather than face a critical review, Maggie tucked her drab, colorless blobscape under her tablet. As an artist, she was hopeless. Even Suzy was better. The only one worse was Ben Hunter, who didn’t give a hoot. Maggie probably shouldn’t, either, but then she’d always hated to fail at anything.
“It’s the quality of your paints, Maggie,” Janie said softly. “Too much filler. Let me give you a few tubes of artists grade paint, it’ll make all the difference in the world.”
“Thanks, but it won’t, not really. I shouldn’t even be here.”
“I was wondering about that,” the older woman said with a lift of one carefully penciled eyebrow. “There are some excellent beginner’s classes available in Winston. Had you thought about signing up for one at the Sawtooth Center?”
Before she could come up with a reply that wasn’t an outright lie, Perry waltzed into the studio brandishing his brush as if it were a baton. “All right, ladies…and gentlemen,” he added as an afterthought. “Now, here’s what we’re going to do today, even those of you who don’t need loosening up. It won’t hurt and it just might help give you a different perspective.”
“The hell it won’t hurt if it’s that toe-touching crap.” Charlie’s grumbling voice could be heard all the way across the room.
Perry glared at him. Then, lifting his drawing board from the table at the front of the room, the instructor dropped it onto the floor, a fresh sheet of three-hundred-pound d’Arches already taped in place. Beside it he set his water pail and his big messy palette. “Now, bending from the waist—” He swayed from the hip several times in case anyone was in doubt of the location of the waist. “I want you to swe-e-eep in the sky, using plenty of color in a big, juicy wash!”
He demonstrated with a few broad strokes, clearly visible to those at the front tables. Those in the back of the studio hadn’t a clue.
“You, Mr. Hunter—are you amused at something I said?”
“Who, me? Amused? I was just wondering why anyone who wants to can’t sit on a chair and straight-arm down to the floor. Get pretty much the same result, wouldn’t we?”
“Must I explain all over again? We need free-dom of movement. That simply can’t be had sitting down.”
But when three women left the room and returned with kitchen chairs, he onl
y shrugged and went on with his demonstration.
Some forty minutes later as the class broke, some moving to the front of the studio to view the morning’s masterpiece, others heading for the doors, Ben came up beside Maggie and slipped an arm around her shoulders. “You gotta admit, what he did this morning looks a hell of a lot better than these things he’s got hanging on the wall. If that’s an example of loose, I like it a whole lot better than tight.”
Maggie felt as if someone had touched her with a live wire. Somehow she was going to have to drum up some resistance before she did something foolish. “I wouldn’t know, since I couldn’t see past all his admirers,” she said, trying for blasé and missing it by a mile. And then, “Ben…” She looked up and found herself captured by his warm brown eyes. “Um—Charlie looks like he’s coming down with something. You think he might be catching whatever Ann has?” She hated it when her voice sounded as if she’d just run a three-minute mile, but that was the way Ben affected her. Maybe she was the one with the allergies.
“He was out late last night. Probably just needs more sleep. C’mon, I want to show you something.”
“Out where? What about the next assignment?”
Ben just shrugged. “It’ll wait.”
“Where are we going?” Not that she cared as she hurried after him. Obviously, mountain air had a deleterious affect on the immune system.
He led her out the back door, away from the house, to the vine-covered arbor. “If you’re talking about the view,” she said breathlessly. “I saw it the other night, remember?”
What if he tried to kiss her again?
What if he didn’t?
So much for her powers of resistance.
“You put fifteen people—sixteen counting Silver—in one house, and it’s damned near impossible to find any privacy.”
Her breath snagged in her lungs. He was going to kiss her again! Her lips softened in expectation.
Driven to Distraction (Silhouette Desire S.) Page 10
