She shot him an unrepentant grin. “I doubt that, sir. I know where all the bodies are buried.”
Rafe sighed heavily. She did, too.
When the Winding River Wildcats did a class reunion, the festivities went on for three solid days. There was a welcome barbecue on Friday night, a rodeo during the day on Saturday, a dance Saturday night and a farewell picnic on Sunday. It all flowed right into the town’s annual Fourth of July celebration.
Gina was less interested in all of that than she was in spending a few quiet hours with her oldest and dearest friends. For just a little while she wanted to forget all about that slime Roberto Rinaldi and the financial mess he’d left her to clean up.
“Couldn’t we just go down to the Heartbreak, have a few beers, listen to some music and chill for a few hours?” she pleaded, even as the others were coaxing her off her parents’ front porch and toward a car on Friday night.
“There will be beer and music at the barbecue,” Emma told her. “Besides, since when have you ever turned down the chance to party? The only one in our crowd who was any wilder was Cassie.”
At the mention of Cassie, Gina’s spirits sank even lower. “I wish she’d come tonight.”
“She’s promised to be at the dance tomorrow night,” Karen reminded her. “And you know perfectly well why she stayed away.”
“Because of that run-in with Cole earlier,” Gina said. “She really was shaken by that. He came within seconds of bumping face-to-face into their son.”
“It might have been best if he had,” Karen said. “I think she’s just postponing the inevitable.”
“Maybe so, but as much as I wish she were here, I am not going to let it spoil tonight,” Lauren said. “Now, get moving, you guys. I’ve been living on lettuce a long time now. I haven’t had a decent barbecue in years, and I am ready to pig out, no pun intended.” She herded them toward the fancy sports utility vehicle she had rented for her visit.
Twenty minutes later Lauren turned into the parking lot at the school where they had shared some of the best times of their lives. Known far and wide as the Calamity Janes, the five of them had stirred up more trouble than any graduate before or since. Cassie had been the ringleader, but the rest of them had willingly gone along with whatever mischief she devised.
Now Karen lived on a ranch, Lauren was in Hollywood, Cassie was still struggling to keep her son a secret from his father and Emma was a hot-shot attorney in Denver. Like Emma and Lauren, Gina was considered one of the class success stories. The daughter of an insurance agent and a high school secretary, in high school Gina had earned much-needed spending money by working as a waitress right here in town. Now she owned her own very exclusive restaurant in New York. By anyone’s standards, it was a rags-to-riches story.
If only they knew how close it was to turning around the other way, she thought with a sigh as they approached the football field that had been turned into giant picnic grounds for the night. A stage had been set up under the goal post at the north end, a pit for the roasted pig was at the opposite end and in between were rows of tables with every kind of food imaginable, all catered by the town’s restaurants. Huge galvanized steel tubs were filled with ice and crammed with soft drinks and beer.
Classmates had already staked out spots for themselves by tossing blankets on the ground, but at the moment nobody was sitting. Everyone was milling around greeting people they hadn’t seen since graduation ten years before.
Suddenly Gina felt an elbow being jammed into her ribs. “Hey,” she protested, turning to face Lauren. “What was that for?”
The woman who had been declared most likely to succeed because of her brains, not her now-legendary beauty, gestured toward the bleachers, where a lone man sat, legs stretched out in front of him, elbows propped on the bench behind. He looked aloof and out of place. He also happened to be handsome as sin, but in the last few days Gina had sworn off the type. If she never met another sexy charmer, it would suit her just fine. In fact, at the moment, Bobby’s disappearing act had made her view every male with healthy suspicion.
“Who, pray tell, is he?” Lauren asked. “He’s definitely not one of us. Nobody we went to school with could improve that much in twenty years, much less ten.”
Gina forced herself to give the stranger a closer inspection. True, he was gorgeous, in a citified, sophisticated way. Even in jeans and a chambray shirt—which looked brand-new from this distance—there was no mistaking the man for a cowboy. He was too polished, his chestnut hair a little too carefully trimmed, his complexion a little too pale, his cheekbones a little too aristocratic. He all but shouted that he was some Yankee blueblood.
“Well?” Lauren prodded. “Do you know him?”
Gina was certain she’d never seen him before, but that didn’t seem to stop her heart from doing a little lurch or her stomach from taking a dip. It was possible he was someone’s husband, sitting on the sidelines because he felt uncomfortable among all the strangers. She didn’t think so, though. She had the uneasy sense that his penetrating gaze was locked directly on her. Not on Lauren, who tended to captivate any male in a room, but on her, Gina Petrillo, with the untamable hair, too-wide hips and a ten-year-old sundress she’d snagged from the back of the closet in her old bedroom.
Lauren, ever confident from years in the limelight, didn’t seem to notice that the man’s attention was elsewhere. She grinned at Gina. “Only one way to find out.”
Gina wanted to tell her not to go over there, to steer as far away from the man as she could, but she knew the warning would only draw a hoot of laughter. There wasn’t a person born who could intimidate Lauren once her curiosity was aroused. That confidence was something new. In high school Lauren had been as shy as she’d been brainy. The adoration of millions of fans had given her self-esteem a much-needed boost.
Gina deliberately turned her back on the scene and went in search of a desperately longed-for beer. She had just tipped up the can for a long, slow swallow when she heard Lauren say, “Oh, here you are. Gina, sweetie, this incredibly gorgeous man is looking for you. Aren’t you lucky?”
Gina’s stomach plummeted as she slowly turned to face them. With every fiber of her being she knew she wasn’t the least bit lucky. Never had been, and certainly not lately. No, this man was not looking for her because he’d been dying to get her recipe for fettuccine.
“Gina Petrillo, Rafe O’Donnell,” Lauren said, relinquishing him to Gina with a broad wink and then abandoning the two of them as if she’d just accomplished the matchmaking success of the century.
Gina recognized the name with a sense of inevitability. She forced herself to look straight into the man’s unreadable topaz eyes. There was little point in pretending that she didn’t recognize the name. Nor did she have to work very hard to figure out what he was doing here. She was not going to let him rattle her, though. She would remain cool, calm and collected if it killed her. She refused to let him think for a second that she was harboring any sense of guilt.
“A long way from home, aren’t you, Mr. O’Donnell?”
“As are you, Ms. Petrillo.”
“No, this is my home,” she said firmly.
“And New York?”
“Where I work.”
“Not any longer, if I have anything to say about it.”
She gave him a wry look. “Then I guess the battle lines are drawn. It’s a good thing you’re not either judge or jury. I might be quaking in my boots.”
“You should be, anyway. I’m very good at what I do.”
“And what is it that you do, Mr. O’Donnell? Condemn people without a trial?”
“Get at the facts, Ms. Petrillo. That was the whole purpose of that deposition you skipped out on.”
She regarded him with indignation. “I didn’t skip out on anything. Check your appointment book. I rescheduled.”
“Without my permission.”
“Your secretary didn’t seem to have a problem with it.”
“Ye
s, well, Lydia sometimes forgets who’s in charge.”
If it had been anyone else under any other circumstance, Gina might have grinned at his resigned expression. Instead, she said only, “You must find that extremely annoying.”
“Mostly it’s just an inconvenience,” he corrected.
“Yes, I imagine chasing halfway across the country after bad guys like me must play havoc with your schedule.”
To her surprise, he chuckled.
“You have no idea,” he said. “I had really big plans for this weekend.”
“Oh? A ball game with the kids? Maybe a charity event with the wife?”
“No kids. No wife.”
That news set off totally inappropriate little butterflies in Gina’s stomach. To her deep regret they seemed to be doing a victory dance. She refused to let him see that he could disconcert her in the slightest way—especially not in that way.
She studied him thoughtfully. “A hot date, then?”
“Nope.”
“Surely you weren’t spending the weekend all alone, Mr. O’Donnell.”
“Afraid so. Of course, I would have had my share of entertainment. Before I left I got a subpoena for the Café Tuscany books. I had someone pick them up yesterday morning. I understand your assistant was very helpful. Too bad you and your partner aren’t that cooperative. Where can I find Rinaldi, by the way?”
Gina barely contained a groan. That explained the frantic messages she’d been getting from Deidre all day. Gina hadn’t called back because she had vowed to take this weekend off from everything connected to the restaurant. She had figured Monday would be soon enough to return the call and face whatever catastrophe had struck. Just one more bad decision she would have to live with. They were stacking up faster than the ones the Calamity Janes had made in high school.
“I’m sure those books would have been as illuminating as anything I can tell you,” she said. “You should have stayed at home with them. You could have crunched numbers all weekend long. As for Bobby, if you locate him, let me know. I have a few choice words I’d like to share with him.”
“Do you expect me to believe he skipped out without telling you?”
“Frankly, I don’t care what you believe. Now, go home, Mr. O’Donnell. It’s not too late to cozy up with those financial records. Why not fly back tonight?”
“Because I gave the pilot on the charter jet that brought me here from Denver the night off and I hate to ruin his evening,” the attorney countered. “He was looking forward to doing some line dancing at someplace called the Heartbreak.”
“How very thoughtful of you. And how very expensive to go around chartering jets to get from here to there. Do your clients know how you toss their money around?”
“Oh, this trip’s on me,” he said easily. He glanced around at the crowded field, took a deliberate sniff of the smoky, barbecue-scented air. “I haven’t been to an event like this in a long time.”
She regarded him with skepticism. “For such a proponent of truth, Mr. O’Donnell, that’s quite a fib. You’ve never been to an event like this, have you?”
She deliberately looked him over from head to toe. “I’m guessing some East Coast prep school, then Harvard. If you’ve ever been to a reunion, I’m sure it was in some fancy hotel or private country club. And my hunch is that the closest you’ve ever come to a horse is on a New York street corner and there was a cop mounted on its back.”
“You’d be wrong,” he said without rancor. “I went to public schools, then to Yale, not Harvard.”
“That’s not exactly a significant distinction.”
“I suggest you not say that to an alumnus of either university. We do like to cling to our illusions of supremacy.”
“Well, cling all you like, just do it somewhere else. I’m here to have a good time with some old friends. I don’t want to find you lurking in the shadows everywhere I turn.”
“Too bad. I’m not going anywhere.”
His vehemence was annoying, but not all that surprising. “What really brought you running all the way out here?” she asked curiously. “Are you afraid I’m going to disappear? Are you hoping to discover I’ve stashed the missing money in a mattress at my parents’ house?”
The idea seemed to intrigue him. “Have you?”
“Nope. No stash. No hiding place. And I can show you my airline ticket. It’s round-trip. Go home, Mr. O’Donnell. I’ll see you right on schedule in a couple of weeks.”
“We could get this out of the way right here and now,” he suggested. “Then I could get back to New York and you could enjoy the rest of your weekend.”
“Without an attorney present? I don’t think so.”
He shrugged. “Then I guess you’ll just have to get used to having me underfoot for…how long did you say you were planning to stay?”
“Two weeks.”
The news seemed to make him very unhappy, but he nodded. “Two weeks, then. I’ll look forward to it.”
Gina sighed. “Suit yourself. I’m going to get another beer.”
He seemed to find that amusing. “Drinking won’t make you forget I’m here.”
“No, I imagine it won’t,” she agreed. “It would take a blow on the head to accomplish that. But the beer might make your presence more palatable.”
She gave him a jaunty salute. “See you in court, Mr. O’Donnell.”
“Oh, I’ll be seeing you long before that,” he said smoothly. “In fact, I’ll be everywhere you turn.”
If only his mission weren’t to put her in jail, Gina thought with a trace of wistfulness, she might actually look forward to that.
As it was, the knot of dread in her stomach tightened. She might not be guilty of anything except the bad judgment to go into business with Bobby, but Rafe O’Donnell struck her as the kind of man who could dig up secrets, twist words and paint a very dark picture of the saintliest person on earth.
And he intended to stay right here in Winding River turning over rocks, no doubt, looking for incriminating evidence, pestering her friends. She shuddered at the prospect.
Maybe she should just get it over with. Talk to him, and send him on his way. But that idea held no appeal, either. She needed time to gather her thoughts and see an attorney back in New York. She didn’t want to drag Emma or anyone else here into this unless she absolutely had to. It was her disaster and she would fix it. Assuming it could be fixed.
In the meantime the music had started and nobody loved dancing more than Gina did. She could postpone that beer for a few more minutes. She gave Rafe O’Donnell a considering look.
“Can you do a two-step?” she asked.
He looked at her blankly. “What’s that?”
She regarded him with pity. “Never mind,” she said, reaching for his hand. “Just follow my lead.”
He caught on more quickly than she had expected. He wasn’t good, but he wasn’t tripping over his own feet or stepping on hers, either.
“You do rise to a challenge, don’t you?” she teased.
“There’s very little I won’t do to win,” he agreed solemnly.
“Are we still talking about dancing?”
“Were we ever?”
Gina sighed. So that was the way it was going to be. He was never going to let her forget why he was here.
“I think I’ll have that beer after all,” she said, even before the music ended. She started away, then turned back. “Leave my friends out of this.”
“I won’t say anything,” he agreed, then had to ruin it by adding, “For the time being.”
“Look, Mr. O’Donnell…”
“I think since we’re going to become so well acquainted over the next couple of weeks, you should call me Rafe.”
She shrugged off the request. “Whatever. The point is, they don’t know anything about this and I don’t want them to.”
“Why? Your friend Lauren makes ten million a movie. She could write you a check and put an end to this right now. You could pay of
f all those people who’ve been bilked, settle up the restaurant’s accounts and life would go on. You’d never have to see me again.”
“She could,” Gina agreed. “But it’s not her problem. It’s mine.” She leveled a look straight into his eyes. “No, let me correct that. It’s Bobby’s.”
“But he left you holding the bag, didn’t he?”
She held up her hands. “I’m not doing this. Not now. Good night, Mr. O’Donnell.”
She deliberately turned her back on him and walked away, but with every step she took, she felt his gaze burning into her. She was glad he couldn’t see her face, because then he’d know exactly how badly the encounter had shaken her.
Halfway across the field, she ran into Lauren.
“What did you do with that gorgeous man?”
“That gorgeous man is a viper,” Gina snapped.
Instantly her friend’s teasing expression faded. “What did he do?” Lauren demanded, her gaze searching the field for the man who’d offended her friend.
Gina grinned. “It’s okay. Settle down. It’s nothing I can’t deal with.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
But even though she managed to inject a note of confidence into her voice for Lauren’s sake, Gina couldn’t help wondering if Rafe O’Donnell wasn’t way more than she could handle. She thought of the way her pulse had skipped in his presence, then amended the thought: he might be more than she could handle in more ways than one.
Chapter Two
Rafe had been stunned when he’d realized that the woman sashaying over to him earlier in the evening was the Lauren Winters, an actress renowned for her beauty and her box office appeal. Who would have imagined finding such a glamorous superstar in a one-horse town in the middle of nowhere? To top it off, she seemed to fit right in. No one was gawking. No one was begging for autographs. Clearly she wasn’t just a celebrity imported for the event, but a hometown girl.
But as intrigued as he was to be face-to-face with the superstar, he’d barely been able to pull his gaze away from her friend. From the moment Lauren had introduced him to Gina, he’d been captivated. That was the only word for it, and it was damned inconvenient. He didn’t trust her. He didn’t like her. But his body didn’t seem to give two hoots about any of that.
To Catch a Thief Page 2
