“For one thing, she kept me up all night,” Mac replied as he ushered Julie inside, then grinned in response to Julie’s outraged look. George Hinkle, neatly casual in a white polo shirt and dark slacks, looked up from where he was working at a computer on a desk near the door and nodded at her.
“Hey, Mac. Mrs. Carlson.” There was a fair amount of reserve in his tone as he greeted her, and Julie remembered that he’d been upset about Mac’s association with her. He didn’t look any happier about it tonight. Which was fine with her. She wasn’t sure how happy she was about it herself.
“Please call me Julie,” she said, then made a wry face. “I’m about to lose the Carlson, anyway. I’m getting a divorce.”
“We heard that,” Rawanda said, shaking her head in commiseration. “Divorce is a bitch. I’ve done had two. Didn’t make me a dime out of either one, either.”
“You didn’t tell me you’d had two.” Hinkle frowned at Rawanda, who looked self-conscious. Clearly there was a relationship between them—of which Mac, who was moving toward the pizza boxes a step ahead of Josephine, seemed to disapprove, if his expression was anything to go by.
“Uh, I might just have forgotten to mention one.” Rawanda’s gaze swung to Julie. “You want some pizza? No need to let the boss hog it all.”
“Um, just one slice,” Julie said, following Rawanda as the other woman headed toward where Mac was opening the pizza boxes. A heavenly smell reached Julie’s nostrils, making her stomach growl. She realized that, between stress and the press of work, she hadn’t eaten anything all day except a glass of orange juice at her mother’s that morning and a pair of stray Hershey’s Kisses found at the bottom of her work basket at the shop.
“Here.” Mac put a slice of vegetarian pizza on a napkin and passed it to her. A six-pack of Coke had obviously come with the pizza, and he handed her a can. It wasn’t diet, which was what she usually drank, but it would do. The whole supremely unhealthy meal would do. Oh, yes, she thought, biting off the tip of her slice and savoring the wonderful flavor, it would definitely do.
“You get that Simmons thing done?” Mac, sitting on a corner of the desk and biting into his own well-laden slice, asked his partner. Hinkle was on his feet now, helping himself to pizza.
“Yeah.” He glanced at Julie, then back at Mac. “You want those pictures, they’re on your desk.”
Sinking down on the couch to savor her treat, Julie interpreted the glance that Hinkle had thrown her way to mean that the pictures were the ones he had taken of Sid and Amber.
The thought didn’t even hurt.
Mac nodded. “Thanks.” He took another bite. “So what have you got for me?”
Rawanda, her mouth full of pizza, shook her head and said, “Ooh, boy.”
Hinkle took a bite out of his own pizza slice, then slid a sideways glance at Julie before replying. “The Rand Corporation is the parent company for all kinds of business enterprises. Some of them seem legitimate, or at least they perform real services, like All-American Builders or Sweetwater’s. Others appear to be dummy companies used to move assets and money around, kind of like a shell game. Bottom line is, Rand Corporation is definitely mob-affiliated, if not mob-controlled. Julie’s father, Mike Williams, drew a steady paycheck from the Rand Corporation for eleven years, ending in January 1987. He was listed as a transportation specialist, which I interpreted as a truck driver. Most of the personnel records have some sort of notation about the reason employment with the company ended—retirement, resignation, termination. His paychecks simply stopped being issued. No reason given.”
“The same month Daniel and Kelly Carlson disappeared,” Mac said. “All right, what’s the connection?”
“That I don’t know,” Hinkle said. “At least, not yet.”
Mac looked thoughtful. “Mike Williams stopped working for Rand Corporation in January 1987, but he was still alive. He was seen again after that date.”
“He didn’t die until 1992,” Hinkle said, confirming Mac’s words.
Mac’s gaze moved to Julie. “Didn’t you say that you saw your father off and on until you were fourteen, and then he dropped out of your life for a few years? When did you see him again?”
Julie took a swallow of Coke. Even after all these years, she didn’t much like talking about the father who’d been pretty much a nonpresence in her life.
“I was nineteen. It was right before I won Miss South Carolina.”
Mac got an arrested expression on his face. “Didn’t you say you met Sid right after you won that?”
Julie nodded.
“I need you to tell me everything you can remember about your father, all the way up to your last meeting with him. Can you do that?”
28
JULIE JUST LOOKED AT MAC for a moment without replying. Suddenly the slice of pizza she had just polished off felt heavy as lead in her stomach. She wished, vainly, that she hadn’t eaten it.
“I think Mr. Hinkle—”
“George,” George interjected.
“George, then. I think George was right. I think my father was a truck driver. At least, there was a time when he was always saying he’d do this or that with us—Becky and me—when he got off the road. And he was on the road a lot.” She paused, her eyes meeting Mac’s as she took a deep, and, she hoped, unobtrusive breath. “I really don’t know that much about him. He and my mother divorced when I was two. He was her second husband. She had four others after him. Men are—they used to be—kind of disposable for her. He never came around much, although Mama would call him sometimes—” Telling this was hard, she discovered, harder even than she had expected: it was way too personal; if Mac had not held her gaze, giving her a lifeline to grab on to, she would never have gotten so much out. “—when she needed money. When he had it, he would give it to her. I got the impression he didn’t have it a lot.”
“He dropped out of your life entirely when you were fourteen?”
Julie nodded, and swallowed. Mac got up from the desk and came to crouch in front of her, taking her hands. Julie’s fingers tightened around his almost convulsively.
“Can you tell me about the last time you saw him? I think it might be important.”
It was clear from his expression that he realized this was a difficult subject for her. His silent support strengthened her. She forgot that he had lied to her, had used her, and that there had been an ulterior motive to his friendship from the beginning. All she knew was that every time, when she had needed him, he’d been there for her—just as he was there for her now. She looked into his eyes, locked her gaze on his, and, reluctantly, cast her mind back ten years.
“Mama and Becky were both gone somewhere—I don’t remember where now, but I do remember I was alone. It was just getting dark, and I was sitting in the living room of our trailer—we lived in a trailer, Mama and Becky and me—hemming a dress I meant to wear in the Miss South Carolina pageant and watching something on TV, and there was a knock on the door. I got up to answer it, and there stood Daddy, just as big as Ike. I hadn’t seen him in about five years, and we just looked at each other for a minute, and then he said howdy, Becky and I kind of laughed and said I’m Julie and he said oh, of course and how you doing and that sort of thing. He came on in, but he seemed real uncomfortable—well, I was uncomfortable, too, because I didn’t know him very well, even if he was my father, and he didn’t even know me well enough to tell me apart from Becky. Anyway, we visited for a little while—I can’t really remember what we talked about, but nothing very much. Like I said, it was kind of awkward, and he seemed kind of on edge, like he was anxious to go.”
Julie paused, and swallowed again, and her eyes dropped from Mac’s eyes to his mouth. It was a truly beautiful mouth, even if it was a man’s mouth and “beautiful” probably wasn’t the right word for it. She stared at it and thought how beautiful it was because she didn’t want to think about anything else.
“Julie?”
Unwillingly, her eyes met his again. Go
d, she didn’t want to go back there. These memories belonged to another lifetime—another Julie. A far too vulnerable Julie.
“Then he left. He walked out the door, and I walked to the door too, and watched him walk to his truck—it was a beat-up old truck—and then he turned around and looked right at me and I waved, and he said I love you, Becky.” Julie swallowed. “Then he got in the truck and drove away. I never saw him again until I went to his funeral. The whole time I was there at that funeral I just kept thinking, He was my daddy and he couldn’t even get my name straight. How pathetic is that?”
All of a sudden she couldn’t talk any more because her throat ached too much. She blinked because her eyes stung. She felt moisture spill over her lower lids and slide down her cheeks and realized she was crying. Embarrassed, she closed her eyes and pulled her hands free of Mac’s and covered her face and willed the tears to stop.
“Julie,” Mac said, and stood up and gathered her up in his arms and sat back down on the couch with her on his lap. Julie took a deep breath and lowered her hands and blinked at him, hoping the worst of her loss of control was over. After all, it was stupid—stupid—to cry over something that was so far in the past. Mac was all blurry, she discovered as she tried to focus him. The tears wouldn’t stop no matter how she tried to hold them back, and as she took a deep, meant-to-be-calming breath, it turned without warning into a sob.
Mac’s face tightened, and his arms tightened, and he said something that she didn’t understand. Knowing that he cared made the tears flow faster despite her best efforts to contain them. She couldn’t bear it, she thought, couldn’t stand facing the fact that her father had never loved her enough to even make sure of her name, couldn’t deal with the welling resurgence of the sense of loss and abandonment that had stayed with her all her life, and she closed her eyes, trying to block the world out along with the pain.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry.” It was all she could do to choke the words out. “I’m making a total fool out of myself, I know.”
“It’s all right to cry.” Mac’s voice was very soft, and it was her final undoing. He felt so safe and solid and comforting, and she realized that she had needed safe and solid and comforting for years without even realizing it. The thought brought more tears with it, and she gave up the fight to contain them, melting bonelessly against him, wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her face on his shoulder and crying as if her heart would break.
There were vague sounds of movement in the room behind her, but Julie barely noticed. She clung to Mac like a fly to sticky paper and wept as if from a well of sorrow that would never go dry.
“We’ll just go now,” George said, presumably to Mac. “Call if you need anything.”
“Yeah, we’re gonna go,” Rawanda echoed.
Julie had all but forgotten their presence until they spoke. It was as if she and Mac had been all alone in a bubble, and now, with the realization that others were present, the bubble had popped. She felt a fresh sting of embarrassment, and tried to at least stop the tears now and sit up and show them that, though she might have succumbed to temporary weakness, she had gotten it all out of her system now, and she was far from the crybaby they must think her.
But it was too late: she heard the sound of the door opening and closing and they were gone. Anyway, though she tried hard, really, really hard, she couldn’t stop, she discovered to her horror. Now that the tap that led to her deepest, most long-buried emotions had been opened, she couldn’t turn it off again any more than she could stop her heart from beating. It was as if she had to cry, just like she had to breathe, to live. The pain had been building up too long, and it had to get out. She hadn’t cried, she realized, since her father’s final visit, when she’d wept bitterly after he’d left because she’d been secretly wanting her father for years and when he had finally come he couldn’t even tell her from her sister. She hadn’t even cried at his funeral, and she hadn’t cried—not one time—since.
It was almost funny that she was just at this moment realizing that. Was she in touch with her feelings, or what?
The thought brought a little giggle with it that came out sounding more like a gasping sob, and then Mac was kissing her cheek, her ear, her jaw—whatever he could reach—and rocking her back and forth in his arms as if she were a baby and murmuring soothing things to her, and she was acting like a baby and crying as though her heart would break.
Finally, when the tears ended and the sobs quieted into no more than an occasional long shivery sigh, she rested in his arms, spent. Her head was buried in the curve between his shoulder and neck, and she kept it there for a long time because lying against him like that was just exactly what she craved, and anyway she was too drained and too ashamed to look up.
Finally she did. She didn’t sit up, but she lifted her head and looked at him. His blue eyes were grave and beautiful as they met hers, and his hand stroked her back through her thin cotton T-shirt almost absently. Her legs, bare to the tops of her thighs because her skirt was short anyway and had ridden up, were bent at the knees and curved around his torso. Her breasts were nestled against his chest and her arms were draped around his neck. He felt warm and firm and so good, so right, holding her that it scared her. She gritted her teeth and lifted her chin because she knew she’d made an absolute fool of herself, and then she gave him a wary frown capped by a prosaic little sniff.
He smiled at her, slowly, and his eyes turned tender.
“Hey,” he said. “You’re breaking my heart here, you know.”
Then he slid his hand up her back to her nape and bent his head and kissed her.
At the touch of his mouth, Julie caught fire. She was suddenly desperate for his warmth, for his tenderness, for the solid comfort of touching him. She pushed her tongue into his mouth, and at the touch of her tongue against his, Mac seemed to detonate. The kiss exploded. Suddenly they were both clinging together, desperate for each other, consumed with passion. His tongue was scalding hot as it thrust deep into her mouth. His mouth was hard and fierce, his arms around her as tight as steel bands. She was plastered so closely against him that she could feel the thud of his heart against her breasts. His hands, as they stroked down her back and pulled the hem of her T-shirt free of her skirt to slide, warm and faintly rough, up her rib cage, were shaking. Julie shivered in response, tightening her arms around her neck and kissing him as if she would die if she didn’t. One hard warm hand found her breast, and she made a little sound deep in her throat and was lost, totally lost, to the licking flames of desire.
“Oh, God, Julie.” The words were more growl than groan. Mac pressed her backward, and Julie felt the cool slide of leather against her back. Then he was looming over her, yanking her T-shirt over her head, unfastening her skirt and pulling it off, and she was helping him, pulling at his clothes too, until he was bare to the waist and she was tugging his jeans down his legs. He kicked off his sneakers, shucked his briefs, and then he was coming back down to her and she was spreading her knees for him and tugging at his shoulders to bring him closer. His thighs were hard and hot and rough with hair, and unbearably exciting against the silky smoothness of hers. His chest was wide and well muscled, with just the right amount of hair, and it made her mouth go dry just looking at it. His shoulders were broad and firm and slightly damp with sweat beneath her palms.
She wanted him with an intensity that made her dizzy.
But he paused, still keeping his weight from her with his knees and his hands, his gaze sweeping over her.
“Nice,” he said, in apparent reference to the lacey white bra and panties she still wore but possibly also to what was inside them. His voice was thick and his eyes burned, and Julie moved sensuously beneath his searing regard. Her hand moved up to cup the back of his head, and she pulled his mouth down to hers. The kiss, which she had meant to be soft and leisurely, was fierce and deep and dazzling instead. When he lifted his head she murmured a protest, sliding her lips down his neck, her mouth open and shak
ing, as he pulled a little away.
With quick, deft movements he slid his hands behind her to unfasten her bra and pull it off, then bent his head to capture one of the full, creamy breasts he had exposed. Julie closed her eyes, moaning, and pressed his head closer as his mouth closed over her nipple. His mouth was hot and wet and unbelievably arousing as he suckled first one breast, then the other. Julie arched her back, offering him her breasts with abandon, clutching his head with both hands now as he kissed and sucked and played. She moved with mindless longing beneath him, stroking her hands down his back, over his buttocks, around the tops of his thighs.
He was hard and enormous, she discovered as her hands found him, and she wanted him so much she thought she would die if she had to wait another minute. He groaned as her hand closed around him, and lifted his head from her breasts to watch her face with glittering eyes. Breathless, aching for him, she guided him to her, only to come up against a barrier and be reminded at the last minute that she still wore her tiny lace panties.
She moaned in frustration as he pushed against the barrier of the fragile cloth, ready to rip the offending garment off with her bare hands if she had to to get what she wanted. But his hand was already between them, between her legs, touching her through her panties, rubbing her, making her gasp. Then his hand moved inside one leg opening to slide inside her, in and out, hard and fast, while at the same time he bent his head to kiss her breasts.
“Mac. Oh, Mac.” Head flung back against the leather couch, hair spilling toward the floor, Julie reacted like a wild thing, squirming shamelessly beneath him, clutching his shoulders, lifting her hips in wordless supplication, feeling the heat and tension build inside her until she was shaking with it, until she was so hot she thought she would die if he didn’t come into her right then.
To Trust a Stranger Page 31
