Bluer Than Velvet

by Mary McBride

  The well-tended, rectangular garden was easy enough to find, even though her three-inch heels had an annoying tendency to sink into the ground. She pulled two red tomatoes from a tall vine, then bent forward and plucked a little clump of leaves from the dark soil.

  “What do you know? A radish!” she murmured, shaking off some of the dirt before plopping it into the plastic bowl and proceeding to pick several more of its mates. The onions weren’t all that difficult to identify, and she tugged up four of those. Then she straightened up and gave the rest of the garden the once-over, searching for the mysterious endive.

  Spying something green with curly leaves on the far side of the little plot, she made her way on tiptoe around a pinwheeling plastic sunflower and several wire cages. Then—“Oh, please, please, don’t let this be anything poisonous.”—she reached down to pluck a leaf just as something sprang up into her face.

  She jerked upright. The thing, the horrible thing, was in her hair, so she batted at it, only to have the creature take a flying leap down the front of her dress.

  Then Laura did what any normal, self-respecting city girl would do. She screamed bloody murder.

  Sam dropped the potato peeler in the sink, picked up the 12-gauge shotgun behind the back door, and was out in the backyard in mere seconds expecting to find his client fighting for her very life with a bruiser named Artie. Instead she was hopping around the back of the garden, flapping the front of her dress, screaming “Get it off me! Get it off me!”

  He put the gun down in the grass and headed toward the garden, trying to wipe off the grin that he knew would only irritate her.

  “Get it off me,” she shrieked as he neared.

  “Hold still.”

  Apparently she couldn’t, so he grasped her shoulders, turning her toward him. “Will you hold still? It’s probably just a grasshopper. It’s not going to hurt you.”

  “Get. It. Off.” Her eyes squinched closed in her already squinched face.

  “Okay. Okay.”

  He looked at her hair and scanned the blue velvet on her shoulders and neckline. “I don’t see anything. It must’ve taken off.”

  “It’s down my dress,” she said.

  “Down…” Sam’s gaze dropped to the pale skin bordered by a hint of black lace. “I can’t…”

  “Get it,” she shrieked.

  “Hold still.”

  He closed his own eyes a second, letting out a kind of heaven-help-me sigh, then eased his fingers into the front of the dress, down into black lace and blue velvet and warm, firm flesh. Lucky little guy, he thought, as he gently pinched the ends of a pair of frantic wings, then eased the insect as well as himself up and out. The grasshopper shot away in a single, ecstatic leap.

  “You can open your eyes now,” Sam said.

  She did, but just barely. “I hate bugs.”

  Sam retrieved the colander that Laura had apparently flung off into space when she was attacked, and now he was picking up scattered vegetables and at the same time trying not to think about the heat his hand had so recently encountered beneath all that blue velvet. He started to say something, but she sliced him with a glare.

  “And don’t you dare say they’re more afraid of me than I am of them, Sam Zachary, because it isn’t true.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that,” Sam said, reaching to break off a few tender leaves of endive and laying them on top of the tomatoes and radishes and green onions. “I was only going to ask you how you like your steak and what kind of dressing you prefer on your salad.”

  “Oh.” She gave a little shrug. “Medium, I guess, and Thousand Island. French would be fine, too.”

  “Okay.”

  He shouldn’t have asked, Sam thought, since he had every intention of grilling the rib eye black on the outside and a perfect, medium-rare pink inside, and tossing the salad with a tarragon vinaigrette.

  All of a sudden he felt irritable, curmudgeonly, like a doddering old bachelor too set in his ways to even listen to anyone else’s preferences. Or worse. Too comfortable with the familiar to appreciate something new and different. Someone new and different.

  “Better get back inside,” he grumbled, “before the praying mantises start to swarm.” He handed her the colander. “Here. Take this. I need to get my shotgun.”

  She shivered. “Not for the praying mantises, I hope.”

  “No.” He picked up the gun. “I only use this on the wolf spiders.”

  “You were kidding, right, about the wolf spiders?” Laura asked halfway through dinner.

  They were sitting in the kitchen on opposite sides of what she considered a very retro aluminum-and-plastic dinette set. The whole room, in fact, was fabulously retro. It looked as if it had been lifted from another era with its white metal cabinets, its fake marble linoleum floor, and almost boxcar-sized white enamel stove.

  “Yes, I was kidding,” Sam answered with a subdued little chuckle. “How’s your steak?”

  “Fabulous.” She took another mouthwatering bite. “It would’ve been a waste to use it on my eye. The salad’s great, too. You made the dressing yourself?”

  He nodded.

  Sam Zachary was still wearing his apron, but the blue gingham and ruffles couldn’t make even the slightest dent in his masculinity. In an odd way, Laura decided, they seemed to accentuate it all the more. God, he was gorgeous. Not that that was any big deal. Not that she cared.

  “So, where’d you learn to cook, Zachary, S. U.?” she asked, putting her knife and fork down to pick up the cold bottle of beer he’d put at her place.

  “Right here. After my mother died last year, it was a case of either learning how to cook for myself or wasting away to skin and bones.”

  Laura nodded. She knew what that was like. She’d been in a similar situation a few years before when her grandmother passed away, but she’d solved the skin-and-bones problem with pizza deliveries and salad bars and take-out Chinese.

  “I meant what I said, Sam. About not having to feed me. I’m sure I’m not paying you enough for…”

  “I’ll put it on your tab,” he said, pushing his empty plate away, then taking a swig from his own bottle of beer. He put the dark brown bottle down, returning it precisely to the wet circle it had made on the tabletop, before he leaned back and crossed his arms. “You want to tell me a little bit more about this Jones guy so I have a better idea what I’m dealing with?”

  “Jones?”

  “The slugger?” He gestured to her eye.

  “Oh. That Jones.”

  She shifted in her chair, but the vinyl seat had such a good grip on her thighs, it felt as if she’d ripped off a layer of skin. It didn’t help, either, that she could almost hear Nana chanting Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

  “Artie, you mean.”

  He gave her a long, silent, steely-eyed stare which seemed to translate as yes, that was exactly what he meant and not to confuse the blue gingham apron with a blue gingham disposition.

  “Artie’s, um, well…persistent,” she said.

  “How long have you been seeing him?”

  Laura blinked. “Seeing him?”

  “Dating him,” Sam clarified.

  “Dating Artie?” She almost laughed, then shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. I’ve never gone out with him. He’s my landlord’s son and for some reason he’s been giving me presents the past few weeks. Flowers. Candy. Stuff like that. I thought it was, well, kind of cute in the beginning.” She reached out, tracing a finger along the label of her beer bottle, frowning now. “It stopped being cute this morning.”

  “So you’ve never gone out with him?”

  “Never. Not once. Come to think of it, he never even asked me out.” She quit staring at the label and lifted her eyes to Sam’s. “Pretty weird, huh?”

  More than weird, Sam was thinking. He could well imagine, once having met Laura McNeal, wanting to shower her with gifts, but he couldn’t fathom not asking her out on a date, as well. Unless, of course, this A
rtie guy knew that she was already involved with somebody else. If she was, though, why hadn’t she gone to that somebody else for help?

  “Do you live alone?” he asked her, not quite hitting the target of his curiosity dead-on, but edging close.

  She nodded. “I live in an apartment over my shop.”

  “Your shop?”

  “I told you. Remember?” She gestured to her dress. “I have a vintage clothing and jewelry store. Nana’s Attic.”

  “Ah.” He had forgotten, which didn’t say a lot for his ability to process information at the moment. He wanted to blame the beer, but he knew it was that damned grasshopper down the front of Laura’s dress. The backs of his fingers still felt warm from their brief contact with her flesh.

  Abruptly, he picked up his empty plate and carried it to the sink.

  “I’ve got a job tonight,” he said over his shoulder, over the splash of the water from the faucet. “I need to drive back into the city around midnight. Just for a few hours. You can stay here if you want. You’ll be safe. But if you feel uncomfortable, you can come along with me. It’s up to you.”

  “What kind of job?” She picked up her plate, too, and headed toward him at the sink.

  Sam had forgotten about her legs during dinner while those long and lovely limbs were concealed beneath the table. He remembered them now, so vividly he almost forgot what she had just asked him. Oh, yeah. The job.

  “Surveillance,” he said. “It shouldn’t take more than an hour or two.”

  One of her finely shaped eyebrows arched a bit more. Her blue eyes twinkled and a smile played at her mouth. “Ooh, surveillance. Sounds dangerous. Real private eye stuff, huh?”

  “Right.” He took her plate and rinsed it under the faucet. “But it’s not dangerous. Don’t worry.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t worried. It’s kind of exciting, actually. Who are we spying on? A murderer returning to the scene of his crime? A robber casing a bank? A big drug deal?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Well, what then?”

  She was standing so close that he could see tiny golden flecks in the blue of her eyes as well as the true line of her lips, even fuller than her pink lipstick implied. A mouth made for kissing if ever he had seen one. Suddenly his brain was ticking off the months it had been since he’d kissed a woman. Not just a woman. Jenny. He’d really never kissed anyone else.

  “You’ve seen too many movies,” Sam said more gruffly than he intended, slapping their dishes and utensils into the dishwasher. “We’re going to sit on a hot, tarred rooftop adjacent to the parking garage of the Metropole Hotel, waiting for a sixty-six-year-old man to finish his weekly tryst with his twenty-year-old receptionist, then watch him walk her to her car and kiss her good-night.”

  “That doesn’t sound too exciting,” Laura said.

  “Told ya.” He wiped his hands on one of his mother’s cross-stitched dishtowels and returned it to its metal bar beside the sink.

  “And then?” she asked. “What happens next? You call the police and have him arrested?”

  “Nope. Then I take a picture of the lovers, have it developed, and I give the print to a sweet little old lady with blue hair who’s still ninety-nine percent convinced that her husband of forty-two years is playing gin rummy every Wednesday night.”

  The playful light in Laura’s eyes went out like two candles being snuffed, and for a second, Sam regretted his candor.

  “Well, you asked,” he said. “Cases like that are the bulk of my work. Rescuing dames in distress is just a sideline.”

  He had hoped she’d laugh at that, lame as it was, but she didn’t. Suddenly she looked less like a dame in distress than a sad little girl, playing dress up in her mother’s clothes.

  Reaching out, she straightened the dishtowel on its rod, then sighed. “You’re right. It’s not like the movies.”

  “You don’t have to come along, you know. You really will be all right here if you want to stay.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll just stick with you for a while, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind. It’ll be nice to have company. Only…”

  “Only what?”

  “Well, the last time I saw a private eye’s assistant dressed like this…” He dropped his gaze to the soft drapery of blue velvet sloping from her delicate collarbone. “…it was in a movie. Maybe there’s something in one of the closets upstairs that might be a little bit less, um…”

  “Vintage?” she suggested, the twinkle returning to her eyes.

  “That, too.” Sam stepped away from the sink, blaming the current spike in his temperature on all that humidity from the hot rinse water. “Come on. Let’s have a look.”

  Sam leaned against the wall outside his mother’s bedroom, listening to the distinctive sounds of a woman dressing and undressing, to the slide of hangers across a metal rod, the slithering of fabrics over skin, the puttings on and the peelings off, the snapping of snaps and the long glide of zippers opening and closing.

  When he’d suggested that Laura might find something to wear in his late mother’s closet, he hadn’t expected her search to take so long, much less to take on the proportions of a Broadway production number. He needed to get back to the city to set up his surveillance.

  “Are you about done in there?” he asked through the crack in the door.

  “Just about,” Laura called out, her voice slightly muffled by what sounded like crisp taffeta. “How long ago did you say your mother passed away?”

  “Last year.” He heard more rustling, more zipping or unzipping before she spoke again.

  “White Shoulders,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Her fragrance. She wore White Shoulders, didn’t she?”

  Did she? Sam didn’t have a clue, and he said so just as Laura suddenly appeared in the doorway.

  “Some detective you are,” she said, coming out into the hall while adjusting the shoulders and the neckline of her dress, which, to Sam’s amazement, just happened to be the same, skimpy blue velvet getup she’d been wearing all day.

  “I thought you were going to change,” he said. “What happened? Didn’t anything fit?”

  “Just about everything fit.”

  “Well, what then?”

  She was quiet a moment, standing with her hands on her hips and staring down at the floor. Then she sighed and gave a small shrug. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, Sam, when I tell you. Promise me you won’t, okay?”

  “The wrong idea? About what?” he snapped.

  “Don’t be so angry.”

  “I’m not angry,” he said, sounding more baffled now than angry. “I’ve just been hanging out here listening to you try on enough outfits to clothe the female population of a small city. And then, after all that, you come out in…” He stabbed a finger at her dress. “…in this.”

  “This,” she said, jutting her chin into his face, “doesn’t smell like White Shoulders.”

  “So?”

  “So?” Her volume increased to match, if not drown out, his. “So, if it’s all right with you, Sam Zachary, I just didn’t want to smell like your mother.”

  She flounced past him to stomp down the stairs, as much as anyone could stomp in stiletto heels, leaving Sam standing there shaking his head and wondering why it made any difference who she smelled like when he had no intention of getting close enough to tell.

  And even if he did get close enough, say, to kiss her, there was no way he was ever going to confuse Laura McNeal with his mother.

  Chapter 3

  It was good to be back in the city, Laura thought. Well, sort of. If you didn’t mind climbing six flights of smelly, littered stairs in a dark abandoned building, then camping out on a scratchy army blanket flung out on a hot, tarred roof where shards of broken liquor bottles glittered in the summer moonlight.

  She wasn’t complaining, though. Not out loud, anyway. Not even when her heels had stuck fast and deep in soft tar bubbles and
Sam Zachary had to pick her up and carry her across the roof and then go back to retrieve her captured shoes. She didn’t complain aloud even when the army blanket beneath her began to feel as if it was deliberately clawing at the backs of her thighs and calves. Not even when she decided she was about to die of thirst.

  Eyeing the big canvas bag that Sam had brought with him and parked on a corner of the blanket, she asked, “You don’t happen to have a can of soda or a water bottle in there, do you?”

  He was sitting beside her as he had been for the past hour or so, knees drawn up, arms looped casually over them, and his gaze trained permanently on the cement maze of the parking garage next door. “Sorry.”

  Laura made a dry little noise deep in her throat, then ran her fingers through the damp locks of her hair, wondering vaguely if she might be able to lick some of that moisture from her hands. “It must be ninety degrees up here,” she said, hoping he’d take the not-so-subtle hint.

  “Probably.”

  “Definitely.” Laura shifted on the blanket, letting it take a bite out of her right thigh now that it had pretty much chewed up her left.

  Now, too late, she wished that she had changed into one of Sam’s mother’s outfits, regardless of their ingrained fragrance. Maybe the light blue pincord suit with its boxy jacket and long A-line skirt. Or maybe the navy piqué dress with the delicate lace collar. Both had fit her perfectly.

  But, while she was trying on the garments, Laura had come to the conclusion that his mother’s lingering scent would only make Sam sad, and she had decided that she’d rather keep looking inappropriate, if not bizarre, than cause this man a single moment of heartache. He had such a nice smile. Well, when he wasn’t frowning.

  She glanced over at him. In the moonlight his expression seemed neutral at the moment, neither happy nor sad. Just patient. As patient as a stone. He reminded her of the Sphinx, which reminded her of the desert, which reminded her of just how thirsty she was.