Bluer Than Velvet

by Mary McBride

  The answer to that was simple enough. It was because he was Sam. Because he seemed genetically incapable of saying no when somebody needed him. Because he was true blue and loyal and chock-full of all the good qualities that Laura had thought no longer existed. So, while Janey pressed and pressed, Sam dithered and demurred and declined her invitations until she was finally forced to give up. Well, not quite.

  “Samantha misses you so much, Sam,” she crooned.

  “I miss her, too. Give her a kiss for me, will you? I’ll stop by once business calms down. I promise.”

  “Next week?” Janey asked, not missing a beat or a chance to pin him down.

  “Probably.”

  “Tuesday?”

  Give it a rest Laura wanted to scream.

  “I’ll see. Get that headlight fixed, Janey, okay?”

  “Sure. Okay. Maybe Tuesday, then. Samantha will be so happy. I’ll call to remind you. See you, Sam.”

  With Sam’s hand still heavy on her shoulder, Laura could hear gravel spit from under Janey’s tires when she wheeled her car around and drove back the way she had come. Laura imagined that sole headlight burning with an almost demented light, like a cyclops driven wild by what he couldn’t reach.

  “The coast is clear,” Sam said, sounding as if he’d been hunkered down in a foxhole with bullets whizzing over his head for the past few minutes.

  Laura sat up, plucking at the damp sleeves of her T-shirt and the knees of her jeans, battling with her need to tell Sam just how wrong he was to think his kindness was anything but misguided or even dangerous where Janey Sayles was concerned. A woman who would use her own defenseless daughter to get his attention was probably capable of anything, and Laura was more convinced than ever that Janey was behind the curling iron incident and the vandalized tomatoes. If only Sam could see…

  “Thanks,” he said quietly. “If it makes you feel any better, Laura, I think you’re probably right about Janey.”

  “You do?”

  Sam nodded, then muttered an oath. “Yeah. And I bet you think I’m the world’s biggest coward, don’t you?”

  “No.” She leaned over to kiss his cheek. “I think you’re the world’s sweetest coward, Sam Zachary.”

  While Sam tended the storm-battered rose bushes in the front yard, Laura went inside to change out of her wet clothes. Her indignant huff had lasted all of half an hour. Not an easy man to walk out on, her sweet, cowardly Sam.

  She put her toothbrush back in the bathroom, glanced at the damp mop of curls on her head, then at the charred vanity top, and profoundly wished that Janey had chosen something other than the curling iron with which to wreak her havoc earlier. Why hadn’t she just sprayed shaving cream all over the place or short-sheeted the beds?

  Well, that was simple enough to figure out. Because then Sam wouldn’t have blamed Laura for burning down his house. If they had nothing else in common, at least she and Sam shared the privilege of being stalked by firebugs.

  But from now on Sam would be wary of the woman, she thought while trotting down the stairs. Who knows? He might even work up the courage to tell her to buzz off, although Laura doubted it. His streak of loyalty, which she found so endearing, seemed to apply to enemies and stalkers as much as it did to old loves and old houses and all the junk inside them.

  She stood at the bottom of the stairs a moment, gazing into the living room with all its glass gewgaws and porcelain knickknacks, while the kernel of an idea began to take shape in her head. Sam had enough collectibles and old clothes to stock a small retail outlet, while she was a retailer plumb out of stock. Would he consider being her partner, she wondered?

  No. Probably not. He hadn’t shown much interest earlier when she’d broached the subject of selling his mother’s clothes. On the other hand, he didn’t exactly strike Laura as Private Eye of the Year. He showed far more enthusiasm for his silly garden than he did for his occupation.

  It couldn’t hurt to ask, she decided. She had to do something, after all. She couldn’t continue living on Sam’s generosity indefinitely.

  In the kitchen, she glanced at the clock. It was a little after five, time for all good cooks to stoke up their ovens, fire their burners, and drag out their chopping boards. Okay. So she wasn’t a good cook. So she’d chickened out at breakfast this morning when threatened by seventeen kinds of cheese. That didn’t mean she couldn’t come up with something halfway edible for dinner.

  The plastic bowl brimming with rescued tomatoes caught her eye, and inspiration struck. Anybody could slice tomatoes, right? A little salt. A pinch of pepper. A slosh of salad dressing. How hard was that? She pulled out a drawer in search of a knife just as the phone rang.

  When it was obvious, after five or six rings, that Sam wasn’t going to come bounding through the door to answer it, Laura picked up the receiver and said hello.

  “Yes, ma’am. It’s Ms. McNeal, right?”

  “Yes,” Laura answered. “Who is…?”

  “This is Officer Charlie Travis, ma’am. I met you this morning when I was checking out that prowler report.”

  “Oh, sure. I hope you’re calling to say you found him and arrested him.”

  “Well, no. Not exactly. Is Sam around? I really need to talk to him.”

  “He’s outside someplace,” Laura said, peering out the window over the sink and then looking out the back door, but failing to see Sam. “If you want to hang on, I’ll go out and give him a shout, Officer.”

  “How about if you just have him call me back?” the man said. “I’m at home. He’s got my number.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell him.”

  “I appreciate that, ma’am. Tell him to call as soon as possible, will you? It’s pretty important.”

  After she hung up, Laura stepped out the back door. Sam was carrying an armload of greenery across the yard.

  “Careful,” he called to her. “Watch out for the wolf spiders.”

  “Very funny,” she yelled, glancing nervously at the ground around her feet. “You just got a phone call.”

  “Be right there. Let me just toss these on the mulch pile.”

  A mulch pile! Laura sighed as she stepped back inside. This was like living in a foreign country. How in the world could she be falling for somebody who had a mulch pile?

  The thought brought her up short halfway to the sink. She wasn’t falling for Sam. She was grateful, that was all. He was providing protection and offering her shelter. He was sweet and loyal and extraordinarily nice to look at, but she wasn’t falling for him. Okay. So he was fabulous in bed, too, and made her feel things she’d never felt before. That was sex, not love.

  She was not falling in love with him. She was never going to fall in love with anybody. Not only that, she wasn’t going to start doing cutesy things in the kitchen like making rosebuds out of radishes or silly carrot curls. Good grief. All this country air must be rotting her brain.

  She stood glaring at the tomatoes on the counter when the phone rang again. Now what? Laura glared at the phone, too, almost hoping it was Janey calling this time so she could have the pleasure of hanging up on her. She snatched the receiver off the hook and muttered hello just as Sam came in the back door.

  “Laura?” the voice on the other end of the line said in response to her surly greeting. “Laura, doll, is that you?”

  Artie! Oh, my God.

  “It’s Artie,” she rasped with her hand covering the mouthpiece.

  Sam looked at her as if he had suddenly gone deaf and extremely dumb. “Who? Who is it?”

  “Artie,” she whispered. “Oh, God, Sam. Here.”

  She tossed the phone at him as if it were a live grenade, then paced back and forth from the door to the window while she listened to Sam murmur a series of calm and noncommittal uh-huhs and okays and sure things before he finally offered a cheerful “Great. See you then,” and hung up.

  “He knows I’m here,” Laura said, coming to a standstill in the middle of the kitchen, attempting to keep her vo
ice out of its highest, hysterical registers.

  Sam didn’t answer immediately, but stood gnawing on his lower lip, gazing out the window, presumably lost in thought, hopefully coming up with a plan to ensure her survival. She was already mentally grabbing her toothbrush and shopping bags again, preparing to flee.

  “Well?” Laura asked, no longer able to disguise her impatience or her rising anxiety. “I can’t stand the suspense, Sam. Tell me. What did Artie say? He knew it was me, didn’t he?”

  Sam’s gaze swung from the window to her. “He recognized your voice. He said I must be one hell of a detective to have found you so fast.”

  “Oh, great. That’s just great.” Laura rolled her eyes. “What else?”

  “And he said I had earned a handsome bonus for my excellent work.” He waggled his eyebrows, much to Laura’s irritation.

  “Wonderful,” she snapped. “I couldn’t be more pleased for you. And just when does he intend to give you this handsome bonus?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “He’s expecting us in his office at noon.”

  She was certain she hadn’t heard him right. Either that, or it had been a slip of the tongue. “You mean Artie’s expecting you, don’t you?”

  “No. I mean us. You and me. At noon.”

  Chapter 11

  While he was telling her about the meeting with Artie, Sam could actually see the color drain from Laura’s face. She wobbled, looking ill, but when he reached out to steady her, she slapped his hands away.

  “Traitor,” she barked. “I should have known that’s why you didn’t want me to leave. How much is he paying you?”

  He took a step back, raising his hands helplessly. “Wait a minute. Whoa. You don’t really think I’d…”

  But apparently she did. Her eyes glittered like blue ice when she cut him off with, “No. I thought I was safe. I thought you were different from everybody else, Sam. I thought you were better. The best. Boy, was I wrong!”

  “Laura,” he protested, “I’m not…”

  “How much is good old Artie paying you to turn me over to him, you Judas?” she screeched.

  “Judas!” He ripped his fingers through his hair. “I’m jeopardizing my investigator’s license, my only source of income, and you’re calling me a Judas? I don’t believe this.”

  He yanked a chair out from the table. “Will you just sit and listen to me for two minutes?”

  Laura eyed the chair as if it might be booby-trapped.

  “Please,” Sam said. He gave the chair a little shake. “Just sit.”

  “This better be good,” she said, brushing past him to perch on the very edge of the seat, tense as a sprinter just before the starting gun.

  Sam lowered himself into the chair across from her. “I am not turning you over to Artie.”

  “But you said—”

  He raised a hand to silence her. “I said we’re meeting with him. Frankly, I don’t see that we have any other choice now that he knows where you are.”

  “I’ll leave.” She sat back and crossed her arms.

  “Yeah. That’s one option, I guess. But then I’d have to leave, too, and I really don’t want to do that.”

  Some of the flintiness went out of her eyes. “You’d do that?”

  He wanted to shake her almost as much as he wanted to wrap his arms around her. “Of course, I’d do that. What did I just say to you in the car only a half hour ago? Were you even listening?”

  “You asked me not to go. At least until I had somewhere to go.”

  “I said a hell of a lot more than that,” he muttered irritably. Why didn’t women ever listen, he wondered? Why didn’t they understand him? He spoke English, didn’t he? Why didn’t Janey get it? Or Laura?

  “I care about you, dammit,” he said.

  Why Laura tilted back her head and laughed at that, Sam had no idea. It wasn’t funny to him.

  “Oh, Sam,” she said on a long sigh. “I care about you, too. That’s probably why I don’t want you to totally disrupt your life for me or jeopardize your investigator’s license when you won’t even remember my name a year or two from now.”

  “What? I just don’t get it, Laura. Do you think I have some sort of mental deficiency? Some problem with my long-term memory?”

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t think you have any deficiencies at all. It’s me. I’m the one with the long-term problem. Men…well, they walk out on me.”

  Her shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “I don’t know. I should probably just solve this whole horrible thing with Artie by saying yes to him and then waiting for the rotten creep to take the inevitable powder.”

  The idea alone was enough to tighten the muscles in Sam’s shoulders and neck, and to turn his stomach sour. He was already worried enough about the possibility of violence in tomorrow’s encounter. Not Artie’s violence so much as his own. He rolled his neck to loosen a few of the knots, then said, “I’ve never walked out on a woman in my life.”

  “That’s because there was only one woman,” she shot back.

  “I rest my case.” Sam grinned.

  Laura cocked her head to one side, staring at him a long while before she said, “What exactly did you have in mind with this meeting tomorrow?”

  “Well, see, a guy like our friend Artie isn’t deterred by threats of physical violence. In fact, the more he’s threatened, I suspect, the bigger and meaner and better he feels. So I was thinking we’d appeal to his innate sense of morality.”

  “You’re assuming he has one,” she said.

  “Okay. Then, call it his territorial instinct.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “In a nutshell, it means that when I tell him you’re my woman, he’ll have the good sense to stay away from you.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?” she asked.

  Sam shrugged. “Then, I’ll just deck him and be done with it. Either way, he won’t be bothering you anymore.”

  Sam’s woman.

  Even though it was a fiction, it had a certain appeal, Laura decided while she sat watching him as he prepared to turn the salvaged tomatoes into spaghetti sauce. There was something about a hunk in a blue gingham apron, two hundred pounds of dense bone and solid muscle decked with ruffles and bows, that kept sending little ripples through her bloodstream and making her heart nearly itch with desire.

  My God, she was even paying attention as he gathered the ingredients for the spaghetti sauce. No. Sorry. The Bolognese sauce. Well, almost Bolognese. When Sam confessed that he didn’t have any chicken livers on hand, fresh or frozen, he had such a look of disappointment on his face that Laura altered her jubilant “Thank God!” to a wistful “Aw, gee.”

  She sidled up to stand beside him at the sink where he was running tomatoes under a spray of water from the faucet. Ordinarily, the kitchen sink was not her favorite place to be, but with Sam close at her side, it was suddenly akin to standing before that famous fountain in Rome, the one where visitors tossed coins and made wishes. Oh, how she wished…

  “Can I help?” she asked, afraid to wish for what she couldn’t have. Or, more precisely, what she couldn’t keep.

  “Sure. Here.” He plopped one big fat tomato in her hand and then another. “How about blanching these?”

  “You got it.”

  She pondered the red, succulent globes a moment. Blanching? Blanching? All she knew to do to tomatoes was slice the suckers, so she decided that blanching was obviously just a fancy word for that.

  “Where’s the knife?” she asked.

  “What for?”

  “To slice…I mean, to blanch them with.”

  Sam grabbed back his tomatoes, the expression on his face wavering somewhere between horror and hilarity.

  “How about just opening up a bottle of wine?” he suggested.

  Laura looked heavenward. “You must think I’m such a boob.” She started to turn, to go back to her seat at the table where she obviously belonged, but Sam caught her in his arms.
/>   “I think you’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a long, long time,” he said, nudging her chin up, coaxing her gaze to meet his. “So, you’re not exactly comfortable in a kitchen. What difference does that make?”

  Absolutely none at the moment, she thought, when she was oh so comfortable in his arms, so cozy in the warm light of his eyes. Sam widened his stance, leaning back against the counter, drawing her closer against him, dispelling any notion that she might have had that beneath the ruffled gingham apron there was anything but hard masculine heat.

  He bent his head, brushing his lips softly against hers, sampling one corner of her mouth with his tongue, driving her utterly wild.

  “How hungry are you?” he whispered huskily.

  “Famished,” she answered in a voice nearly as sultry as his, rising on tiptoe as she spoke to be nearer, closer. “Ravenous.”

  “Me, too.” He deepened the kiss deliriously, then quit just long enough to murmur, “We weren’t going to… You asked me not to do this, remember?”

  No. She barely remembered her own name. “I must’ve been out of my mind,” she groaned.

  “Are you now?”

  As he spoke, Sam was tugging her T-shirt from her jeans. His big hands cradled her rib cage a moment and his tongue tantalized her ear. “Are you out of your mind now?”

  “Completely,” she managed to say while she reciprocated by wrenching up the back of his shirt so she could feel the smooth, bewitching warmth of his skin. Oh, how she adored the slight give to it before her fingertips met solid muscle. How she loved the shiver even her lightest touch seemed to provoke.

  “Me, too,” Sam said just before a wolfish growl rumbled deep in his throat and he swept her up into his arms. “We need a bed,” he muttered against her ear. “I’m getting too old for that floor stuff.”

  The phone on the far wall jangled, earning a sigh from Laura and a gruff curse from Sam. It suddenly occurred to her that after the shock of Artie’s call, she had forgotten to give Sam the message from Officer Charlie.