by Raye Morgan
Now here he was again, looking tall and lean and somehow vaguely dangerous in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It was definitely time for her to take her leave.
Daniel was staring at her in surprise that quickly turned to suspicion. Again. What did the man instinctively have against her? It was so strange. People usually took her at face value, and her value was pretty high, if she did say so herself.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Her chin rose. The man had a lot of nerve. “What are you doing here?” she countered.
He nodded toward Phoebe. “This is my grandmother.”
That was too bad. She’d really liked the older woman a lot. Now she was going to have to be careful to avoid her.
“Well, that’s something I guess the poor dear can’t be cured of, isn’t it?” she said, then recoiled, immediately wanting to bite her tongue for using such a sarcastic tone. But the man had asked for it.
“Children, children,” Phoebe scolded. “I see you already know each other, so I won’t introduce you. But I may have to give you a quick lecture on playing nicely with each other.”
Abby turned apologetically and took Phoebe’s hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you. We’ve had such a nice talk and I hope we get a chance to do that again. But I’m overdue at work. I must get back. There’s a staff meeting at eleven.”
Daniel snorted. “Poor old Richie Strong is probably wandering the halls like a lost puppy, looking for you right now,” he said.
Throwing him a poisonous look, Abby smiled at Phoebe. “I’ll be back in the morning with those brochures.”
“Ah, the famous brochures,” Daniel said softly.
She blinked and forced herself to smile even more broadly. “What time does your grandson usually come to visit?” she asked Phoebe as she turned to go. “I want to be sure to miss him.”
“I don’t want you coming back here at all,” Daniel said, his voice pleasant, but his eyes steely.
“Daniel!” Phoebe was outraged.
“I mean it, Gram. I don’t want you dealing with stuff from that clinic. They’ve got some kind of voodoo vibe going on over there, and I don’t want you involved.”
“You are impossible,” Abby said through clenched teeth.
Fury sizzled all through her system. She’d never before come across anyone who could instantly turn her usual complacency to rage the way this man did. Turning on her heel, she meant to make a dramatic exit. The only problem was, her first target seemed to be a closet. She realized her error immediately, but not soon enough to hide it from Daniel.
He grinned, standing in her way with his arms crossed.
“I’m beginning to understand where you make your mistakes,” he told her, “and how you end up locked in places you shouldn’t go into. You see, this is a door, but it’s not the right door. This is a door to a closet. That is the door to the outside world. Not the same thing.”
She knew her face was bright red, but right now she didn’t care. She only wanted to get out of the room before she did something really stupid. Her hands were already balled into fists. What would he do if she took a swipe at his nose? Oh, was she ever tempted!
“Could you just please get out of my way?”
“Oh. Certainly.” He stepped back, but at the same time, a crew began rolling another bed into the room and they both had to stand against the wall to let them pass and maneuver the bed.
“So what are you doing now?” he asked her softly, his words covered by the commotion in the room. “Trying to go after me through my grandmother?”
“Go after you!” Her jaw dropped and her hands itched to grab something to throw at his head. She had to suffice with glaring daggers at him. “Of all the egos I’ve ever known, yours is the most inflated. It’s practically bouncing off the ceiling.”
The pretty redheaded nurse had come into the room along with the moving crew. Abby noticed her distractedly as she handed Phoebe a cup with pills in it and turned to go, pausing to glance at the other two, deep in their argument.
“Well, I don’t know,” Daniel was saying in what Abby thought was a truly insolent manner. “Evidence isn’t everything, but it sure can point in a direction and—”
“Evidence!” She jabbed her forefinger at his chest. “I’d say the evidence shows you were the one coming after me yesterday. Name one good reason why I would be going after you.”
The nurse shook her head and grinned as she passed them. “Just check out those biceps, sweetie. They’ll give you a clue.”
Abby whirled and glared at the woman, but she was disappearing through the doorway.
Daniel grinned. “See? Why would I be going after you when I’ve got beautiful redheads following me around?”
“Oh!” She tried to leave but the crew was wheeling the bed back out again. Something about a broken control button. So she contented herself with hissing at him out of the side of her mouth. “Just stay away from me, Mr. O’Callahan.”
“Fine. And you stay away from my grandmother.”
She turned her head so fast, her hair whipped around her face. “Your grandmother is a grown woman. She can have visits from any friends she wants.”
He shook his head, looking exasperated. “Why are you always talking back?”
“You can only talk back to an authority figure. And I don’t see one here.”
A space opened up, and she finally made good her escape.
“See you tomorrow night at the seminar,” he called after her, making it sound like a threat.
“Not if I see you first,” she called back.
Something about the way she was stomping off made him think she would have liked to have his prone body under her shoes. He pictured that, and, for some reason, he was grinning again.
“Daniel O’Callahan, what are you doing treating that lovely young woman that way?” Phoebe demanded when they finally had the room to themselves again.
He looked at his grandmother and sighed, suddenly deflated. The thrill of the fight was wearing off, and he realized it hadn’t gone as well as he might have thought at the time. Funny how that happened.
“I guess you could say that I just gave you a demonstration of why I don’t date much,” he admitted.
He thought for a moment of Charlene, the last woman he’d gone out with, and winced, trying to push that picture right out of his mind. That was one his grandmother didn’t know about. Charlene was a stripper. With the mandatory heart of gold, he supposed. But still, a stripper.
That was the down side of being a cop. You spent so much time with the underside of life that was what you got used to, whom you felt comfortable with. And added to that, everybody started to look like crook.
Quite a contrast to Abby Edwards. She was Snow White compared to what he was used to. Not his sort at all. In fact, the very type he should stay away from, especially now when he was on administrative leave from his department.
He winced, wishing he could get over the bitterness. All his years of hard word and loyalty to the force seem to count for nothing once there was an accusation lodged against him. He knew the rules were the rules and this was the way things had to be. But that didn’t mean he had to like it—especially since the charges were to transparently lame. A man he’d arrested later charged that he’d stolen a great deal of money from him during the arrest. The man just happened to be the brother of a prominent politician, so though there was no evidence at all against Daniel, he was on the hot seat and had to go through a complete investigation and a hearing. Did he feel betrayed? Hell yes!
And that only fed into his natural cynicism, making him feel even more like an outsider. And making him a very bad fit for a women like Abby.
So why was he looking forward to that seminar more than ever?
Three
Abby turned her back to her full-length mirror in the bedroom of the apartment she shared with a sleek black cat named Ming. Looking over her shoulder, she frowned at her own
reflection in the glass. Was she getting fat?
Her mother’s voice sounded in her head. “Now, Abigail, you stay away from mirrors. Looking at yourself too much will only bring on shallow thinking. There are more important things in the world than looking pretty.”
She frowned, shaking her head. She’d listened to her mother and avoided shallow thinking and spent her high school years winning all the awards but looking like a drowned cat most of the time. Thinking back now, she realized that a little more balance might have been useful.
“Just a little shallow thinking,” she murmured to herself. “And not quite so much killing myself with homework and piano lessons and science club.”
She’d made her parents proud as peacocks, but she hadn’t had a date to the senior prom.
It had only been in the last few years that she had learned how to make herself look good. And her mother still didn’t trust it. She grinned, thinking of her.
“Too bad, Mom,” she muttered. “You’ve got Daddy. How am I supposed to get a man of my own if I don’t do what has to be done to get one?”
At first she’d attacked a beauty regimen as a project to be mastered, just like she did everything. She was one of the few people in the world who studied hairstyles and lip gloss the way astronomers studied the stars. For a while, she was maniacal at self-improvement.
But that didn’t last all that long. Very quickly her intrinsic sense of proportion took over and she relaxed a bit. The natural look was more her mode anyway—as long as natural didn’t mean unkempt and careless.
She’d seen a response in male interest right away and she’d actually dated a bit. But the men she’d met that way hadn’t exactly rung her chimes. Nice men—but no violins, no flight to the moon on gossamer wings.
And yet, a yearning had begun to grow in her. And she had to admit, deep in her heart, that this was one of the reasons she’d gone after the job for Dr. Richie the way she had. She’d met him at a Chamber of Commerce meeting where she’d been gamely trying to drum up some business for her flagging public relations firm.
He’d been very friendly to her. In fact, he had a way of talking that had made her feel as though she was the only person in the room, the only person he cared about at all. It was sort of thrilling, actually, to have this famous media star act as though he was interested in her and her alone. She’d felt lighter than air that day.
She’d overheard him complaining about his PR team and she’d immediately begun to think about going after the job. It had helped a lot to restore some of her wavering confidence when he’d seemed so impressed with her work.
“The man pretty much saved my life,” she admitted to herself, reaching into the closet to pull out the blue silk suit she wanted to wear to the seminar. “Well, my professional life, anyway.”
She paused, staring into space. Did that mean she had a…“thing” for Dr. Richie? She wasn’t sure. For some crazy reason, Daniel O’Callahan flashed into her mind at exactly the moment she started to conjure up a picture of the good doctor.
“Ugh!”
She shook that image away. Why was that man cluttering up her brain? He was annoying, obnoxious and just plain infuriating. And he seemed to take such pleasure in being a jerk.
Okay, so maybe he was sort of good-looking in a hard and dangerous way. And maybe he had made her laugh a time or two. Still, the way he always seemed to be looking for motives behind everything she did was downright offensive. She was going to avoid him like the plague from now on.
She slid the blue silk skirt up around her hips, wondering why it seemed to be more of an effort than usual. And then the zipper stuck. Looking into the mirror, she noticed the way the fabric was pulling and groaned. She was gaining weight. And she was going to have to find something else to wear.
“Ming, I’m fat,” she told her cat, who was busy laying down a carpet of black cat hairs in the middle of her white bedspread.
Ming looked up, narrowed her eyes critically, but didn’t comment.
Tugging the skirt off, Abby began to look around for an alternative, and her gaze fell on the jar of NoWait, the new weight-reduction oil Dr. Richie had developed, sitting on her dresser.
She hesitated. Should she try it? Dr. Richie had given her a sample to use in order to get acquainted with the product and its effects, but she’d thought she might just pass on that. Still, it was true that she ought to know all about what she promoted. Maybe it was time to do exactly that.
She picked up the jar and curled her fingers around it. The feel was nice, hefty and smooth, and the look was inviting. Carefully, she twisted off the top. The scent that drifted up was fresh, a sort of musky citrus that had an exotic allure.
“Why not?” she murmured. Using her forefinger, she dabbed some behind one ear. It felt cool on her skin. She did the same behind the other ear, then closed the jar and looked at herself expectantly in the dresser mirror.
Well, what now? She didn’t feel any different.
Shrugging, she turned to her closet to find something else to wear. Time would tell and she didn’t have any of that left for lollygaging. The seminar was due to start in a little over an hour and she should really be there early to help set up.
A mint-green silk suit replaced the blue one. The skirt was a little snug, too, but not as bad as the other, and she was dressed and ready to go in no time.
“Wish me luck,” she said to her cat as she pulled out her car keys and started for the garage. “I’m jumping into the deep end tonight.”
Ming regarded her with a complete lack of interest in her golden eyes. In fact, she stretched out her leg and began cleaning it intently, just to prove she wasn’t going to waste any more of her valuable time on someone who wasn’t handing out food.
Abby laughed and opened the door. A balmy breeze was blowing, and something about it filled her with a sense of anticipation. Suddenly she was sure good things were coming her way tonight. As she walked toward her car, she found herself singing a silly love song, and she laughed again.
Life, it seemed, was exceptionally good.
An hour later Abby was at the microphone, getting the overflow crowd into the proper mood for Dr. Richie’s speech. Expectations were running high. She could feel the energy behind all the faces turned up toward her, and it filled her with excitement. She wanted to know and touch every one of them. She’d never felt this way before—as though she were involved in something big, something important, something that had the potential to change a lot of lives. It was wonderful.
A ripple went through the crowd. She turned. Yes. Here he came, marching like a glorious champion, head high.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said into the microphone. “Please welcome the man who has taken the Pacific Northwest fitness community by storm, Dr. Richard Strong.”
Applause shook the rafters, rolling in waves as he walked, smiling and reaching out to take the hands that stretched toward him. Excitement grew as he emerged from the crowd and mounted the stage, taking the podium.
The consummate performer, she thought as she watched him, overwhelmed with affection and pride. He was perfect. Any woman would be lucky to end up with a man like him. She sighed as he looked over at her with an approving smile.
Any woman at all.
Daniel was standing in the shadows watching Abby and Dr. Richie interact. It was pretty depressing stuff. What did women see in the jerk, anyway? Did he have some sort of spell he cast over them? Looking around the room, seeing the fervent looks on some faces, he felt repelled more than anything else. Strange. He’d never understood the appeal of the man himself.
He did get the appeal of Abby, however. His gaze kept straying her way.
Her long shining hair hung down her back like a sweep of silk and her dark eyes looked huge in the stage lighting. She stood with her weight evenly balanced and her hips thrust a bit forward, making her look as if she was ready to dance at any moment. But most strikingly, her face was radiating happiness.
&nbs
p; She looked, he decided, like someone at a revival who had just seen the light. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but he was afraid a part of it was complete infatuation with the slick doctor at the podium. And that was enough to make him a little crazy.
Richie Strong was speaking and the crowd was drinking him in as though he held the secret to life.
“When actually,” Daniel said to himself, “what he holds is the secret to hypnotizing a crowd.”
You’re jealous, a voice whispered in his ear. You’re green with envy. You want to be the one Abby is sending those adoring looks to. Don’t you?
He shrugged. Maybe. Just a little. But it never paid to be jealous of a media sensation.
From what he’d been able to glean from casual sources, Dr. Richie was the current star in the pantheon of fitness gurus who often burst upon the scene, spread their glory across the sky and burned out in a spectacular crash of raised hopes, or else faded away into obscurity as the people turned to someone else. Where had he come from? How had he arrived at this exalted status so quickly?
Those details were sketchy at best. It seemed he had suddenly appeared as a hugely popular motivational speaker, touting his fitness and lifestyle seminars all over the Pacific Northwest. Now he’d taken over the clinic here at Portland General and it was widely assumed he would use it as a base from which to launch an even more powerful enterprise. The man was the latest thing. The sky was the limit.
Why wouldn’t Abby worship him? Everyone in the room seemed to feel the same way. From the looks he saw on their faces, they were all in the bag. Except for Daniel.
But that wasn’t what he was here for. As he tuned in to the lecture, he found it more a sales pitch than anything else.
“No, my friends. This is not magic. Though you may think it is once you’ve experienced the speed and strength of the effects. My formula is based on sound scientific principles. There are certain immutable precepts in the foundation of nutritional studies. They are ageless and never change. What I have done is found a new way to work within the same framework that everyone else must work in. I’ve picked up on elements others have missed, made new combinations, seen things in a new light. And what I’ve come up with has proven to be one of the most exciting discoveries ever in the field of weight management. And that is what I have to share with you tonight.”
