At Your Service (Silhouette Desire)

by Amy Jo Cousins

  Not possible. And when you change your mind, I’ll be right here.

  So she woke with a smile on her face. Of disbelief, admittedly, that the man could be so unbelievably arrogant, but a smile nonetheless. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that.

  She could, however, remember the last time she’d awakened and felt safe in her bed. On this morning she was incredibly grateful to feel such simple comfort again.

  The night before she hadn’t even turned on the lights in her new room before falling on the bed, fully dressed, and most of the way to sleep before her head hit the pillow. She rolled over now to take a look at her temporary home and her smile broadened in gladness at the sight.

  The room was small, tucked under the eaves on the third story of an old house built like a clapboard castle, with turrets and all. The ceiling sloped sharply above her bed, creating an atmosphere of cozy warmth. Someone had painted the walls a butter yellow that glowed in the morning sunlight. The hardwood floors shone richly beneath scattered rag rugs and there was, wonderfully, an actual window seat built into the outside wall. A quilted cushion and several throw pillows made it an inviting place to curl up with a book and tea. Grace could picture it on a rainy day and hoped she’d be here long enough to enjoy that pleasure.

  An antique-style fan whirred softly in one corner, blowing the warm morning air pleasantly throughout the room. She’d slept beneath a single cotton sheet, which she threw back now as she rolled out of bed and onto her feet. When she reached over her head in a long stretch, her fingers brushed the slope of the ceiling and she grinned.

  Sarah had left her bags on top of a long, low dresser that sat tucked beneath the lowest eave. Next to it, she’d also left a note folded on top of a blue towel and facecloth.

  Grace—

  Hope your first night’s rest was a good one. The bathroom is down the hall on the left. Use anything you need, and feel free to take the same liberties in the kitchen. If you can find anything worth eating, that is.

  Tyler said last night to tell you not to show your face in the bar before 4 p.m., but to bring the stuff you need to complete the paperwork. I’m at work, will see you at Tyler’s later.

  Welcome,

  Sarah

  Grace sat on the edge of the dresser with a thump. How could she have forgotten so quickly? Clearly, that hadn’t been a problem for her boss. The small matter of her registration with the federal government as an official employee of Tyler’s Bar & Grill was still hanging over her head.

  Like a guillotine, she thought morbidly.

  I’ll just have to figure out how to build that bridge when I need to cross it. But right now, what I need is a shower. A long, hot, wash the smoke out of my hair, shower. Tyler and his paperwork can wait.

  In the bathroom, she scrubbed and soaked and refused to notice the dark chestnut roots growing in at the base of her honey-blond hair. She’d paid a ridiculous amount of money to have it done at a downtown salon no one in her circle visited, on the day she’d run away. Something about the drastic change in hair color, and the new, softer cut she’d requested, had shifted the whole shape and feel of her face. She looked younger, and more vulnerable, than she had in years.

  Looking at herself in the mirror, she felt sure that no one who knew her previously would recognize her, as long as they didn’t get more than a casual look. With her current lack of funds, she’d have to wait awhile before touching up the roots, but she didn’t think anyone would notice for at least another couple of weeks.

  Thoughts of being recognized, though, had spoiled her morning as thoroughly as thoughts of the upcoming confrontation with Tyler. Pacing the kitchen in her bathrobe, she scooped some debatably dated lemon yogurt out of a carton and tried to think her way out of either of her dilemmas.

  Tyler first. If only because her problems there were more concrete. No ID, no job. But how to get around that catch-22 was the question. Could she fake a mugging on her way to work? Pretend that her wallet had been stolen and hope to ride for a week or two on that story, too busy to go to the D.M.V. to get another driver’s license?

  But what good would that do her, really? In a week, she’d just have to come up with another story, and although Tyler might bite once or even twice, surely it was too much to expect a third time.

  You know, in spy novels it’s always ridiculously easy to get a fake passport or driver’s license made, she thought, angrily recalling her favorite authors. They make it sound like all you need is five hundred bucks and a phone book and it’s goodbye Grace Haley, hello Grace Desmond.

  I bet John LeCarre has never actually been on the run in his life, or he would have realized it just isn’t that easy. At least not when you’re without underworld connections.

  As she got dressed in an outfit nearly identical to the one from the previous evening, she settled unhappily on the mugging story as her best of several bad options. She laced up her shoes and packed her apron back in her bag after removing her tips from the night before. The money she tucked in a dresser drawer, except for a twenty-dollar bill that she put in her wallet. She trusted Sarah, and there wasn’t a lock on her door here in any case. Nor could she go and deposit the money in a bank, unless she wanted to provide her family with a way to track her down.

  She locked the apartment door behind her and headed down the interior stairs. On the walk home last night, she thought she’d spotted a pay phone at the corner convenience store.

  Indeed, there was a phone bolted to the exterior of the brick building, and the clerk inside was more than happy to give her change, after she bought a bottle of lemon ice tea and a copy of the Sun Times and the Tribune. If her family had made any announcement about her disappearance, she’d find it in one of the two Chicago dailies.

  She flipped through every page of both papers, sitting on a curb in the parking lot, and then did it again from back to front.

  Nothing.

  Not a word about her disappearance for more than two weeks in a row now.

  It wasn’t as if she’d expected the headlines to be blaring Heiress Kidnapped! After all, she had left a note in plain view on the dining room table of her penthouse condo, where anyone coming to check on her would find it. Or her cleaning lady would have come across it and called her family. And she’d popped another little security blanket in the mail to her attorney, too.

  But it wasn’t mere ego, either, that had made her expect to see something about her abrupt departure from the Chicago restaurant scene in the newspapers. She was a well-known figure in the kind of circles that were regularly written up in the society columns of the local papers. And almost three weeks without an appearance by her at some charity function or event hosted at one of the Haley restaurants ought to have been occasion for some notice.

  Shaking her head, she tucked the papers in her bag and crossed to the pay phone.

  Maybe Paul would have some answers for her.

  Once again, one of Chicago’s elite French chefs was less than thrilled to be rousted from sleep at what he considered the indecent morning hour of noon. But he was happy enough to hear from her and more than willing to clear up the mystery of her family’s lack of public reaction.

  “They what?”

  She ignored the heads of passing pedestrians that turned at her shriek and shoved more quarters in the phone as the recorded voice broke in for the second time.

  “They say you are sick with grief over your grandmère, chérie. That because she dies, you cannot…what did they say? Think straight,” Paul explained again patiently. “They say that you have gone off to one of those fancy hospitals for rich women with too many problems. You know, like that president’s poor wife.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she sputtered. “They’re telling people I’m at some kind of rehab clinic? Who’s going to believe that?”

  “Ma chère, if you are not here to show them otherwise, many people will believe it.”

  “What a mess.” Grace slumped against the edge of the
phone booth and stared blankly at the street in front of her. She’d thought to buy herself some time and perhaps hoped to make her family worry. Take her seriously for once.

  “Indeed it is,” Paul said sternly in her ear. She could hear his disapproval ringing down the phone line. “But everything can be fixed, chèrie, if you would just come home!” His voice was booming by the final words.

  “I can’t, Paul.”

  “Why not?”

  Grace took a deep breath. She needed to share her burden with someone, and there was no one she trusted more than Paul. “They want to sell the restaurants.”

  “Who does? Which restaurants?”

  “My family does, Paul. And Charles, too.” And then the worst part of all. “They want to sell all of the restaurants. They’ve already lined up a buyer for each one.”

  The silence over the phone line was deafening. Paul had worked for the Haley Group restaurants since Grace’s grandmother had gone into business, and she knew the news that her family wanted to break up the company would devastate him. Paul had worked in every restaurant in the corporation, as varied as the cuisines and decor and attitude might be, and looked on each one as being one of his children. For the past ten years, he had reigned as head chef at Nîce, the capstone of the Haley Group.

  “Even my restaurant?” In Paul’s mind, it was his kitchen, therefore his restaurant.

  “Yes.”

  “You are certain that they meant my restaurant, too.”

  Grace’s laugh was shaky. At least Paul would always remain the same. “I’m certain.” He muttered something in French. “I don’t think you ever taught me the translation for that one.”

  “You don’t want to know, chérie. But I still do not understand. Your grandmother, she put you in control of the Haley group, yes?”

  “Not exactly.” Grace wondered how to explain it to this crazy, lovable Frenchman who had to have a sous chef balance his checkbook for him. “She made me the CFO and Managing Director, which means I’m in charge of all the day-to-day decision-making, but Charles is still the president. Even if he is mostly a figurehead.”

  The thought of how Charles had schemed his way into her family, playing on their trust in family ties that went back generations, until he’d convinced everyone that his visibility and social connections made him the prefect image-maker for the restaurant conglomeration, still made her want to stick pins in a voodoo doll.

  “That boy. He does not know a pâté from a piece of…never mind. I have been thinking that you owned the Haley Group, Grace.”

  “A large part of it, but not all.” Grace forced herself to continue speaking as if her next words didn’t break her heart. “Grandmother meant to change her will, but she fell ill first. She left me fifty percent of the Haley Group. Enough that they can’t sell without me, but I can’t get rid of them, either.”

  “These troublemakers?”

  Her laugh was born weakly from the sharp pain beneath her breastbone. “Yes. These troublemakers.” Her custom-tailored boyfriend. Her mother. Her family. People who were supposed to be her support, her bedrock. Not her betrayers.

  Family wasn’t supposed to try to sell off, piece by piece, all that you had worked to put together over the years.

  “Paul, I’m out of quarters here. Just keep an eye out, will you? And don’t worry, before any deals are made, I think I have one last option to play.” After all she’d done to hide, the next step ran against every instinct, but she needed the connection. “If there’s an emergency, you can leave a message for me at a tavern uptown. It’s called Tyler’s.”

  Grace used the hours before her shift to set in motion what she feared might be a last-ditch attempt to save her restaurants from being scavenged like a corpse on the Serengeti Plain. It’s funny, she thought as she waited on hold at yet another pay phone, I don’t even remember when I started to think of them as mine. To feel as if each restaurant, from the flowers on the host desk to the lock on the Dumpster, belongs to me, if only because I know it so well.

  But they are mine.

  She felt pride of ownership at the thought, stronger than when she’d thought of the restaurants as belonging to her family as a whole.

  But my mother and Charles don’t value them as anything other than investments. They can’t understand why we shouldn’t just sell them off and pocket the cash. Go play in the Mediterranean for a good long while. They’ve never understood what it meant to Grandmother, what it means to me, to see the business she built up from a deli on State Street blossom into this.

  I’m damned if I’ll sell off her vision.

  My vision.

  Grace reined in her irritation at the thought of the various investment groups and individuals who wanted to purchase each Haley Group property. She imagined them as drooling, panting greyhounds at the starting line of a racetrack, moments from springing ahead and chasing down the prize. But that wasn’t fair. In all likelihood, each potential buyer was completely unaware that those offering to sell off a piece of the Haley Group were not, in fact, authorized to do so.

  Which sparked an idea.

  Another hour and she’d drafted a list of instructions to her attorney. She would wait to send them off, hoping to find a way to settle matters with her family amicably. But if necessary, she would use whatever weapons she had to preserve her Grandmother’s vision. Grace’s own dream.

  Charles and her mother would find they weren’t the only ones who could betray blood.

  Tyler’s immediate grin and the casual, “Hey there, Gracie, darlin’,” he tossed out upon seeing her, did nothing to blind her to the fact she was walking into the lion’s den.

  “How’d lunch go?” she asked. Today, Saturday, had been his first day open for lunch, although Tyler had expected it to be slow.

  “Better than I expected.” He finished wiping down the bar and then flicked the bar rag at a man sitting by the taps, his back to the room. “Probably helped that I had such a charming devil behind the bar.” The man shook his head and waved Tyler off. Grace saw that he seemed to be reading some kind of legal document. “Grace Desmond, meet Spencer Reed, Addy’s husband. The finest attorney north of the Loop.”

  “You’re just impressed that I talked the alderman out of a liquor license in time for your grand opening,” Spencer said, turning on his stool.

  Tall and wiry, with curling blond hair, a wicked grin and wire-rimmed glasses that he obviously used only for reading as he peered over them at her. Grace got the impression of fair-haired Clark Kent, and understood why Addy went home with such a smile in her eyes.

  “You bet I am. Doesn’t do much good, opening a bar and grill, if you can’t have the bar half open, along with the grill.”

  Introductions continued, Grace shook hands with all the sincerity she could muster, less than thrilled to find herself chatting casually with a well-known Chicago attorney. Particularly one whose eyes locked on her with calculated observation. Not suspicion, exactly. But as if he were taking a mental photograph, listing bullet points under the heading “For Further Investigation.” She was afraid it wouldn’t take him long to figure out where he’d seen her before.

  The contrast with Tyler couldn’t have been clearer. Spencer was the kind of man Grace was used to dealing with in her regular life. Polished. Urbane. Comfortable traveling in the upper echelon of society. And she could appreciate with a woman’s eyes that he was physically attractive. But she observed him as she would an Ansel Adams photograph, with appreciation but no desire to acquire it.

  Tyler made her need to own, to possess, stand up and shout out loud.

  He was rough-edged, as likely to assault a woman with a knee-weakening kiss in the middle of a crowded bar as to carefully walk her home without attempting to hold her hand. He dedicated himself to pursuing his goals without rest, and worked from a strength in family that let him rely on his mother and sisters to lend a hand when disaster struck. And he cared enough about an unknown diner waitress he’d hired on the fly
to make sure that she slept in a safe place.

  And the fact that Tyler makes you drool doesn’t factor in at all, Grace?

  She was glad that Tyler chose that moment to walk to the far end of the bar. It was hard to look a man in the face when you couldn’t stop yourself from picturing him naked. Then she saw the papers he held in his hand, and all pretense of serenity fled.

  “Come on, let’s get this over with.” He waved her over to a seat at the end of the bar.

  Grace felt light-headed and figured it was a toss-up as to whether she passed out or threw up. She knew in an instant that she could never pull off the mugging story.

  The truth?

  Not a chance. She might find Tyler as sexy as all get-out, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be on the phone to the newspapers as soon as he found out who she was. Any money he might be paid aside, the free publicity alone—Haley Works For Tips At Tyler’s Pub—would be priceless.

  Even in a best-case scenario, Grace could picture him contacting her family, because he felt sorry for her, and for them, and thought he could fix things. The man had shown distinct tendencies to take care of the women in his life, and she supposed she was one of those women now, if only as an employee.

  The entire question was pointless, really. Spencer Reed sat at the other end of the bar and she wouldn’t be saying a damn word in front of witnesses, particularly not that one.

  So. No answer at all.

  “I can’t fill those papers out.”

  “Really. Why?” He didn’t strike her as being surprised or concerned. Rather, he seemed watchful, as if she had just provided him with one of several expected responses.

  “Does it matter?”

  He shook his head impatiently, as if in disbelief at her stupidity. “Of course it does. Are you a criminal on the run from the law?”

  She knew the question was meant to be ridiculous. “Of course not.”

  “There you go.” His grin was encouraging. “That would be bad.” He stopped for a moment and looked at her. Then he turned, poured her a cup of coffee and set it in front of her with sugar and half-and-half. “Drink this.” She wrapped her hands around the solid ceramic mug. “Damn it, Grace. You always look so vulnerable. I’d probably try to help you if you’d just broken out of jail where you’d been locked up for robbing banks.”