His Trophy Wife

by Leigh Michaels

  She took a closer look. Selby seemed ten years older this morning, almost haggard. “For heaven’s sake, Selby, I can take care of myself. You didn’t have any more sleep last night than the rest of us did. Go have a nap.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  Morganna didn’t believe for an instant that he would actually take himself off duty, but at least she’d tried. She let him open the dining-room door for her.

  Abigail was indeed in the room, with a cup of coffee, a concerned frown on her face and Sloan sitting next to her.

  Selby really is tired, Morganna thought. He’d forgotten to warn her of Sloan’s whereabouts. He usually did so almost automatically, without her needing to ask. It had become something of a conspiracy between them, over the months.

  Not that it would have mattered this morning, of course. If Sloan hadn’t been in the dining room, she’d have had to go looking for him. As he started to stand up, Morganna waved him back into his chair and asked briskly, “How’s Joel this morning?”

  “About the same,” Sloan said.

  Morganna turned from the sideboard with a cup and saucer and caught her mother’s gaze. Abigail was watching her closely, her eyes narrowed. Then she looked deliberately from Morganna to Sloan.

  Oops, Morganna thought. In all the stress, she’d forgotten for a moment that under these circumstances, the loving wife she was supposed to be would have greeted her husband before asking even the most important questions. And it didn’t look as if Abigail was likely to assume that Morganna and Sloan had already said hello over the toothpaste—so some sort of gesture seemed necessary. The quicker and more casual the better, she decided, so even if he was startled Abigail wouldn’t have time to notice.

  Morganna leaned over the back of Sloan’s chair to give him a one-armed hug, pressing her cheek briefly against his, intending to pull back almost instantly. But instead, his hand came up to capture hers and hold it firmly against his chest. She could feel his heart beating steadily under her fingertips, and her own skittering madly as he turned his head and kissed the corner of her mouth. The saucer she was holding trembled, and the cup rattled a warning.

  With what must have looked like great reluctance, Sloan released her, and Morganna sank into a chair.

  Abigail reached for the coffeepot, which stood at her elbow. “Good thing you hadn’t already filled that cup,” she murmured. “Did I forget to mention that you shouldn’t be shy about expressing your affections in front of me?”

  Selby came quietly into the room. “Mr. Montgomery, the fire investigator is here, requesting to see you.”

  Sloan looked at Abigail. “You were wondering what he’s like—now you can see for yourself. Show him in, please, Selby.”

  This morning, without the heavy fireman’s coat and boots and helmet, the investigator looked much more approachable, but Morganna noticed the way his gaze swept over the room when he came in. She would have sworn there wasn’t a single item he’d missed.

  “Coffee?” Sloan asked. “You met my wife last night. This is her mother, Mrs. Ashworth.”

  The investigator nodded at Morganna, shook Abigail’s hand, and took the cup Selby offered. “Thanks. This looks much better than the stuff we were drinking last night. You have a nice place here, Mr. Montgomery.”

  “Thank you,” Sloan said. “The house has belonged to my wife’s family for over a century.”

  “I see.” The investigator’s gaze slid meditatively over Morganna’s face. “I thought you might like to know what we’ve turned up so far. I have only very preliminary findings as yet, of course. It could take days, maybe weeks, before we have all the results of lab tests and everything.”

  “Weeks?” Sloan sounded less than pleased. “When can I get onto the premises with a construction engineer to find out exactly how bad the damage is?”

  The investigator’s eyes were bright. “You’re going to rebuild?”

  “That’s what the construction engineer is for—to tell me whether it’s financially feasible. Or even possible.”

  “Of course. Well, you can go in today if you like. As long as you go with me.”

  Morganna said, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Sloan. The building might not be stable—”

  “I’ve got an extra helmet in my car,” the investigator said casually.

  She was irritated. “Oh, that would do a lot of good if one of the walls collapsed!”

  “I won’t take him anywhere he won’t be safe, ma’am.”

  Which puts me pretty firmly in my place, Morganna thought. Sloan looked a little annoyed, too—as if he thought she was being overprotective. So she bit her tongue.

  The investigator turned to Sloan. “In fact, Mr. Montgomery, I’d like very much for you to come with me today. I hope you can tell us what was already there in the building, and what may have been brought in to start or feed the fire.”

  “I can already tell you one thing that wasn’t there when I left yesterday. I don’t store gasoline in my office.”

  The investigator raised an eyebrow. “How did you know there was gasoline, Mr. Montgomery?”

  “I smelled it on Joel’s clothes when I carried him out. It was pretty obvious.”

  “Yeah,” the investigator said casually, “it is hard to miss, isn’t it? People think gasoline burns up entirely and leaves no trace, but it’s one of the easiest things in the world to spot. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of container, though. I suppose our arsonist could be the tidy sort, and he carried the gas can out with him. Though they usually don’t, since it doubles the chances of being spotted with the evidence. Tell me about that natural gas space heater beside your desk, Mr. Montgomery. Did you leave it turned on or off yesterday?”

  “Off, of course. I only used it on very cold mornings and never if I was away from the office for more than a few minutes. Why?”

  “Because it was burning like a blowtorch last night till the crews got the gas switched off at the main.”

  “I suppose the explosion could have broken something,” Sloan offered.

  The investigator shook his head. “Nope. The natural gas had to be leaking already when the spark hit. That was what blew the place up, because there simply wasn’t enough gasoline to have exploded like that. And none of the fittings were broken. I looked this morning.”

  Morganna’s fingers tightened on her cup. “But how on earth do you know all that? The building’s in shambles!”

  “You’d be surprised what we can figure out,” the investigator said easily. “It takes us days sometimes to get to the bottom of the debris, but we get there eventually. We’re looking for what’s there but isn’t supposed to be—like gas cans. And also we’re looking for what’s supposed to be there but isn’t.”

  She frowned. “I don’t understand. If something isn’t there, how can you possibly know that it’s missing?”

  “It’s mostly common sense. We look for valuables. Important papers. Photo albums. Family pets. Those are all things people don’t want to lose in a fire, so sometimes they remove them before the fire starts.”

  “But if they know there’s going to be a fire…” Her voice trailed off. “I see. If they knew, then they’re automatically guilty of the arson.”

  “Something like that.” The investigator drained his coffee cup. “If you’re ready, Mr. Montgomery, let’s go take a look at your building.”

  Be careful, Morganna wanted to say. But it would probably only earn her another impatient look from Sloan and a condescending comment from the investigator.

  She hoped the investigator wouldn’t notice that there was no photograph of her mixed in with whatever was left of Sloan’s desk. In fact, he’d never displayed one—but she’d hate for the investigator to get the wrong idea about why something which common sense said should be there so obviously wasn’t.

  A fire engine still stood in the street outside, with a skeleton crew standing by, on the lookout for flare-ups and hot spots. The investigator nodded to them and passed
on by. Sloan took a deep breath and followed.

  The sight of the interior of his factory, shattered and blackened, with one corner of the roof open to the sky, turned Sloan’s stomach. He picked his way across the production floor in the fire investigator’s wake. Yesterday, he could have walked across the enormous room blindfolded and not even stubbed his toe, because he knew every inch of his property so well. Today, even if all the debris had been magically whisked away, he’d have had trouble, because everything looked different. Even the machines, which weren’t obviously ruined, looked alien because of the oily soot that coated every surface.

  “Not much point in paying a construction engineer to state the obvious,” he said, almost to himself.

  “The obvious? You mean that it’s not worth salvaging?” The investigator kicked at a lump of debris.

  “That’s what it looks like to me.”

  “I’ve seen worse. The building is pretty solid, and once all the mess is cleaned up it’ll look a lot different. But I guess I wouldn’t blame you for taking the insurance money and retiring. Playing billiards, or whatever it is you do in that big house.”

  “I’m a little young to retire to billiards,” Sloan said curtly. “I was just thinking that it might be more practical to start over somewhere else.”

  “Wait and see. At least the roof beams are still solid. If they’d been steel, they’d have twisted like spaghetti when the water hit them.” He stopped and kicked at a blackened length of wood. “Do you notice anything out of place?”

  Sloan stared at him for a second, then said dryly, “I assume you’re not talking about the obvious. No, I don’t see anything that shouldn’t be here. Or anything missing, either.”

  “Then let’s very carefully go upstairs to your office and take a look.” The investigator added casually, “Your wife doesn’t seem to want me to look very closely at this fire.”

  Sloan’s gut tightened. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just a feeling. She seemed to be making the implication that I don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to things like whether a natural gas connection is open, and whether a sprinkler system has been deliberately shut off.”

  Sloan shrugged. He hoped the gesture looked more natural than it felt. “She’s a novice at fires, and especially at understanding arson. I was curious about those things, too.”

  “I see. Well, I’m just doing my job. And part of my job is, whenever somebody tries to discourage me from looking, I look a little harder. Now, Mr. Montgomery—what do you see?”

  Morganna turned the circus-theme room box around on the rotating stand on her worktable and looked into it through the tiny windows. A six-inch-tall window-peeker would be quite impressed, she thought. The lion-cage bed was particularly striking, and she was very pleased with how easy it had been to convert the design for a carnival popcorn cart into a small desk, complete with a tiny lamp with a real bulb built into the striped canopy on top.

  The room box was nearly done, ahead of schedule for the Carousel Ball auction. Of course, that was largely because she hadn’t moved from her worktable all day. She felt just a little guilty about that, and especially about leaving her mother to entertain herself for hours on end. But it would have done no good to pace the floor and fret, which was what Abigail seemed to want her to do. Instead Morganna had kept her hands busy with something useful, and as usual, she found that the physical work concentrated her mind as well.

  And of course, her mother would have been welcome to join her. In fact, Abigail had been in and out of the workroom several times during the day. At midafternoon, she’d come in to report that Sloan still hadn’t returned, and when Morganna merely shrugged and said she wasn’t surprised, Abigail had given a snort and asked if Morganna ever paid attention to anything that was larger than dollhouse scale.

  “Miniatures are my hobby, Mother,” she’d said quietly.

  “No, Morganna, they’ve become an obsession. Letting them take over this room was one thing. Allowing them to take over your life is another.”

  And perhaps, Morganna thought wearily, Abigail was right. It was so much easier to retreat to the miniature room than it was to spar with Sloan, or to perform the role of happy wife for her friends. Emily Hamilton understood, of course—but she was the only one Morganna had confided in. And even Emily didn’t know all the details.

  She picked up the tiny circus train which she had so laboriously fabricated, and set it on a track that circled the room just below ceiling level.

  Behind her, Sloan said, “That train would make any real little boy drool. And maybe a few big boys, too.”

  She hadn’t heard him come in. She straightened a stuffed animal in the pile atop the lion-cage bed. “Are you talking about yourself? I didn’t know you were a model train buff, Sloan.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” His tone was matter-of-fact.

  Morganna bit her lip. “How did it go today—with the investigator?”

  “Nasty.” He pulled up a stool and perched beside her. “That room is really beautiful.”

  Morganna eyed it critically. “Do you think it’s too neat and orderly? For a little boy’s room, I mean.”

  “Maybe. It also looks a little chilly, with nobody there to enjoy all those great toys. Why don’t you ever put people in your scenes?”

  “Because I’ve never found ones that look real enough. Nothing ruins a miniature fantasy faster than a stiff plastic-looking doll in the middle of it. So I pretend that the people have just stepped out.” She pushed back from the table and looked at him levelly. “What happened today that you don’t want to talk about?”

  For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to answer. “The insurance company investigator showed up. It’s going to be a mess, Morganna. Because it’s definitely arson, the company is very reluctant to pay the claim until there’s a suspect in jail. And the fact that I increased the coverage just this week didn’t help my credibility with either the insurance guy or the fire investigator.”

  The sensation of déjà vu swept over her. Time seemed to fold in on itself as she relived the announcement that her father’s suicide meant that the life insurance company was reluctant to pay the claim…

  But eventually that had all worked out, she reminded herself. At least, Sloan had told her that it had, and she tried to smother the lingering doubt that he’d actually funded that check for Abigail himself. It had turned out all right before. So surely this time, too—

  “You mean they haven’t arrested those men yet?” she asked.

  “No. And they probably won’t for a while.”

  She frowned. “Why not?”

  “All kinds of reasons, apparently. Mostly because they want to be absolutely certain of getting a conviction. You heard the investigator this morning, about taking a while to get all the test results. And until they can talk to Joel—”

  “How much evidence does it take?”

  “More than they have at the moment, obviously.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve just talked to your mother, Morganna. I’ve asked her to go back to Arizona immediately.”

  “What?” She was stunned. “Sloan, you can’t just kick my mother out of the house! And why would you want to get rid of her, for heaven’s sake?”

  “Because I want you to go with her.”

  She stared at him. “Why?”

  “Use your head, honey. The guys who burned the factory didn’t accomplish everything they set out to do.”

  “You mean,” she said coolly, “that they didn’t succeed in turning you into a cinder. And you’re afraid they’ll try again.”

  “No,” he corrected. “I’m afraid if they do try again, they might miss and get you instead.”

  Morganna was startled at the warmth that flooded over her. She hadn’t anticipated feeling so good about the idea that he wanted to protect her.

  “Or they might hurt Abigail by mistake,” he added. “And I already feel guilty enough about Joel.”
>
  The warmth receded as quickly as it had come. So he classified his wife in precisely the same category as he put his mother-in-law, she told herself bitterly. And his controller. Well, what else had she expected?

  “You’re right,” she said. “Up to a point. In fact, I’ll take Mother to the airport myself. But I’m not going with her.”

  “Your devotion to duty is charming, Morganna. But please do me a favor and stop short of declaring that your place is beside me, facing whatever comes our way. I’m already feeling a little ill today and I’m not sure I could stomach that cliché.”

  She pulled back as if she’d been slapped.

  Sloan rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay, I probably shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Really? I thought you were trying to make me mad enough to get on a plane. And that comment came pretty close.”

  “On the other hand, if it works…” he muttered.

  “But not close enough. I am not leaving. Is that clear?”

  “Dammit, Morganna, why not?”

  Because my place is beside you, facing whatever comes our way. The words seemed to echo through her head.

  It was a cliché, he was right about that. But there was a reason that sayings grew into proverbs—it was because they were true.

  And in this case, it wasn’t Morganna’s sense of duty that had made those words come to her mind. It was far more than that. Heaven help her, she wanted to be beside him, sharing good and bad, laughter and tears. Sharing everything.

  Exactly when, she wondered miserably, had she made the gigantic mistake of falling in love with a man who wanted only a trophy for a wife?

  CHAPTER SIX

  MORGANNA had thought there could be nothing more destructive to a woman’s pride than being married to a man she didn’t love. Now she knew there was something infinitely worse—loving a man who wanted her only as a decoration for his life, not as a real part of it.

  Even his invitation to make their marriage a physical union as well as a legal one had been nothing more than an extension of the role he had assigned her as trophy wife. He wanted her in his bed because their children would be one more visible sign of his success. And because sleeping with her would be convenient for him, and no doubt pleasant enough. But he hadn’t invited her into his bedroom because he felt any particular tenderness for Morganna. Any other woman with the same social background would have done as well.