A Woman Like Annie

by Inglath Cooper

  “No one was out there,” he said, hitching a thumb over his shoulder, “so I just—”

  “That’s fine. Come in,” she said, standing.

  From ten feet away, he could see the strain on her face, the tension in her shoulders, heard a note in her voice that made it sound like someone else’s voice altogether. “Are you all right?”

  “Ah, yes. Could I get you something? Coffee?”

  “No. I’m fine, thanks.”

  She stood facing him, palms pressed to the top of her desk as if that were the only thing holding her upright. “So did you find out anything else—”

  “What’s wrong, Annie?” The question was out on the gut instinct that the devastated look in her eyes meant something.

  She all but crumpled before him, like a tent with the pegs suddenly pulled, dissolving onto the chair behind her desk. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’m fairly worthless at everything this morning. I really need to just go home and—”

  He was around the desk in less than two seconds, again before giving himself time to consider any of the reasons why it might be a bad idea. He dropped to one knee, turned the swivel chair so they were face-to-face. Up close, her despair was impossible to miss. Her eyes red-rimmed, what makeup she had on streaked and tear-damaged. “What happened?”

  “Something personal.” She sighed, her gaze on the hands in her lap. “I’ll work through it. I’m just a little blindsided at the moment.”

  “I’d like to help, Annie. Let me.”

  She lifted her chin then, the look in her eyes so vulnerable and terrified that he had the immediate and overwhelming urge to take her in his arms, wrap her up tight and swear to her that everything was going to be all right. No matter what the problem was.

  He put a clamp on that and made himself wait.

  “I…J.D.’s lawyer called yesterday. He’s filing for custody of Tommy.”

  The words hit Jack dead center in the chest. Stunned him to the point that his mind went blank. He finally found voice enough to say, “No court in its right mind would take Tommy from you.”

  She looked up at him, hope flaring in her eyes. And he prayed to God he was right, that his words weren’t just platitudes. Annie was a wonderful mother; Tommy was the focus of her life. It was one of the first things he’d realized about her—that love for her son and the pride she took in making a home for him, wanting him to grow up feeling secure and cherished. He knew these things to be true. They were qualities, he realized suddenly, for which he respected her.

  “I want to believe that,” she said, “but I keep thinking about all the things that could happen, about how much J.D. hates to lose when he decides he wants something—”

  “Wouldn’t he want what’s best for Tommy?”

  She sighed again. “J.D. has a way of figuring out what’s best for others by first deciding what’s best for him.”

  Jack started to offer an opinion on J.D.’s apparent lack of character, but decided against it, suspecting his reasons were tinted with something else besides amazement at the man’s obvious lack of care for the pain he was causing Annie. Now wasn’t the time to take a look at those reasons.

  “I know what you need,” he said, standing and pulling her to her feet in front of him. “A blue plate special. With extra mashed potatoes.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” she started to protest.

  “No arguments,” he said, taking her by the hand and leading her out of the office. “Essie used to say people and shirts have two things in common. Starch always improves them.”

  WALKER’S WAS NEARLY FULL when they got there. Charlotte Turner was working the front. She looked at Jack, then winked at Annie and gave her a thumbsup. Annie’s face went warm. Charlotte had obviously drawn her own conclusions. She put them at one of the last tables left in the back. Despite the numbness settling over her senses, Annie was aware that nearly every person in the place looked up as they threaded their way through the room. She could practically hear their thoughts. Has she changed his mind yet?

  They were sitting down with a glass of iced tea in front of them when Jack said, “So what does your lawyer think?”

  “That we need to just wait and see exactly what J.D. is asking for.”

  “Sounds logical.”

  She nodded. “Except I’m feeling anything but logical right now.”

  “Annie, you’re an incredible mother. Anyone who bothers to look can see that.”

  They were words she needed to hear just then. Since she’d left her attorney’s office earlier that morning, fear had been gaining more and more of a foothold inside her. She reached for the reasoning in his voice like a lifeline.

  “It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever imagined. Losing him.”

  “You won’t lose him.”

  She wished for his certainty, told herself that in all likelihood he was right. But then he didn’t know what J.D. could be like when he decided he wanted something.

  “Hey, you two.”

  Annie looked up. Clarice stood beside the table, wearing a smile that fell about as far short of convincing as any she’d ever seen on her. “Clarice,” she said. “Did you get my message earlier?”

  “Yeah. I just hadn’t had a chance to call you back.” She looked at Jack, smiled another neutral smile. “Hey, Jack.”

  “How’s it going, Clarice?”

  “Good,” she said, sounding, Annie thought, brittle around the edges.

  “Would you like to join us?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t want to intrude, and anyway, I’m meeting someone.”

  “Who?” Annie asked.

  “Wallace.”

  “Kingsley?” Annie did a poor job of hiding her shock.

  Clarice nodded. “He should be here any minute.”

  Clarice couldn’t stand the man. Called him Wallace-the-thirty-two-arm-octopus. Annie could barely meet eyes with him now and not bubble into laughter. So why was Clarice having lunch with him?

  Wallace appeared just then, coming up behind Clarice and putting a proprietary tentacle on her shoulder. “Hey, doll,” he said. Annie knew her sister, knew the smile Clarice pasted on her face was fake, that she was forcing herself not to slap his hand away.

  “Hi, Wallace. You know Annie. And this is Jack Corbin. Jack, Wallace Kingsley.”

  Jack stood up, shook the man’s hand, which happened to be the one not clamped to Clarice’s shoulder. “Good to meet you.”

  “Corbin. You’re the one about to close down the factory, I hear,” Wallace said.

  “Wallace.” Clarice’s tone was a verbal swat.

  The waitress appeared with their lunch plates.

  “Looks good,” Clarice said. “We’ll leave you to it.”

  “Call me later?” Annie called out after her sister, who had already turned to leave and answered with a wave.

  The waitress placed a plate in front of them both. “Anything else I can get you?” she asked.

  “We’re good,” Jack said.

  Annie glanced across the room where Clarice and Wallace had taken a table facing the window. She could see Clarice’s hurt in the very set of her shoulders. Knew that she had somehow found out about yesterday and understood the unreturned phone calls. Suddenly, the plate in front of Annie lost all appeal. She glanced at her watch, deep-rooted loyalty for her sister making her say, “Oh, goodness. You know what, I’ve got to get back to the office. There are about fifteen things I need to get done today before it’s time to pick up Tommy.”

  “Annie, wait—”

  She pushed her chair back, reached for the bill the waitress had left on the table. “I’ll get this on the way out.”

  FOR THE REST OF THE DAY Clarice was in a stew.

  Everyone in the office did their best to avoid her. Question du jour? What is up with her?

  True enough, she wasn’t going to win any personality awards from her colleagues this afternoon. She’d built herself a fairly high pedestal of indignation. She excused her
behavior with her own sense of betrayal. By Annie. That was the part that hurt so much. Her own sister. How could she be so uncaring of Clarice’s feelings?

  So maybe she could be accused of making assumptions. As mayor, Annie had a role in this whole C.M. business, granted. It could be reasoned that her meetings with Jack were nothing more than strategy sessions or whatever. Reasoned, that was, except for the few seconds when she’d observed the two of them today before they’d ever realized she was in the restaurant.

  That look!

  A person would have to be a turnip to miss it!

  Never in her life had Clarice seen that look on Annie’s face before. She was smitten with the man. Smitten!

  And it was her guess that he wasn’t much better off. She’d felt the force field around that table from twelve feet back.

  Served her right, she supposed, for staging that whole thing. From the post office across the street, she’d seen the two of them go into Walker’s, and in a moment of desperation—not to mention a momentary loss of good sense—she’d corralled a startled-looking Wallace who’d been coming in the post office into taking her to lunch, a proposition to which he agreed with respect-reducing haste.

  “Why, Clarice,” he’d said. “I was sure you were blowing me off, ignoring my phone calls after our date a few weeks ago.”

  She’d intended to call him just as soon as the first-date-hand-swatter he’d inspired her to invent rolled off the assembly lines. “Now, Wallace,” she’d said, “don’t go imagining things.”

  If he hadn’t been in possession of an ego the size of Colorado, she might have felt guilty. But she couldn’t have made a ding in his self-image with a crowbar and a large sledgehammer.

  Heaven save her from these duds!

  Why was it that she couldn’t meet a good man? And why was it that just when she thought she had, Annie had to mess the whole thing up?

  ANNIE FUMBLED HER WAY through the next two days, regretful and worried. Regretful that she’d left Walker’s the way she had Tuesday. Professional, Annie! Worried about what was beginning to feel like a serious rift with Clarice and the nagging concern over J.D.’s latest hijacking of her life.

  She had just set Tommy’s dinner on the table Thursday night when the phone rang. Maybe it was Clarice finally returning one of the dozen or so messages Annie had been leaving for her.

  “Hey, Annie, it’s Jack. Is this a bad time?”

  “Ah, no.” And then, hesitating, “I’m sorry for leaving so fast at lunch Tuesday.”

  “I was considering changing my aftershave.”

  “Your aftershave is fine. I just…things are kind of complicated.”

  “With Clarice?”

  Annie hesitated, then sighed. “Yeah.”

  “I don’t want to cause problems for you, Annie.”

  “You’re not. And anyway, let me worry about that.”

  “And what about J.D.? No chance he’s changed his mind?”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “So I’m thinking you need another outing with Jack Corbin, private eye extraordinaire.”

  “The kind where I’ll worry about getting shot or going to jail?”

  “Much tamer than that.”

  Annie smiled. “So what’s the plan?”

  JUST OVER AN HOUR LATER, Annie pulled into Jack’s driveway and cut the engine of the Tahoe. She sat there for a moment, debating the wisdom of agreeing to meet him tonight. She should make some excuse. The line between her legitimate obligation to help reroute the fate of Corbin Manufacturing and her own attraction to its owner had blurred to the point where she couldn’t honestly say which had more weight.

  As far as C.M. was concerned, she felt obligated, and, yes, wanted to help him in any way she could. But on another level, a personal level, she had to be honest with herself. There was an undercurrent of something else pulling them along now. Unspoken, but there. Awareness of one another. The desire to follow it, see where it led. The final destination was without doubt the edge of that cliff she’d been envisioning. But there was a lot of straight road before that point, some sights along the way that Annie yearned to see and had not seen in a very long time. And never with a man like Jack.

  Never with a man like Jack.

  The front porch light flicked on, and he came out, a jacket over his arm. She got out of the Tahoe. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” he said.

  And there was a second, just one, maybe two, when something good settled over them, identifiable to Annie not as a single thing, but a combination of pure physical awareness tempered with a thorough gladness to set eyes on each other again. Or so it felt to her before self-doubt called her presumptuous for assuming he felt the same things.

  “Okay, Sherlock, what’s up?” she asked.

  “I suspect the product is being taken out of the factory at night. I put a little listening device in the men’s room and got a hint today that something might happen tonight.”

  Annie was impressed. “Wow. High tech. Just the men’s room?”

  “Call me chauvinist, but it seems more likely men would be involved. Some of that furniture’s pretty heavy.”

  “True.”

  “I thought we could park somewhere close and walk in,” he said. “That way no one will realize we’re there.”

  “I’m all yours.”

  It was one of those slips-of-phrase she instantly wished she could take back. That was until she glanced up to find his gaze on her, and felt, maybe for the first time in her life, the heady sense of power a woman feels when she knows a man wants her.

  SHE SMELLED SO damn good.

  Jack knew her scent now. Some soft, subtle perfume—he had no idea what kind—but it made him think of spring flowers, sunshine and making love. And not necessarily in that order.

  From here on out, he could be any place in the world, smell that perfume, and it would be Annie he thought of.

  Annie, who was now sitting in the seat beside him, rigid as a flagpole, hands clasped in her lap.

  At some point along the way, things had taken a turn between them. Headed toward something that had the feel of inevitability to it and filled him with the conflicting urge to run and to stay.

  Stay had a stranglehold on him at the moment.

  He could have gone to the factory alone tonight. Pretty much no getting around that fact. And even after all the arguments against doing so—each of which he’d held up for his own consideration—he’d reached for the phone and called her, the words just there as if someone else were saying them.

  He turned the Porsche onto a narrow dirt road a quarter mile or so from C.M.

  “Deep undercover?” Annie was smiling.

  “Deep. I’ve got our camouflage gear in the back.”

  “What!”

  “Kidding,” he said.

  “Good. Mud-green and brown are not my colors.”

  “Then that would have been a disaster,” he teased.

  A strip of woods lay between them and the factory. The building was just visible through the tall old oaks and maples.

  “Are we walking through there?” Annie asked, sounding skeptical.

  “Do you mind?”

  She worried her bottom lip with small white teeth. “Ah, what about snakes?”

  “It’s September. Probably not too many out now.”

  “One is too many.”

  He looked down at her shoes, perfectly sensible running shoes beneath a pair of faded blue jeans. Which he took a moment to admire. He’d heard a lot of women say they didn’t wear jeans because it took a teenager to look good in them. Not so for Annie. She looked good in them. She should live in blue jeans. “I’ve got on boots,” he said, looking down at the old pair of Ropers. “No snake’ll get through these.”

  “You think one could bite through mine?” She held up one foot at an angle, looking down at the shoes as if they’d already failed her.

  “You really don’t like snakes, do you?”

  She shook her head
. “It’s my one concession to terror. When I was a little girl, I stuck my hand in a hen’s nest at my grandparents’ farm looking for eggs. There happened to be a snake in there doing the same thing.”

  “Did it bite you?”

  “On the finger. I nearly died before they got me to the hospital.”

  A shaft of something not immediately identifiable hit him in the chest. A mingled combination of fear and relief. It took a few seconds for words to surface. “Okay,” Jack said, clapping his hands together. “No walking through the woods for you tonight. Come on, I’ll be carrying you.”

  “What?” The question came quickly enough that Jack knew it had caught her completely off guard. “No, that’s all right. I—”

  “Piggyback. You’ve already witnessed what a good pack pony I am.”

  “Jack, really, I couldn’t—”

  But he wasn’t taking no for an answer. “It’s not that far, and you’ll be glad. You won’t have to think about what’s beneath every crunch of leaves.”

  She shivered, clearly torn. “Why don’t I just wait here? I could be a lookout.”

  “But I need you over there. Come on,” he said, turning around and bending his knees.

  “Oh, goodness. Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  There was probably only one thing in the world that would have made Annie climb on his back just then. And the thought of stepping on a snake was obviously it. With reluctant movements, she lifted one leg, clamped it to his waist, then gave a little jump onto the small of his back, hooking the other leg in place. “This is terrible,” she said.

  “What’s so terrible?” He stood up, boosted her into place and started walking.

  She gave a little shriek and then, “Maybe I should just walk.”

  “Your ticket’s been punched. No getting off now.” He could feel the stiffness of her posture. “Annie, you can relax, I won’t break.”

  “I am relaxed.”

  He laughed. “If I run us into a tree limb, you’re going to break.”

  “I’m fine,” she insisted.

  A few more strides and then, “Annie.”

  “What?”