Passion and Scandal

by Candace Schuler

  Steve went stock-still, his whole body tightening under a sudden barrage of conflicting emotions. The weight of her head pressed against the taut muscles just north of his waistband, the silkiness of her heavy hair sliding through his fingers, the smell of her perfume at such close range, aroused every aggressive masculine instinct he possessed. The soft shaking of her shoulders, the trembling sound of her breathing as she tried to control herself, had him struggling for tenderness.

  It wasn't as if he'd never had a woman turn to him for comfort before. In his line of work, knowing how to comfort a distraught woman—or a man or child, for that matter—was as important as knowing what questions to ask and where to look for the answers. But if anyone had told him, even ten minutes ago, that he'd be standing in his office with a beautiful woman's face practically pressed into his groin, trying to think of ways to comfort her instead of get her on her back on his broken down sofa, he would have laughed and said they were crazy.

  And yet, here he was, stroking her hair and hoping like hell she didn't notice the part of him that had suddenly sprung to rigid attention beneath his jeans.

  "It's okay now, honey," he murmured soothingly. "Just take a couple of deep breaths and you'll be all right. No sense getting upset until we know if he's the right one, now, is there?"

  Willow sniffled and shook her head. "No, you're right." She put her hand on his waist, pushing a little away from him, and tilted her head back. "I'm sorry," she said, gazing up at him with eyes that glimmered with unshed tears. She tried to smile, her lips quirking up at the corners in a self-deprecating, embarrassed little grimace devoid of any real humor. "I'm acting like a crazy person."

  "I guess you're probably entitled to act a little crazy," he murmured gruffly, gazing down at her as he mindlessly smoothed his palm over the back of her head. "It's not every day you find out you might be related to the next senator from California." He grinned, revealing the dimple in his lean cheek. "The fact that he's a Republican was bound to make the shock worse."

  She smiled for real, as he had meant her to, honest amusement replacing some of the dazed confusion in her slanted golden brown eyes. Steve lifted his free hand, intending to brush back the lock of hair that had fallen over her face. Somehow, he found his hand cupping her cheek, instead, and he extended his thumb, slowly brushing it across her lower lip.

  She gasped once, a tiny breath of sound, and went very still in his hands, like a small, fragile animal instinctively freezing to avoid detection by something bigger and infinitely more dangerous than she was.

  He stroked her lip again, and the curve of her cheek, and the line of her delicately chiseled jaw, fascinated by the shape and texture beneath his caressing thumb. She was soft everywhere. Soft lips. Soft skin. Soft hair, as dark and thick as his mother's mink coat, as shiny as the satin ribbons his younger sister used to wear in her hair when she was a little girl.

  He had a sudden, searing vision of laying Willow Ryan down, naked, on that mink coat, her soft pale skin gleaming like a pearl against the lush fur. He imagined tying her up with the satin ribbons, winding the long shiny strands around her ankles and thighs and wrists, around her arms and waist and breasts, tying it all up with a pretty bow beneath her chin. And then slowly untying it all again, revealing her softness inch by delicious inch, like a present meant just for him.

  And he could do it, he thought. He could have her right here, right now. She was vulnerable and off-balance, looking to him to solve her problems for her. It would be so easy. With just a little persuasion, he could have her lying naked beneath him on the old leather couch against the wall. One kiss, two, and she would be his. He tightened his hand on the back of her head, drawing her up out of the chair. Willow rose to his touch like a marionette in the hands of the puppet master.

  He touched his lips to hers once... twice... three times... soft, sweet, coaxing little baby kisses that had her parting her lips in anticipation of more. He gave it to her, caressing her lips with his in a moist open-mouthed kiss. She made a small yearning sound, deep in her throat, a tiny whimper of uncertain resistance and arousal, barely loud enough to be heard.

  It was enough to jolt Steve out of the sensual fog that enveloped him. Good God! What was he thinking? What was he doing? He didn't get sexually involved with clients. It was his one unshakable, irrevocable rule.

  She'd come to him needing help. Trusting. Vulnerable. And, then, when her defenses were at their lowest, when she'd turned to him in a moment of need, seeking the simple comfort of a human touch, he'd gotten a hard-on and started daydreaming about ravishing her on the office furniture. There were names for men who preyed on the vulnerabilities of women but they were ones that had never been—and never would be—applied to him.

  Deliberately, Steve relaxed his hands, releasing her head, and stepped back. "Feel better now?" he asked, trying to keep it light, trying to reassure her.

  "Ah... yes," she said and, amazingly, she was. His gentle kiss had been exactly what she needed to chase away the sick, confused feeling in her stomach. "Yes, I am."

  "Well, then, since we aren't going to be able to talk to Roberts until tomorrow," he said casually, as if they both weren't breathing just a little too fast, "how 'bout we take a ride over to the Wilshire Arms? It'll give you a chance to look at the place you may have been conceived."

  Chapter 3

  Willow tipped her head back against the white leather upholstery of Steve Hart's 1967 baby blue Mustang convertible and let the Los Angeles sun beat down on her face. She'd suggested driving her car to the Wilshire Arms, since it was parked just two doors down from Thuy's bakery, but Steve had taken one look at the sedate gray sedan she'd rented from Hertz and walked right on by it. They'd had to walk three blocks to the secured parking lot where he kept his car—which qualified as a major hike to most Californians, who drove everywhere. But now, sitting in the sporty little convertible with the sun beating down on her closed eyelids and the wind dancing in her hair, Willow decided the blister forming on her left heel was worth it.

  It was one of those perfect Southern California days. The kind of day that made millions of people decide Los Angeles was the only place they wanted to live despite earthquakes, urban crime, and high taxes. Willow stretched a little, pushing her shoulders back against the soft leather seat, and sighed in contentment, indulging herself with imagining they were driving along the Coast Highway, heading north, with the land rising up, rich and golden, on one side of the road and the Pacific crashing against the beach on the other.

  And then there was the squeal of brakes. A horn honked in response. And someone shouted an anatomically impossible obscenity.

  Willow's lovely fantasy vanished into thin air. She sighed and opened her eyes—just as they passed a billboard advertising the low, low, incredibly low interest rates available at a certain friendly neighborhood bank.

  She straightened in the soft bucket seat, automatically smoothing her skirt down over her knees. "It just occurred to me that we haven't discussed your fee," she said, raising her voice to be heard above the sound of Jan and Dean singing about a little old lady from Pasadena and her lead foot.

  Steve reached over and turned the radio down a notch. "Excuse me?"

  "Your fee," Willow said, appalled she had forgotten about it until now. She'd been distracted, certainly, but it wasn't like her to neglect to get the financial aspects of any deal settled first.

  Steve gave her a considering glance out of the corner of his eye as he downshifted into first to take the corner at Santa Monica and Westwood. "Seventy-five dollars an hour with a six-hundred-dollar nonrefundable retainer up front," he said, quoting his highest rates. He charged most of his cases a lot less than that. Many were done pro bono. But a woman in a seven-hundred-dollar suit and real gold jewelry could afford to pay top price. "Plus expenses."

  Willow was prepared to pay whatever it took to find her father, of course, but—"Seventy-five dollars an hour?" she said skeptically, automatically haggling fo
r a better deal. "Isn't that a little high, even by L. A. standards?"

  "Naw, those are my discounted rates. Just for you, sweetheart," he said, slanting her a lazy glance as he changed lanes to pass an in-line skater who was making illegal use of the roadway. "If they're too high maybe we can take it out in trade."

  A warm little flutter of awareness slid down her spine; twin to the feeling that had rippled through her the first time he'd flashed his dimple; distant cousin to what she had felt when he kissed her. It was a dangerous feeling, and inappropriate, given the circumstances. "And just what exactly do you mean by that?" she asked, giving him a sharp look from under lowered brows.

  "Not what you're thinking," he chided her, lying through his perfect teeth. Because she was right, it was exactly what she was thinking. Not for real, of course. He wouldn't sink so low as to suggest she trade sexual favors for his services as an investigator. But a man could dream, couldn't he?

  And he'd been dreaming, all right, his fingers closing tighter and tighter on the leather-wrapped steering wheel as he'd darted glances at her out of the corner of his eye. She'd sat there with her face turned up to the sun like a pleasure-seeking sybarite, her breasts pushing against the front of her tailored silk blouse and her sleek gray pin-striped skirt sliding higher up her thighs every time she snuggled against the leather. God, he wished she weren't a client.

  "What I had in mind," he said, "was a simple exchange of professional services."

  Willow considered that for a moment. "You mean barter?" she asked innocently, as if the concept were unfamiliar to her. During her early years on the commune, before she'd taken over the management of Blackberry Meadows' Pure Fruit Essences and made them all rich beyond their wildest dreams, barter had been the primary means of economic survival. Willow had been better at it than anybody.

  "I guess we could work something out." She shifted in her seat, crossing her legs as she angled her body toward him, and hooked a sheaf of flyaway hair behind her ear. "What did you have in mind?"

  Was she doing that on purpose? he wondered. Using her sex appeal to try to distract him? He slanted another glance at her out of the corner of his eye. As far as he could tell she had nothing but business on her mind. The sexiness was just a natural part of her, an inborn quality that even her I'm-a-highly-skilled-professional-woman outfit couldn't hide.

  "Did any of those fancy degrees you've got teach you anything about computers?" he asked.

  "The one you had in your office had a 386SX processor, with 4 megabytes of memory, a 150-meg disk drive and a 300-dpi laser printer," she said, showing off. Making what you had to offer as attractive as possible was the first step to successful bartering. "You should have gotten a Pentium processor with 12 megabytes of memory, a gigabyte of disk space and a built-in CD-ROM. It has a lot more power for not a lot more money. And a 600-dpi printer would give you much better quality graphics."

  "I don't want better quality graphics," he grumbled, turning his attention back to the traffic as it slowed for a construction crew. "I just want to computerize my accounting system."

  "Well..." Now that she knew what he wanted, she could settle into some serious haggling. "Judging by the ledger I saw on your desk, I'd say you don't even have a decent manual system at the moment. It'd probably take me, oh... two or three days just to make sense of the mess you made of it, then, say, another day to get a new system set up. So, four days total should do it." She nonchalantly plucked a nonexistent piece of lint off her skirt and held it out over the car door for the wind to take. "I make nearly four thousand dollars in that time with Blackberry Meadows," she said, rounding to the nearest hundred. "Of course," she added, setting him up for the kill, "if I have to teach you to use the computer first, we should probably add another week to that estimate."

  "Is that four thousand a week before or after taxes?"

  "Before," she admitted. "But I don't think that's relevant. Your seventy-five dollars an hour is a before-tax figure, too."

  The lady was one sharp cookie; a sharp, sexy cookie, whether she was trying to be or not. He'd never realized a business discussion could be so damned stimulating.

  "Do we have a deal?" she asked.

  "I'm thinking." He stalled, just to make her work for it.

  "I'd be willing to throw in two of those days of training for free as a gesture of goodwill."

  "Deal," he said, and downshifted into another turn.

  They both smiled, each satisfied that they had made the better bargain.

  * * *

  The Wilshire Arms apartment building was located on Wilshire Boulevard between a small Italian grocery store and a brick-fronted bar named Flynn's. It was an aging grande dame of a building, a great lady from a bygone era with sun-washed pink stucco walls, wrought-iron balconies, graceful arched windows, and a fanciful turret rising up from one corner of the slanting red-tiled roof. Originally constructed in the twenties by a successful real-estate speculator, it had undergone several incarnations over the years, suffering the ignominious fate of having its spacious, high-ceilinged rooms chopped into ever smaller apartments. But somehow, through all the changes it had endured, it never lost its original elegance and glamour.

  Willow stared at it, her gaze darting back and forth between the building and the photographs she held in her hands. The banana tree in front was taller now than it was in the pictures and there were some lush flower beds that hadn't been there back in 1970, but it was plain to see how Steve had so easily recognized it. It had hardly changed at all in the last twenty-five years.

  "Are you going to sit in the car all day and stare at it?" Steve asked, looking down at her from where he stood on the sidewalk. "Or are you going to get out and come in with me?"

  Willow looked up, startled to realize he was standing on the other side of the door, holding it open for her. "Oh. Sorry." She slipped the photographs into the pocket of her suit jacket and swung her legs out of the car.

  Steve permitted himself a quick glance before looking away; he couldn't really be blamed for picturing her ankles with satin ribbons wrapped around them. That was just the kind of fantasy that stuck in a man's mind.

  "Why don't we put that in the trunk?" he said, when she leaned over and reached into the back seat of the open convertible for her briefcase. "You're not going to need it here and there's no sense lugging it around."

  Willow handed it to him without comment, waiting on the sidewalk as he walked around behind the car. He stowed the briefcase and then, to her secret amusement, leaned over and carefully buffed off the fingerprints he'd left on the gleaming paint job with the sleeve of his navy sport jacket.

  "She's a classic," he said when he looked up and caught her smiling. "And classics deserve to be pampered."

  "I'm surprised you park her in the street if you feel that way."

  "This is a pretty good neighborhood," he said, taking her elbow to escort her up the brick path to the front steps of the building. His dimple flashed briefly. "And she's got an alarm that'll wake the dead if anyone so much as breathes on her too hard."

  The front door of the Wilshire Arms had a keyed security lock, meant to keep everyone but tenants out of the building. There was a small brass panel set into the pink stucco wall on one side of the door. It held a column of push-button doorbells, each neatly labeled with a name and apartment number. Above it was a gleaming brass plaque, about two feet square, with the name of the building deeply engraved in bold Gothic script. Below it someone had scratched the words Believe the Legend.

  "What do you suppose that means?" Willow asked as Steve reached out to press the buzzer marked Manager. "What legend?"

  "I have no idea. Probably just some juvenile delinquent's idea of a joke."

  "It is referring to the legend of the lady in the mirror," said a soft voice from behind them. The accent was faintly Russian.

  Steve and Willow turned as one. A tiny woman, not much more than five feet tall, was standing at the bottom of the wide brick steps. She w
as dressed in a hot pink jogging suit and high-top sneakers. A silver lame baseball cap was perched on her head, with a thick, snow-white braid poking out the hole in the back and hanging down over one shoulder. She appeared to be in her eighties.

  "I'm sorry," Willow said, thinking she must want to get into the building. "Are we blocking your way?"

  "Oh, heavens, no, child. I usually go through the courtyard gate around the other side of the building after my morning walk." She waved one fragile, blue-veined hand to indicate the general direction. "That way I do not have to remember to carry my key. But I saw you here, pushing the manager's buzzer, and I thought I should tell you he is probably not back yet. He was just leaving the building—a trip to the hardware store, I believe—when I started out on my walk this morning." She gave them a cheery, unabashedly inquisitive smile. "Did you want to see him about renting an apartment?"

  Steve shook his head. "We just have a few questions about some former tenants we hoped he might be able to answer. It all depends on how long he's been the manager here."

  "Oh, Mr. Mueller has been with the Wilshire Arms for..." she tilted her head as she thought about it "...for almost twenty-seven years, I believe it has been."

  Steve and Willow exchanged a significant glance. Twenty-seven years. This Mueller might be able to tell them something about her mother.

  "Yes, I am sure of it," the beautiful old lady said. "He started to work here in 1968.I remember it very well because that was the year I had my apartment painted in shades of mauve. What an unfortunate mistake that was," she confided with a lilting laugh that wouldn't have sounded out of place coming from a young girl. "I had Mr. Mueller repaint the entire apartment over for me immediately."

  "Then you've been here since 1968, too?" Willow asked, hoping for yet another possible source of information about the mother she'd never known.