by Judy Duarte
The observation made her smile. She took his words as a compliment, and because it was a compliment, she was compelled to frame a denial.
“Maybe I’m just squeamish.”
Despite the fact that she still looked fragile, she didn’t strike him as the squeamish type. “If you were squeamish, you would have had the exterminator come in and kill it, not carried it off in a little wire cage to an open field.”
His voice was deep, low. Romantic, she thought, although she’d been willing to bet he probably didn’t think so. And now that she looked, aside from being soft and brown, his eyes were sad. Incredibly sad. He was a man who’d been through a great deal. Maybe even a tragedy. He had been a star-crossed lover, she guessed, her mind leaping to the topic that was never far from her thoughts. Romance was what made the world go around and someday, she was going to have one of her own.
Someday.
Abruptly Brooke stopped herself before her mind slipped into high gear. She still had a lot to do before she went home herself.
“Um, we are closed, Mr.—” Pausing, she looked at him expectantly.
He thought of giving her an alias. It was a simple enough thing to do. He certainly had enough identification on him to back him up if he gave her another name. But then he decided there was no need for the extra deception. He sincerely doubted that she had any idea who he was or what he did for a living.
From what he’d managed to gather about her, Brooke Moss had led a very sheltered life. Young, sheltered women had no need to concern themselves with people who made their living as private investigators.
And keeping the lies down to a minimum made them easier to keep track of.
“Banning,” he finally told her. “Mark Banning.”
“Banning,” she repeated, wrapping her tongue around the name. She liked it. It was strong, uncomplicated. Uncompromising. Like him. “Were you here for the poetry reading?”
She didn’t remember seeing him, but then, there’d been a lot of people here tonight, she might have not noticed him—although a man like Mr. Banning was hard to miss.
He shook his head. “I just missed it. I slipped in afterward.” On purpose. He wanted to mill around the store when it was filled to capacity so that he wouldn’t attract too much attention. “During the autographing period.”
“Are you interested in collecting autographs?” Even as she asked, Brooke knew the answer had to be no. The man she was talking to didn’t look like someone who cared about collecting other people’s names scribbled on pieces of paper.
“No, but I am interested in San Francisco.” It was the cover story he’d prepared for himself. Ross owned a bookstore that specialized in the unique, the books that didn’t turn up on the shelves at local chains, as well as a sampling of the usual current fare. Going out of his way to seek out Moss’s establishment because of the kind of books it carried seemed to be a good excuse for him to be there.
“Well, we are in San Francisco.” She laughed as she stated the obvious, then sobered just a little. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Banning—”
He realized he was staring at her smile and forced himself to focus.
“Mark,” he corrected.
He’d also found that people tended to talk more easily to people they were on a first-name basis with, although now that he had met her, he had a feeling that talking was the one thing Brooke Moss or Ross had absolutely no trouble with.
“Mark,” she echoed, punctuating his name with a smile before taking another stab at evicting him. She’d let people linger after hours before, but she was tired tonight, and besides, she wanted to go home to her father to make sure he was all right. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mark, but we are closed.”
He nodded. There was nothing to be gained by pushing. And he did want to verify that he was right about Moss. Besides, his job wasn’t over once he was sure the man was who he’d been sent to find. There was more to the assignment than that. “What time do you open in the morning?”
Brooke looked up at him. Apart from the scar, he had nice features. Strong features. He was a very nice-looking man, actually. Handsome in a dark, brooding sort of way. She felt contrite over her initial reaction. The man probably thought she was some kind of empty-headed idiot.
“Officially we open at ten, but the door’s usually unlocked by nine, if not before.” Her father always liked to come in early to spend time with his books. If a customer wandered in and joined him, that was fine, too. The tomes that lined the shelves of the store were so much more than just books to him. They were his friends, his link with the past as well as his portal to the future. He’d tried to instill the same sort of feelings within her and to a great extent, he’d succeeded. “This is kind of my home away from home.”
He pretended to look confused. “Then you don’t work here?”
She hadn’t meant to mislead him. “I do. I mean—never mind.” The more she talked, the more tangled her tongue seemed to become. Maybe she should quit while she wasn’t too far behind. “It’s late and I’m afraid I’m beginning to sound as if I’m babbling.”
That wasn’t exactly the word he would have applied to it. “Actually, I find your voice very pleasant to listen to.”
Having done what he’d set out to do, which was just to lay a tiny bit of groundwork for future visits, Mark slowly began to make his way to the door.
“I’ll be here at ten tomorrow,” he promised.
She really wanted him to come back. Maybe tomorrow she could make up for being such a dolt tonight. Walking with him toward the door, she stopped by the front desk. “Nine if you like. It’s my turn to open the store and I’ll be here at nine.”
Were there other clerks here he hadn’t taken into account? “You take turns?”
“With my father.”
But that wasn’t strictly true, at least, not anymore. For the past two weeks, she had been the one to open every day. Even so, that didn’t mean she had to give up hope that her father would come around and pick up his routine again. The one that had always given his life such structure, such purpose. With all her heart she longed to see the man who had been her very first hero restored to his former self. She wished he’d confide in her, tell her what was wrong.
“This is his store,” she explained, not bothering to hide the pride that came into her voice.
Glancing at the chair beside her, she sighed inwardly. She’d forgotten about those. They still had to be put back in the storeroom and they weren’t about to walk themselves in there.
Holding the back of the chair with one hand, she lifted the seat, folding it into place. “He’s had it ever since I could remember.”
There were at least forty chairs in the small bookstore, five rows of tightly lined-up chairs all but rubbing against one another. Stacking them was going to take her a while.
Mark always believed that opportunities were there to be made use of. This would give him more time to talk to her, to draw more information out of her while putting her at her ease.
Abandoning the door, he picked up the chair closest to him and folded it. He leaned it against the one she’d just put against the wall.
She looked at him in surprise. “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she protested.
But even as the words left her mouth, Brooke was pleased by the gesture. She knew that he was a kindhearted man.
He was already folding his third chair. “It’ll go quicker if you have help.”
She could feel her heart warming toward him. As far as heroic deeds went, this wasn’t exactly slaying a dragon for her, but it was a good start.
“Well,” Brooke allowed cheerfully, “there’s no arguing with that, but I was just chasing you out of the store.”
He passed very close to her as he leaned another chair against the vertical stack. The tiniest sliver of guilt went through him as he saw what appeared to be a slightly dreamy look enter her eyes before it faded again. He was just doing his job, nothing more, he reminded himself.
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“You can chase me out once we’re finished.”
She smiled at him as, again, she amended her image of him. Still Heathcliff, but a softer version now.
Heathcliff on a good day, she decided.
She shook her head, starting on the next row of chairs. “It wouldn’t seem right, then.”
He slapped together another chair. Metal clanged against metal. “All right, you can walk me out of the store when we’re finished.”
She tilted her head, as if that would help her absorb the nuances of his speech better. There’d been something in his pattern that had caught her attention right after her initial shock had vanished.
Alarms went off in his head. Was something wrong? Had she recognized him from somewhere? “What?”
She smiled, embarrassed that she’d been so obvious. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
Relief descended over him. He folded another chair and forced a smile to his lips. “Why, do I have an accent?”
She grinned. “New York, right?”
Her grin was dazzling, he realized. Like sunshine caught in a prism, shooting out shafts of rainbows everywhere. He forced himself back into his role and to focus on what she’d just said.
Mark frowned ever so slightly. It had been five years since he and Nick had moved out here, leaving New York and all the dark memories behind. He thought he’d shed everything about that life.
Apparently not.
He’d never thought of himself as having an accent to begin with, but if he had, five years should have been enough time to at least mute it if not disintegrate it altogether.
She was still looking at him, waiting to see if she was correct.
“Right,” he told her, picking up another chair. “Does it show?”
Brooke picked up on the trace of annoyance in his voice. Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything. Was he ashamed of where he came from? Or was he trying to live something down?
“It’s not as pronounced as some I’ve heard,” she told him quickly, then, because honesty demanded it, softly added, “but no one would mistake you for a native Californian.”
He didn’t want the focus on him, on anything about him. He wanted it on her. And so he turned the conversation 180 degrees.
“Are you? A native?” he added when she didn’t respond immediately.
He knew the answer to that, just as he knew the answer to a lot of other questions about her. She would have been surprised, he thought, at the amount of things he did know about her. And that he was going to know more. But that was his job, to find things out. To pull the pieces of puzzles together until some grand whole emerged.
Besides, he’d learned long ago that the more information you had at your disposal, the less likely you were going to be caught off-guard.
“Born and bred,” she told him with a laugh.
He saw her struggling with the chair she’d picked up. It groaned slightly, resisting being folded. He crossed to her and took the chair out of her hands. With a little effort, he folded it.
He liked her laugh. It sounded like a light spring rain, falling on thirsty flowers. She was, he thought, everything he once thought life could be, if only the right things happened. Happy, optimistic, hopeful.
All the things he was not and hadn’t been for a very long time. Almost forever, except for that short period of time with Dana, he thought.
But that was so far in the past now, it was as if it had happened to someone else. All but for the very last part.
Brooke picked up another chair and started to fold it when she looked at him. The expression on his face had her stopping. “Where are you?”
Her softly voiced question broke through the haze forming around his brain. “Hmm?” Quickly he stacked the chair and picked up another. “Here, in your shop.”
She wasn’t talking about his body. “No, I meant just now. In your head. You looked as if you were a million miles away.”
He fell back on his cover story. “Just thinking about the book I’m working on.”
Brooke’s eyes suddenly became as huge as proverbial saucers and he found himself fascinated despite efforts not to be.
“You’re working on a book?” Of all the things he could have said to her, this was the one thing that was guaranteed to rivet her interest. She adored writers and thought of them as being several degrees above mortal men and women. “What kind of a book?”
He started on the last row. “A history of San Francisco.”
She cocked her head, contemplating his answer. “Odd subject for a New Yorker.”
“I’ve always been interested in the city.” The lie, practiced, came easily to his lips. “First time I heard the term earthquake, it was about the 1906 one they had here.”
She stopped working. “And that’s what attracted you? Our earthquakes?”
He didn’t want her thinking he was some kind of a ghoul. God knew the scar underscored that aspect of him enough.
“No, the many layers within the city, the rich history.” He forced enthusiasm into his voice. “San Francisco is a great deal like New York, you know, in many ways. You’ve got a melting pot here, too. There’re different pockets of culture and—” Choosing the right place, Mark deliberately stopped abruptly. “I’m talking too much.”
“No, you’re not,” she encouraged. “Keep talking. I’ll keep listening.”
Just then she heard the front door opening behind her. Hadn’t she locked it?
Reproaching herself for being careless, Brooke turned around just in time to see her father walking in. There was a troubled expression on his face.
“So, you are here.”
Bingo, Mark congratulated himself as he looked at the man crossing the threshold. If this wasn’t his quarry, then the man had a doppelgänger running around somewhere in the city.
Chapter Three
The man standing in the doorway had the wiry body of a runner, another hobby Mark knew Derek Ross had once pursued. In his youth Derek had been into track and field. He still maintained a strong interest in running, although his routine had been cut back somewhat over the years.
An easier way to strike up an acquaintance would have been to observe him jogging along a customary route and then fall into place and run with him. Joggers welcomed others experiencing the same punishing regimen they were enduring.
But for one reason or another, Derek Ross wasn’t jogging these days. Mark knew, because he’d sat outside his house, both early in the morning and early evening, and waited for the man to emerge for a run. He’d waited in vain.
Still, it couldn’t have been that long since he’d given up the hobby. His body was still lean, still very trim. His thin state made him look taller than the five feet, eleven inches Mark had been given as a description. The eyes were the right color, green, and his hair was black, like his daughter’s, with only flecks of gray beginning at the temples.
He bore a strong resemblance to his daughter, Mark thought. And to the young man in the photograph of Marla Carlton and her brother that he’d been given.
Any lingering doubts he had that he was on the wrong trail all but vanished entirely. Granted, there was still a small margin for possible error, but by and large, Mark was as sure that this was the man he’d been asked to find as he had ever been of anything.
However, he was nothing if not thorough. The job had taught him to check and then double-check and then check one more time before allowing a sense of accomplishment to enter into the picture. Not that there was ever any triumph attached to it. He’d stopped feeling positive things like triumph a long time ago. That side of him, that part that could feel anything except anger, had faded out of existence that evening in the small bathroom of his barely post-World-War-II Queens apartment.
A sliver of remorse jabbed at Brooke and she flashed her father an apologetic look.
“I didn’t mean to make you worry, Dad.” He looked so wan, so pale these days she thought, like a ghost of his former self. But at
least this was a good sign, that he’d come to look in on her. It meant that he wasn’t completely detached and oblivious to things and that gave her a smattering of hope. “The reading ran over and then Mr. Hazley stayed to sign autographs and talk to some of his fans….”
Brooke saw the way her father was looking at the other man. There was just a hint of suspicion in his eyes. It was the same glimmer of wariness that seemed to arise every time someone new would walk into the store. It never remained for long, but it was always there, as if her father didn’t really trust anyone beyond her in this world.
She was tired and she was letting her imagination run away with her again. What was in her father’s eyes was the natural kind of suspicion that every father exhibited about his only daughter’s life. He probably thought she was meeting someone after hours.
As if her life wasn’t an open book to him.
An open, rather boring book, she thought with just a touch of despair. But that could change. That would change, she promised herself. Just as soon as she got a chance to do something about it. Just as soon as she was sure her father was all right and she got a few things squared away.
Just as soon as. The very words silently mocked her.
Derek Moss turned his attention to the man in his bookstore, a small hint of a frown forming as he studied him. The man he’d found talking to his daughter certainly didn’t look like the usual sort of patron who came through Buy the Book’s doors. If asked, Derek would have ventured a guess that the only thing the man read was the newspaper. And only the headlines at that.
There was an edgy air about him. He looked as if he might be more at home on Fisherman’s Wharf than a shop known for its rare books. If this had been a hundred years ago or so, he would have placed the man at the helm of a pirate ship, or a blockade runner at the very least.
But then, Derek mused, you really couldn’t tell a book by its cover, could you? Look at him, after all.
Closing the door behind himself, Derek crossed to his daughter and the man. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure. I’m Derek Moss. This is my shop. Mine and Brooke’s,” he amended.
