“I have a confession to make, Sam Zachary,”

Laura said as she traced the rim of her glass with a fingertip. “I thought I had made a big mistake about hiring you. I was even thinking, earlier tonight, about asking you for a refund, and hiring somebody different.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “And?”

“I know now I didn’t make a mistake. I feel safe with you.”

She wouldn’t have, Sam thought, if she knew the direction in which his mind was tending while his gaze roamed unhindered over her relaxed face and figure. About all that separated him from the thugs he had just taken care of was a willingness to obey the law. That and the fact that they were in a public place. Otherwise…

Otherwise, what, for God’s sake?

Dear Reader,

As the Intimate Moments quarter of our yearlong 20th anniversary promotion draws to a close, we offer you a month so full of reading excitement, you’ll hardly know where to start. How about with Night Shield, the newest NIGHT TALES title from New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts? As always, Nora delivers characters you’ll never forget and a plot guaranteed to keep you turning the pages. And don’t miss our special NIGHT TALES reissue, also available this month wherever you buy books.

What next? How about Night of No Return, rising star Eileen Wilks’s contribution to our in-line continuity, A YEAR OF LOVING DANGEROUSLY? This emotional and suspenseful tale will have you on the edge of your seat—and longing for the next book in the series. As an additional treat this month, we offer you an in-line continuation of our extremely popular out-of-series continuity, 36 HOURS. Bestselling author Susan Mallery kicks things off with Cinderella for a Night. You’ll love this book, along with the three Intimate Moments novels—and one stand-alone Christmas anthology—that follow it.

Rounding out the month, we have a new book from Beverly Bird, one of the authors who helped define Intimate Moments in its very first month of publication. She’s joined by Mary McBride and Virginia Kantra, each of whom contributes a top-notch novel to the month.

Next month, look for a special two-in-one volume by Maggie Shayne and Marilyn Pappano, called Who Do You Love? And in November, watch for the debut of our stunning new cover design.

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

Bluer Than Velvet
Mary McBride

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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For my editor

Margaret O’Neill Marbury,

with gratitude and much affection

MARY MCBRIDE

When it comes to writing romance, Mary McBride is a natural. What else would anyone expect from someone whose parents met on a blind date on Valentine’s Day, and who met her own husband—whose middle name just happens to be Valentine—on February 14, as well?

In addition to her contemporary romances, she has also written eleven historical romances for Harlequin Historicals, most recently Bandera’s Bride, a June 2000 release.

She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband and two sons. Mary loves to hear from readers. You can write to her c/o P.O. Box 411202, St. Louis, MO 63141.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 1

“Most people hire a private investigator to find somebody, Miss McNeal. Not the other way around.”

“Well, I’m not most people, Mr. Zachary.”

“Yeah. I can see that.”

What the man could see, Laura McNeal thought as she reversed the upward creep of her hemline and the downward plunge of her bodice, was plenty of cleavage and way too much leg, but she couldn’t help that. There hadn’t been time to change.

What she could see, on the other hand, was a dingy, pea soup-colored room with a scuffed linoleum floor and windows that were so dirty they barely let in more than a ray or two of daylight. Against one wall there was a dented metal filing cabinet. Against the other wall was a calendar with a picture of Rocky and Bullwinkle on top and the wrong month hanging down below.

The place looked more like the Salvation Army furniture annex than an office, and across the big battered desk, slouched a man who didn’t look at all like a tough-as-nails private eye.

Just her luck. She’d been in the market for a German shepherd, rabid if possible, and she’d wound up with a Saint Bernard, instead. She needed Sam Spade, but who did she get? Sam Spoon.

“Mind if I ask how you got my number, Miss McNeal?”

“The phone book,” she said, not adding that out of the dozen or so private investigators listed there, Zachary, S. U. was the very last one she had tried. Her first call that morning had been to Allied Investigators, but when she detailed her immediate problem for the man on the phone, he had made it absolutely clear that his agency didn’t want to be allied with her or her problem.

All the other investigators she had called had been out of their offices, presumably plying their trade, and she had been too desperate to leave a message with a secretary or on an answering machine, too frightened to wait for someone who might or might not return her call.

Then, when she called Zachary, S. U., he answered his own phone. No secretary. That should have set off a little warning bell right then that maybe Zachary, S. U. wasn’t the keenest private eye in town.

Laura remembered wondering what the initials S.U. stood for. Now she came to the unhappy conclusion that they probably stood for Seriously Unqualified. Or Severely Unemployed. Sexual Under-current also came fleetingly to mind, but she immediately dismissed that notion.

“And the shiner?” he asked.

Laura blinked, painfully. “Excuse me?”

“How’d you get the shiner?” He touched a finger to his eye. At the outer corner where the deep, sexy crinkles were. “You know. The black eye.”

She wracked her Suddenly Unprepared brain for an answer that wouldn’t unnerve this last-ditch detective as much as the truth had unnerved the first. If a real investigator didn’t want to have anything to do with her even on the phone, this guy would probably pick her up bodily and throw her out of his office.

“I got it from the man I don’t want to find me so he can do it again,” she said as firmly as she could.

“Did you call the police? File a report?”

Laura just shook her head and tried to look pathetic, even more than she already did, so he wouldn’t ask why she hadn’t called the police. Nobody called the police about Art “the Hammer” Hammerman or his son, Artie, unless they had a particular fondness for black-and-blue or an incredible longing for plastic surgery or—worse—an outright death wish.

“I’d recommend that you do,” he said. “File a report. The sooner the better.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Laura never meant to cry, but all of a sudden a big tear plopped on the blue velvet of her skirt, followed quickly by another and another. She brushed at them, then brushed again to reverse the dark nap of the velvet, then just kept brushing, unable to stop either that or the stupid crying.

Oh, hell.

Sam Zachary yanked open the warped, top right drawer of his secondhand desk. When he didn’t see a box of tissues, he slammed the drawer shut and opened the top left, the middle left, then every other drawer. He had scratch pads, legal pads, an outdated phone book, a lifetime supply of paper clips and cheap ballpoint pens, four cans of tomato juice and half a dozen granola bars, but not a single tissue for this weeping woman. Dammit.

Then he heard the distinctive sound of a tissue being plucked from a box, and realized she had helped herself from the box hidden behind a stack of magazines and client files on the far side of his desk.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted out between soggy sniffs. “I’ll be fine. I really will. Just give me a minute to get myself together, will you?”

“Sure. Take your time.”

Sam leaned back in his chair, battening down that natural instinct of his to wrap his arms around a crying female, especially this one in her ditzy little dress that left almost nothing to the imagination. Except that wasn’t quite true because his imagination had gone into overdrive the minute she’d walked into his office a little after noon like a blond, blue velvet vision teetering on three-inch spiked, rhinestone-studded heels. With a shiner the size of Rhode Island.

He sighed softly. Why me?

Using his surname plus initials rather than some macho company name and batting last in the Yellow Pages had been a fairly successful strategy thus far in limiting his business. He really hated his job, and used any excuse not to do it. Today was the twentieth, and just as soon as he wrapped up the surveillance on Millard Boynton—straying spouse No. 72—he planned to take the rest of the month off, add thirty or forty square feet to his vegetable garden, put in some good mileage on his rowing machine, and finally nail down Bach’s “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” on the piano.

In a minute, once the waterworks stopped, Miss or Mrs. Laura McNeal was going to lift her blue velvet eyes from her blue velvet lap and ask him—no, she was going to implore him—to help her escape an abusive husband or, more likely, to elude an overly aggressive pimp.

Sam Zachary was already framing his reply.

No.

He hadn’t gotten far beyond that thought when Miss or Mrs. Laura McNeal sniffed a conclusive sniff, wadded the soggy tissue in her fist, then recrossed her dynamite legs, and leaned forward.

“Will you help me, Mr. Zachary? Please. I need to disappear.”

Sam felt his eyes snap up from the wisp of black lace just visible at the leading edge of her neckline.

“I’m not a magician,” he said half-heartedly.

“Please.”

“I’m pretty expensive,” he said. Coward.

“How much?” She was already withdrawing a checkbook and a big blue fountain pen from a tiny beaded purse that didn’t look as if it could hold more than a key and a Kleenex.

“A hundred dollars a day, plus expenses.” Liar. It’s two-fifty and you know it. He cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. The springs squealed like stuck pigs. “I’d need a hundred as an advance.” Instead of the usual five.

“You’ve got it.”

She wrote the check with a quick, left-handed flourish that struck Sam as a nearly impossible feat, then she ripped it out and waved it like a tiny flag of victory before she passed it across his desktop.

“So, what do we do first?” she asked. “I mean, to make me disappear?”

Sam closed his eyes a moment. That was one way of doing it, he thought.

For starters, Zachary, S. U. had told Laura that he was going to take her someplace safe. That had entailed a walk down the three flights of stairs from his office and then a pretty precarious climb into the front seat of his battered, black Chevy Blazer truck, which had also afforded S.U. not only a further glimpse of thigh but the opportunity to clamp his hand to her blue velvet backside when one of her high heels slipped off the running board.

Beside him now as he wove the vehicle through traffic, Laura asked, “So, what does the S.U. stand for?”

“Sam,” he said, hitting the brakes for a sudden amber light. “Samuel Ulysses, actually.”

“Oh, God.” Laura rolled her eyes. He was a Sam, even if he wasn’t Sam Spade. She started to giggle.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.” The laughter she tried to stifle erupted in a snort. The facial contortion made her eye hurt. “It’s just sort of a private joke.”

He gave her a sidelong glance—a fairly withering one, in her estimation—then said, “Between you and yourself, I take it.”

“Sort of.” Laura sat up straighter, tugging her hemline down and her bodice up. “Sam’s a nice name, actually. You should use it in the phone book instead of those silly initials.”

“I’ll take that into consideration.”

He stepped on the gas, and Laura was pretty sure she saw his fingers tighten on the steering wheel and his mouth shape a tiny, impatient sneer. Oh, great. Her big Saint Bernard was turning out to be as irritable as a cocker spaniel. She sighed. This wasn’t going to work.

“Look, maybe we should just forget…”

Sam Zachary spoke the exact words, at that exact moment, in the same frustrated tone of voice. A quick little grin telegraphed across his lips before he stiffened them again.

“I really do need some help,” Laura said quietly, looking down while she traced a beaded daisy on her handbag, not daring to look at him because she didn’t know whether or not she was going to dissolve into tears again. For someone who had barely shed a tear in the past decade, she was certainly making up for it now.

“I know,” he answered just as quietly. “That’s why I’m taking you someplace where you’ll be safe.”

Safe. That was all she wanted to be just then. Safe from rotten Artie Hammerman.

Laura tilted her head back and closed her eyes, one of which had begun to throb painfully. Maybe it was all her fault. Maybe if she hadn’t accepted Artie’s first, surprising gift, none of this would have happened. But nobody had given her flowers since her senior prom, and suddenly, three weeks ago, there was her landlord’s bullnecked, muscle-bound son, dressed in a checked suit with foot wide lapels and a tie as wide as the Mississippi River, angling a huge box of long-stemmed, deep red American Beauties through the front door of her shop.

“Oh, Artie,” she’d exclaimed. “For me? They’re beautiful. But why?”

Her next mistake was accepting his dopey shrug and big gooey smile as a satisfactory answer.

Then came the candy. She didn’t even know they made heart-shaped boxes that big! Or bottles of Chanel No. 5 that were so enormous they had to be picked up with two hands.

After the perfume arrived, she got nervous and put in a call to the Hammer himself. But Art Hammerman, Sr., had brushed off her concerns about his son.

“Don’t worry about it,” he’d told her in that Don Corleone voice of his. “Indulge the kid.”

But then the car came. A white convertible with red leather seats and the biggest red bow that Laura had ever seen. That had been early this morning, just before Artie knelt before her and opened the little hinged purple box with the big diamond ring nestled inside it.

Then, when she told him he had to take it back, Artie had pushed her, then pulled her, then finally punched her, all the while bellowing “If I can’t have you, Laura, then nobody else can, either.”

Well, nobody else wanted her. But that wasn’t exactly the point. And nobody, by God, had ever hit her. Ever.

“What’d I do wrong?” she muttered now, dragging her fingers through her hair. “I really, really don’t deserve this.”

“People rarely do, Miss McNeal.”

She’d almost forgotten that Zachary, S. U. was sitting barely two feet away, his eyes safely glued to the road, his hands at a steady ten and two on the wheel. “Excuse me?”

“I said people rarely get what they deserve. Good, bad or indifferent.”

Great, Laura thought. He was a philosopher, too.

“Well, they should,” she answered irritably.

They were crossing the two-lane Tri-County Bridge just then. The river glittered below in the summer sun. Laura looked back. The steel-and-glass towers of the city were diminishing fast. Ahead of them, on both sides of the ribbon of road, stretched green fields, broken only by an occasional farmhouse and a dull red barn.

It suddenly occurred to Laura that it might be prudent to ask Sam Zachary just where he was taking her. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. What if she had escaped rotten Artie Hammerman only to be abducted by a guy who sat in a crummy little office just waiting for innocent victims to come along? What if the S really stood for Serial, as in killer?

Laura swallowed hard. Then the U was obviously for Uh-oh.

She glanced to her left. Sam Zachary didn’t look like a sociopath or a menace to society. He didn’t even look dangerous. He looked…well…sincere. Even sweet. All this despite the fact that he also looked strong as an ox.

His thigh muscles bunched just under the faded denim of his jeans. His navy polo shirt curved across a barrel of a chest and the short sleeves showed off his tanned, muscular arms. The sweetness, though, was in the little upward curve of his mouth and the deep crinkles at the outer corners of his eyes. Actually, he was a very good-looking man.

But so was Ted Bundy.

“Do you have a license or anything?” she asked, breaking their silence.

Those lips tilted up a little bit more. “Good time to ask.” He shifted in the seat, stretching out a long left leg, and produced a worn leather wallet from his back pocket.

“Here,” he said, tossing it onto her lap.

Laura breathed a little easier after she opened it and saw not only his driver’s license but a pretty official-looking license from the State Board of Private Investigators. Zachary, Samuel Ulysses was thirty-three, six foot three, and weighed two hundred and fifteen pounds. She already knew he had medium brown hair, although the card failed to mention that it was slightly sun-streaked, and that his brown eyes held an incredible warmth while they crinkled at the corners.

“Satisfied?” he asked, holding out an open hand for the return of his wallet.

Laura closed it and plopped it in his palm. “I guess so.” Relieved was more like it, she thought. “Now I should probably ask where you’re taking me.”

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than he slowed the truck and hit the turn signal. “We’re almost there,” he said, turning the big Blazer left onto a shaded and narrow gravel road.

Laura’s first thought was that this was probably the rural equivalent of a dark, deserted alley, that proverbial place where you never wanted to meet anybody, but before she was able to feel properly hysterical, she found herself quite overwhelmed by the beauty of the scene.

Big trees along both sides of the road formed a green, sun-dappled canopy high overhead, and through the trees to her right Laura could see a pasture brightly carpeted with wildflowers where horses and cows were grazing contentedly. A white wooden fence ran along the edge of the road, and birds—blue ones and red ones and black ones with red-spotted wings—perched atop every other fence post as if they’d been hired by a landscaper for decorating duty.

“This is lovely,” she said, opening the window all the way and sticking her head out to take in a deep breath of the fresh, clean country air. “I haven’t been out here in years. I’m pretty much a city girl.”

She sighed as she edged down the hemline that had crept several inches up her thigh when she leaned out the window, and just for good measure she gave her bodice an upward tug. “You can probably tell.”

“I can tell.” Now he swung the car into another, narrower canopied lane, then put on the brakes in front of one of the most enchanting Victorian houses that Laura had ever seen.

It was two stories of pristine white clapboard and dark green shutters, of spooled archways and gingerbread eaves, all of it nestled into a deep wraparound porch. There was a porch swing with dark green cushions. Oh, and a trellis fairly groaning with bright yellow roses in the sideyard, and not too far from that a wonderful blue gazing ball that mirrored the entire, incredible scene.

“Oh, this is just absolutely gorgeous! I love it!” Laura exclaimed. “What is it? A bed and breakfast?”

“Nope.” Sam Zachary turned off the ignition and plucked out the key. “It’s home,” he said. “Come on.”

Sam went into the kitchen after doing a quick inspection of the rest of the house. The important rooms—the living room, guest room, and both baths—looked fairly decent, much to his relief. It had been a while since he’d had anybody in to clean. Although why he was worrying about Laura Mc-Neal’s first impression of his house was beyond him.

On the drive from the city, he’d pretty well concluded that she was a hooker. She had to be. Nobody else would dress that way in the middle of the day. Nobody else would dress that way period.

He’d left her on the porch swing, happy as a three-year-old, smiling while she pushed the big wooden swing back and forth with the pointed toes of her impossibly high, rhinestone-studded heels. She struck him as unusually carefree for a working girl who was obviously out of work for the duration.

Unless she thought that he…

Sam had just opened the refrigerator door, but now he slammed it shut. He must be nuts, bringing this woman here. It had seemed so obvious, so perfect. An ideal hideout where he could keep a casual watch out for her while carrying on with his own life. What was he thinking?

Shaking his head, he opened the door again and grabbed two cans of diet cola. She was still blissfully swinging when he walked out on the porch. Fine host that he was, he popped the tab on her cola before he handed it to her.

“We need to talk, Miss McNeal. We need to get a few things clear.” He slung a hip up on the porch rail, staring down at her, blatantly ignoring her long shapely legs and world-class ankles. “It is Miss, isn’t it?”

“Why don’t you just call me Laura?”

“Okay, Laura. But that still doesn’t answer my question. Are you single? Married?”

“Single,” she replied, and Sam felt a sudden, inexplicable, almost goofy sense of relief. He immediately relegated it to the fact that he didn’t like working domestic disputes which tended to be ugly if not downright dangerous. People who loved each other could be the very worst of enemies.

“So you’re not trying to get away from an angry husband, then, I guess.”

“No.”

Sam sighed. He felt more like a dentist pulling teeth than a P.I. eliciting details from a client. “Who, then?”

“A man.”

He stared out at the yard a moment, courting patience, taking a break from the sight of her lovely legs. “You’re going to have to be a bit more specific, Miss, uh, Laura,” he finally said, “if you want me to help you with this situation.”

“A man who wants to marry me even though he barely knows me.”

Okay. So she wasn’t running away from her pimp. That still didn’t mean she wasn’t a hooker. One of her johns got emotionally involved no doubt. Somehow that didn’t surprise Sam. Laura McNeal was a beautiful woman. She had a face like an angel and a body custom-designed for sin. His own body, as a matter of fact, was acutely aware of hers at the moment. He took a swig from the soda can in the hope of cooling off.

“This man,” he said. “He’s a john, I assume.”

“No,” she answered, after a quick, confused blink. “He’s an Artie.”

Then it was Sam’s turn to blink. “Excuse me?”

She kicked off one shoe, then the other, and tucked about six miles of slender leg beneath her. “The man who hit me, the one who wants to marry me, is named Artie.”

“I meant, is he one of your customers?”

She shook her head, frowning. “No. Artie’s never…” Then her velvety blue eyes sparked with sudden comprehension. “That kind of john!” she exclaimed. “You think I’m a…a prostitute?”

“Well, I… You know.” He gestured to her minuscule dress and the discarded shoes. “The clothes and all.”

The swing started to rock back and forth with her laughter. “Oh, Sam. That is so funny. You thought I was a prostitute!”

He glowered now, feeling foolish, not to mention pretty inept in the deductive reasoning department, and nearly shouted, “Well, why the hell else would you wear a getup like that?”

“Because I own a vintage clothing store, that’s why.”

Sam thought she might have ended with “you idiot” but he wasn’t sure because, laughing as hard as she was, Laura could hardly get the words out clearly.

“This…” She touched the skimpy skirt of the dress. “…is because I was trying on some new merchandise when Artie showed up this morning. Then, after he hit me, I was out of there. I didn’t take time to change.”

“That was smart,” he said, hoping the praise would make her forget that he’d insulted her.

“Not smart so much as scared. Especially when he said, ‘If I can’t have you, then nobody else will, either.”’

Sam didn’t like the sound of that one bit, but he didn’t want to frighten this woman more than she already was. “And you think he means it?”

“I know he means it.” She touched her bruised eye, wincing slightly. “Oh, boy, does he mean it.”

“Artie what? What’s this creep’s last name?”

For an instant, she looked blank. Then her lips compressed and her gaze cut away from his for the briefest moment before coming back. “Jones,” she said. “The creep’s name is Artie Jones.”

Sam nodded and murmured, “Okay,” then took a long and thoughtful sip of his cola, all the while wondering why this woman felt compelled to lie to him—and badly, too—about her assailant’s name. And if that was a lie, he wondered just how much else about Laura McNeal he should allow himself to believe.

Chapter 2

Oh, good one, Laura!

Jones! She felt like smacking the heel of her hand to her forehead. If she intended to make up a different surname for Artie, couldn’t she at least have come up with something a little bit more original? Jones! She might as well have said Smith. The only thing the fake name had going for it was that she’d probably be able to remember it if Sam Zachary asked her again.

He probably would, too. She was sure of that. The private investigator had gone a little thin-lipped and slit-eyed when she’d answered his question, but there was no way on earth she was going to tell him the truth when the mere mention of the name Hammerman tended to make people sweat and develop uncontrollable tics. Even people as big as Sam Zachary.

For every one of his reputable businesses, Art “the Hammer” Hammerman probably had two or three disreputable ones. He was a landlord whose buildings often inexplicably burned down. He was a land developer whose notion of eminent domain included threats, poisoning family pets, and if necessary a well-aimed rifle shot through a kitchen window. A labor leader who had an endless supply of thugs to do his bidding and just enough cops and judges so he never got caught, or if caught, he certainly never went to jail.

But worst of all right now in Laura’s view, the Hammer had a son who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

She was following Sam into the house now after he’d told her it would be a good idea if she stayed here at least for a day or two until he could come up with a more suitable plan. That had sounded reasonable to Laura. She was even relaxing a bit, having come to the conclusion that if Sam had intended to assault and rape her, the man had already had ample opportunity and hadn’t made even a remotely devious or lecherous move. At least none that she was aware of.

Anyway, she wanted to stay.

The inside of the house turned out to be even more inviting than the exterior. The ancient hardwood floors had been lovingly cared for. So had the lace curtains at the windows, although they did look as if they could use a quick little dip in some bleach. There was a Victorian sofa with a carved mahogany back and fabulous claw feet, which was heaped with at least a dozen plump tapestry and needlepoint pillows into which Laura could’ve done an immediate swan dive.

Everywhere she looked were wonderful knickknacks and gewgaws and bits of kitsch. They sat on shelves, on crocheted doilies atop tables, on the antique what-not in the corner. Paperweights and porcelain figures. Vases and glass animals and Kewpie dolls. They marched across the mantel and formed chorus lines on all the windowsills. It was a collector’s paradise.

“I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven,” Laura heard herself saying. “Look at all this magnificent stuff!”

Sam, with one foot already on the bottom step of a staircase, came to a standstill, then slowly turned to face her. “What? All this junk?”

“It’s not junk,” she said, almost indignantly. “What a marvelous place. It’s like living in…”

He snorted, interrupting her. “Secondhand Charlie’s Garage and Used Furniture Outlet.”

Laura shook her head. “No.” Her voice sounded disembodied, almost dreamy, even to her. “No, it’s like living in my Nana’s house. It’s perfect.”

“Perfect,” he muttered. “You’re kidding, right?”

She shook her head again. “It’s wonderful, Sam. How long have you lived here?”

“All my life.”

Edging back one sheer lacy curtain, Laura lifted a small white pot of violets from the sill and inspected its five, no, six deep purple blooms. She had a sudden vision of her grandmother’s fingers, stiff with arthritis and freckled with age, poking into the soil below the dark, velvety leaves of African violets. She could almost hear Nana’s chirpy voice. Don’t let their little feet dry out, Laura, honey.

Only then did she notice that there was moisture in the saucer attached to the pot. Sam Zachary, Private Eye, watered African violets! Why that pleased her so much, Laura couldn’t have said. It was just…well…sweet somehow and far more domestic than she ever would have given him credit for, especially considering his ratty, run-down office in the city.

“You should probably feed this little guy, too,” she said almost to herself, putting the pot back on the sill, then turning to the man who was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. “All your life here. What a lucky, lucky man you are.”

Sam started up the stairs, listening to each familiar groan and creak, testing the give in the banister, thinking that he’d never felt like a lucky, lucky man. Ever. Well, not lately anyway. Not since Jenny Sayles’s car had slid through a guardrail on Highway A-14 and then crashed in the icy underbrush along Cabin Creek. When Jenny died, all his luck, both good and bad, had perished with her, and Sam had lived in a sort of luckless limbo ever since.

He turned left at the top of the stairs, then opened the door of the spare room which his mother had also used as a sewing room. The clutter inside rivaled that of the living room downstairs. Laura McNeal ought to be in hog heaven up here, he thought.

“This should be fairly comfortable,” he told her. “As far as I know, the bed’s hardly ever been slept in.”

She made a beeline for his mother’s ancient Singer sewing machine, still parked on a card table, and ran a hand over its worn black surface. He’d seen women look at diamonds or fur coats the same way, their eyes a little glazed, their faces touched with an ineffable longing. But a sewing machine? Sam was half tempted to tell her to take the damned thing with her when she left, but then he was leery of whatever form her expression of gratitude might take.

“Well, I’ll just let you get settled in,” he said. “Bathroom’s just on the right. I won’t be in your way.”

“Thanks. I’ll try to keep out of your way, too.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m going to go take a look in the freezer and see if I have a nice little steak I can thaw out.”

“I really don’t expect you to feed me, too,” she said.

Sam lifted his index finger to touch his eye. “A medicinal steak.”

“Oh. Does that really work?”

“Couldn’t hurt.”

He winked at her as he stepped back into the hall, and then descended the stairs muttering to himself. Winking! Good God. He never winked. Guys in polyester suits with gold chains around their necks winked. So he convinced himself it was just a sympathetic twitch, brought on no doubt from the pitiful sight of the woman’s purple shiner.

Laura only meant to test the bed. She woke up three hours later, startled at first by her strange surroundings, then comforted by the sight of the sewing machine. She stretched beneath the soft warmth of the granny afghan, then stopped midstretch, suddenly realizing that Sam Zachary must have come in and covered her with it while she was sleeping.

The Big Ben clock on the nightstand told her it was almost six o’clock. Her stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten since Artie Hammerman smashed his fist into her half eaten glazed doughnut this morning just before he’d smashed it into her face. She lay there for a moment, refusing to even contemplate her predicament, while from somewhere downstairs came the clattering of pots and pans and the metallic rattling of silverware and the occasional thud of a refrigerator door.

She smelled coffee, too, and lay there imagining the beguiling fragrance wafting up the staircase like wavy banners in a cartoon. Her stomach growled. Hadn’t Sam Zachary said something about a steak?

For lack of a comb, she ran her fingers through her hair, at the same time deciding not to get anywhere near the oval mirror above the antique dresser for fear of sending herself into a deep depression. If her eye looked anything like it felt, which was awful, she didn’t even want to see it.

Laura had trotted halfway down the staircase, still listening to kitchen noises, when it suddenly occurred to her that it might not be Sam Zachary who was making all that decidedly domestic racket. He had inquired about her marital status, she recalled, but she hadn’t asked him if he was married, had she? Instead she’d just assumed—maybe even vaguely hoped—he wasn’t.

“Stupid,” she muttered, wrenching her tight skirt into line and tucking in her chin to check for any undue exposure. She did the best she could to disguise her cleavage, then sighed. It probably didn’t matter. As a private investigator’s wife, Mrs. Sam Zachary had no doubt seen her share of weirdos and woebegone people. Laura was feeling a bit of both when she reached the bottom of the stairs and turned left, past the dining room, in order to search out the kitchen.

Sam was standing at the sink, his back to the door while his wide shoulders almost blocked out the light from the blue gingham-curtained window. Gingham apron strings from a big floppy bow in the center of his back dangled over his decidedly iron buns. Sam Zachary in an apron! If there was a Mrs. Zachary, Laura thought, the woman definitely belonged in the matrimonial hall of fame.

“Hey,” she said, stepping into the room.

“Hey.” He turned sideways just enough to give her a glimpse of the ruffles on the apron’s bib. “You fell asleep.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t plan to.”

“No problem. Are you hungry?”

“Famished.”

“Good,” he said. “You’re in charge of the salad.” He picked up a white plastic colander and held it out in her direction. “The garden’s out the back door to the left. There are tomatoes and onions and radishes, a couple of early peppers, and maybe even some endive left.”

Laura grasped the colander, trying not to let her expression betray the fact that she hadn’t the vaguest idea what endive looked like. Especially on the hoof, so to speak. Jeez. Didn’t they have supermarkets around here?

“Back in a jiffy,” she said as she pushed open the screen door and stepped outside where she inhaled a long draught of the clean country air ever-so-slightly tinged with roses. It was nice, she thought, not to breathe bus fumes and three-day-old garbage. She was going to enjoy this little vacation.

The well-tended, rectangular garden was easy enough to find, even though her three-inch heels had an annoying tendency to sink into the ground. She pulled two red tomatoes from a tall vine, then bent forward and plucked a little clump of leaves from the dark soil.

“What do you know? A radish!” she murmured, shaking off some of the dirt before plopping it into the plastic bowl and proceeding to pick several more of its mates. The onions weren’t all that difficult to identify, and she tugged up four of those. Then she straightened up and gave the rest of the garden the once-over, searching for the mysterious endive.

Spying something green with curly leaves on the far side of the little plot, she made her way on tiptoe around a pinwheeling plastic sunflower and several wire cages. Then—“Oh, please, please, don’t let this be anything poisonous.”—she reached down to pluck a leaf just as something sprang up into her face.

She jerked upright. The thing, the horrible thing, was in her hair, so she batted at it, only to have the creature take a flying leap down the front of her dress.

Then Laura did what any normal, self-respecting city girl would do. She screamed bloody murder.

Sam dropped the potato peeler in the sink, picked up the 12-gauge shotgun behind the back door, and was out in the backyard in mere seconds expecting to find his client fighting for her very life with a bruiser named Artie. Instead she was hopping around the back of the garden, flapping the front of her dress, screaming “Get it off me! Get it off me!”

He put the gun down in the grass and headed toward the garden, trying to wipe off the grin that he knew would only irritate her.

“Get it off me,” she shrieked as he neared.

“Hold still.”

Apparently she couldn’t, so he grasped her shoulders, turning her toward him. “Will you hold still? It’s probably just a grasshopper. It’s not going to hurt you.”

“Get. It. Off.” Her eyes squinched closed in her already squinched face.

“Okay. Okay.”

He looked at her hair and scanned the blue velvet on her shoulders and neckline. “I don’t see anything. It must’ve taken off.”

“It’s down my dress,” she said.

“Down…” Sam’s gaze dropped to the pale skin bordered by a hint of black lace. “I can’t…”

“Get it,” she shrieked.

“Hold still.”

He closed his own eyes a second, letting out a kind of heaven-help-me sigh, then eased his fingers into the front of the dress, down into black lace and blue velvet and warm, firm flesh. Lucky little guy, he thought, as he gently pinched the ends of a pair of frantic wings, then eased the insect as well as himself up and out. The grasshopper shot away in a single, ecstatic leap.

“You can open your eyes now,” Sam said.

She did, but just barely. “I hate bugs.”

Sam retrieved the colander that Laura had apparently flung off into space when she was attacked, and now he was picking up scattered vegetables and at the same time trying not to think about the heat his hand had so recently encountered beneath all that blue velvet. He started to say something, but she sliced him with a glare.

“And don’t you dare say they’re more afraid of me than I am of them, Sam Zachary, because it isn’t true.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” Sam said, reaching to break off a few tender leaves of endive and laying them on top of the tomatoes and radishes and green onions. “I was only going to ask you how you like your steak and what kind of dressing you prefer on your salad.”

“Oh.” She gave a little shrug. “Medium, I guess, and Thousand Island. French would be fine, too.”

“Okay.”

He shouldn’t have asked, Sam thought, since he had every intention of grilling the rib eye black on the outside and a perfect, medium-rare pink inside, and tossing the salad with a tarragon vinaigrette.

All of a sudden he felt irritable, curmudgeonly, like a doddering old bachelor too set in his ways to even listen to anyone else’s preferences. Or worse. Too comfortable with the familiar to appreciate something new and different. Someone new and different.

“Better get back inside,” he grumbled, “before the praying mantises start to swarm.” He handed her the colander. “Here. Take this. I need to get my shotgun.”

She shivered. “Not for the praying mantises, I hope.”

“No.” He picked up the gun. “I only use this on the wolf spiders.”

“You were kidding, right, about the wolf spiders?” Laura asked halfway through dinner.

They were sitting in the kitchen on opposite sides of what she considered a very retro aluminum-and-plastic dinette set. The whole room, in fact, was fabulously retro. It looked as if it had been lifted from another era with its white metal cabinets, its fake marble linoleum floor, and almost boxcar-sized white enamel stove.

“Yes, I was kidding,” Sam answered with a subdued little chuckle. “How’s your steak?”

“Fabulous.” She took another mouthwatering bite. “It would’ve been a waste to use it on my eye. The salad’s great, too. You made the dressing yourself?”

He nodded.

Sam Zachary was still wearing his apron, but the blue gingham and ruffles couldn’t make even the slightest dent in his masculinity. In an odd way, Laura decided, they seemed to accentuate it all the more. God, he was gorgeous. Not that that was any big deal. Not that she cared.

“So, where’d you learn to cook, Zachary, S. U.?” she asked, putting her knife and fork down to pick up the cold bottle of beer he’d put at her place.

“Right here. After my mother died last year, it was a case of either learning how to cook for myself or wasting away to skin and bones.”

Laura nodded. She knew what that was like. She’d been in a similar situation a few years before when her grandmother passed away, but she’d solved the skin-and-bones problem with pizza deliveries and salad bars and take-out Chinese.

“I meant what I said, Sam. About not having to feed me. I’m sure I’m not paying you enough for…”

“I’ll put it on your tab,” he said, pushing his empty plate away, then taking a swig from his own bottle of beer. He put the dark brown bottle down, returning it precisely to the wet circle it had made on the tabletop, before he leaned back and crossed his arms. “You want to tell me a little bit more about this Jones guy so I have a better idea what I’m dealing with?”

“Jones?”

“The slugger?” He gestured to her eye.

“Oh. That Jones.”

She shifted in her chair, but the vinyl seat had such a good grip on her thighs, it felt as if she’d ripped off a layer of skin. It didn’t help, either, that she could almost hear Nana chanting Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

“Artie, you mean.”

He gave her a long, silent, steely-eyed stare which seemed to translate as yes, that was exactly what he meant and not to confuse the blue gingham apron with a blue gingham disposition.

“Artie’s, um, well…persistent,” she said.

“How long have you been seeing him?”

Laura blinked. “Seeing him?”

“Dating him,” Sam clarified.

“Dating Artie?” She almost laughed, then shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. I’ve never gone out with him. He’s my landlord’s son and for some reason he’s been giving me presents the past few weeks. Flowers. Candy. Stuff like that. I thought it was, well, kind of cute in the beginning.” She reached out, tracing a finger along the label of her beer bottle, frowning now. “It stopped being cute this morning.”

“So you’ve never gone out with him?”

“Never. Not once. Come to think of it, he never even asked me out.” She quit staring at the label and lifted her eyes to Sam’s. “Pretty weird, huh?”

More than weird, Sam was thinking. He could well imagine, once having met Laura McNeal, wanting to shower her with gifts, but he couldn’t fathom not asking her out on a date, as well. Unless, of course, this Artie guy knew that she was already involved with somebody else. If she was, though, why hadn’t she gone to that somebody else for help?

“Do you live alone?” he asked her, not quite hitting the target of his curiosity dead-on, but edging close.

She nodded. “I live in an apartment over my shop.”

“Your shop?”

“I told you. Remember?” She gestured to her dress. “I have a vintage clothing and jewelry store. Nana’s Attic.”

“Ah.” He had forgotten, which didn’t say a lot for his ability to process information at the moment. He wanted to blame the beer, but he knew it was that damned grasshopper down the front of Laura’s dress. The backs of his fingers still felt warm from their brief contact with her flesh.

Abruptly, he picked up his empty plate and carried it to the sink.

“I’ve got a job tonight,” he said over his shoulder, over the splash of the water from the faucet. “I need to drive back into the city around midnight. Just for a few hours. You can stay here if you want. You’ll be safe. But if you feel uncomfortable, you can come along with me. It’s up to you.”

“What kind of job?” She picked up her plate, too, and headed toward him at the sink.

Sam had forgotten about her legs during dinner while those long and lovely limbs were concealed beneath the table. He remembered them now, so vividly he almost forgot what she had just asked him. Oh, yeah. The job.

“Surveillance,” he said. “It shouldn’t take more than an hour or two.”

One of her finely shaped eyebrows arched a bit more. Her blue eyes twinkled and a smile played at her mouth. “Ooh, surveillance. Sounds dangerous. Real private eye stuff, huh?”

“Right.” He took her plate and rinsed it under the faucet. “But it’s not dangerous. Don’t worry.”

“Oh, I wasn’t worried. It’s kind of exciting, actually. Who are we spying on? A murderer returning to the scene of his crime? A robber casing a bank? A big drug deal?”

“Not quite.”

“Well, what then?”

She was standing so close that he could see tiny golden flecks in the blue of her eyes as well as the true line of her lips, even fuller than her pink lipstick implied. A mouth made for kissing if ever he had seen one. Suddenly his brain was ticking off the months it had been since he’d kissed a woman. Not just a woman. Jenny. He’d really never kissed anyone else.

“You’ve seen too many movies,” Sam said more gruffly than he intended, slapping their dishes and utensils into the dishwasher. “We’re going to sit on a hot, tarred rooftop adjacent to the parking garage of the Metropole Hotel, waiting for a sixty-six-year-old man to finish his weekly tryst with his twenty-year-old receptionist, then watch him walk her to her car and kiss her good-night.”

“That doesn’t sound too exciting,” Laura said.

“Told ya.” He wiped his hands on one of his mother’s cross-stitched dishtowels and returned it to its metal bar beside the sink.

“And then?” she asked. “What happens next? You call the police and have him arrested?”

“Nope. Then I take a picture of the lovers, have it developed, and I give the print to a sweet little old lady with blue hair who’s still ninety-nine percent convinced that her husband of forty-two years is playing gin rummy every Wednesday night.”

The playful light in Laura’s eyes went out like two candles being snuffed, and for a second, Sam regretted his candor.

“Well, you asked,” he said. “Cases like that are the bulk of my work. Rescuing dames in distress is just a sideline.”

He had hoped she’d laugh at that, lame as it was, but she didn’t. Suddenly she looked less like a dame in distress than a sad little girl, playing dress up in her mother’s clothes.

Reaching out, she straightened the dishtowel on its rod, then sighed. “You’re right. It’s not like the movies.”

“You don’t have to come along, you know. You really will be all right here if you want to stay.”

She shook her head. “I’ll just stick with you for a while, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind. It’ll be nice to have company. Only…”

“Only what?”

“Well, the last time I saw a private eye’s assistant dressed like this…” He dropped his gaze to the soft drapery of blue velvet sloping from her delicate collarbone. “…it was in a movie. Maybe there’s something in one of the closets upstairs that might be a little bit less, um…”

“Vintage?” she suggested, the twinkle returning to her eyes.

“That, too.” Sam stepped away from the sink, blaming the current spike in his temperature on all that humidity from the hot rinse water. “Come on. Let’s have a look.”

Sam leaned against the wall outside his mother’s bedroom, listening to the distinctive sounds of a woman dressing and undressing, to the slide of hangers across a metal rod, the slithering of fabrics over skin, the puttings on and the peelings off, the snapping of snaps and the long glide of zippers opening and closing.

When he’d suggested that Laura might find something to wear in his late mother’s closet, he hadn’t expected her search to take so long, much less to take on the proportions of a Broadway production number. He needed to get back to the city to set up his surveillance.

“Are you about done in there?” he asked through the crack in the door.

“Just about,” Laura called out, her voice slightly muffled by what sounded like crisp taffeta. “How long ago did you say your mother passed away?”

“Last year.” He heard more rustling, more zipping or unzipping before she spoke again.

“White Shoulders,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Her fragrance. She wore White Shoulders, didn’t she?”

Did she? Sam didn’t have a clue, and he said so just as Laura suddenly appeared in the doorway.

“Some detective you are,” she said, coming out into the hall while adjusting the shoulders and the neckline of her dress, which, to Sam’s amazement, just happened to be the same, skimpy blue velvet getup she’d been wearing all day.

“I thought you were going to change,” he said. “What happened? Didn’t anything fit?”

“Just about everything fit.”

“Well, what then?”

She was quiet a moment, standing with her hands on her hips and staring down at the floor. Then she sighed and gave a small shrug. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, Sam, when I tell you. Promise me you won’t, okay?”

“The wrong idea? About what?” he snapped.

“Don’t be so angry.”

“I’m not angry,” he said, sounding more baffled now than angry. “I’ve just been hanging out here listening to you try on enough outfits to clothe the female population of a small city. And then, after all that, you come out in…” He stabbed a finger at her dress. “…in this.”

“This,” she said, jutting her chin into his face, “doesn’t smell like White Shoulders.”

“So?”

“So?” Her volume increased to match, if not drown out, his. “So, if it’s all right with you, Sam Zachary, I just didn’t want to smell like your mother.”

She flounced past him to stomp down the stairs, as much as anyone could stomp in stiletto heels, leaving Sam standing there shaking his head and wondering why it made any difference who she smelled like when he had no intention of getting close enough to tell.

And even if he did get close enough, say, to kiss her, there was no way he was ever going to confuse Laura McNeal with his mother.

Chapter 3

It was good to be back in the city, Laura thought. Well, sort of. If you didn’t mind climbing six flights of smelly, littered stairs in a dark abandoned building, then camping out on a scratchy army blanket flung out on a hot, tarred roof where shards of broken liquor bottles glittered in the summer moonlight.

She wasn’t complaining, though. Not out loud, anyway. Not even when her heels had stuck fast and deep in soft tar bubbles and Sam Zachary had to pick her up and carry her across the roof and then go back to retrieve her captured shoes. She didn’t complain aloud even when the army blanket beneath her began to feel as if it was deliberately clawing at the backs of her thighs and calves. Not even when she decided she was about to die of thirst.

Eyeing the big canvas bag that Sam had brought with him and parked on a corner of the blanket, she asked, “You don’t happen to have a can of soda or a water bottle in there, do you?”

He was sitting beside her as he had been for the past hour or so, knees drawn up, arms looped casually over them, and his gaze trained permanently on the cement maze of the parking garage next door. “Sorry.”

Laura made a dry little noise deep in her throat, then ran her fingers through the damp locks of her hair, wondering vaguely if she might be able to lick some of that moisture from her hands. “It must be ninety degrees up here,” she said, hoping he’d take the not-so-subtle hint.

“Probably.”

“Definitely.” Laura shifted on the blanket, letting it take a bite out of her right thigh now that it had pretty much chewed up her left.

Now, too late, she wished that she had changed into one of Sam’s mother’s outfits, regardless of their ingrained fragrance. Maybe the light blue pincord suit with its boxy jacket and long A-line skirt. Or maybe the navy piqué dress with the delicate lace collar. Both had fit her perfectly.

But, while she was trying on the garments, Laura had come to the conclusion that his mother’s lingering scent would only make Sam sad, and she had decided that she’d rather keep looking inappropriate, if not bizarre, than cause this man a single moment of heartache. He had such a nice smile. Well, when he wasn’t frowning.

She glanced over at him. In the moonlight his expression seemed neutral at the moment, neither happy nor sad. Just patient. As patient as a stone. He reminded her of the Sphinx, which reminded her of the desert, which reminded her of just how thirsty she was.

“I’d kill for a big, tall glass of iced tea,” she said, trying not to whine, but following up her words with a pathetic little moan she couldn’t suppress. “I guess you just forgot to bring anything to drink, huh?”

“I didn’t forget,” he said, still staring at the garage.

Laura immediately perked up. “Oh. You brought something, then?”

“No.”

“But you said…”

“I said I didn’t forget.” His gaze cut toward her briefly before returning to the garage where the suspects’ cars, a big silver boat of a Cadillac and a spiffy little red Toyota, were parked affectionately side by side. The vehicles hadn’t moved, Laura noted glumly. Nor had the garage. Nor Sam.

What a crummy, boring occupation. She was seriously beginning to wonder if she’d made a mistake choosing Zachary, S. U. to protect her. In spite of his incredibly muscular build and sensational tan, he didn’t strike her as a man of action exactly, or as all that smart and well prepared. If he had known they’d be spending half the night on a red-hot rooftop, why in heaven’s name hadn’t he at least thought to bring along something to drink? Even a thermos of lukewarm coffee or hot chocolate didn’t sound half bad at the moment. A dented canteen with one swallow of anything wet.

“Pretty stupid, if you ask me,” she muttered.

“What?”

“Not bringing anything to drink.”

“No. Actually it’s pretty smart,” he said calmly. “You don’t see any bathroom facilities around here, do you?”

She glanced around the bleak rooftop. “No. No facilities whatsoever. Just half an acre of tar bubbles and broken glass.”

“Well, there you go.” He glanced at his watch. “It shouldn’t be too much longer now. We’ll stop on the way home for something.”

“Mm.” She had a vision of a foot tall glass of iced tea with a huge wedge of lemon stuck to its rim. “Be still my heart. I think I could drink a gallon of anything wet with ice cubes floating…”

“Shh.” Sam cut off her liquid reverie with an abrupt hiss. And when Laura started to speak again, he growled, “Quiet. Somebody’s coming.”

As soon as he said that, Laura could hear the insistent bass of a boom box coming from the direction of the stairs. The noise became louder and louder until Laura could feel the rap music beginning to beat in her brain like a headache. Then the door to the rooftop opened, and two dark figures emerged.

Boys, she thought with a quick, small measure of relief. They were just kids. But as they sauntered closer, even in the dark Laura could see that both boys were decked in the obligatory ripped T-shirts, baggy, low-slung pants and turned-around baseball caps of the Devil’s Own, one of the worst street gangs in the city. Worst as in cutthroat dangerous.

“Sorry, fellas,” Sam called out above the harsh beat of the boom box. “This roof’s occupied.”

The boys stopped. So did the music. The sudden silence almost made Laura dizzy.

“Occupied,” the taller one said to his companion. “Occupied.” He set the boom box down with exquisite care. “Maybe this man don’t know what part of town he’s occupying, Jerome.”

“Damn straight,” Jerome said gruffly as he jabbed a finger toward Sam and Laura. “This is our roof, man. We the Devil’s Own.”

They were also higher than any rooftop was ever going to get them, Laura noticed now from their slurred speech and unsteady stances. Their gazes, however, seemed to focus fairly steadily and unfortunately on her.

“Yo, mama,” the tall, lanky one purred, smiling almost viciously as he took several easy steps in her direction. “Why don’t you tell your old man there to take a hike for a little bitty while?”

She started to answer when Sam grasped her knee and said, “Just be quiet, Laura. Let me take care of this.”

“Low-ra.” Jerome turned the bill of his cap to the side, cocked his head, and grinned. Moonlight glittered on one big gold tooth. “You’re one fine lady, Low-ra. Tell that sad-ass man of yours you want to stay here on that blanket with Swat and me. What do you say, Low-ra?”

She was tempted to say that she was a special friend of the Hammer’s baby boy and if anything happened to her, they’d find themselves in a hundred various pieces scattered in dumpsters and vacant lots all over the city. Only her throat was so dry, all she could manage was to croak to Sam, “Don’t you have a gun or something?”

“They’re just kids,” Sam said quietly. “I’m not going to pull a gun on kids.”

But even as he was speaking, it seemed that the kids, Jerome and Swat, had decided they were not at all reluctant to use their own lethal weapons. First Jerome’s long-bladed knife appeared from somewhere underneath his loose T-shirt. Then Swat’s knife materialized, almost from thin air.

“Go on now, man,” Jerome said, gesturing with the glinting blade. “We got some business with your lady.”

Sam muttered a curse under his breath, then slowly began to get up. Laura’s first thought was that he was going to do just what he’d been ordered to do, that he was going to walk away and leave her alone. Alone with the Devil’s Own for some business. Panic surged up in her throat.

“Sam! What are you doing?” She reached out, grabbing for his pant leg, but he pulled away.

“Okay, fellas,” he said. “Look, you really don’t want to do this. Now put the knives away, pick up your boom box, and get the hell out of here before this gets you both a couple of years in Bakerville.”

Laura felt her eyes rolling up in her head now, hardly believing what she’d just heard. These thugs were standing there with knives the size of machetes and Sam Zachary was threatening them with reform school! My God. At least he wasn’t still wearing his blue gingham apron!

She decided right then and there that, after she survived this night, if she survived, she was going to find herself a real private investigator. A he-man. A hero. One with a very big gun.

Jerome and Swat, it appeared, had the same impression of Sam’s abilities. They grinned at each other, traded knowing looks and began to move forward, one of them edging to the right and the other to the left.

“Two against one, man,” Swat said, shifting his weapon from hand to hand and moving closer. “You scared yet?”

Plenty, Laura thought. Spitless.

“Terrified,” Sam answered with a calmness that struck Laura as irrational, if not completely insane, under the circumstances.

Now the lanky Jerome started to make kissing noises. At least that’s what Laura assumed they were. She didn’t even want to know what the noises from Swat’s mouth signified. Oh, God. This is what she’d escaped rotten Artie Hammerman for?

She glanced frantically toward the low brick wall that edged the rooftop, wondering just how much damage a sixty-foot jump might incur, thinking absurdly that if this were a movie there would be a series of canvas awnings to slow her fall, not to mention a conveniently parked truck with a flatbed of straw or stacked mattresses to keep her from breaking every bone in her body.

But this wasn’t a movie and the two gang members were even closer to Sam now. One to the right, the other to the left. Close enough for Jerome to thrust out his blade in a wide, glittering and deadly arc.

What happened next took place so fast that Laura wasn’t even sure her eyes completely registered the events. Sam’s right arm shot out, deflecting the blade, then only a blink of an eye after that his left fist thundered into Jerome’s chin, sending the boy at least half a foot into the air, literally out of his shoes. The knife went sailing, hilt over blade, into the moonlit sky, and before either Jerome or his weapon even had a chance to land, Sam’s right fist smashed into Swat’s face.

For a moment after that everything was absolutely quiet. Jerome sprawled on his back, motionless, three feet from his empty shoes. Swat knelt, his knees sunk deep in tar bubbles, his knife nowhere in sight, and blood from his broken nose pouring between his fingers.

Sam stood there for a moment, silently looking from boy to boy, flexing both hands, before he muttered a curse and turned toward Laura. To her amazement, he wasn’t even breathing hard, and still looked cool and collected, as if he’d merely swatted a pair of pesky houseflies rather than putting two of the Devil’s Own completely out of commission.

Then, suddenly, his gaze flicked beyond her toward the parking garage. His expression darkened perceptibly.

Oh, God! What now? The rest of the Devil’s Own? Laura wondered, looking frantically in the same direction only to see that the big silver Cadillac and the little red Toyota they’d been watching so diligently all night were nowhere in sight. The elderly Lothario and his young tootsie had apparently escaped unseen, not to mention unphotographed by that stalwart shamus, Zachary, S. U.

“Great. That’s just great.” While Sam growled, he held out his hand for Laura’s and pulled her to her feet.

It was only then, when she stood up, that she realized she was shaking, wobbling pitifully in her tarstained high heels. “Wh…what do we do now?” she asked.

Sam had reached down for the blanket and was snapping it smartly into a small square. “Now,” he said, “we haul these two clowns down six flights of stairs and deliver them to the guys at the Fourth Precinct.”

He handed her the folded blanket, and when she took it with her trembling hands, Sam didn’t let go immediately. “It’s okay,” he said softly, his eyes warm in the moonlight and steady on hers. “It’s all right now, Laura. It’s all over. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

All she could do was work up a weak, wobbly smile. “Thanks.”

Sam smiled. “Hey, you hired me to protect you, right? I’m just doing my job.” He angled his head toward the parking lot, then added glumly, “Well, one of them, anyway. It looks like we’re all through here, so after we get rid of these jerks, we’ll go get that tall, cold drink I promised you.”

Laura managed a feeble, grateful nod. “C-could you make it Scotch? A d-double?”

The Ten-Gallon Hat, on Highway Z, was a hole-in-the-wall that billed itself as a roadhouse. By day it looked more like a one-story cement block warehouse, but by night its miles of neon tubing made it look bigger and brighter and a lot more fun than any place else in the county. Sam had spent a lot of time here after Jenny’s accident, but he didn’t remember having any fun.

It was two-fifteen in the morning but the band was still playing when Sam ushered Laura across a floor strewn with peanut shells and discarded beer caps to a small booth in the back, where he hoped her outfit wouldn’t attract too much attention. At least not the sort that would require further use of his bruised knuckles.

Lynette, one of the two overworked waitresses in the place, took their order without her usual chitchat, but she still managed to give Sam a few meaningful looks and whisper, “It’s nice to see you with a date, hon.”

“She’s not a date,” Sam responded gruffly.

“Coulda fooled me,” Lynette whispered back before she disappeared into the crowd on the dance floor.

Then, after their drinks came, along with more meaningful looks, they sat quietly awhile. Laura played with the swizzle stick in her double Scotch and water, while Sam rolled his cold beer bottle across the back of one hand and then the other, trying not to wince.

It had been the first time in his dubious career as a private investigator that he’d had to use his fists. Part of him was glad to know he hadn’t lost much speed, but the rest of him—his aching knuckles, mostly—was protesting vehemently.

“Thank you, Sam.” Laura’s voice floated over the music and across the scarred tabletop. “For defending me.”

“No big deal. I told you. It’s what you’re paying me for.” He took a long pull from the beer bottle. “Anyway, it was pretty stupid of me to take you to that part of town and put you in harm’s way like that. I guess I wasn’t thinking. Probably just too used to working alone.”

Too used to being alone, he added to himself.

“Well, I don’t suppose these clothes helped any, either.” Her gaze fluttered downward for a moment. “I can only guess what kind of babe good old Jerome and Swat thought they’d discovered up there on the roof.” She gave a tiny shrug then. “Will they go to jail?”

“If I press charges,” Sam said.

Her eyes widened. “If?”

“I’m going to assume they learned a pretty good lesson tonight.”

“Sure.” Laura snorted. “They probably learned that they ought to use guns next time instead of knives.” She sipped her drink, then said, “And speaking of learning, where did you learn to throw a punch like that?”

“I did some boxing in college, then later in the Marine Corps.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Don’t be,” he told her. “I wasn’t all that good.” He touched a finger to his nose, where an unexpected left hook had left a small, but permanent detour in the cartilage. “This used to be a lot straighter.”

Even though she’d barely made a dent in her Scotch, her smile already had a slightly inebriated tilt to it. It went well with the blue velvet dress, Sam decided. She went well with the blue velvet dress.

“I have a confession to make, Zachary S. U.” she said as she traced the rim of her glass with a fingertip.

“What’s that?”

“I thought I had made a big mistake about hiring you. I was even thinking, earlier tonight, about asking you for a refund, and hiring somebody different. Somebody, um, well…better.”

He raised an eyebrow. “And?”

“I know now I didn’t make a mistake.” She leaned her head back against the booth’s battered wooden frame, then let out a long sigh as she closed her eyes. “I feel safe with you.”

She wouldn’t have, Sam thought, if she knew the direction in which his mind was tending while his gaze roamed unhindered over her relaxed face and figure. About all that separated him from Jerome and Swat right that moment was a willingness to obey the law. That and the fact that they were in a public place. Otherwise…

Otherwise what, for God’s sake?

He jerked upright and squared his shoulders, then downed the last of his beer and put the bottle down with a solid thump, loud enough to cause Laura’s eyes to pop open.

“It’s time to go,” he said, already sliding out of the booth. “Come on.”

Sleep wouldn’t come that night. Not even after the three fingers of Jack Daniel’s Black that Sam had poured as a last resort. Instead of putting him to sleep, all the bourbon did was give him a headache. And it failed miserably in blunting his desire for the woman who slept in the room across the hall.

For the hundredth time he checked the glowing blue numbers on the clock radio, realizing it would be dawn in less than half an hour. Pretty soon he’d be able to distinguish the muted plaid pattern of the wallpaper, the spiderweb fracture of the windowpane where he’d connected on one of Davey Kenyon’s curveballs in eighth grade, the dozens of trophies on the desktop and bookshelves that could use a good dusting.

He didn’t even need daylight to see the objects in this room where he’d spent most of his nights for most of his life. Most of all he didn’t need light of any sort to see Jenny’s face smiling out at him from the silver-framed photograph on top of the knotty pine dresser. It was always there, that mischievous, gamine face that he’d loved from the very first day of kindergarten when he’d come home—right here—and announced to his mother over cookies and milk that he was going to marry Jenny Sayles, then asked in all seriousness just how long he’d have to wait to do that.

Although his mother had laughed and suggested a seemly eighteen or twenty years might be good, her answer should have been forever.

Sam felt that too-familiar constriction in his throat now and the hot sheen of moisture in his eyes that always came when he allowed himself to think about Jenny for more than a passing moment. Swearing softly, he reached up to double the pillow under his head, then he closed his eyes, for all the good that would do in blocking out nearly three decades of images that seemed almost permanently etched on his brain. Jenny here. Jenny there. Jenny everywhere.

Since he couldn’t marry her in kindergarten, he’d waited until their graduation from high school to ask her. She’d put him off, and then put him off again when they graduated from college. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to marry him. She did. She swore she did. But Jenny had her own itinerary. She wanted to go as far as she could as a concert pianist before settling in as Sam’s wife. And she thought she had all the time in the world. They both did.

His gaze lit on the Divisional boxing trophy he’d won in the Corps. When Jenny moved to Los Angeles to study with the renowned pianist, Hermoine Stahl, it made perfect sense for Sam to enlist in the Marine Corps because Camp Pendleton was just a few hours away from L.A. Later, when Jenny moved to Paris, he pulled a string or two in order to be assigned embassy duty there. Wherever Jenny went, he followed. It had been whither thou goest in reverse.

When Jenny acquired a rampant case of stage fright that prevented her from performing, he’d resigned from the Corps and followed her back here where he’d run for county sheriff, winning in a surprising landslide. But even then, Jenny wouldn’t marry him. She needed to prove she could play on stage, if only one more time.

And then, on an icy stretch of Highway A-14, Jenny’s time had run out.

It was light enough now for Sam’s eyes to trace all the hairline cracks in the ceiling. He wondered how many men his age had only loved one woman in their lives, and of those how many had only made love to one woman. Damned few, he decided.

While Jenny was alive, he’d been oblivious to other women. In the two years since her death, he’d been both oblivious and numb. Then suddenly Laura McNeal had waltzed out of the Yellow Pages and into his office in her little blue velvet scrap of a dress, and had lit a fire in him that Sam didn’t like one bit.

He sat up now, rubbing nonexistent sleep out of his eyes. He should’ve known better than to offer to help the woman. But, since he had, he was going to help her with a vengeance. Help her right out of his life.

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