The Pregnancy Affair

Three

Renny sat in the backseat of the black SUV with Tate, wishing she could wake up in her Tribeca condo and start the day over again. They’d been driving for more than two hours nonstop—pretty much due north, as far as she could tell—and Tate had barely said a dozen words to her during the entire trip.

He’d spoken to the marshal often enough early on—or, at least, tried to. Grady had responded to every question with a promise to explain once he was sure Tate and Renny were settled at a safe location. He’d replied the same way as he hustled the two of them out of the house earlier. He hadn’t even allowed Tate time to change his clothes, hadn’t allowed Renny to bring her handbag or portfolio and had made them both leave behind their electronics due to their GPS.

On the upside, the fact that Grady hadn’t allowed them even basic necessities might be an indication he didn’t intend to detain them for long. On the downside, the fact that they were still driving after two hours was a pretty decent indication that Grady planned on detaining her and Tate for some time.

She just wondered how far from Chicago Grady thought they had to be before they’d be considered safe. They’d crossed the Wisconsin state line less than an hour after leaving Tate’s house and had kept driving past Racine, Milwaukee and Sheboygan. Like any good Northeasterner, Renny had no idea which states actually abutted each other beyond the tristate area, but she was pretty sure Wisconsin was one of the ones way up on the map beneath Canada. So they couldn’t drive much longer if they wanted to stay in Grady’s jurisdiction.

As if cued by her thoughts, he took the next exit off I-43, one that ended in a two-lane blacktop with a sign indicating they could head either west to a place called Pattypan or east to nowhere, because Pattypan was the only town listed. In spite of that, Grady turned right.

Okay then. Nowhere it would be.

The interstate had already taken them into a densely forested area, but the trees grew even thicker the farther they drove away from it. The sky, too, had grown darker the farther north they traveled, and the clouds were slate and ominous, fat with rain.

This day really wasn’t turning out the way Renny had planned. She braved another look at Tate, who had crowded himself into the passenger-side door as if he wanted to keep as much space between them as possible. He wasn’t turning out the way she’d planned, either. She was supposed to have gone to his house in her usual professional capacity, relayed the terms of his grandfather’s will in her usual professional way and handled his decision, whatever it turned out to be, with professionalism.

Any personal arrangements Tate wanted to make with the Bacco family would have been up to him. Then Renny would have gone back to her life in New York having completed what would be the most interesting case she would ever handle in her professional career and try not to think about how early she’d peaked.

Instead, all her professional responses had gone out the window the moment she saw Tate, and every personal response had jumped up to scream, Howdy do! And those responses hadn’t shut up since, not even when the guy was giving her enough cold shoulder to fill a butcher’s freezer.

The SUV finally turned off the two-lane blacktop, onto a dirt road that sloped sharply upward, into even more trees. The ride grew bouncy enough that Renny had to grab the armrest, but that didn’t keep her from falling toward Tate when they hit a deep rut. Fortunately, she was wearing her seat belt, so she only slammed into him a little bit. Unfortunately, when they came out of the rut, he fell in the other direction and slammed into her, too.

For one scant moment, their bodies were aligned from elbow to shoulder, and Renny couldn’t help thinking it was their first time. Um, touching, she meant. Arms and shoulders, she meant. Fully clothed, she meant. But the way her heart was racing when the two of them separated, and the way the blood was zipping through her veins, and the way her breathing had gone hot and ragged, they might as well have just engaged in a whole ’nother kind of first time.

She mumbled an apology, but he didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, he gripped his armrest as if his life depended on it. After another few hundred jostling, friction-inducing feet of what may or may not have once been a road, the SUV finally broke through the trees and into a clearing.

A clearing populated by a motel that was clearly a remnant of mid-twentieth-century, pre-interstate travel culture—single story, brick and shaped like a giant L. There was a parking space in front of each room, but there wasn’t a single car present. In fact, the place looked as if it had been out of business since the mid-twentieth-century, pre-interstate travel culture. The paint on the doors was peeling, the brick was stained with mold and a rusty, mottled sign in front read The Big Cheese Motor-Inn. In a small clearing nearby were a half-dozen stucco cottages shaped like wedges of cheese. It was toward one of those that Inspector Grady steered the SUV.

“Seriously?” Renny said when he stopped the vehicle and threw it into Park. “You’re going to hide us in a cottage cheese?”

“We’ve used this place as a safe house since nineteen sixty-eight,” Grady said. “That’s when we confiscated it from the Wisconsin mob. These days, no one even remembers it exists.”

“There’s a Wisconsin mob?” Renny asked. “Like who? Silo Sal Schlitz and Vinnie the Udder?”

“There was a Wisconsin mob,” Grady corrected her. “The Peragine family. Shipping and pizzerias.”

Of course.

The marshal snapped off his seat belt, opened his door and exited, so Renny and Tate did, too. The moment she was out of the vehicle, she was swamped by heat even worse than in Chicago. Impulsively, she stripped off her jacket and rolled her shirt sleeves to her elbows. Her hair, so tidy earlier, had become a tattered mess, so she plucked out the pins, tucked them into her skirt pocket and let the mass of dark hair fall to the center of her back. Then she hastily twisted it into a pin-free topknot with the deftness of someone who had been doing it for years, drove her arms above her head and pushed herself up on tiptoe, closing her eyes to enjoy the stretch.

By the time she opened her eyes, Tate had rounded the back of the SUV and was gazing at her in a way that made her glance down to be sure she hadn’t stripped off more than just her jacket. Nope. Everything was still in place. Though maybe she shouldn’t have fiddled so much with her shirt buttons earlier, since there was a little bit of lace and silk camisole peeking out.

But come on. It was a camisole. Who thought camisoles were sexy these days?

She looked at Tate, who was eyeing her as if she were clad in feathery wings, mile-high heels and a two-sizes-too-small cubic-zirconia-encrusted bra. Oh. Okay. Evidently, there was still at least one guy in the world who found camisoles sexy. Too bad he also hated her guts.

As unobtrusively as she could, she rebuttoned the third and second buttons. Then she followed Grady to the giant cheese wedge, telling herself she only imagined the way she could feel Tate’s gaze on her ass the whole time.

“Oh, look,” she said in an effort to dispel some of the tension that had become thick enough to hack with a meat cleaver. “Isn’t that clever, how they made some of the Swiss-cheese holes into windows? That’s what I call functional design.”

Unfortunately, neither man seemed to share her interest in architectural aesthetics, because they just kept walking. Grady pulled a set of keys from his pocket as he scanned the tree line for signs of God knew what, and Tate moved past her to follow the marshal to the front door, not sparing her a glance.

Renny deliberately lagged behind, scanning the tree line herself. Though for different reasons than Grady, she was sure. In spite of the weirdness of the situation, and even with the suffocating heat and teeming sky, she couldn’t help appreciating the beauty surrounding her. The trees were huge, looking almost black against the still-darkening clouds, and there was a burring noise unlike anything she’d ever heard. She recognized the sound as cicadas—she’d heard them on occasion growing up in Connecticut—but here it was as if there were thousands of them, all singing at once.

The wind whispered past her ears, tossing tendrils of hair she hadn’t quite contained, and she closed her eyes to inhale deeply, filling her nose with the scent of evergreen and something else, something that reminded her of summers at the shore. That vague fishy smell that indicated the presence of water nearby. If they really had traveled due north, it was probably Lake Michigan. She wondered if they were close enough to go fishing. She’d loved fishing when she was a little girl. And she’d always outfished her father and brothers whenever they went.

She listened to the cicadas, reveled in the warm breeze and inhaled another big gulp of pine forest, releasing it slowly. Then she drew in another and let it go, too. Then another. And another. Bit by bit, the tension left her body, and something else took its place. Not quite serenity, but something that at least kept her panic at bay. She loved being outdoors. The farther from civilization, the better.

She felt a raindrop on her forehead, followed by a few more; then the sky opened up and the rain fell in earnest. Renny didn’t mind. Rain was hydrotherapy. The warm droplets cooled her heated skin and tap-tap-tapped on the leaves of the trees and the hood of the SUV, their gentle percussion calming her even more.

With one final breath, she opened her eyes. Tate stood inside the door of the cottage looking out at her, his expression inscrutable. He was probably wondering what kind of madwoman he was going to be stuck with for the rest of the day—maybe longer. Renny supposed that was only fair, since she was wondering a lot of things about him at the moment, too.

Like, for instance, if he enjoyed fishing.

* * *

As Tate gazed at Renata, so much of what had happened today became clear. The woman didn’t even have enough sense to come in out of the rain.

He must have been nuts to have thought her professional, capable and no-nonsense. Then again, he’d also been thinking she didn’t seem to want to be any of those things. Now he had his proof. Even when the rain soaked her clothing, she still didn’t seem inclined to come inside.

On the other hand, her saturated state wasn’t entirely off-putting. Her white shirt clung to her like a second skin, delineating every hill and valley on her torso. Just because those hills weren’t exactly the Rockies—or even the Grassy Knoll—didn’t make her any less undesirable. No, it was the fact that she’d disrupted his life and gotten him into a mess—then made a literal federal case out of it—that did that.

Actually, that wasn’t quite true. She was still desirable. He just didn’t like her very much.

He heard Grady in the cabin behind him opening and closing drawers, cabinets and closets, and muttering to himself. But the activity still couldn’t pull his gaze from Renata in the rain.

Renata in the rain. It sounded like something by a French watercolorist hanging in the Musée d’Orsay. But there she was, a study in pale shades, and if he were an artist, he would be setting up his easel right now.

She really was very pretty. Not in the flashy, showy, don’t-you-wish-you-were-hot-like-me way that the women he dated were. Her beauty was the kind that crept up on a man, then crawled under his skin and into his brain, until he could think of little else. A quiet, singular, unrelenting kind of beauty. When he first saw her standing at his front door that morning, he’d thought she was cute. Once they started talking, and he’d heard her breathless, whiskey-rough voice, he’d even thought she was kind of hot—in a sexy-librarian way. But now she seemed remarkably pretty. In a quiet, unrelenting, French-watercolorist kind of way.

“Mr. Hawthorne?” he heard Grady call out from behind him, raising his voice to be heard over the rain pelting the roof.

Yet still Tate couldn’t look away from Renata. Because she started making her way to the door where he stood. She stopped long enough to remove her wet shoes, then continued barefoot. The dark hair that had been so severe was sodden and bedraggled now, bits of it clinging to her neck and forehead, and the suit that had been so efficient looking was rumpled and puckered. Somehow, though, that just made her more attractive.

“Mr. Hawthorne?” Grady said again, louder this time.

“What?” Tate replied over his shoulder. Because now Renata was only a few steps away from him.

“Sir, I’m going to have to go into town for some supplies. This place hasn’t been used for a while, and I didn’t have any notice that we’d be needing it. I did turn on the hot-water heater, so there should be hot water in a few hours. But the place is kind of light on fresh food. I shouldn’t be gone long.”

Renata was nearly on top of Tate now—figuratively, not literally, though the literal thought was starting to have some merit. So he stepped just far enough out of the doorway for her to get by him, but not far enough that she could do it without touching him. She seemed to realize that, because she hesitated before entering, lifting her head to meet his gaze.

As he studied her, a drop of rainwater slid from behind her ear to glide down the column of her neck, settling in the divot at the base of her throat. He was so caught up in watching it, to see if it would stay there or roll down into the collar of her shirt, that he almost forgot she wasn’t the kind of woman he found fascinating. It wasn’t Renata that fascinated him at the moment, he assured himself. It was that drop of rainwater. On her unbelievably creamy, flawless, beautiful skin.

When he didn’t move out of her way, she arched a dark eyebrow questioningly. In response, he feigned bewilderment. She took another small step forward. He stood pat.

“Do you mind?” she finally asked.

“Mind what?”

“Moving out of the way?”

Well, if she was going to speak frankly—another trait he disliked in women—there wasn’t much he could do but move out of the way.

“Of course,” he said. And moved a step as small as hers to the side.

She strode forward at the same time, but she moved farther and faster than he did so her shoulder hit him in the chest, and they both lost their footing. When Tate circled her upper arm with one hand, he discovered Renata Twigg had some decent definition in her biceps and triceps.

Muscles were another thing he wasn’t crazy about finding on a woman. So why did finding them on Renata send a thrill of...something...shooting through his system?

“Sorry,” he said.

“No problem,” she replied. In a breathless, whiskey-rough voice that made him start thinking about sexy librarians again.

She kept moving, but even after she was free of him, his palm was still damp from her clothing, and there was a wet spot on his shirt where her shoulder had made contact. Those would eventually dry up and be gone. What wouldn’t leave as quickly were the thoughts circling in his brain that were anything but dry.

He watched her as she continued into the cabin, noting how the rain had soaked her skirt, too. The skirt whose length barely passed muster for proper office attire. The dampness made it seem even shorter—though it could just be Tate’s overactive imagination making it do that—and it, too, clung to her body with much affection. Whatever Renata lacked in the front—and, really, no woman ever lacked anything up front—she more than made up for behind. The gods might have made her small, but they’d packed more into her little package than a lot of women twice her size.

“Mr. Hawthorne?”

Reluctantly, he returned his attention to Grady. The marshal was looking at him in a way that indicated he knew exactly where Tate’s gaze had been, and if he were Renata’s father, he’d be hauling Tate out to the woodshed.

“Did you hear what I said?” he asked.

“You have to go into town for some supplies,” Tate replied. See? He could multitask just fine, listening to Grady with the left side of his brain while ogling Renata with the right.

“And I won’t be gone long,” Grady added as he made his way to the front door. “There’s a phone in the bedroom, but if either of you uses it to call anyone other than me, this is going to turn into a much longer stay than any of us wants. Get it?”

“Got it.”

“Good.” Without another word, Grady exited.

Leaving Tate and Renata truly alone.

Four

Renny watched Inspector Grady leave, then scanned the cottage and decided things could be worse. The place was actually kind of cute in a retro, Eisenhower-era kind of way. The walls were paneled in honey-colored wood, and a fireplace on one side was framed by creek stone all the way around. Doors flanked it on each side, one open and leading to a bedroom and the other closed, doubtless a bathroom. The wall hangings were amorphous metal shapes, and the rugs were textile versions of the same. The furniture was all midcentury modern—doubtless authentic—with smooth wood frames and square beige cushions. On the side of the cottage opposite the fireplace was a breakfast bar and kitchenette, whose appliances looked authentic to the middle of the last century, too.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.