Tangled Up In You

Chapter 13

The little collar had pink sparkles and a tiny pink bell and when Maddie had walked to the road to check her mail at around three, she’d found it in her mailbox. No note. No card. Just the collar.

Mick was the only other person who knew about Snowball. She hadn’t told any of her friends for fear they’d all die of shock. Maddie Jones-cat owner? Impossible. She’d spent most of her life hating cats, but here she stood, pink collar in hand and staring down at a white ball of fur curled up in her office chair.

She scooped the kitten up in both hands and brought it face level. “This is my chair,” she said. “I made you a bed.” She carried the kitten to the laundry room and set her on a folded towel inside an Amazon box. “Rule number one: I’m the boss. Number two: you can’t get on my furniture and get it all hairy.” She knelt down and placed the collar around Snowball’s neck.

“Meow.”

Maddie scowled.

“Meow.”

“Fine. You look cute.” She stood and pointed a finger in the kitten’s direction. “Rule number three: I let you in and gave you some food. That’s where it ends. I don’t like cats.” She turned on her heels and walked out of the laundry room. The tinkling of a bell followed her into the kitchen and she looked down at her feet. She sighed and pulled a local telephone book out of a drawer. She turned to the yellow pages, reached for her cell phone, and punched in the seven numbers.

“Mort’s,” a man answered, but it wasn’t Mick.

“Is Mick available?”

“He usually doesn’t show up until eight.”

“Could you give him a message for me?”

“Let me grab a pen.” There was a pause and then, “Okay.”

“Mick, thanks for the pink collar. Snowball.”

“Did you say ‘Snowball?”

“Yeah. Sign it ‘Snowball.’”

“Got it.”

“Thanks.” Maddie disconnected and closed the phone book. At ten minutes after eight while Maddie glanced through a crime magazine, her phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Your cat called me.”

Just the sound of Mick’s voice made her smile, which was a very bad sign. “What did she want?”

“To thank me for her collar.”

Maddie glanced at Snowball lying in the red chair, licking her leg and in flagrant disregard of rule number two. “She has good manners.”

“What are you doing tonight?”

“Teaching Snowball which fork to use.”

He chuckled. “When is she going to bed?”

She flipped a page in the magazine and her gaze scanned an article about a man who’d killed three of his trophy wives. “Why?”

“I want to see you.”

She wanted to see him too. Bad. And that was the problem. She didn’t want to feel all happy inside just at the sound of his voice on her telephone. She didn’t want to see him in a parking lot and remember the touch of his hands and mouth. The more she saw him, thought about him, wanted him, the more their lives became entangled. “You know I can’t,” she said and flipped a few more pages.

“Meet me at Hennessy’s and please bring your camera.”

Her hand stilled. “Are you offering to let me take photos inside your bar?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t usually take the photos for her books, but there wouldn’t be a problem if she did.

“I want to see you.”

“Are you bribing me?”

There was a pause on the line and then he asked, “Is that a problem?”

Was it? “Only if you think I’ll have sex with you for a few photos.”

“Honey,” he said through what sounded like a sigh of exasperation, “I wish getting you naked was that easy, but no.”

Just because she went to Hennessy’s and took some photographs didn’t mean anyone was going to end up naked. She’d lived without sex for four years. Clearly she did have some self-control.

“Why don’t you come here around midnight? The place will be cleared out and you can take as many pictures as you want.”

If she went, she’d be using the undeniable attraction between them to get what she wanted. Just as he was using her desire to photograph the inside of the bar to get what he wanted. She wondered if her conscience should rise up and decline the tempting offer, but as had happened from time to time in her life when it came to her work and her scruples, her conscience was silent.

“I’ll be there.” After she hung up the phone, she took a deep breath and held it in. Entering that bar would not be the same as every other crime scene she’d walked and explored and stood within. This was personal.

She let out her pent-up breath. She’d viewed the crime scene photos and read the reports. Twenty-nine years after the fact would not be a problem. She’d sat across a mesh barrier from killers who told her exactly what they’d do to her body if they ever got the chance. Compared to that nightmare, walking into Hennessy’s was going to be a piece of cake. No sweat.

Hennessy’s was painted a nondescript gray and was bigger than it looked from the outside. Inside it had two pool tables and a dance floor on either side of the long bar. In the middle, three steps led down to the sunken floor surrounded by a white railing and fitted with ten round tables. Hennessy’s had never had the unruly-girls-gone-bad reputation of Mort’s. It was more laid-back and was known for good drinks and music. And for a time, murder. Hennessy’s had finally lived down the latter-until a certain true crime writer had blown into town.

Mick stood behind the bar and poured South Gin into a cocktail shaker. He glanced up at Maddie, at the light shining in her hair, picking out reddish brown strands in her ponytail. He returned his gaze to the tall clear bottle in his hand. “My great-grandfather built this bar in 1925.”

Maddie set her camera on the bar and glanced about her. “During Prohibition?”

“Yeah.” He pointed to the sunken middle. “That part was a restaurant dining room,” he said. “He made and sold grain alcohol out of the back.”

Maddie looked at him through those big brown eyes that turned all warm and sexy when he kissed her neck. At the moment her eyes were a little wide, like she was seeing ghosts. “Was he ever caught?” she asked but looked about once again, her mind clearly not on his masterful attempt at conversation. When he’d opened the back door and seen her standing there, she’d looked so tense, he’d had to check his first impulse to push her against the wall and kiss the breath out of her.

“Nah.” Mick shook his head. They both knew she was there to take photographs, and Mick was surprised at how uptight she was about being inside the bar. He thought she’d be happy. He was giving her what she wanted, but she didn’t look happy. She looked ready to break. “The town was too small and unimportant in those days, and Great-Grandfather was too well liked by everyone. When Prohibition ended, he gutted most of the place and turned it into a bar. Except for maintenance and a few necessary renovations, it’s been like this since.” He added a splash of vermouth, then put the lid on the cocktail shaker. “My grandfather turned the area over there into a dance floor and my father brought in the pool tables.” He shook the premium gin and vermouth with one hand and reached below the bar with the other. “I’ve decided to leave it as is.” He set first one and then another frosted martini glass on the bar. He added a few olives on toothpicks, and as he poured, his gaze lowered from the firm set of her jaw down her throat to her white blouse and the top button that look perilously close to popping open and giving him a great view of her cleavage. “I’ve put my money and energy into Mort’s. Next week my buddy Steve and I have a meeting with a couple of investors to talk about starting a business giving helicopter tours in the area. Who knows if it will pan out? Owning bars is what I know, but I really want to branch out and have other interests. That way I don’t feel as if I’m standing still.” He pushed the martini glass toward her and wondered if she was even listening to him.

Her fingers touched the stem. “Why do you feel as if you’re standing still?”

He guessed she had been listening. “I don’t know. Maybe because as a kid I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of here.” He reached for the toothpick in his martini and bit an olive off the end. “But here I am.”

“Your family is here. I don’t have family-well, except for a few cousins I’ve met briefly. If I had a brother or sister, I’d want to live by them. At least I hope I would.”

He recalled that her mother had died when she’d been young. “Where’s your father?”

“I don’t know. I never met him.” She stirred her martini with the olives. “How do you know what I drink?”

He wondered if she’d purposely changed the subject. “I know all your secrets.” She looked a bit alarmed and he laughed. “I remember what you were drinking the first night I saw you.” He walked around the end of the bar and sat next to her. She turned to face him and he planted one of his feet between hers on the rungs of her stool. She wore a black skirt and his knee forced the material up her smooth thighs.

“Really?” She picked up the drink and gazed at him over the top of the glass. She drained half of her drink. Sucking down his best gin as if it were water, and if she wasn’t careful, he’d have to drive her home. Which wasn’t a bad idea. “I’m surprised you remember anything beyond Darla’s tempting offer to show you her bare bottom,” she said and licked her bottom lip.

“I remember you were being a smart-ass that night too.” He took her hand and brushed his thumb across the backs of her knuckles. “I wondered what it would be like to kiss your smart mouth.”

“Now you know.”

“Yes.” He moved his gaze across her face, her cheeks, and jaw and wet lips. He looked back up into her eyes. “Now that I know, I think about all the places I didn’t get to kiss you the other night.”

She set her glass on the bar. “Lord, you’re good.”

“I’m good at a lot of things.”

“Especially at saying just the right thing to make a woman feel like you really mean it.”

He dropped her hand. “You don’t think I mean it?”

She grabbed her camera and spun around on her stool. Mick moved his foot and she stood. “I’m sure you do mean it.” She turned her back on him and raised her camera. “Every time you say it and to every woman you say it to.”

Mick picked up his glass and also stood. “You think I’ve said that to other women?”

She adjusted the focus and snapped a picture of the empty tables. The strobe flashed and she said, “Of course.”

That stung, especially since it wasn’t true. “Well, honey, you don’t give yourself enough credit.”

“I give myself a lot of credit.” Another click and flash, then she said, “But I know how things are.”

He took a drink and the cool gin warmed a path down his throat and settled next to a spot of irritation. “Tell me what you think you know.”

“I know I’m not the only woman you spend time with.” She lowered her camera and moved to one end of the bar.

“You’re the only woman I’m seeing right now.”

“Right now. You’ll move on. I’m sure we’re all interchangeable.”

Mick walked away as the strobe flashed. “I didn’t think you had a problem with that.” He moved into the dark shadows and leaned a hip into the jukebox.

“I don’t. I’m just saying that I’m sure we’re all the same in the dark.”

She was really starting to piss him off, but he had a feeling that was her point. He wondered why the hell he’d wanted to see her so damn bad. She believed the gossip about him, and he wondered why he cared. She didn’t mind if he saw other women, and he wondered why that bothered him. Maybe he should. Maybe he should kick her ass out and call someone else. The problem was he didn’t want to call someone else, and that ticked him off almost as much as her attitude.

She took several photos of the floor in front of the bar from different angles, then he said, “You’re wrong about that. Not all pussy is the same in the dark.”

She glanced over at him. He’d meant to offend her, but typical of Maddie, she didn’t act like other women. Instead, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Are you trying to make me mad?”

“It seems fair. You’re trying to make me mad.”

She thought a moment and then confessed, “You’re right.”

“Why?”

“Maybe because I don’t want to think about what I’m doing.” She moved to the end of the bar and looked at the no-skid mats on the floor. She snapped a few photos, then lowered her camera. Just above a whisper, barely loud enough for him to hear, she said, “This is harder than I thought it would be.”

He straightened.

“It’s the same bar and mirrors and lighting and old cash register.” She set the camera down and grasped the end of the bar. “The only things that are different are the blood and the bodies.”

Mick walked toward her and set his glass on the railing as he passed it.

There was a catch in her voice when she said, “She died here. How can you stand it?”

He placed his hands on her shoulders. “I don’t think about it anymore.”

She turned and looked up at him, her eyes wide and stricken. “How is that possible? Your mother killed your father right at the top of the stairs.”

“It’s just a place. Four walls and roof.” He slid his hands down her arms and back up again. “It happened a long time ago. Like I said, I don’t think about it.”

“I do.” She bit her lip and turned her head away to wipe at her eyes.

Mick had never met a writer before Maddie, but it did seem to him as if she were awfully emotional for a woman writing a book about people she didn’t even know.

“This has just been so much harder than I thought it was going to be. I don’t take my own photos for the books, and I thought I could do this.”

Maybe she had to immerse herself in the details and feel them in order to write about them. Hell, what did he know? He didn’t even read books that often.

She looked up at him. “I have to go.” She grabbed her camera off the bar and walked around him. On her way out, she picked up her jacket and purse off one of the stools where she’d set them earlier.

This evening had turned to shit and he did not know why. He didn’t know what he’d done or hadn’t done. He’d thought she’d take a few photos. They’d have a drink, talk, and, yeah, hopefully get naked. He followed Maddie through the back and out into the alley.

“Are you going to be okay to drive?” he asked as he stepped from the back door.

She stood just inside the pool of light and fumbled to shove her arms into the sleeves of her jacket. She nodded, and her purse dropped to the ground by her foot. Instead of picking it up, she covered her face with her hands.

“Why don’t I take you home?” He moved toward her, then bent down and picked up her purse. He’d been raised by females, but he did not understand Maddie Dupree. “You’re too upset to drive.”

She looked up at him through liquid eyes as a tear spilled over her bottom lashes. “Mick, I have to tell you something about me. Something I should have told you weeks ago.”

He didn’t like the sound of that. “You’re married.” He put her bag on the hood of her car and waited.

She shook her head. “I…I’m…” She let out a breath and brushed the tears from her cheeks. “I’m not…I’m afraid…I can’t…” She wrapped her arms around his neck and glued her body to his. “I can’t get the crime scene photos out of my head.”

That was it? That’s why she was so upset? He didn’t know what to say. What to do. He felt helpless and he slid his hands around her sides and held her. The skin across his abdomen got tight, and he knew what he’d like to do. He figured it was a good thing she couldn’t read his mind, but it was her fault, really. She shouldn’t have pressed into him and clung to his neck.

“Mick?”

“Hmm?” Tonight she smelled like vanilla again and he ran his hands up and down her back. Holding her was almost as good as sex.

“How many condoms do you have on you?”

His hand stilled. He’d bought a box of Trojans yesterday. “I have twelve in the truck.”

“That ought to be enough.”

He pulled back to look into her face, her profile lit by the light at the back of Hennessy’s. “I don’t understand you, Maddie Dupree.”

“Lately, I don’t understand myself.” She ran her fingers through his hair and brought his mouth down to hers. “And where you’re concerned, I just can’t seem to do the right thing.”

Late the next morning, Maddie stood in her kitchen and raised a steaming cup of coffee to her lips. She wore her white bathrobe and her wet hair was slicked back from her shower. Last night she’d almost told Mick that Alice Jones was her mother. She should have told him, but each time she opened her mouth, she couldn’t say the words. She hadn’t been afraid to tell him, but for some reason, she just couldn’t tell him. Maybe the timing was off. Another time would be better.

More than anything, she’d needed him to help clear her head of the horrible images. She’d been to her mother’s grave and she hadn’t fallen apart. But standing in the exact spot where her mother had died, she’d felt like someone had reached inside her chest and ripped out her heart. Perhaps if she hadn’t seen the photos of her mother’s blood and her blond hair stained a dark brown. Perhaps her world wouldn’t have flipped upside down and she wouldn’t have gotten so emotional.

She hated getting emotional, especially in front of other people. Most specifically in front of Mick, but he’d been there and seen it and she’d needed someone to hold on to and focus on when everything seemed so unbalanced.

He’d followed her home and she’d taken his hand and led him into the bedroom. He’d kissed her in all those places he’d said he’d been thinking about. He set every nerve ending in her body on fire, and she knew she should feel bad about being with him again. It was wrong of her, but being with him felt too good to feel really bad.

“Meow.”

Snowball wove a figure eight between her feet and she looked down at her cat. How had her life come to this? She had a cat in her house and a Hennessy in her bed.

She set her cup on the counter and moved to the pantry to grab a bag of kitten food. A dead mouse lay on the floor and Snowball sniffed its tail. She’d moved the poison the night she’d decided to keep Snowball, but that didn’t mean the mouse hadn’t eaten the bait. “Don’t eat that or you’ll get sick.” She grabbed Snowball and carried her into the laundry room. Snowball purred and butted her head against Maddie’s chin. “And I know for a fact you did not sleep in your bed. I found white fur on my office chair.” She set the kitten in her Amazon box and poured food onto a little dish. “I do not want to walk around with white fur on my butt.” Snowball jumped out of her box and attacked her food as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. Last night as Mick had walked from the bathroom, a smug, satisfied smile tilting one corner of his lips, the kitten had stalked him across the carpet and attacked his leg.

“What the hell?” he’d yelped and danced around as Snowball had dashed back under the bed. “I can’t believe I wasted money buying that damn thing a collar.”

Maddie had laughed and patted the bed next to her. “Come here so I can make you feel better after the big bad cat attack.”

He’d moved to the bed and pulled her up so she knelt before him. “I’m going to make you pay for laughing at me.” And he had. All night long, and when she’d woken this morning, she was alone. Again. She would have liked to have woken and seen his face, his blue eyes looking at her, all sleepy and sated, but it was better this way. Better to keep a distance even though they’d shared a night as physically close as two people could possibly get.

While Snowball chowed, Maddie picked up the mouse with a paper towel and carried it to the garbage outside. She called a local veterinarian and made Snowball an appointment for the first week in August. Her low-carb granola bars had teeth marks on the outside of the box, but the bars looked okay. As she took a bite, her doorbell rang.

Through the peephole she gazed at Mick, standing on her porch, looking showered and shaved and relaxed in a pair of Levi’s and an untucked striped shirt over a wife beater. She ignored the little tumble in her stomach and opened the door.

“How’d you sleep?” he asked as a knowing little smile brought out his dimples.

She opened the door wide and he stepped inside. “I think it was around three when I finally passed out.”

“It was three-thirty.” He walked past her and she shut the door behind him. “Where’s your cat?” he asked as they moved into the living room.

“Eating breakfast. Are you scared of a little kitty?”

“Of that Tasmanian furball?” He made a rude scoffing sound and pulled a little stuffed mouse from the front pocket of his jeans. “I got her some catnip to mellow her out.” He tossed it on the coffee table. “What are your plans?”

She planned to work. “Why?”

“I thought we could drive to Redfish Lake and get a bite to eat.”

“Like in a date?”

“Sure.” He reached for the terrycloth belt and pulled her toward him. “Why not?”

Because they weren’t dating. They shouldn’t even be having sex. Dating couldn’t happen no matter how her stomach tumbled or her skin tingled.

“I’m hungry and I thought you might be hungry too.” He dipped his head and kissed the side of her neck.

She moved her head to one side. She did have to eat, though. “Why Redfish Lake?”

“Because they have a good restaurant in the lodge there, and I want to spend the whole day with you.” He kissed the side of her throat. “Say yes.”

“I’ll need to get dressed.” She pulled her belt from his grasp and turned away. As she entered her bedroom she called out, “How far is Redfish Lake?”

“About an hour and a half,” he answered from the doorway.

She hadn’t expected him to follow her and she looked over at him as she grabbed a pair of underwear from a drawer. He leaned against the doorframe, and his eyes watched her, moving with her hands as she pulled up a pair of pink silky panties. His gaze felt very intimate. More intimate than when he kissed the insides of her thighs and his eyes turned that certain sexy blue. Intimate like they were a couple and it was normal for him to watch her dress. Like this relationship was more than it really was and more than it was ever going to be. As if there were a chance at tomorrows and the day afters. She raised her brows up her forehead. “Do you mind?”

“You’re not going to get all modest, are you? Not after last night.” She continued to stare at him until he sighed and pushed away from the doorframe. “All right. I’ll go get your cat stoned.”

She watched him leave and tried not to think about tomorrow or the days after and things that could never be. She dressed quickly in a pink cotton sundress. She pulled her hair back in a claw and gazed in the mirror as she put on a little mascara and lip gloss.

In the harsh light of day, with her sexual desire sated and her emotions tightly under control, she knew she had to tell him she was Madeline Jones. He deserved to know.

The thought of telling him cramped her stomach and she wondered if he really had to be told at all. Last night she might not have been real tactful when she’d brought up other women. She’d obviously made him mad, but the fact was, Mick Hennessy was no more a one-woman man than his father had been. Or his grandfather. Even if he wasn’t seeing anyone else right now, he would get tired of Maddie. He’d move on sooner or later, so why tell him today?

If anything, she should clear up her mortifying outburst last night. She wasn’t a woman who got all weepy and cried on a man’s neck. Perhaps she hadn’t broken down like some women were apt to do, but for her, it was a loss of control that embarrassed her. Even twelve hours later.

A half hour into their drive to Redfish, she decided to clear it up. “Sorry about last night,” she said above the country music filling the cab of Mick’s truck.

“You don’t have anything to be sorry about. You got a little loud, but I like that about you.” He grinned and glanced at her through the lenses of his blue mirrored sunglasses before returning his gaze to the road. “Sometimes I don’t always understand everything you say, but you sound real sexy while you’re saying it.”

Somehow she suspected they weren’t talking about the same thing. “I was talking about getting all emotional at Hennessy’s.”

“Oh.” His thumb tapped against the steering wheel, keeping time to a song about a woman liking chrome. “Don’t worry about it.”

She wished she could take his advice, but it wasn’t that easy for her. “There are just certain girls I’ve never wanted to be. One of them is the emotional girl who cries all the time.”

“I don’t think you’re an emotional girl.” Air from the vents touched the dark hair about his forehead. “What are the other girls?”

“What?”

“You said there are girls you never wanted to be.” Without taking his eyes from the road, he turned off the CD player and spoke into the suddenly silent cab. “One is the emotional girl. What are the others?”

“Oh.” She counted them off on her fingers. “I don’t ever want to be the stupid girl. Nor the get-drunk-and-slutty girl. The stalker girl or the butt girl.”

He looked over at her. “The butt girl?”

“Don’t make me explain it to you.”

He returned his gaze to the road and smiled. “Then you’re not talking about a girl with a big butt.”

“No.”

“Oh, so I guess I don’t ever…”

“Forget it.”

He laughed. “Some women say they like it.”

“Uh-huh. Some women say they like to be paddled, but I’ll never know the pleasure of either.”

Mick reached across the center console and took her hand. “What about being tied to a bed?”

She shrugged. “I kind of like that.”

He brought her hand to his mouth and smiled against her skin. “I guess I know what we’re doing after I get off work.”

Maddie laughed and turned her attention to the scenery. To the pines and thick brush and the South Fork of the Payette River. Idaho might grow famous potatoes, but it also had spectacular wilderness areas.

At the lodge, they sat at a table that looked out at the blue-green water of Redfish Lake and at the snow-covered peaks of the Sawtooth Mountains. They ate lunch and talked about the people in Truly. She told him about her friends, and about Lucy’s wedding last year and Clare’s impending nuptials. They talked about everything from the weather to world events, sports to the latest West Nile virus outbreaks.

They talked about almost everything but the reason she moved to Truly. By tacit agreement they avoided talking about the book she was writing and about the night his mother had killed two people and then herself.

The day was relaxing and fun, and during those rare moments when Maddie looked into his eyes, her conscience reminded her that he would not be with her if he knew who she really was. She shoved it down and ignored it. She turned a deaf ear, and by the ride home, she’d buried her conscience so deep, it was just a faint whisper that was easily ignored.