that, cutie pie, I’d have pressed for a sample long before this,” she announced.
God give him strength. “It was an accident.”
“I know.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“The wonder was that it happened at all. Every time I’ve been around you before, I was pretty sure you were more tempted to kill me than kiss me.”
“I was. I am. And if you hadn’t been living a sheltered life hunched over a keyboard, you’d have known the chemistry was there. Where I come from, you don’t wake up a sleeping lion. Now I assume, five miles back, you must have had some reason for throwing your arms around me?”
“Reason?” She said the word like it was alien. With Rebecca, that was certainly possible. For one long, horrifying minute, her soft green eyes stayed glued to his face, studying him, making him feel aggravatingly…naked. But then she blinked, and abruptly lifted her hand, as if just then remembering she was holding a piece of paper. “Of course I had a reason. A superb reason. Gabe! You won’t believe what I found!”
Well, she was diverted from talking about all that touchy, tricky chemistry business, but calming Rebecca down when she was excited had a lot in common with containing a rumor in Washington.
Gabe saw the letter, read the letter, was dragged into Monica’s bedroom closet, where she’d found the letter, but even after they headed back downstairs, she was prancing with energy—and trying hard to make him eat crow.
“Did I tell you I’d find something? Did I?”
“Now listen, shorty, you’re getting your hopes sky-high. This really isn’t proof of anything—”
“It’s proof that there could have been another factor involved in Monica’s murder. It’s proof that someone besides my brother was butting heads with Monica in the same general time period around her death.”
Yeah, he saw it that way, too. And it burned his butt that an idealistic, altruistic hopeless dreamer of a mystery writer had managed to find the clue instead of him—especially since he’d turned the damn mansion upside down himself three times now, and come up with nada.
Because Gabe wasn’t born yesterday, he carefully sneaked the letter away from her and folded it neatly in his pocket. A Los Angeles address for this Tammy Diller had been on it, an address Rebecca had certainly seen—but hopefully wouldn’t remember. The back of his mind was already clicking with plans. As soon as he got home, he could probe the data bases on the computer for info on that name and address. If anything panned out, he’d need to make travel arrangements for a trip to L.A.
First, though, he had to get rid of Rebecca. How a woman could still be so fired up in the middle of the night was beyond him—especially a woman who looked like she’d tangled with a whole gang in a back alley. Her face was as white as a virgin’s wedding dress, and the gash on her forehead was clearly swelling under the bandage.
“You never believed I’d find anything, now did you? Just like you didn’t believe me about my mother months ago. Logic isn’t always more valuable than intuition, love bug. A woman and a man simply think differently. Even if I hadn’t read a ton of reference books on crime-solving, sometimes a woman can just sense things—”
When she had to stop to take a breath, he broke in.” I admit it. You did good. But it’s going on 4:00 a.m. I think it’s time we called this a night.”
“You mean go home?” From the look on her face, the idea was as appealing as a case of chicken pox.
“I’m beat. I’m ready to pack this in, and I’m sure not leaving you alone here. You got a good lead—” he hastened to get that in, before she could praise herself for another hour and a half on the subject “—and as soon as I catch a few hours’ rest, I’ll run with it.”
“Well, I agree, if you’re beat, you should go home. But I could stay and keep looking a little longer. Maybe Monica had some other hiding places—”
“Maybe she did. But that’s a needle-in-a-haystack possibility, considering all the people who’ve been over this place. And the letter is something concrete that can be pursued immediately. Besides which, we’ve been at this for hours—”
“I’m not tired,” she immediately assured him. He saw the mutinous thrust of her chin.
His chin was bigger, and his scowl had a long history of intimidating potential mutineers before. “The hell you aren’t. You look like the battered loser in a cat fight, and you’re not going to tell me that you aren’t starting to feel those bruises. That bump on your forehead alone has to hurt like a bitch. Now where’s your car?”
She didn’t look even nominally intimidated, but the question effectively distracted her. “About a mile past the main gate. There was a bunch of big old walnut trees that made for a perfect dark place to park. And if I parked that far away, I figured no one would see me when I climbed the fence—”
“I don’t want to hear any more about your breaking-and-entering debacle.” God, she was going to give him gray hair. Until meeting her, he’d considered himself a relatively young thirty-eight. There’d been nothing to turn his hair white but death, destruction, and a few terrorists from his Special Forces days. “Wherever your car is, it sounds too far to walk. Mine’s parked out front, so I’ll just drive you there. Now where’d you leave your wet sweatshirt?”
“In the kitchen.” She glanced down at the black V-neck sweater, and abruptly clutched the neck closed. Heaven knew why. He’d seen her bra, seen her cleavage, seen every inch of her long white throat more than once tonight. Geronimo persisted in responding to her, no matter what repression techniques Gabe tried.
“I’d better put my sweatshirt back on, but where should I put the sweater back?”
“Just keep the sweater. I can’t imagine anyone would know or care if you borrowed it. I’ll get it from you and return it sometime, but putting on a wet sweatshirt on a cold night doesn’t make any sense. Just grab it—and that packsack you carried in with you—so we can go.”
“I think I may have left a light on upstairs. And I have some stuff to clean up in the closet. And I’d better wash out that shot glass—”
There was a reason Gabe always worked alone. His employees were good at teamwork, and often enough his staff paired up for different projects. Not him. He just didn’t like depending on other people. He liked being able to move fast and streamlined.
By the time Rebecca was “done” with all her messing around, he could have finished a slowpoke sucker.
He ushered her outside, turned to lock up the front door, and motioned her toward the long, low antique Morgan.
She wolf-whistled. Almost as good as a man. “What a darling,” she murmured.
“Yeah, she is. ’55. But she was cosseted as a showpiece for most of those years, so she doesn’t have that many miles on her.”
“You can still get parts?”
“Not easily. Parts are not only hard to find, they cost an arm and a leg. Damn few antique dealers even know this breed of car anymore.”
“But
