tea hadn’t been enough to soothe her. On the other hand, the coffee she’d fed to Agent Tennant had only seemed to sharpen his mind, something else that kind of ticked her off.
How could he look so cool and collected—and dammit, so handsome—when she felt like a world-class frump with only one half-functioning brain cell? And why, of all the things that should or could have been circling through her head at the moment, was it his voice of a few hours ago she kept hearing?
You’re not the woman I’ve been looking for.
Story of my life, she thought as she watched him on the other side of her dining-room table, studying her social security card again. She was never the woman men were looking for. Not in the long run. She was always too…something…for them. Too serious. Too dedicated. Too quiet. Too old-fashioned. Too focused. Too straitlaced. Too stuffy.
Not a single charge was true. Yes, she was all of those things from time to time. But never to a point where that was all she was. And she was other things, too, things men just couldn’t seem to see. She could be fun when the situation called for it. She could. And she could be witty and adventurous and outrageous, too. Really. She could. Honest. She’d just never met any men who made her want to be those things, that was all. The men she met were always too…something…for her, too.
“We’ll still have to run a check on you,” Agent Tennant said now, not looking up from her social security card. She’d noticed he’d come back to that little scrap of cardboard several times, as if something about it still bothered him. “There’s a lot I can learn about you from our sources that I can’t from all this.” He gestured toward the piles of paper records fanned out across the table.
Marnie narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you telling me you know more about me than I know myself?”
He was smiling when he looked up at her, but there was nothing happy in the expression. “Well, not at the moment. But by day’s end…”
She shook her head. “Unbelievable,” she said for a second time since meeting him. But again, unfortunately, it was easy to believe.
He studied her in silence for a moment longer, then picked up her birth certificate. It, like her social security card, had seemed to interest him more than anything else she’d presented for his examination.
“This is just a photocopy,” he said. “Do you have the original?”
She couldn’t see what difference it would make, but told him, “No. I don’t remember ever seeing an original, to be honest. I only needed the copy for school registrations and such. I imagine it’s packed away somewhere with my baby effects.”
“According to this,” Agent Tennant said, his attention falling to the document again, “You were born May first, nineteen seventy-two, to Elliott and Lucie Lundy.”
He glanced up again, and again, Marnie was struck by how very blue his eyes were. That, of course, made her notice again how handsome he was, and for some weird reason, she found herself wondering if he was married. Of its own volition, her gaze fell to the hand that was holding her birth certificate—his left. No ring. No tan line or indentation, either. Still, some married people didn’t bother with them. Then she reminded herself it was none of her business if Agent Tennant was married. More to the point, she further reminded herself, she didn’t care.
So why did she need to be reminded of that?
“You mentioned your father passed away,” he said, pulling her back to the matter at hand. Which was not his hand, she assured herself. “Is your mother still alive?”
“No. She died when I was a month old,” she told him.
“In a car accident. I have no memory of her, and my father never remarried.”
For a long moment, Agent Tennant said nothing. Then, “May first, nineteen-seventy-two,” he repeated. But softly, this time, and with some distraction, as if he were thinking about something else when he said it.
She couldn’t imagine why he’d find her date of birth so worthy of consideration, but he said nothing more and stayed quiet so long, Marnie began to feel a little uncomfortable.
Then she realized it wasn’t his silence making her uncomfortable—it was the intent way he was studying her face. He seemed to be most interested in her eyes, however, pinning his gaze there for a long time. Long enough to make heat swamp her entire system. Again.
“I need to borrow this for a little while,” he stated—not asked—as he held up her birth certificate. “I’ll get it back to you this afternoon. This evening at the latest.” He looked down at the papers on the table again and plucked her social security card from the assortment. “I’ll need this, too.”
“Okay,” she agreed reluctantly. Not that she got the feeling that she had much choice. “But why do you need them?”
“I can’t say for sure just yet,” he told her. “But I think, Ms. Lundy, that you and I both are going to be surprised by what I learn.”
Oh, Marnie didn’t like the sound of that at all. “I have to work tonight at Lauderdale’s,” she told him. “And I have students to teach this afternoon.”
“Tomorrow then,” he said. “We should talk then. Are you free in the morning?”
She nodded. “But I have to work at the store in the evening.”
He took a step backward, into her living room. But he continued to look at her face, as if he wasn’t able to look at anything else. “I apologize again for the inconvenience of last night.”
“Inconvenience,” she repeated blandly. “It was a lot more than that. You scared the hell out of me.”
He made a face that indicated he was genuinely sorry, and continued to watch her eyes. “I apologize for that, too.”
A shudder of heat wound through her at the relentlessness of his gaze. The way he was looking at her then…Hungry. That was the only way she could think to describe him. Like a man who’d been starved and neglected for years and had just stumbled upon a banquet.
He kept walking until he was at her front door, his attention divided between her birth certificate, her social security card and her. Marnie seemed to finally win out over the paper documents, however—and my, but wasn’t that a huge compliment, being more important than paper?—because he stuffed the former into his inside jacket pocket and studied her face again. Or, rather, she couldn’t help thinking, her eyes. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was seeing something—or someone—else.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” he said. “Around nine okay?”
“Fine.”
“We can talk more then.”
Marnie wanted to ask about what, since he seemed to already know, but decided maybe she wasn’t all that fired up to hear. There was still a chance, however small, that this was nothing but a bad dream. By tomorrow morning, she might wake up to discover Agent Noah Tennant didn’t exist anywhere outside her feverish imagination, so whatever he had to tell her didn’t, either.
And maybe, she thought further, she’d also wake up tomorrow to discover that an asteroid the size of Lithuania had crashed into Ohio, making this whole
