Читать книгу: «A Gift For The Groom»

Chapter One

The bottom half of the scorching sun had disappeared behind the distant mountains when Nick Claiborne strode across the tarmac of the small airport in Rattlesnake Corners, Wyoming. His V-tail plane, N373GY, affectionately known as Ginny, sat waiting patiently for his return.

The June day had been long and hot. He’d left South Dakota early that morning, flown to Wyoming, spent the day looking for a woman who’d moved over twenty years ago, and now he had to fly to Nebraska tonight in search of that same woman.

Once he and Ginny got into the air, free of the earth, up there alone with the stars, he’d unwind and relax. It was always like that when he could find the time to fly. As a private investigator, he didn’t get to do a lot of flying. This case, frustrating in many ways, at least gave him the excuse to travel.

He completed his preflight walk-around check, unfastened Ginny’s tiedowns and climbed up the wing to the door...which stood slightly open. That was odd. He was always so careful to lock it.

He swung the door wide open, preparing to climb in, to settle in the seat that, after so many hours of use, molded to his body perfectly. Already he could feel the tension unknotting in his neck and shoulders as he caught the familiar scent of...no, something was wrong. His plane wasn’t supposed to smell like honeysuckle.

“Hi! I’m Analise Brewster! You must be Nick Claiborne.”

Nick blinked and dropped his foot back to the wing. He wasn’t given to hallucinations, hadn’t drunk anything all day except water and iced tea and he was pretty sure he wasn’t asleep and dreaming. Therefore, the redhead in his cockpit must be real.

“Analise Brewster?” he repeated. “My client Analise Brewster?” As if there could be more than one.

“That’s right! Am I glad to see you! It’s getting so late, I was starting to worry, afraid I’d been waiting in the wrong plane, except this is the only plane parked here.”

She swung out slender feet in turquoise sandals followed by long, golden legs stretching at least a mile from khaki shorts that should have been mundane and ordinary but somehow on this woman were incredibly sexy. She wore some kind of silky, turquoise blouse that draped oh so nicely over her rounded breasts.

He made himself lift his gaze to her face.

Standing in front of him, almost even with his height of six feet, due to the upward slope of the wing where she stood, she smiled tentatively, her lush, generous lips outlining white, perfect teeth.

Lush, generous lips? Where the hell had that come from?

Okay, maybe they were lush and generous, but he didn’t need to be thinking that about some woman who’d ambushed him from his own plane...some engaged woman.

She extended a slim hand, and he accepted automatically, too stunned to do otherwise, his fingers closing over the smooth skin.

“In your fax,” she said, “you mentioned that you thought you had a solid lead on Abbie Prather. Did you find her today? Is she in jail already?”

Maybe one of those ranchers had slipped something into that iced tea after all. This whole scene didn’t bear much resemblance to reality. He rubbed the back of his neck where those tension knots were gathering again. “What are you doing here? How did you get into my plane?”

“I got your fax last night,” she explained, speaking more slowly, as if she thought he might have difficulty comprehending. She was right about that! “Then I called your office this morning and told your secretary that I planned to meet you here, but I guess you didn’t get my message.”

“No, I didn’t get your message. I haven’t talked to my office today.” Nick looked around the deserted airport. “How did you get here?”

“I drove to Tyler this morning and rented a plane—we don’t have an airport in Briar Creek—and when I got here, you weren’t here, but that man inside told me this was your plane and you’d be back since you’d borrowed his truck because there weren’t any rental cars, so I, um, sort of waited. In your plane. So I wouldn’t miss you.”

She was once again talking even faster than he remembered from their phone conversations. But the wires and circuits of the phone lines hadn’t done justice to that voice. Even in fast forward it called up images of cool lemonade sipped under the shade of a big cottonwood tree in the heat of a Texas summer, of warm breezes sifting through the smooth leaves of a magnolia tree.

He cleared his throat and tried to do the same with his mind. “I still don’t understand what you’re doing here.”

For a brief moment confusion creased her smooth forehead. She looked around as if a little surprised to find herself in the middle of nowhere. Then her gaze returned to him and her smile re-formed. “Why, to be there when you find the woman who framed my fiancé’s father, of course.”

He folded his arms across his chest “Why?”

“Why?” Again she looked a little uncertain. “Well, I should think that would be obvious.”

“It’s not, so why don’t you enlighten me? What possible reason could you have for traveling a thousand miles just to see some woman arrested?”

She bit her lower lip, and Nick found himself unconsciously imitating her action, chewing on his own lip as if he could taste hers by proxy. This woman was dangerous.

She twisted around, bent over and reached into the plane. He tried not to look at her rounded rear in those mundane khaki shorts. Tried and failed.

She straightened and hauled out a satchel that was either a very large purse or a small suitcase. From the bag, after some searching, she produced a camera. “I could take a picture,” she said. “As I already explained, hiring you to find that woman is a wedding present for Lucas. That’s my fiancé. But I haven’t told him yet since it’s a surprise, so I could take a picture as sort of physical evidence. Something to put under the tree, so to speak. Not that we’re having a tree at our wedding. But you know what I mean.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean. You just now made that up about taking the picture. You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

She plunked the camera back into her bag, slung it over her shoulder, lifted her chin defiantly and met his gaze head-on. “I need to be here.”

Her eyes were decidedly green, even in the deepening dusk. Not blue-green like the ocean or gray-green like moss, but green like the treetops in full summer when he flew above them. An urge swept over him to dive into their depths, to assure her it didn’t matter why she’d come to him, that he was glad she was there.

He gave himself a mental shake. It wasn’t like him to let his hormones take over so completely. He was upset she was there, not glad.

“Abbie Prather’s not here,” he growled, irritated with himself as much as with her. “She moved in 1976.”

“Oh, no! You mean we’ve lost her? What are we going to do now?”

She looked so forlorn, he had to fight a totally irrational desire to reassure her, to try to make things right...to take care of her.

Been there, done that, he reminded himself grimly.

He was a private investigator, his services for hire. Gather information, get the facts. That was what he did, and all he did. No involvement with anybody’s problems.

“We—I haven’t lost her. I’ve got a new address for her in Nebraska. I’m flying there tonight just as soon as you get back in your chartered plane and return to Briar Creek.”

“Ah, well, you see,” she began, looking over his left shoulder, refusing to meet his gaze, “that’s not exactly possible. My pilot had to turn around and fly back because today’s his son’s sixth birthday, and they’re having a party for him right about now, so I’ll just go on to Nebraska with you and then maybe I’ll be there when you find Abbie after all.”

“You can’t do that!” Nick protested, a jumbled panic prickling him from all sides. He needed his downtime, his time alone. He did not need a ditzy client hanging around...especially not a ditzy client with golden legs nine miles long and lush lips.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Look, Ms. Brewster—”

“Analise. We should certainly be on a first name basis if we’re going to Nebraska together in that itty-bitty plane.”

“We’re not going to Nebraska together in that itty-bitty... in my plane. Or anybody’s plane.” Nick plowed his fingers through his hair and shook his head. “Abbie Prather is no amateur. She stole twenty-five thousand dollars from the bank where she worked, manipulated bank records to frame your fiancé’s father then obtained documentation to change her identity to June Martin. These are the actions of somebody who knows how to play the game. Now you figure she ran to South Dakota, lived there a couple of years and moved to Wyoming, lived here a couple of years and moved to Nebraska. What makes you think she stayed in Nebraska more than a couple of years? She probably moved another six or seven times. I told you when I took this case that it was going to be tough because it’s so old.”

Analise folded her arms, right under her rounded breasts, pushing them up, thrusting them forward, pulling the smooth turquoise silk taut over them, emphasizing every curve. He’d thought the summer evening was cooling off, but that was before Analise folded her arms under her breasts.

“There’s no motel or car-rental place closer than Casper,” she said firmly. “The man inside told me that. There used to be a motel in Thunder Bluffs, but it burned to the ground when lightning struck it four years ago, or maybe it was five, depending on whether you believe him or the cowboy who came in while I was there. So unless you plan to make me spend the night out here on this hard, cold ground where there are probably rattlesnakes—why else would they call this place Rattlesnake Corners?—you’ll have to take me to Nebraska.”

With a sinking feeling, Nick realized she was right His plans for a peaceful, restorative, solitary trip fluttered away into the night. At the moment he had no choice. He lifted his hands in resignation. “All right, all right! I’ll take you to Nebraska and tomorrow morning you’ll make arrangements to get home.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not going with me traipsing around the countryside looking for Abbie Prather.”

“I said okay. What’s your problem?”

He wasn’t sure he believed her. He was both dreading and looking forward to flying to Nebraska with her in that itty-bitty plane. Those were his problems.

“As long as we understand that you’re not going to be present when I find Abbie Prather.”

She didn’t say anything.

“That’s the job you hired me to do. If you hire somebody to paint your house, do you insist on taking up a brush and helping him?”

“I live with my parents. They’re the ones who hired that painter. He had a fear of heights and our house has three stories and sits on top of a hill besides. So of course I helped him.”

Somehow her answer didn’t surprise him.

“Well, you’re not going with me tomorrow, and that’s that.” He climbed into the cockpit and slid into his familiar seat. But it seemed to have developed new contours and no longer fit him so well, as if Analise’s intrusion into his haven had altered it physically.

She got in beside him and closed the door. Odd that he’d never before noticed how small this cabin was, how close his seat was to the passenger’s.

He fastened his seat belt and focused on his starting checklist, making a concerted effort to ignore his passenger.

Just as the engine growled to life, Analise pulled a bag of chips out of that huge purse of hers, ripped them open and began to crunch.

“Could you keep it down? You’re making more noise than the engine.”

“Sorry. Flying makes me nervous, so I eat to distract myself.”

Oh, great! “Do you have a candy bar in there or something a little quieter?”

She stuffed the chips back into her purse. “I hope you’re not going to be this cranky the whole way to Nebraska.”

“I am,” he assured her. “In fact, it’s probably going to get worse. By the way, you never did tell me how you got into my plane. I know I left the door locked.”

She peeled the wrapper off a candy bar. “Picked the lock. I learned how to do it in college.”

“You learned to pick locks in college? Where did you go? Burglar U?”

She lifted an eyebrow at his absurd question. “I went to school in Austin. I dated a guy who taught me to pick locks, among other things.”

“Other things?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear those other things, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking.

“We ran together, five miles a day. Physical fitness. Then there was scaling six-foot fences, playing poker and blackjack, dealing off the bottom of the deck, shooting a .38 revolver—”

“Shooting a-you dated a criminal?”

“Of course not! Richard was an undercover cop. Would you like a candy bar? I have plenty.”

“No, thank you,” he muttered. His neck muscles had tied themselves into tight knots again, and he could feel a headache building behind his eyes.

He tried to focus on the things he loved about flying, especially flying at night—the sense of freedom, of isolation and serenity. For the next hundred or so miles, the land below would be totally dark except for the occasional car or house. No city lights. Nothing around anywhere...north, south, east, west, up or down.

Nothing but Analise Brewster with her lush, generous lips wrapped around a candy bar, her long legs tucked demurely to one side and looking anything but demure. Analise Brewster sitting inches away from him, touching him with the combined, oddly compelling scents of honeysuckle and chocolate.

“Put your legs down and fasten your seat belt,” he barked.

She complied so hastily he felt a little guilty for snapping at her.

He taxied to the run-up area and went through his instrument check then took up the microphone to announce his intention to take off to any planes that might be within radio range.

This was going to be a long, long flight

Analise took a large, desperate bite out of her candy bar as she felt the plane lift off the ground, and her stomach gave a corresponding lurch right into her throat. This was the scariest and most exciting part of flying, that moment of actually going up into the air, unsupported by anything but magic. She understood how butterflies flew and how it was impossible for bumblebees to fly even though they did. But the unlikelihood of a bumblebee’s flight didn’t even come close to the impossibility that tons of metal with wings that couldn’t flap should be able to stay aloft.

She ate more of her candy bar, ignored those butterflies . that had taken up residence in her lurching stomach and resisted the urge to chatter, something she was prone to do when she was nervous. Nick had indicated he needed silence while he got everything going and she certainly didn’t want to cause him to do something wrong, something that would break the magic spell and send them plummeting to earth.

She’d done enough chattering tonight, anyway. By the time he’d arrived, she’d been pretty nervous, had begun to think she was going to have to spend the night in the plane. In fact, from the time she’d walked into the airport, her rented plane already on its way back to Tyler, only to find that Nick wasn’t waiting for her, she’d been getting progressively more concerned.

This latest impulsive act, charging across the country a week before her wedding, might not prove to be one of her better ideas. In fact, it would probably go down in the column of incidents that reinforced her parents’ incessant worries about her. It seemed the harder she tried to be the perfect daughter, the worse things got.

Her parents weren’t happy that she’d taken so long to make up her mind about marrying Lucas Daniels. Their wedding was wedged in next Saturday between morning and evening ceremonies and their rehearsal was scheduled for today, a week early, the only time they could get the church.

And the closer it got to that rehearsal, the edgier and more claustrophobic she got. Somewhere around four o’clock this morning, she’d decided that what she really needed to do was come to Wyoming to be certain Nick was able to garner enough evidence to clear Lucas’s father’s name before the wedding so his parents would come. Her concern over that issue had doubtless been causing her distress.

It had seemed like such a good idea at the time, but now Nick’s pointed questions made her wonder about her motivation. It wasn’t exactly logical.

One foul-up after another. The story of her well-intentioned, ill-fated life.

As she desperately devoured her candy bar, she stole a glance at Nick. The shadowy, uneven light from the instrument panel accented the craggy planes of his face, giving him an even more intriguing, dangerous look than when she’d first met him. His shaggy brown hair, just a little too long, touched the collar of his faded denim shirt. The top buttons of that shirt were undone, allowing springy tufts of that same hair to escape.

She twisted the diamond ring on her finger and thought of how lucky she was to be engaged to a nice man like Lucas Daniels. She pictured his handsome face with his kind smile, his immaculately cut and styled black hair that told of his Native American heritage. Lucas was her best friend, her parents’ best friend. When she and Lucas were married, her parents would finally have to admit that she’d done something right. They could stop worrying about her every minute of every day.

She was glad she’d made the last-minute decision to marry him. This antsy, trapped feeling was probably normal for a bride-to-be.

In six and a half days she’d marry Lucas and that would at least keep her out of one brand of trouble. Never again would she run the risk of becoming involved with a man because he had that aura of danger and defiance.

The aura Nick exuded from every pore.

He set the automatic pilot and leaned back.

Analise crumpled the empty candy-bar wrapper and pulled out a bag of chocolate sandwich cookies.

“No wonder you’re so hyper, eating all that sugar,” Nick grumbled.

“I told you, flying makes me nervous.”

“Why do you fly if it makes you nervous?”

“Because it’s the fastest way to get places, of course. Anyway, I have a theory. If you’re afraid of something, you have to do it and then you won’t be afraid of it. Since my parents have made a career out of worrying about me, I could be afraid of everything if I didn’t make an effort to do all the things they think I shouldn’t do.” She offered him the bag of cookies. “Here. You could stand to relax a little, too. Surely you’re not nervous about flying. Although, if you go along with my theory, becoming a pilot would be the logical thing to do to overcome that fear.”

“I love to fly.” He accepted a couple of cookies. “But I didn’t have any dinner.”

That was a good sign. Eating cookies together was always a bonding experience.

“So,” she said brightly, hoping to inspire a bit of brightness in her cranky pilot, “tell me what you discovered today about Abbie Prather.” He didn’t respond immediately. His jaw muscle twitched. Maybe he was still chewing on that cookie. “You can just give me your report verbally instead of faxing it to me since I’m not home to receive the fax,” she encouraged, giving him plenty of time to swallow.

His lips compressed as if the cookie tasted bad or he didn’t want to comply with anything she asked. She knew there was nothing wrong with the cookie.

“I searched the records in Casper,” he finally said, “and talked to people who live in the area where Abbie Prather lived, and I found out two things. She moved to Nebraska in about 1976, and she had a little girl with her.”

Analise stopped with her cookie halfway to her mouth. “A little girl? Where did she get a little girl?”

“I would imagine she got her in the usual way.”

“But she didn’t have a baby when she left Briar Creek! And you didn’t mention any baby in South Dakota, or any husband!”

“No evidence of a husband. My guess would be that she either had the child right before or right after she left Texas. The people I talked to today figured the kid to be about two when she moved here and four when she left.”

“But where was this baby when she was in South Dakota?”

“In South Dakota she lived out away from people, just like she did in Wyoming. If she’d had a baby with her in South Dakota, it would have been easy to hide her. A toddler’s another story, and the people who saw this little girl said she was a pistol. Very visible. Had red hair and was always getting into something. Every time they saw her, the kid was charging around and Abbie was yelling at her, though they said by the time she left. the kid was getting kind of cowed by all that yelling.”

Analise touched her own curls, sadness sweeping over her at the thought of Abbie’s daughter being cowed. “A little red-haired girl, four years old. She’d be about my age. If Abbie hadn’t stolen that money and left town, her daughter and I might have been friends. That’s terrible that Abbie yelled so much at her that she broke her spirit But at least now we know why she stole the money.”

“You think stealing the money to take care of her kid justifies her actions?”

“No, of course not! But it explains why she did it. She must have been pregnant in Briar Creek and the father wouldn’t marry her so she had to leave in shame—”

“Leave in shame? This was 1972, not 1872.”

“Briar Creek can be pretty provincial. Anyway, she managed to hide her pregnancy, but she knew she couldn’t hide the baby ... they make too much noise...so she stole the money and left town. If she’d stayed in Briar Creek and given her child up for adoption, my parents might have taken her and I’d have had a sister. They wanted another child.”

The idea brought an eerie sense of déjà vu, doubtless because she’d always wanted a sister, had even invented one when she was a child, a red-haired sister who looked like her and was named Sara. How sad that she’d missed the possibility. Sad for her and the other little girl. Abbie didn’t sound like an ideal mother, while her own parents were practically perfect...unlike their changeling daughter.

“That’s pretty much the way I had it figured,” Nick said. “However, you should realize that this could mean your fiancé’s father was the father of her baby.”

“No way!”

“Then why did she choose him to take the blame?”

“Because he was the most likely candidate. He’d been in trouble before when he was a teenager. His family was really poor, and when he was in high school he was dating Lucas’s mother, whose family wasn’t poor though they weren’t wealthy, either. Anyway, he wanted to take her to his senior prom but he couldn’t afford to rent a tuxedo, so he stole one. At least, he tried to steal one. They caught him. He got off with probation because he’d planned to return it after the prom and he was an honor student and he’d never been in any kind of trouble before, but when that thing at the bank came up and he looked guilty, nobody bothered to check any further.”

“Which doesn’t mean the man wasn’t the father of Abbie Prather’s child. Why didn’t your fiancé look into this?” He lifted a hand to cut off her protestations. “I just think you ought to know that you may be opening a can of worms here. This may not be the kind of wedding present your Lucas wants. There may be a good reason he never investigated.”

“There certainly is a good reason. Well, a fairly good reason. It’s real good if you understand Lucas’s point of view. He was only four years old when his dad was convicted, so pretty much all he remembers is how people treated the family of a convicted felon. As soon as his dad got out of prison sixteen years ago, they moved to Pennsylvania where nobody knew anything and started over. His parents have told him repeatedly that they have to forget the whole thing, move forward and put it behind them. Give themselves and everybody else a chance to forget. They won’t even come back to Briar Creek for our wedding.”

“If they don’t want to dredge the whole thing up, why are you doing it?”

“So his parents can feel comfortable coming to our wedding and because Lucas really does want to know the truth, deep inside.”

“I see.” Disbelief oozed from the pores of both words.

“He does! Okay, he’s never really said it in so many words, but he says it every day by his actions. He’s a doctor. He could practice anywhere in the country, but he chose to move back to Briar Creek and go into practice with my dad. He tries really, really hard to be an exemplary citizen and show people by the way he lives that his father couldn’t possibly be guilty. If he says his dad’s a total straight-arrow, I believe him. You find that little girl’s birth certificate and we’ll see who the father is and I guarantee it won’t be Wayne Daniels.”

“I fully intend to do that, but this is Saturday night, and the courthouses won’t be open until Monday morning at nine.”

She sighed. “Then I guess we’ll have to wait to settle that point. What’s the little girl’s name? Did anybody remember?”

“Oh, yes. Several people remembered because Abbie yelled at her so much, calling her name. It’s Sara.”

Talk about déjà vu! “Sara,” she repeated. “When I was a little kid, my imaginary sister’s name was Sara, and then I gave the name to my favorite doll when I was six.”

“It’s a common name.”

“I guess so.” But her doll, like her and like Abbie’s daughter, had red hair. In fact, she still had the doll in a carriage in one corner of her room, a part of her childhood she couldn’t seem to let go of.

She sat quietly for a moment, thinking about Abbie’s daughter and the coincidences of their similarity in hair color and age and of having a doll with the girl’s name. If she believed in fate, she’d have thought Sara was destined to be her friend or even her adopted sister, and Abbie’s crime had sent fate awry.

Many times she’d overheard her parents lament that she had no sister and talk tentatively about having another baby. When she was young, she’d believed they’d refrained from having one because she was such a problem, they didn’t have enough worry left over for a second child. Now that she knew more about the process of obtaining babies, she realized perhaps they hadn’t been able to have another.