Beckett's Cinderella (5 page)

Liza bent to retrieve the book she'd flung across the room in disgust, mostly at herself for not being able to concentrate. She reached behind the door for her nightgown just as the phone rang in the kitchen.

It was too early for her creepy caller. On the other hand, it was too late for any of her suppliers. Uncle Fred's friends usually called during the day.

She reached for the phone on the fourth ring, then waited until the fifth to lift the receiver. “Hello?”

“Eliza?”

Air left her lungs in a whoosh. She felt behind her for a chair. “What do you want?”

“Would you please just set aside your suspicions and think about what I said? Ask your uncle if he knows anything about your family's history.” Before she could respond, he said, “But I guess he's the wrong side, isn't he? He's your mother's brother, not your father's.”

She hooked a chair with her foot and sat, willing her heart to slow down. “Actually, he's my maternal
grandfather's brother, but that's none of your business.” The silence lasted for three beats. Then, in a quieter tone, she said, “How about your grandfather, uh, PawPaw? Is he all right?”

“Thanks. Yeah, he's still hanging in there. Waiting for you to come to your senses and let me square things so he can die in peace.”

She took instant offense, as if his grandfather's health were somehow dependent on her. “You're waiting for him to die? What kind of creep are you, anyway?”

Too tired to try to justify himself, Beckett cut her off. “Eliza, PawPaw's over a hundred years old. We're not quite sure how old he really is, but I don't think he'll be around too much longer. And, yeah, before you ask, I'm sorry. I'll miss him—we all will. Now, how about it, can we talk again? This time will you just listen while I explain and then take the damned money?”

“I'll think about it,” she said after a long pause. Great. She'd think about it. “Fine. You do that.”

Beckett decided to hold back on asking about her cousin Kathryn and any other cousins they hadn't been able to confirm until he'd solidified his position. After that, with any luck, he would be able to concentrate on business long enough to meet with a couple of ship owners in Newport News, maybe another one in Morehead City, and get back to Charleston in time to help deal with whatever came next, be it a nursing home or a funeral home.

God, he was tired.

Had he or had he not told her to expect him to show up in the next day or so?

Dammit, PawPaw, hang in there. I'm not ready yet to let you go!

After hanging up the phone, he sat in the semi-darkness of the east room of the elegant old house where the distinguished old man had once read him stories about Blackbeard's exploits off the Carolinas. Oddly enough, he could easily picture Eliza here in the same room, maybe arranging flowers or talking over the day's events with his parents, his friends.

The room no longer smelled of cigar and pipe tobacco, but of leather, wood polish and the eucalyptus oil his mother used to refresh her bowls of potpourri. It was a familiar smell, one he hadn't realized he'd missed until lately. Lavender in the linen closet, cedar in the coat closet, eucalyptus in the potpourri. Funny the way different scents could arouse different emotions, different memories. A whiff of cinnamon always made him homesick, no matter where he happened to be. His mother's cinnamon-raisin bread, fresh from the oven…

Rebecca Jones Beckett was a terrific cook. She and Miss Dora, the housekeeper, fought for kitchen dominance. Miss Dora usually won because of his mother's many social and charitable obligations.

Now she was spending most of her time at the hospital, taking benne seed wafers or whiskey cookies to the nurses, driving his father and his breathing apparatus back and forth and helping his uncle Lance
interview companions for his aunt Kate, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer's.

Close family ties, Beckett thought with a deepened sense of his own mortality, were both a blessing and a burden. He couldn't imagine being without them. All the same, in these uncertain times he couldn't imagine a man's deliberately taking on the responsibility of a wife and kids. Not that there had ever been any guarantees.

Unlike premature graying, the commitment gene was one that had skipped his generation. Carson showed no more inclination to settle down than he did. Which probably meant the end of this particular branch of Becketts, he admitted with an unexpected shaft of regret. His mother would be disappointed. Already was, for that matter. She'd had her grandkids' names picked out and waiting for years.

Idly he wondered if it was family feeling alone that had brought Eliza Chandler from the high-rent district of a big Western city to the boondocks of rural North Carolina. Could be she was trying to outdistance her past, if she'd been a part of her husband's scams after all. Maybe she'd skated clear by using her looks and that touch-me-not attitude she projected so well. Wouldn't be the first time something like that had happened. On the other hand, she might simply have come to the rescue of an elderly relative.

He yawned, stretched and thought about replacing the mattress in his old bedroom with a king-size model. But that would mean getting rid of the old mahogany sleigh bed, and his mother would be un
happy. He'd sleep on the carriage-house floor before he'd add to her woes.

Not that he'd spent all that much time here over the past few years, anyway. If he ever did decide to move his headquarters from Delaware to Charleston, he would definitely need to get a place of his own, else his mother would be running his business instead of just trying to run his life. For all he loved her more than anyone in the world, Becky Beckett was one managing woman. The proverbial steel magnolia.

I
t was two days later when Beckett pulled into the Grants' driveway. Queen Eliza's modest chariot was parked close to the house. Beyond that, between the house and a half-grown holly tree, what appeared to be an old Packard was permanently enshrined on four cement blocks. The fact that he even recognized the make made him feel older than his thirty-nine and a quarter years.

“Must be the life I lead,” he muttered as he skirted a ladder propped against the roof, dodged a pot of pink and purple flowers and knocked on the screen door.

Funny, he mused as he waited for her to answer the door, the way the dilapidated old house looked so familiar. He'd been here, what? Twice? Even that
crazy old fruit-and-vegetable stand out front, with its homemade counters and bins and its rusted tin roof, looked welcoming. He couldn't say much for her security system—a flimsy wraparound wall made of hinged lattice panels with a single padlock. But then, maybe fresh produce wasn't that much of a draw to shoplifters.

Beckett heard her muttering from somewhere inside the house. He'd tried unsuccessfully to call from New Bern and again from Elizabeth City. She needed an answering machine, if her old rotary dial phone could be retrofitted to support such an accessory.

“Ready or not, here I come,” he muttered. He had a twinge in the small of his back from too many hours of driving and he was working on a pressure headache. Both complaints fell off the radar screen the minute he saw her.

What
was
it about this particular woman that riveted the attention of every male cell in his body? She was beautiful, sure, but he'd seen beautiful women before. Feature by feature, there was nothing particularly outstanding about her. Yet, even in the middle of a family crisis, he couldn't seem to pry her from his mind.

Which was plain crazy. Because despite the hasty research into her background and a few nonproductive conversations, he scarcely knew the woman.

She greeted him with a dry “I might've known.” But then, he could hardly expect her to welcome him with open arms. He tried to picture her welcoming her late ex-spouse at the end of a workday.
Hello,
honey, how was your day? Rip off any more senior citizens?

Somehow, it didn't ring true.

She'd screwed her hair into a shaggy knot and anchored it with that tortoiseshell gadget again. She was barefoot, wearing pants that were a few inches too short—or maybe they were meant to show off her world-class calves. No makeup. Wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong idea, now would we? He wondered if she realized how sexy she looked with her naked mouth looking rebellious and just a little bit pouty.

“Am I interrupting a ball game?” he asked when she opened the screen to let him inside. Did it reluctantly, he noted with something akin to amusement. She wasn't going to give an inch, oh, no.

“The game was this afternoon.”

“Right. I actually forgot this was a holiday weekend until I got out on the highway. Is your uncle…?” Raising a questioning brow, he nodded to the living room.

“Gone to bed. His arthritis bothers him when the weather forecast calls for rain—sometimes even when it doesn't.”

“Old bones are a better barometer than any computer model NOAA uses, at least that's what PawPaw says.”

Liza led him into the living room. It was smaller than his boyhood bedroom back in Charleston, its furnishings undistinguished—a few of them downright ugly—but it was a comfortable room. A small pile of
orange peelings and a scattered newspaper indicated what she'd been doing when he'd arrived. He waited until she took her seat before settling onto the faux leather recliner.

“Would you like to have another go at the documents, such as they are, or would you rather I just cut to the chase and tell you what I know about how it all started?”

“Tonight?”

“I'm here. You're here.” Granted, it was later than he'd planned. What with the way both clock and calendar had lost all meaning during the process of traveling between Delaware and Dublin, his parents' home and the hospital, then back and forth to this place, he hadn't realized until after he'd left Charleston what day of the week it was, much less that it was the start of Labor Day weekend. Once he'd hit the highway, traffic had been pretty much bumper-to-bumper in both directions.

“I'm listening,” she said.

Yeah, sure you are, he thought. Her arms weren't crossed over her breasts yet, but that didn't mean she'd lowered the drawbridge. “There's really not much to tell. You looked over the packet. I've already given you a rough outline—at least, as much as I know about it. Evidently, our great-grandfathers were in business together around the turn of the century. Some kind of investment business, I believe.”

The first shield snapped into place: she crossed her arms. He waited for her to comment, and when she didn't he went on. “I don't know what went wrong,
but sometime after they split up, mine evidently got to worrying about some kind of debt he owed yours. Before he died, he asked his son—that's PawPaw—to make good on it. Incidentally, that's where the letter and the stock certificates came from.”

“Stock certificates,” she repeated.

“Well, yeah…you saw it. Stuff's worthless now. I had it checked out with a broker. It might've had some value back in PawPaw's day—enough to cover whatever my family owed yours, at any rate. Now it's worth whatever a collector might offer. My guess—not even pennies on the dollar. It's yours if you want it, but to settle the debt, the Becketts—”

“Wait a minute, back up. If your—if the stock's worthless, where did the ten thousand dollars come from?”

Beckett frowned at a framed photograph on the mantel above the boarded-up fireplace. He could just make out a couple standing in front of a field of corn that was taller than they were. “Well, you see—”

“Just tell me the truth, that's all I ask. Because, quite frankly, when some stranger tracks me down and offers to give me something I've neither earned nor want, alarm bells start going off.”

“Right. Sure. I mean, I can understand that.”
Under the circumstances
was implied. He was tactful enough not to mention it aloud. “But this is on the level. It started out with some old stock and a few promissory notes, but—” Oops. Hadn't Car said that one of the charges the Financial Crimes Unit had
nailed her husband on was selling fake promissory notes? “What I mean is—”

“What you meant was that since my husband was a crook, I must be one, too. Either that or incredibly naive. That I'll grant, but did you actually expect me to grab the bait and not even bother looking for a hook?” Patches of color bloomed on both her cheeks. “Or wait—I get it now. This is one of those pyramid schemes, isn't it? You hook me, then I'm supposed to talk all my friends into buying your worthless stock or notes or whatever, right? I'm supposed to get a big commission for every sucker I bring in. They drag in their friends, and they're promised commissions, too, only the commissions never happen. If that's the way it works, I already know the routine, so thanks but no thanks.”

In other words, been there, read the book, bought the T-shirt. Beckett couldn't much blame her for being skittish, but dammit! “Look, I know what you must be thinking and I'm sorry, but I'm not your husband. This is on the level.” He'd made the mistake of activating the recliner when he first sat down. Now he clicked the leg rest back into place, sat up and glared at her. “If you'd just listen to what I'm saying and stop—”

“I listened.”

“—stop interrupting, maybe we could wind things up here and I could get on with my own business.”

“Oh? You mean this isn't your real business?”

He looked at her.

“Would you like some coffee?” Her smile was utterly guileless.

“That's it. Try to throw me off balance so I'll forget where I was. Coffee? Yes, thank you very much, I would like a cup of coffee! Black, no sugar.” And no arsenic, please.

That smile of hers would have one-upped the
Mona Lisa
, chipped front tooth and all. “Black, no sugar,” she repeated. “Right. Now, why am I not surprised?”

She left, and a few moments later he got up and stalked after her. If she had any thought of slipping out through the back door, she was in for a surprise. It wasn't that he didn't trust her; surprisingly enough, he did. But Beckett had no intention of letting her off the hook, now that he was so close to winding things up. He had a feeling PawPaw might not be around much longer, and if he could do this one thing to put his mind at rest he would damned well do it. Even if he had to hold her down and force her to accept the money.

Five minutes—make that ten. Five for a cup of whatever brew she was concocting, five more to wind up this crazy business. Then he'd be on his way.

She hadn't escaped out the back door, after all. With a mutinous look on her face, she was measuring coffee, spilling almost as much as she poured into the filter basket.

“What's with the ladder I saw propped up against the roof? Getting ready to put up a bigger sign?” Two could play the game of diversion.

“Hardly. Roof rot. A section of gutter fell off this
morning, and Uncle Fred wanted to know if the roof was going to cave in.”

“Is it?” Leaning against a counter, he crossed his legs at the ankles. God, he was tired.

“Probably. Sooner or later. Nothing lasts forever.”

“I'm surprised you could find anyone to check it out on a holiday weekend.” Absently, he reached for a peach from the bowl on the kitchen table. Miss Dora always kept a fruit bowl filled in the kitchen of his mother's house. She used to swat his hand whenever he reached for a cookie before meals, but she never minded his sneaking fruit.

Now, without even thinking, he took out his handkerchief and rubbed the fuzz off before biting into the soft, ripe fruit.

“You might try washing it first.”

“Sorry. What you mean is, I might try asking first.”

“That, too,” she said dryly, setting the coffee to brew. With any luck, he told himself, they'd have wound up their business by the time it was done. He could gulp and run. He needed the caffeine.

Wrong. Caffeine was the last thing he needed. He'd refueled his nervous system at every pit stop along the way. Maybe what he was looking for was an excuse to prolong his exposure to this maddening woman until he could figure out what it was about her that kept drawing him back here. He had an unsettling feeling it was no longer entirely PawPaw's unfinished business.

“What's the word on the gutter—eaves, what
ever?” If he could keep her off guard, maybe he could sneak in with a flank attack.

“I told you I don't know yet. I got out the ladder and set it up first thing this morning, but so far I haven't had a minute all day to go up and look.”

God, she was something else. Up close, her skin was even more remarkable. Pale to the point of translucency. She smelled like soap and oranges. Probably rushed off her feet all day selling her cabbages and peaches and whatnot. On her, even exhaustion looked good. “You know, you really should hire some help. Has it occurred to you that while you're busy trying to operate that antique gizmo of yours, a lot of stuff probably walks out without stopping by the checkout counter first? Not all the pirates are on the high seas.”

“You know, you really should mind your own business.” She threw his words back at him. “Has it occurred to you that if I could afford to hire help, I'd have done it long before now? And for your information, I know—better than most, probably—that not all pirates are on the high seas.” She speared him with a look from her clear, whiskey-colored eyes.

“Ouch,” he said softly. “Eliza, I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything personal, I was just making an observation.”

He expected her to tell him to take his observations and hit the road. Wouldn't much blame her if she did. Instead, she did the last thing he'd ever have expected. “Have you eaten supper yet?”

Like a bear coming out of hibernation, his stomach growled. Well, hell. “Not yet. I was hoping to wind
things up early enough to head back to Charleston tonight. Figured I'd get something to eat on the road.”

“You shouldn't drive when you're this tired.” It was a quarter past nine.

“I'll need to go back at least as far as Elizabeth City to find a vacancy. The place where I stayed last time I was in this area is booked up, all five units. I called ahead once I saw all the traffic and realized what was going on.”

She got out a frying pan. Beckett bit into the peach, afraid to say more for fear of rocking the boat. Obviously exhausted, she was moving like a sleepwalker, and hungry as he was, he'd almost rather see her go to bed than stand there and cook whatever she had in mind to cook.

His imagination, hyped by too much caffeine over the long day's drive, created moving images of her elegant body stepping out of those rumpled pants, pulling the chambray top over her head and reaching behind to unfasten her bra. Women's arms were a remarkable feat of engineering, the way they could reach back and then so far up. Men's arms were different—at least his were. But even as tired as he was, he'd have made it easy for her if she'd asked. Pulled her closer, supporting her while he reached around and unhooked her bra, then eased the straps off her shoulders, following them with his lips until—

“One egg or two? I'm scrambling.”

“Uh…two?”
Wake up, man, you're dreaming!
“I can make toast if you'll show me where—”

“Bread box.” She pointed it out, then indicated the toaster before dropping three slices of bacon into a skillet. Dare he hope one of them was for him?

“About the ladder—Eliza, you shouldn't—”

“Most people call me Liza.”