Bride by the Book (Crimson Romance) (14 page)

But why? He had no idea, unless he’d been right when he told Cliff she had an agenda of her own. Angie was an enigma, all right, and he needed some answers before he did something really stupid.

He looked at Angie wistfully. He’d like nothing better than to lie down beside her, but she was probably going to hate him enough already. If she remembered anything at all about the evening, he thought wryly.

He laid her keys and her purse on her dresser where she would see them immediately and closed the door softly behind him. He supposed he’d better call her about ten o’clock the next morning. Perhaps by then she’d feel a little better.

Strangely exhilarated, Garner headed for the front door. He wasn’t sure how or when it had happened, but he felt like a man who had just come back to life after a long, miserable hibernation. In less than two weeks, since he’d met Angie Brownwood, he suddenly realized he was completely healed from his Dallas experience.

It was a reversal, he thought, grinning. The kiss of the beautiful princess had brought the sleeping prince—or was it the frog?—back to life.

His hand was on the front door knob when he heard a peculiar sound coming from the front bedroom. He peered inside. Five tiny red lights blinked and danced. Entranced, Garner flicked on the light and stepped inside.

He bit back a gasp. Angie didn’t have just one little net-book computer. She also had two desk models, and they were the newest, most advanced machines available. Garner knew that much just from looking at them.

She also had another laptop, a larger model with a sleek red metal casing and little red LED lights across the front below the screen. It was a gaming computer, he realized abruptly. He’d never have guessed Angie enjoyed computer gaming.

Garner watched the blinking lights a moment then studied the room. Angie had turned it into an office of sorts. One computer occupied the dresser top. The other desktop computer and the laptop sat atop the chest-of-drawers, and the dresser stool had been pulled up beside them.

A printer sat on the dresser stool. Garner gazed at it with longing. It was a new and expensive color laser model.

Several cardboard boxes had been stacked in a corner out of the way. Garner walked over and bent to peer into one. It held several dozen computer books, fat and thin. He scanned a few of the titles. They were so specialized he didn’t even know what part of the computer’s operation they referred to.

He touched the space key on the keyboard of the laptop computer lightly. The screen lit up. He found himself looking at an elaborate mythical world, one that combined the beauty of a tropical jungle with a handsome black man and an equally lovely black woman. The pair apparently lived in a paradise full of lurking dangers, because a few moments of studying the screen revealed stealthy movements in various areas of the greenery, not to mention other hints like a reptilian tail, a gleaming sword, and a clawed foot.

Fascinated, he knelt on the floor and watched the screen. It was obviously a game, one that tempted him to reach for the joysticks beside the computer. He had never seen a game with such gloriously rendered animation before. It looked like an actual jungle, and the two characters inhabiting it looked almost like real people.

Suddenly he noticed a small pad of paper lying on the floor beside the chest-of-drawers. He picked it up and studied the rambling list of titles and sketches that decorated it.

Ra-thor and Lenora: On The Run
, he read, and frowned. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he had heard of Ra-thor and Lenora before.

A second title on the list read,
Ra-thor and Lenora: Tulip Mania
. Beside it Angie had sketched a tiny forest of what looked like man-eating tulips and two little stick figures fleeing.

The third title read,
Ra-thor and Lenora: The Venus-Flytrap Forest
. The two tiny stick figures stood in the center of some crudely sketched Venus Flytrap plants that had aimed their pod-like appendages at them.

He grinned. So Angie had something to do with designing computer gaming programs. That would explain a lot.

He studied the on-screen jungle once more, admiring the realism of the two characters and their background. If he’d known anything at all about computer gaming, he might have dared try his hand at it, but for all he knew, he’d blow up the machine or something equally awful.

He checked on Angie once more. She slept peacefully, her breathing deep and even, so he closed her bedroom door and let himself out of her house, careful to lock the door behind him. It was high time he found out who Angelina Brownwood really was, and why she now called herself a professional secretary.

He drove to his office and sat down at his computer. When he turned it on, he noted that it booted rapidly, without any error messages or other notifications, and displayed his startup screen without a single hitch. Happily, he went to his internet browser and called up a search program. Obviously, Angie knew her computers, even outdated devices like his. Garner decided to start his search by typing in: Angelina Brownwood, Palo Alto, CA. The search engine responded swiftly, with a veritable list of hits. He scanned them swiftly. There was even a Wikipedia entry that described an Angelina Brownwood who worked as head of project development at BrownWare, the major software company. She was the daughter of Vernon Brownwood, one of the company’s founders.

BrownWare? Garner almost laughed aloud. Everybody who used a database program probably used VP-Base, BrownWare’s major program. Offhand, he couldn’t recall any other programs the company put out.

He clicked on the top link. The headline explained almost everything that had been puzzling him.

Major Upheaval: BrownWare Head Fires Daughter

Garner skimmed the article. It stunned him so much, he wound up printing it out for a more leisurely perusal. According to the reporter, Vernon Brownwood had literally gone to war against his cofounder, Peter Van Holden, and his daughter, Angelina over a list of grievances that made so little sense to the reporter, he only discussed the major grievance, namely an update to VP-Base. He fired his daughter and filed a lawsuit against his old friend, and since then business at BrownWare had come to a halt. When contacted, Angelina Brownwood had said she wasn’t fired. She had quit. Peter Van Holden claimed he was filing a countersuit against Vernon Brownwood and was asking for half the company’s assets.

He whistled. In his relatively short career as a corporate attorney in Dallas he had seen a few of these company feuds. They could get really nasty, and it looked to him as though things at BrownWare had gotten nasty.

He scrolled through a few more articles about the upheaval at BrownWare. One woman, a secretary named Fonda Clancy, stated that she knew nothing. Furthermore, her job description did not entail taking sides in company disagreements and any reporters wanting comments should contact someone in management. Garner almost laughed out loud at the boatload of attitude that came through so clearly in the woman’s words.

Angelina Brownwood declined all requests for interviews and said she was leaving the area permanently to explore “new opportunities.”

One of those new opportunities, speculated one computer magazine columnist, might be the Ra-thor and Lenora computer game, developed jointly by Angelina Brownwood and Peter Van Holden, which had gone over unexpectedly big with young gamers. In his opinion, there was an entire series of Ra-thor and Lenora games just crying to be developed.

Garner found the whole scenario almost unbelievable. Everyone had heard of Vernon Brownwood and VP-Base, but who expected to run into Vernon Brownwood’s daughter in Smackover, Arkansas, of all places?

The most recent article said that product development at BrownWare was reputed to be at a standstill, and Peter Van Holden had filed a countersuit against Vernon Brownwood. Worse, the company’s government contract was supposedly in jeopardy, thanks to Vernon’s disinterest in taking care of business.

Angelina Brownwood had vanished. Obviously, she had gone on to bigger and better things.

As his secretary? Garner’s mind boggled, but he kept reading. By the time he’d finished, he realized two things. One was that Angie had genuinely lost all interest in the problems at BrownWare. The other was that the people at BrownWare appeared to think Angie was the only person who could save their jobs and the company.

He logged off then went to his file cabinet and searched out Angie’s résumé and Peter Van Holden’s telephone number. It was time he found out the truth about Angie’s situation. He called the number and introduced himself.

“You’re who?” Peter said suspiciously.

“Look,” Garner said. “Angie Brownwood is working for me as my secretary, but you know as well as I do she’s no secretary. Suppose you tell me the truth about what’s going on here?”

“Not me,” Peter sputtered. “Ang made me memorize a spiel I’m supposed to give all prospective employers, and that’s what I’m sticking to. Want me to read it to you?”

Garner somehow managed not to laugh. “Not particularly. Besides, I’m not a prospective employer any longer. I’m her boyfriend.”

“
Boyfriend!
” Peter exploded. “Angie? Our little Angie? Hold it just a minute here. Who the hell is this?”

“I’m Garner Holt, and I want to know why a beautiful young woman like Angie moves here and behaves like she just got out of a dungeon.”

“Are you talking about Dungeons and Dragons? That’s old stuff, man. Ra-thor and Lenora is the game of the future. And I’m not saying that because I helped write it.”

“What is it about working with grammar-checking programs that turns a person into a complete idiot?” Garner broke in. “Or did you ever have anything to do with a grammar-checking program?”

“Not me,” Peter said. “Never fooled with the stuff myself. Look here. Angie’s like my own daughter. If you’re messing around with her…”

Garner gave up. “Maybe you’d better go ahead and read me Angie’s spiel.”

Peter read off a piece about Angie’s previous employment with “Van Holden Software” that detailed numerous secretarial duties and contributions to the mythical company. When he’d done so, he apparently felt he’d done his duty.

“Don’t know where Angie came up with the idea for being a secretary,” he confided. “She was one of those child geniuses, you know. Never did anything but fool with computers from the day she was born. Vern thought she was going to set the world on fire, but between you and me, Ang didn’t have what it takes. She just didn’t
care
about programming.”

“She seems…very knowledgeable about computers.”

Peter made a sound indicating there were some things more important than computer knowledge. “She burned out long before they gave her a Master’s at Cal Tech and sent her home. It was sort of a consolation prize, you know. She wasn’t Ph.D. material.”

“She has a Master’s from Cal Tech?” Garner repeated. “Sounds pretty impressive to me. But what do I know?”

“They don’t give Master’s degrees at Cal Tech,” Peter explained. “The only people who get them are the ones who can’t cut it in the Ph.D. program.”

“I see.” He didn’t, but he vaguely remembered a friend who had gone to MIT telling him something along the same lines. “Still she must have been pretty smart to get any degree at all from Cal Tech.”

“Ang left Cal Tech when she was twenty-one and went to work at BrownWare,” Peter said. “Poor kid never had a normal life. I told Vern she’d go off the deep end one of these days if he didn’t let her get on with something she liked instead of trying to make her follow in his path.”

“How old is Angie?”

“She’d be twenty-five or so now, I think,” Peter said. “It’s one hell of a thing. Ang turned out to have a talent for game development. She came up with a great scenario, so I helped her program it. When it took off and made us a lot of money, it got Vern on our case. He’s so busy living in the past, he doesn’t realize there’s more to programming these days than databases and business software.”

“Why is her father mad about that?” So, Angie and Peter Van Holden had created the Ra-thor and Lenora game. About the only thing he knew about the game was that it had been a huge hit around last Christmas.

There was much more, all delivered in the chatty tones of a man who had been sitting in front of a computer screen for the past two weeks and needed someone to talk to. Garner hung up at last and sat staring at the wall where his law degree hung.

He remembered how he’d felt when he’d left Dallas and wondered if Angie had felt anything like he had when she’d driven into Smackover. He had considered his professional life over and figured everything he did next would be a comedown.

He recalled the beautiful young blond who regarded everything as a new and wonderful experience. Angie had been like a person getting out of jail. To her, everything was new and exciting.

It was all in how you looked at it, Garner realized, smiling ruefully. He, too, had more or less gotten out of jail when he left the demands of corporate practice and his equally demanding, disastrous marriage. Life would have been a lot more fun back then if he’d looked at leaving his life in Dallas the way Angie obviously looked at leaving her life in Palo Alto.

Angie had chosen to believe herself liberated. No wonder she was having such a good time being a secretary.

They had a lot in common, Garner realized. One of the major things they had in common was something she’d already let him know she wasn’t interested in discussing—her father.

Garner waited until ten o’clock the next morning before calling Angie. When no one answered the telephone, he realized he had miscalculated. He drove into town and parked his Blazer in Angie’s driveway behind her white car. Sure enough, Angie was in her back yard. She appeared to be wrestling a large lawn mower.

He studied her slender form appreciatively as she struggled to lug the mower around. She wore white shorts and a pastel madras blouse, and her blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

A movement in the crepe myrtle bush by the side of the house caught his eye and made him smile. Angie’s resident mockingbird watched the drama from a high branch, ready to sail forth and defend its territory.