Dawn Stewardson (16 page)

“Catch her!” Billy hollered.

His words were barely out before all five boys were racing into the living room after Roxy.

“Oh, my,” Lauren whispered.

Sully took off. He reached the doorway just in time to see Hoops collide with an end table and send the lamp on it crashing to the floor.

“Stop!” he shouted. “Everyone! No one takes another step!”

The boys all skidded to stops and turned back to look at him. Killer streaked around the end of a couch, then tore up onto the back of a wing chair.

Still barking furiously, Roxy launched herself into the air, tipping the chair over onto its back and sending Killer fleeing for his life toward the dining room.

“Roxy, no!” Sully yelled as the dog hit the floor and began scrambling to her feet.

Either she didn’t hear him over her barking or she was having too much fun to pay attention. Whichever, she ran on the spot for a moment, her feet flying madly while she did her best to get traction on the marble. Then she succeeded and headed after Killer once more.

She tried to negotiate a turn just as she hit an area rug, and the rug went zooming across the floor with her aboard.

“Wow!” Billy said. “Looks like she’s on a flyin’ carpet.”

As the rug slowed down, she leapt off and skittered into the dining room, slamming against the far wall on her way. Then there was another crash—a loud, shattering, very ominous-sounding one that said something major had hit the dining room floor.

Sully knew it had to be the five-foot-high Chinese vase that stood in one corner. That
used to
stand in one corner, he corrected himself unhappily. He’d just begun praying it hadn’t been authentic Ming dynasty or anything like that when Killer streaked back into sight and tore through the living room again, Roxy still in hot pursuit.

“This is like a greyhound race,” Freckles cried, “only with a cat ’stead of a rabbit.”

The other boys snickered.

“Yeah,” Billy said, “an’ only one dog ’stead of a pack. But just think if there was six or eight of them in here, huh?”

Sully shot a death-ray look in the boys’ direction, then took off after Roxy again. By the time he caught up with her, she was wedged head-and-shoulders under Lauren’s bed, her hind legs straining like crazy while she tried to drag her front end back out.

Killer was sitting dead center on the bed, his tail switching angrily back and forth. His yellow slit-eyed glare said he’d never forgive Sully for bringing a monster dog into the apartment. Not in any of his nine lifetimes.

Ignoring the cat, Sully reached under the bed and got a firm hold on Roxy’s collar. Then, by shoving her down flat to the floor with his other hand, he managed to get her unstuck.

“Sit,” he ordered once she’d backed out, his hand still firmly grasping her collar.

She sat, but her eyes strayed to Killer and she began to drool.

“Don’t you ever,” he said menacingly, “do anything like that again.”

“Does she understand English?”

He glanced over to where Lauren was standing in the doorway, feeling like the worst house-guest ever and trying to think of the right words to say. But he’d bet even Miss Manners would be hard pressed to come up with an appropriate apology if her dog had just trashed somebody’s home.

“I’m sorry,” he said lamely. “I guess she figures the lodge cats are
her
cats, whereas Killer…”

“Yes, well,” Lauren murmured, “at least we won’t have to worry about her not getting enough exercise in the kennel. She probably got enough in the last few minutes to do her for days.”

“Lauren, I—”

“I was only joking, Sully,” she interrupted. Then she started to laugh. “It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen!”

That was when he was absolutely certain it was more than simply Lauren’s charm and beauty that had him wanting to spend the rest of his life with her.

B
Y
F
RIDAY AFTERNOON
, with the Forty-Second Street pavement so hot beneath her feet she could feel it through her shoes, Lauren was wishing she’d never suggested the idea of playing detective.

On Wednesday evening, only a couple of hours after Sully and the boys had arrived, she’d sent their fax—ostensibly from Ben Ludendorf—to Blackstone, care of Fax Depot.

So far, though, their lure hadn’t worked. And by now she was almost convinced she should simply have hired a real detective agency without telling Sully. Then, once she’d had an address and phone number for Blackstone…

Well, that was where the plan would run into trouble, and why she’d decided against it in the first place. Sully would have figured out exactly how she’d gotten her information. And given his attitude toward her money, he’d have been angry.

So here she was, standing on Forty-Second Street for the second day in a row, roasting half to death while she tried to keep one eye on the five boys and the other on Fax Depot—where the manager, for a suitable potential reward, was inside keeping an eye out for Blackstone.

She glanced at her watch, thinking Sully should be along soon to relieve her. Elliot was picking the boys up from her apartment in a couple of hours, and after that, she thought, smiling to herself, she and Sully would have the evening alone together.

The thought improved her mood immeasurably. Then she spotted Sully striding down the street and it improved even more. The boys spotted him, as well, and converged on him.

“Still no luck, Sully,” Billy told him. “So maybe we shouldn’t go stay at Lauren’s brother’s tonight. After the game, we could just come back to Lauren’s. And tomorrow we could—”

“Then we’d miss out on swimmin’ in Mr. Van Slyke’s pool,” Terry whined.

“You boys have helped enough,” Sully said. “You really have, so you deserve a day’s fun.”

“Hey,
this
has been fun,” Freckles said. “I never knew there was so many crazies in the world as I been seein’ on this street.”

“Yeah, well, it wouldn’t be fun to be one,” Sully told him. Then he glanced at Lauren. “You and the boys had better grab a cab now, so they’ll all be ready when Elliot gets there. I’ll see you about nine-thirty or ten. No later.”

She nodded. “Want to meet me at a restaurant? Or should I just pick up some things at my deli?”

He grinned at her, then said, “I’m more of a deli guy than a restaurant guy.”

Lauren laughed and said goodbye, counting the hours until she’d see him again.

When he arrived at her apartment just after ten, she’d laid a picnic out on her balcony. They ate and talked for hours, and even though they’d seen no sign of Blackstone, Lauren thought the day had been absolutely perfect.

W
HEN THE CLOCK RADIO
came on the next morning, the announcer was in the midst of telling his listeners that it was a quarter to seven on another sunny Saturday morning in the city. Lauren didn’t move for a minute, just lay there remembering how hard it had been to say good-night to Sully. He’d insisted on staying at his friend’s place again, despite the boys being out on Long Island. He was serious about setting a good example for them—apparently even when they weren’t around.

Of course, they weren’t exactly predictable, so maybe he’d figured that Billy might come up with some crazy plan that would have landed them back at her place in the middle of the night. Or…well, there were an endless number of crazy plans those kids might hatch. So, since it was pointless to even speculate, she climbed out of bed and after a quick breakfast took a taxi down to Fax Depot. With only Saturday morning traffic to contend with, she was there before eight.

Today, she decided, since she didn’t have five rambunctious boys in tow, there was no reason to stand out on the street. No reason not to wait inside where it was air-conditioned. She paid the driver, then went in and nodded surreptitiously to the manager.

She’d barely been waiting two minutes before she happened to glance toward the door and saw a familiar face. It wasn’t a familiar face she liked, though. It was the face of her least-favorite board member, so she turned her back and began reading the instructions on a photocopier. The last thing she wanted was Hunter Clifton spotting her and feeling he should come over for a chat.

By the time she was halfway through the instructions, she’d begun to wonder what on earth Hunter was doing in Fax Depot. She knew he had a fax machine at home because he’d sent faxes to her office from it. And his bank probably had a hundred of them. So why would he be using a commercial service?

She turned around, thinking that maybe it hadn’t really been him. But there he was, talking to the clerk behind the counter. Glancing at the manager, she noticed he seemed to have developed a twitch in his right eye. She certainly hoped he wasn’t coming down with something. If he went home sick, who’d point Blackstone out to her?

Mere seconds later, the manager was at her side, hissing, “That’s him! That guy just picking up a fax.”

“What?” She looked over quickly, but Hunter Clifton was still the only customer at the counter.

“Lady,” the manager muttered. “You said I pointed out Blackstone, I got two hundred bucks. So how ’bout handin’ it over, huh?”

“Oh, no,” she whispered to herself. Dirk Blackstone was actually Hunter Clifton. Which meant
Hunter
had arranged for Leroy to rob the bank.

Considerably shaken, she turned her back on the counter once more, digging in her purse for the money. As she handed it over to the manager, she decided there was absolutely no conceivable reason to confront Hunter right there and then.

The friend Sully was staying with had had something going on today, so she’d given Sully her spare set of keys before he’d left last night. Which meant that, as early as it was, he’d probably already be at her place. So, once Hunter was safely gone, she’d let Sully know who Blackstone was and that she was on her way home. Once she got there, they could think everything through—and see how much sense they could make of things before Hunter even realized they were onto him.

After all, she knew where Hunter worked and her files would tell her where he lived. Given that, they could pay him a visit whenever they liked.

Surprise visits are the order of the day

“N
O, NO
, W
ALTER
.”
Roger Van Slyke waved off the concierge as he picked up the house phone to call Lauren’s apartment. “Don’t phone up. We want to surprise her.”

“But Mr. Van Slyke, I just came on duty. For all I know, she’s not even home.”

“My daughter? Up and out this early on a Saturday? That would be highly uncharacteristic, Walter. I’m sure she’s in.”

“Honestly, Roger,” Susannah whispered when they started for the elevators, “you’re being absurd. What do you think she’d do if she had two minutes’ advance warning? Crawl down the side of the building to avoid her own parents?”

“I don’t want her having time to think about what she’s going to say. I want an honest discussion about what she figures she’s playing at with that man. And since she doesn’t think very well on her feet, the best way of getting honesty is to take her by surprise.”

“This whole trip here is absurd,” Susannah muttered. “I just don’t understand why you think you can run her life. You’d never dream of trying something like this with either Elliot or Marisa.”

“Elliot and Marisa have good heads on their shoulders, even if I don’t always like what they do.”

They got into the elevator and Roger pushed the button for nine.

“Roger,” Susannah pressed, “the idea of coming over here like this, first thing in the morning—”

“If we came later, Sullivan might have already arrived from… Where did Ursula say he was staying?”

“She said she thought it was the same friend he stayed with last weekend. And I gathered that’s why she and Elliot ended up taking those boys for a couple of nights—because the friend didn’t have room for all of them or something. Ursula was very vague about the details. But the point I was making is that the idea of you coming over here like this—”

“You came with me,” Roger pointed out.

“Only to ensure you don’t say anything
totally
out of line.”

“Me? You think
I’m
being out of line? Susannah, Jack Sulli van is an ex-con who’s spending his life looking after misfit kids. He has no education, no money, no prospects, and he lives in some old fishing shack in the middle of the Adirondacks. Now, do you expect me to believe you think he’s suitable for Lauren?”

“I never said he was suitable. All I said was that he seemed like a decent man. And he probably
did
save Elliot’s life.”

“Fine. He’s a decent man and a hero, as well. I’m not arguing that, but it doesn’t make him suitable for Lauren. And the fact that he’s come into town again, for the second weekend in a row…”

“I’m sorry I ever told you he was here,” Susannah snapped. “In fact, I’m sorry Ursula told
me.
If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have started worrying and we’d both be home right now, enjoying coffee and croissants instead of about to upset Lauren. Roger, she’s an adult, and whether you like it or not—”

“Whether I like it or not, her judgment isn’t what it should be. So somebody has to talk to her before she does something ridiculous—like actually getting involved with that man. And if it isn’t us, who’s it going to be?”

The elevator arrived at the ninth floor and they started in the direction of Lauren’s door.

“I think you’re making a very big mistake,” Susannah muttered as Roger reached for the knocker.

W
HEN THE KNOCKING WOKE
Sully, it took him a moment to realize he was in Lauren’s living room.

As planned, he’d come over to her place first thing, when his buddy had taken off for the day. Clearly, he’d fallen asleep on the couch—hardly surprising since he’d spent yet another sleepless night just thinking about Lauren.

Whoever was out there knocked again, and Sully decided that since the concierge hadn’t called up, it had to be a neighbor. He headed for the door, digging his cell out as he walked. There was a text from Lauren that read, “I know who Blackstone is and I’m on my way home.”

Way to go,
he thought, a huge grin spreading across his face as he opened the door—only to have the grin instantly vanish when he saw Lauren’s parents standing in the hall.

The conclusion they jumped to at finding him there, this early in the morning, was painfully obvious. While he stood in the doorway desperately wishing he was a thousand miles away, the Van Slykes stood in the hall staring at him—Susannah Van Slykes’s eyes filled with surprise, Roger’s with what looked like homicidal impulses.

Susannah recovered first, if murmuring “Oh, my” counted as recovering. She quickly followed up with, “We just stopped by to see Lauren, Mr. Sullivan.”

“It’s Sully,” he reminded her. He doubted she could care less, but he was awfully hard-pressed to decide what he should be saying.

“And Lauren isn’t here at the moment,” he ventured, “but she’ll be back soon. I actually just got here myself—” he started to explain, then one of the elevator doors slid open and Lauren stepped out.

Talk about perfect timing. Another minute and he’d have been babbling.

“Mom, Dad,” she said starting down the hall, “Walter told me you’d just come up. What are you doing here at this time of day?”

Sully had to give her credit. In the few minutes it had taken to get from the lobby to the ninth floor, she’d done a great job of composing herself.

“We thought we’d stop by and take you out for breakfast,” Roger was saying. “We didn’t know you had company,” he added icily.

“Oh, yes, I do. But that’s obvious, isn’t it. You remember Sully, of course, so…would you like to come in for coffee?”

It was apparent that what they’d really like was an explanation of exactly what Jack Sullivan was doing here, but they silently filed past him and followed Lauren into the living room.

Shutting the door, he uneasily trailed after them.

When her parents sat down, she shot him a smile that looked only a little tense. “Why don’t you give us a few minutes?”

He nodded, although he wasn’t at all sure he should let her face this alone. But they were
her
parents, so didn’t it make sense to follow her lead? Deciding it did, he turned and started away. As he disappeared from their line of vision, he heard Roger say, “We really need to talk, Lauren.”

“A
LL HE’S TRYING TO SAY
,” Lauren’s mother told her in a far more reasonable tone than her father had been using, “is that it wouldn’t be wise to become involved with Jack Sullivan.”

Lauren nodded. Her mother
always
seemed to be smoothing things over for her father. This morning, though, he’d just gone too far. She couldn’t remember ever out-and-out yelling at him in her entire life, but right now she was about a hairbreadth away.

“Dad,” she said as reasonably as she could, “I still take your advice about a lot of things. Even though I’m thirty years old, I still do. But, as I recall, you were all in favor of my becoming involved with Brandon. The eldest Stockton boy has brains, you used to tell me, and he’s from such a good family. Why don’t you go out with him? you’d say. And then, after I’d been going with him for a while, you started telling me that marrying him would be the smartest thing I could ever do.”

“I don’t remember any of that.”

“Well, I do. I remember it perfectly. And marrying him certainly
wasn’t
the smartest thing. So at this stage of the game… Look, I’m sorry you don’t like the idea of my seeing Jack Sullivan, but I’d really rather you didn’t try to give me advice when it comes to my love life.”

“Lauren, you’re a Van Slyke.”

“So what?” she snapped.

“So Jack Sullivan is probably a fortune hunter, that’s what!”

She felt as if her father had slapped her face. She took a deep breath, then quietly said, “He told me you’d say that. And I told him you thought I had more going for me than just the Van Slyke money. But I see I was wrong.”

“Lauren,” her mother said quickly, “your father didn’t mean to imply that Sully is
only
after your money. All he was trying to say, was—”

“Mom?” she interrupted. “Mom, I’m right here in the room. I’ve heard everything he’s been trying to say. But the bottom line is that I’m a grown woman, so who I fall in love with really isn’t anyone’s business but my own.”

“Oh, Lauren, you and Jack Sullivan can’t have anything at all in common, so even letting yourself think about falling in love with him is only asking for heartache.”

“Mom, I’m already beyond thinking about it, all right? Which means there’s really no point to this discussion. So rather than make Sully even more uncomfortable than he already must be, I think it would be best if you and Dad left.”

“I think,” her father muttered angrily, “Jack Sullivan should be the one leaving.”

“Don’t make me choose,” Lauren said, “because you wouldn’t like the result.”

W
HILE
L
AUREN AND HER PARENTS
were awkwardly saying their goodbyes, Sully quietly headed the rest of the way down the hall to the main guest room and sank onto the bed, his emotions reeling. When he’d first stopeed to listen, he’d only wanted to be sure that Lauren’s father wasn’t going to reduce her to tears. But the longer he stood there…

Well, the bottom line was that he shouldn’t have eavesdropped. That was something Billy would have done. On the other hand, if he hadn’t listened he wouldn’t have heard Lauren tell her parents she loved him.

He mentally repeated that part of the conversation, afraid he might have misunderstood. Her mother had said she shouldn’t even think about letting herself fall in love with him. And she’d said, “Mom, I’m already beyond thinking about it, all right?”

His heart hammering, he told himself there was no misconstruing that. She was in love with him. Just as he was in love with her. But where did they go from here?

He heard the front door open, then close. A minute later, Lauren appeared in the doorway.

“They’re gone,” she said, wandering across the room and sitting down on the bed beside him.

“Uh-huh, I heard them leave.” He took her hand, no more sure what to say to her than he’d been of what to say to them.

“I’m sorry they came here like that,” she murmured.

Leaning closer, he gently kissed the side of her face. “I’m sorry my being here caused you grief.”

“Your being here hasn’t caused me any grief, Sully. I love having you here. It was my father who caused the grief.”

They sat in silence for a few moments. Then he said, “I overheard part of your conversation.”

The way her face turned pink made him smile.

“Do I want to know which part?” she asked.

“I don’t know. But there’s something I want to tell you.”

She gazed at him expectantly.

“I…” He hesitated. He loved her so unbelieveably much the words should be easy to say. Instead, they were in credibly difficult. He suspected that was because he’d never said them before. Oh, maybe he had long ago. Maybe as a child he’d said them to his mother. But if he had, he didn’t remember.

“You what?” Lauren said softly.

It was only by closing his eyes that he could make them come out, and even then his “I love you” was a mere whisper.

When he opened his eyes there were tears trickling down Lauren’s cheeks. “What?” he said, wiping them away.

“I didn’t know if you’d ever say that. I love you, too, but I thought you were so worried about all the differences that you might never…” She shrugged and gave him a tiny smile, then wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him.

He could taste her tears and feel her love, and it made him wish the rest of the world didn’t exist—at least, not any part of it that didn’t think they belonged together.

“Lauren,” he finally murmured, “what are we going to do about this?”

“I don’t know.” She gazed into his eyes. “Sully, all I know is that I’ve never felt about anyone the way I feel about you. Never felt anything even remotely close.”

“All right,” he said, cuddling her to him. “The question is this. How do we end up together? I mean, you
would
like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d like that very, very much.”

He smiled. How could he not smile when the woman he loved loved him. But even though that made all those differences fade in significance, none of them had entirely vanished. And even if some of them might not be nearly as important as he’d once believed, there was still one obstacle that seemed insurmountable.

The likelihood of Lauren deciding she wanted to spend the rest of her life at Eagles Roost was about as low as his deciding he wanted to spend the rest of his life in the city.

“All right,” he said once more. “The problem is, if a dolphin and a meadowlark fall in love, where do they make a home?”

She laughed at that. “Which am I? The dolphin or the meadowlark?”

“I don’t know. Whichever you’d like to be. Either way, how do we work things out?”

“Why don’t we mull it over for a while,” she suggested. “In the meantime, with all the
excitement,
for lack of a better word, I nearly forgot why I came home.”

He looked at her blankly for a moment, then said, “Because you know who Dirk Blackstone is. You saw him picking up the fax.”

“Well, not exactly. I mean, I don’t think there really
is
a Dirk Blackstone. It was Hunter Clifton who picked up the fax. My board member. The vice president of the bank—”

“That Leroy robbbed a branch of,” Sully said, finishing her sentence. “But if our mystery man is actually one of your board members, what does that add up to?”

She shook her head. “I’m not certain, but I did try to make sense of it on the way home. And I think it might be significant that Hunter’s fairly new to the board. He only joined it a few months before I became director—only volunteered back around the end of last year.”