Distinguished Service & Every Move You Make (Uniformly Hot!) (18 page)

He was, however, used to letting other people do the talking. Ask a couple of questions, and most people went off on long tangents that usually left him knowing more than he’d like.

But with Mariah, he found he didn’t know nearly enough. She’d been quiet ever since they’d left her office in Houston. Throughout the drive to the airport, the plane ride, then the drive to Scottsboro, the few questions he had asked had received little more than one-word answers.

Zach rubbed the back of his neck as he closed the cab door, watching Mariah lead the way to the door of what looked like a retail store about as big as a city block. While he didn’t consider himself a ladies’ man, he certainly thought he knew a whole lot about women. And one of those things was that they loved to talk. All you had to do was find the key word. Shopping usually did the trick. But he’d tried no fewer than ten of the regular conversation words on Mariah and she hadn’t bitten on one of them. Not even politics had gotten more than a small smile from her.

He shrugged and followed after her. Okay, so she wasn’t interested in idle conversation. It was a new one for him, but Zach could handle it. Well, he could if there wasn’t the whole P.I. angle to think about. He’d like to get to know more about the business. And he’d like to get to know a whole lot more about Mariah Clayborn.

They talked to a clerk who told them that the type of baggage they were talking about wouldn’t be on the sales floor yet, but back in the warehouse behind the store. She made a phone call then walked them back to a large door. “Go on in. You’re expected. You’ll find James somewhere in the piles.”

Piles? Zach scanned the countless objects for sale, the place looking like a garage sale lover’s paradise, then stepped through the door the clerk held open. He immediately saw what she was talking about. Everywhere he looked were mountains of luggage. Big pieces, small pieces, expensive pieces, cheap pieces. All things that belonged to somebody somewhere and held cherished memories from their trips.

“Oh, boy,” Mariah said, next to him.

“You can say that again.”

“Oh, boy.”

Zach jerked to look at her and grinned. “I meant figuratively.”

She smiled back. “I know. I thought it deserved two.”

“Ah.”

Zach couldn’t quite put his finger on why, but whenever Mariah smiled, he either grinned or grinned wider, and an inexplicable heat slinked through his abdomen, making him want to touch her. It didn’t matter where. To tuck her wild hair behind her ear. To run his finger down the smooth column of her throat. To circle her right breast where the soft cotton of her T-shirt draped enticingly over the small mound.

“Hello!”

Zach heard the greeting, but was at a loss as to where it had come from.

“I take it you’re Miss Clayborn?”

It seemed to take Mariah a great effort to tear her gaze away from him. The heat he felt sizzled, knowing that she was as compelled by him as he was by her.

“Um, yes, that would be me,” she said finally.

A middle-aged guy with thick glasses popped up from behind a pile of suitcases nearest to them. Zach raised his brows.

“James, at your service,” he said, wiping his hands against his striped, short-sleeved shirt, then offering his hand. “Would either of you like some Starbucks?”

“No, thank you,” Zach said.

Mariah shook James’s hand. “You’re the one I talked to?”

“No. That would be Sally. I don’t sound like a woman to you, do I?”

Zach suppressed a chuckle. The guy in front of them definitely didn’t look like a woman.

Mariah cleared her throat. “Sorry. I was calling from the Houston airport so I really couldn’t make out much about the voice with all the background noise.”

“Airports. Hate ’em,” James said, offering his hand to Zach.

Zach nodded in complete agreement as he gave James’s hand a brief shake.

“So you all are looking for a wedding dress.” James pushed up his glasses again and peered around him. “Someone else here on the same errand. You’d be surprised how many of those things end up here.”

“Wedding dresses?”

“No, people looking for them.”

“Ah.”

“Found one the other day.” He kicked a suitcase out of the path and called out to another guy nearby, telling him to keep the pathways clear. “Wouldn’t be able to find your way out without the pathways,” James explained.

“By ‘found,’ do you mean people or wedding dresses?”

“Wedding dresses, of course.”

Zach tuned in on where Mariah was going. “And by the other day, which day, exactly, do you mean?”

“Two days ago.”

The right timeframe.

“Where is it? The dress, I mean?”

James motioned toward the far corner of the room. “Right where I directed the other guy who got here about twenty minutes ago looking for a dress, too.”

“Ah,” Zach said again, barely hiding his amusement.

Mariah laughed.

James stared at them both, having missed out on the joke.

“Sorry,” Mariah said. “I was just wondering if, you know, the guy looking for the dress actually plans on wearing it.”

James’s brows hovered above the dark rims of his glasses. “You don’t mean…you aren’t saying…” He let out a deep breath. “Oh Lord, I hope not. Either way, I don’t care, though. I’m a firm believer in the don’t ask, don’t tell policy. But now that you’ve said that, it’s put…well, an image in my head, you know? And that’s one image I could do without.”

“You and me both,” Zach said.

Zach took Mariah’s elbow and steered her toward where James was leading the way down one of the paths he’d mentioned. Little more than two feet wide, the path wound around mountains of varying sizes and colors. A Louis Vuitton here, a knockoff there. A khaki duffel bag in the way of the path, a package of skis at shoulder level, ready to decapitate anyone who wasn’t watching where they were going. How did all of this stuff come to be lost?

“James, what happens to all this?”

He shrugged. “Well, the airline does extensive tracking for ninety days. Sometimes the owners themselves find their way here, but not often. If they do, or the airline matches up the bag with the passenger, they regain their things. Otherwise, we sell the stuff in the front room. We also hold auctions. We wouldn’t have room otherwise. We have a website, you know. Sell stuff there, too.”

The older man stopped and scratched his chin, considering the piles in front of him when they came to a fork in the path. He looked one way, then the other, then pointed to the right. “This way, I think. Yes, yes. This way.”

Zach gazed down at Mariah, who was looking at the baggage with as much curiosity as he. “Lose anything recently?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “No. But it looks to me as though it wasn’t for lack of the airline trying.”

“I’ve lost no fewer than three bags over the years.”

“Do a lot of traveling, do you?”

“Yes.”

“Work related?”

Zach rubbed his chin. P.I.s traveled, didn’t they? Sure they did. “Yes. Don’t you?”

“This was my third time on a plane. And, this trip aside, my travels have been strictly personal. I haven’t had much call to travel out of Texas yet, you know, for the job.”

“Personal? That one trip wouldn’t have had anything to do with your exes, would it?”

She winced, making him wish he hadn’t said anything. “No. It was for my mother’s funeral. I was eight.”

Zach felt lower than the bottom of his shoes. “I’m sorry.”

She shrugged, obviously trying to pull off a nonchalance he was sure she didn’t feel. “That’s all right.”

He cleared his throat. “My mother died when I was nine.”

Her big brown eyes widened. “Your father?”

“Out of the picture. I don’t even know where he is. Not that it matters. He wasn’t around long enough to make an impression.”

Zach grimaced. He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d volunteered the information. He didn’t think he’d told anyone in his adult life how old he’d been when he’d lost his mother. Yet here he had known this woman for only a few hours and he’d shared the information with her as easily as he did the time.

“I guess it’s my turn to say I’m sorry.”

He mimicked her moves and shrugged his shoulders, knowing the casualness he was going for fell far short of the mark. “That’s all right.”

His response brought a warm smile to her face. He discovered again he liked it when she smiled. He liked it a lot.

“Here we are,” James said, coming to a halt and breaking the quiet moment. The older man scratched the top of his head. “At least this is where I think it is.” He looked around. “But where’s the other guy?”

Fifteen or so jumbo suitcases were stacked behind Mariah. Zach squinted, trying to make out whether or not one of them had just moved. Then suddenly the entire stack began to teeter precariously.

He calmly reached out and touched her arm. She blinked up at him, her tongue darting out to moisten her bottom lip. Then he yanked her into his arms, away from where she’d been standing, where the cases were now hitting the floor one at a time.

“Dang nab it!” James shouted.

Zach had never actually heard a person say the words in the flesh and, despite what had just happened, he fought a smile.

“If I’ve told the kid once, I’ve told him a thousand times, you’ve got to stack these bags carefully.” He eyed where Mariah had curled her hands into the front of Zach’s shirt, the side of her head resting against his chest.

Zach could hear the
thump-thump
of his own heartbeat. He wondered if Mariah could hear it, too. The soft smell of sunshine-Texas sunshine-filled his nose, and the feel of one-hundred-percent Mariah Clayborn filled his arms. The heat that had earlier taken up residence in his abdomen dropped to his groin. His condition was not helped any by the shifting of Mariah’s hips.

“You okay?” James asked her.

Zach looked down to find her staring at the man as if just realizing he was there. She pushed away from Zach so fast she nearly toppled them both over. Zach caught her and chuckled.

“I’m fine,” Mariah said, squaring her shoulders and looking everywhere but at Zach. “Where did you say this damn suitcase was?”

4

W
HOA
,
COWBOY
.

Mariah could swear she was shaking. She eyed the avalanche of suitcases, then Zach Letterman’s wide, hard chest, and swallowed hard. The problem was she wasn’t sure what bothered her most-that a few measly suitcases were to blame for her shaken demeanor, or Zach Letterman.

Definitely Zach Letterman.

She covertly lifted her hand. Definitely shaking. She smacked the hand back to her side and made a fist.

Okay, so for those few moments it had felt good to be pressed against his hard male length as if she was a damsel in distress and he the brave hero. Even if he’d only been protecting her from suitcases. She’d breathed in the crisp scent of his shirt, felt his large hands pressing against her back, and felt…different somehow. At least different from the way she’d felt with any other guy. She was used to the smell of chewing tobacco and sweat. But somehow she got the impression that when Zach sweated, he smelled like cologne.

It didn’t make any sense, really. All her life she’d been around real cowboys. Men who hiked up their pants and puffed out their chests and made it their mission in life to play the role of heroes. Yet whenever any of them had tried to help her, she’d shunned them. Felt insulted. Had even broken her leg in three places once in her haste to show she could take care of herself. Her horse had rolled and caught her underneath.

Yet let a few bags fall to the floor and she was hopping into a Yankee’s arms and batting her lashes as if she wasn’t capable of tying her shoes right.

“I’ll be darned,” James said, breaking into her mental musings.

Zach moved up next to the man and Mariah moved to the other side. Before them sat no fewer than fifteen suitcases, all hanging open and gutted, their contents mixing with the next.

“I take it this isn’t the way to go about searching for bags,” Zach said dryly.

“Heck no, it ain’t.” James kicked a few steps forward. “All the stuff gets mixed up then.” He threw his hands in the air.

Zach looked down at something he’d taken out of his front pocket. “Blue canvas suitcase with blue leather straps.”

Mariah noted that all the suitcases that had been opened matched that description.

“The guy,” James said.

“The guy? What guy?”

He waved his hand. “You know, the one who got here just before you looking for a wedding dress.” He looked around and Mariah followed his gaze, finding no other person in sight. At the far end of the warehouse, a door clanged. She couldn’t say for sure, but she’d have chanced a guess that the man in question had just left the building.

Zach frowned and glanced at her. “I don’t have a very good feeling about all of this.”

Mariah had to admit she felt the same way, but she wasn’t about to admit that to him. It reeked too much of the damsel-in-distress situation. “We’re talking about a wedding dress here.”

“A wedding dress our client is paying through the nose to locate.”

James wasn’t paying attention to them. Instead he was stepping through the small piles of clothing. A moment later he said, “Forgot one.”

Zach leaned closer. “If the dress is in there, that means the guy who got here before left without it.”

“Maybe he found the dress he was looking for.”

“Only one dress in this lot,” James said.

James unzipped the bag then flopped the lid open.

Sitting in the middle of wads of balled up tissue paper sat the wedding dress in question.

“Coincidence,” Mariah said.

“Fact,” Zach countered.

* * *

“W
E
’
RE
BEING
FOLLOWED
.”

Zach stared in the rearview mirror through the back window of the rental car, watching another sedan shadow their moves. He didn’t miss Mariah’s exasperated roll of her eyes.

“We’re not being followed. Maybe the driver is going to the same hotel we are. Have you thought about that?”

Zach sat forward and straightened his suit jacket. Ever since discovering that they were too late to catch the last flight out to Houston, Mariah had been a tad bit cranky. When he’d asked why, she’d said something about not having her toothbrush. Zach told her he always carried an extra and she was more than welcome to have it. He’d barely heard her murmur, “What kind of P.I. carries an extra toothbrush?”

Okay, so since Jennifer had first given him the case this morning, he’d felt a little let down that it had been something so menial, so unexciting. His meeting with Denton Gawlick and his wife had gone smoothly, no red bells. They were renewing their wedding vows next week and needed to have the dress, simple as that.

Then they’d arrived at the Unclaimed Baggage Center to discover someone else was looking for a wedding dress in a suitcase similar to the suitcase in which they’d found their dress. That is the
client
’s dress.

Zach pulled at his tie, which had grown a little tight around his neck. The mere mention of a “their” in the same sentence with “wedding dress” was enough to choke off air.

Hey, he was just as willing as the next guy to stand in front of an altar, only he intended to be ready for it when it happened. Of course his longtime girlfriend Kym had found out the hard way that he wasn’t anywhere near ready for it now. After two years of dating, of mingling their lives, she’d come out and asked him to marry her. That the proposal had come on the heels of his explaining to her what he planned to do, namely pass over control of his tool and die business and pursue what she subsequently called this “P.I. thing” hadn’t helped matters. That he didn’t want to get married had been his response. Kym hadn’t given him a chance to add the “yet” he was sure had been about to come out of his mouth. She’d up and walked out on him, never to be heard from again. Well, except for a voice-mail message telling him not to bother retrieving anything from her apartment because there was no longer anything there to retrieve. The whir of what he’d suspected was her garbage disposal on the other end of the line hadn’t sounded good.

“You’d think the rental car companies would make sure their vehicles had air-conditioning, wouldn’t you?” Zach said.

“That’s okay,” Mariah said, closing her eyes against the hot breeze wafting in the open window. “I don’t like air-conditioning anyway.”

Zach gazed at her. At the warm stains of color on her smooth cheekbones. The dots of moisture on her forehead and long, long neck. The way her damp T-shirt clung to her small breasts. Of course she’d say that. She was used to the heat south of the Mason-Dixon line. Dealt with it on a daily basis.

He settled back against the seat but he couldn’t say it was comfortable. The truth was, looking at Mariah Clayborn made him think of crisp sheets and sweaty bodies. Namely his and hers. Entangled together. Beads of moisture sliding down her elegant neck and over the crest of a breast and pausing there, waiting to be licked off.

“Are you okay?”

Mariah’s voice surprised him out of his reverie. “Yes, I’m fine.” If you counted being in a high state of arousal fine.

It wasn’t like him to be so…obsessed with the idea of sleeping with somebody. Of imagining how her thighs would look pressing against his hips instead of a horse’s back. Or how her mouth would purse just so as she fought to catch her breath.

Zach wiped the sweat from his brow.

“You don’t seriously think someone’s still following us, do you?”

Zach blinked at Mariah. She’d obviously tuned into his distracted state. But just as obviously she didn’t appear to have a clue as to the nature of his distraction.

“I don’t know,” he said.

He judged the hotel to be another mile or so down the road. Good. Because he didn’t think he could last another minute in a car alone with Mariah without either spontaneously combusting…or doing something a professional man shouldn’t be thinking about doing with a colleague, no matter how temporary that working relationship would be.

* * *

I
F
YOU
TAKE
Z
ACH
L
ETTERMAN
out in public, they will come.

As Mariah unpacked the entire inventory of her travel necessities—the toothbrush Zach had given her—she stared at herself in the dimly lit hotel bathroom mirror and sighed. Okay, so he
was
a striking man. Tall, lean with an air of self-confidence that could equal any rodeo cowboy’s. But Mariah couldn’t remember being around a man who attracted so much female attention. From the flight attendant hoping to be totally at his service, to the hotel clerk who had thrown in room amenities Mariah hadn’t known existed, Zach Letterman seemed to be a walking, talking billboard for male sexuality. Sure, she’d tuned into it the instant they’d met. But to be a victim of it, and having to witness how it affected others were two completely different things.

She ran her fingers through her hair, piling it up on top of her head then considering the results. Not that Zach seemed any the wiser for the attention. He had spoken to the clerk and the flight attendant the same way as he had to James, the flighty baggage caretaker. But she wasn’t entirely convinced that his being oblivious to his effect on women was any better than him knowing.

Of course it didn’t help at all that the women barely spared her a glance before writing her out of the picture altogether. No competition. She didn’t even have to see it written on their pretty faces. Their attitudes spoke volumes.

She sighed again and released her hair so it hung around her face again in thick, unruly waves. Not that being no sexual competition was anything new to her. She may have grown up competing with the males, but the females… Well, at first she hadn’t been interested in competing with them. Then there had come the time when she was so far behind in the imaginary competition she’d had to drop out of the race altogether.

Recently a confusing kind of restlessness had begun to coat her insides. A strange kind of itchy sensation, only it was under her skin, not on top where she could get at it. She caught herself scratching her arm and stopped. Had her exes found her sexy? Desirable? She figured they had, considering their physical attentions. But if that was so, where did that leave her in the sex appeal race? Did she have a minute amount that allowed her to go only so far, but just short of the altar?

Not that she was all that experienced. Sure, she’d been intimately involved with three men. Well, two. The first didn’t count because they’d never really had intercourse. Heavy breathing was about as far as things had gone with him, then he’d been in a hurry to drive her back to the ranch. She’d always thought it was because at the last minute he’d decided he hadn’t wanted to have sex with her.

And the other two…

Well, she didn’t want to think about them right now. She couldn’t change them. But she could change herself. She leaned forward and studied what looked like an oncoming zit on her cheek. She made a face then eyed the travel-sized toothpaste tube. One of her cousins had put a dab on a pimple when they were teenagers. Personally, she had thought the action pretty gross. But now that she thought about it, she couldn’t remember Jolene ever really having a full-blown zit.

The mirror reflected the bed in the other room and the open suitcase sitting on top of it. Seeing the old lacy off-white dress lying there in clouds of tissue paper made her heart pitch to her feet. Justin Johnson was getting married. Tom Brewer had gotten married six months ago. And Jackson Pyle two years before that. And none of the three had ever mentioned the word
marriage
around her.

Mariah strode out into the other room, her intention to close the suitcase so she wouldn’t have to see the dress inside. Instead she stood in front of it, staring down at the lace with reluctant fascination.

The only other wedding dress she’d ever seen up close had been her mother’s. It had been tucked away in a box in the attic. The day after her mother’s funeral, she and her father had flown back from Amarillo, where her mother’s family was from and where her father had decided it was best she be buried. After they’d returned home, Mariah had hidden out in the old, dusty attic to get away from the nonstop stream of well-wishers and old women bearing casserole dishes. Up in the attic their voices had faded to an incomprehensible hum, and she’d looked out onto the stables, wishing she could be there instead. She’d leaned against a box only to have it collapse against her weight. She’d opened it up and, sitting on top of some old clothes, was the dress she’d seen her mother wearing in her wedding pictures. It had looked so tiny, so perfect. Just like her mother. And so unlike Mariah.

Three hours later, her father had found her sleeping in that same spot, an imprint from her mother’s dress on her cheek.

Mariah had found the dress again last year while clearing out the attic to make room for a home office for her father. When she’d opened the box, she found the dress looked no less perfect…and no less small. As she’d held the delicate fabric in front of her, she wondered if even at eight she’d been small enough to wear it.

Mariah reached out and rubbed the lace of the wedding dress between her thumb and index finger. She wasn’t sure of this dress’s history, but she was sure it had one. Although she knew that making new things look old was an art these days, she didn’t think anyone would want a dress to look this old. It appeared to be held together by sheer will alone.

What made a woman a woman? she wondered. What did they do that made men want them? Not just for short-term relationships but for the whole nine yards?

There was a soft knock at her door. Her heart shot up from the vicinity of her feet and she quickly closed the suitcase and stuffed it under the king-size bed, almost as if being seen in the same room with it would make her come up wanting even more. Then she crossed the room to open the door.

“Hi,” Zach said, seeming to fill the entire width of the hallway from where he stood her outside her door.

“Hi, yourself.”