Florida Knight (5 page)

“No.” Mona looked as if she were about to cry. “I had seniority,” she murmured, almost to herself. “I haven’t worked weekends for a couple of years now.”

“You’ll just have to plan ahead,” Kate consoled, “make sure there’s someone to cover for you when you’re away.”

“I knew it was too good to be true.” Mona sighed. “New job, more money. I even thought maybe I could replace the old junker.”

Even in their unpretentious neighborhood Mona’s 1982 pickup was a joke. After it broke down on the way to a LALOC event six months earlier, Kate had been forced to replace her
Malibu
with a van. Well-used, but not worn into the ground like the ancient pickup which sat, rusting, under Mona’s ramshackle carport. Now M
ona walked the half mile to
work at the sales center of
Golden
Beach
’s largest orange grove.

“You know what me and Bubba would like?” Mona said, her blue eyes alight with the glow of dreams. “A real house. Nothing fancy—just a little ol’ cracker shack. But something with more than a half-pint lawn . . .”

“Which you’d have to mow.”

“Flowers . . . maybe a fence.”

“White picket,” Kate supplied.

Mona hung her head. “Okay, so I’m crazy. I never said it was anything more than a dream.”

Kate dashed across the length of the small room, flung herself onto the couch next to Mona. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she cried as she hugged her friend’s slight shoulders. “I’m a beast, an idiot, a cynical dried-up old prune. If you don’t dream, life passes you by.” Oh, yes, she knew all about that. But until this afternoon—when she ran head-on into Michael Turco—she hadn’t realized what she had done to herself. She’d opted out. Stepped aside . . . and hadn’t so much as waved as the mainstream world whizzed past, while she hid in a stagnant pool in a quiet
Florida
town, with an occasional foray into the well-defined concepts of a society hundreds of years in the past.

No, she wasn’t a latter-day Flower Child. She wasn’t a total dropout. She didn’t do drugs; she had a productive, useful job. Nor was she protesting anything, as had many of the socially conscious Flower Children, not all of whom had been Dropout Druggies. They’d had ideals, hopes, and dreams that had been passed to a new generation. But Kate Knight? When had she stood up and taken sides on any issue, from saving turtle nests to fighting rampant overdevelopment? Never. Not once. Not even in college had she tried to save the whales or defend a redwood.

Nor had she done anything useful beyond the confines of her job. She had given up dreams, even given up all thoughts of the future. Oh, yes—for more years than she cared to count, she’d been facing the world with a double case of tunnel-vision. One set of tracks led to her job, the other to LALOC. She was a paralegal, she created costumes. She played at being some sort of hermaphrodite cross between a medieval lady and a warrior. And until today—this particular day when she’d met Lieutenant Michael Turco of the FHP—she’d gone through the motions quite happily. Even smugly. All was right with the world of Kate Knight.

Oh hell!
Kate Knight di
dn’t cry, she never cried. But moisture blinded her eyes as s
he patted Mona’s shoulder while the new assistant manager of the Golden Beach Groves sales center dropped tears onto Kate’s sagging sofa. It wasn’t just the thought she might have to give up LALOC events that had caused the kind-hearted Mona to dissolve in tears. Mona was much too strong for that. Kate frequently questioned whether she could have stood up to the blows which Mona Ellis had endured.

Mona was a saint, Kate decided, not for the first time. It was she herself who was lacking. She who would have to face up to re-opening a crack into the outside world, to putting a damper on her cynicism, to allowing dreams—however small—back into her life.

Go slow, slow, slow!
Her turgid backwater of life was calm and cozy. A familiar friend. If she ventured out, where would it lead? Perhaps not just into the mainstream, but into a roaring, racing series of whitewater cataracts that would tumble her into a whirlpool. Followed by oblivion.

Yet that’s what was going to happen, no matter how hard she fought against it. She could dig in her heels, resist, struggle, say
no
as often and futilely as she liked. Michael Turco wasn’t going to let her rest on the safety of the bank.

Chapter 4

The moment Barbara Falk entered the office the next morning, she turned eager eyes on her assistant. “Well,” she demanded, “how did it go?”

“Fine,” Kate mumbled, staring at her computer as if the machine couldn’t boot up without someone watching its tumbling scrawl of system and virus checks.

“Kate?” Attorney Falk peered at her paralegal’s rigid profile. “Are you going to do it?”

“Yes.”

Barbara waited a beat, dropped her briefcase on Kate’s desk. Placing both hands on the highly polished wood, she leaned down until she was almost eye level with her stubborn, close-mouthed employee. “What did you think of him?” she asked, each word crisp with precise enunciation.

“He’s . . . dynamic.”

Ah, that was better, Barbara thought. Slightly more hopeful. “I insisted on talking with him before I turned him loose on you,” she offered. “On the phone he was everything that was polite, but of course he would be. But when I saw him, he took my breath away. There’s something about him . . . like a tiger deigning to take time out to make nice before going back to the hunt. I suspect he can be rather . . . overwhelming.”

“He was.”

Since Kate still wasn’t looking at her, Barbara allowed herself a wince.
Alt
hough she hadn’t seen Michael Turco since he was a child, she knew his family well. She’d made sure he wasn’t married before she agreed to allow him to approach Kate. Her paralegal led too narrow a life. Barbara was more than happy to do her civic duty while indulging in the role of matchmaker on the side. Yet there wasn’t an ounce of anything but thinly veiled disgust in her assistant’s tone. “Kate, if you really want out . . .”

“No.”

Barbara tapped her fingers on her brown leather briefcase, hoping Kate would elaborate. Nothing but silence. “You’re both strong, dynamic, intelligent. I thought the two of you would be able to work together,” she said at last. “He’s a good cop, you know. Just single-minded about finding the person who hurt his brother. If you give him a chance . . .”

“I
am
giving him a chance.”

“You’re giving him a chance with LALOC,” Barbara pointed out. “I don’t think you’re giving him a chance as a person.”

Kate’s fingers froze on the keyboard; her head snapped around. “I didn’t know that was part of the deal,” she challenged.

Barbara picked up her briefcase, shook her head. “It’s not,” she conceded, “but I admit I had hopes.”

Kate was tempted to tell her boss what she could do with those hopes but, fortunately, thought better of it. It wasn’t the first time her kind-hearted employer had tried to play matchmaker; it probably wouldn’t be the last. It was one of the hazards of her job. This latest effort would be no more successful than all the others.

“I want to help,” Kate admitted. “I only knew Mark Turco well enough to smile and say
hi
, but he was extremely likeable.” A far cry from his brother whose only interest in women was intimidation.“I was appalled when he was hurt. So I’m fine with this, Barbara, don’t worry about it.” Abruptly, Kate turned back to her computer.

Well, it was early days yet, Barbara consoled herself as she slid into the well-padded blue leather chair behind her desk. If Kate and the lieutenant struck sparks off each other—which evidently they had—it was quite possible the hostility could turn to a conflagration of a different kind.

When Lieutenant Michael Turco’s carefully controlled baritone sounded in Kate’s ear two nights later, she came close to dropping the phone. She’d seldom gone an hour in the last forty-eight without his final words to her echoing through her mind like some solemn promise from hell.
I’ll be in touch.
His simple, even snappish, greeting—“Kate? Michael Turco here”—had her hands trembling, stomach heaving, not to mention other, more southerly, reactions she refused to acknowledge. She, Kate Knight—the girl with nerves of steel—was being spooked by a man who was miles away.

“We need to talk,” Michael continued in a tone so impersonal he might have been a computerized phone solicitor. “How about The Troll House tomorrow night at seven. Dinner’s on me.”

Kate groped behind her for a chair, sat down hard, dragging the wall phone cord with her. The words that came out of her mouth were purely defensive, her brain refusing to kick into gear. “You don’t have to buy me dinner.”

“Yes, I do. I owe you. We have to make plans, get our act together. It might as well be over dinner.”

He made it sound so easy, even sensible. But her body was screaming
date
even as her mind struggled to be rational. Yes, they needed to talk, but not necessarily at one of the best waterfront restaurants in
Golden
Beach
. She’d known he was going to be trouble. Why should she be surprised?

“Well?” Michael demanded as the pause in their conversation lengthened.

Kate’s knuckles were almost as white as the phone. “Certainly, Lieutenant,” she purred. “I always enjoy good food. The Troll House, seven tomorrow.” Good. Not the slightest sign of a wobble to give her away.

“Fine.”
Click.

Kate’s goodbye faded into the air as she realized he’d hung up. Strange man. Her long arms stretched toward the wall, returned her phone to its cradle. For several minutes she sat quite still, staring into space, before she jumped up and rushed down the hallway to her bedroom at the rear of the mobile home. What did she have that was casual enough, yet elegant enough, for the old restaurant that had clung for so many years to the bank of the
Intracoastal Waterway
? Casual enough, yet elegant enough, to bring Lieutenant Michael Turco to his knees.

Perched on a stool at the restaurant’s tiny bar, Michael assured himself he just happened to be looking toward the entry of The Troll House when Kate Knight walked in. He wasn’t really keeping his eyes more on the door than on his drink. Okay, so he could tick off every patron who had entered in the past fifteen minutes. The pleasingly plump couple who were either tourists or snowbirds not yet flown home to Michigan or Iowa, four ladies of a certain age with hair ranging from salt and pepper to gray to shining white, a smartly dressed fortyish couple who looked as if they’d come from one of the waterfront mansions on the barrier island just across the Waterway. And two young women in their twenties who had plopped themselves down beside him at the bar and hadn’t hesitated to start up a conversation. Which was, Michael told himself, why he had turned his back and was watching the entry door so closely.

He would have sworn he’d become old and jaded, that nothing could stir him past mild appreciation of what God gave females. That his interest in Kate Knight was solely the challenge of getting her help in the successful completion of his mission. But
, suddenly, there she was
. . .
and
she took his breath away. Even as he slid off the bar stool, Michael stared. To keep his mouth from sagging open, he forced himself to concentrate on details, starting at shining black leather shoes, moving up over a long expanse of pleated black slacks that looked suspiciously like silk, a long black tunic heavily embroidered with some kind of oriental designs—dragons, cherry trees, stuff like that. And above . . .

Above that she was wearing makeup, perfectly applied makeup that turned her eyes into green fire, and—
oh hell!
—her hair was down, falling in waves of silver blond silk that tumbled in a startling riot of curls around her face, partially obscuring a red dragon embroidered over the modest but firm breasts Michael had tried so hard to ignore that day in Barbara Falk’s office.

Dammit, the woman was playing him. Even as his hardened heart stirred, as did an equally delicate part of his anatomy, he knew it was all an act. Kate Knight had come armed to the teeth, determined to win this round.

Since the mad rush of the prime months of the Winter Season was over, they were soon seated at a window table only scant feet from the Intracoastal Waterway, which at this point wasn’t much more than a shored-up canal less than a hundred feet wide. Kate, who had planned on treating Michael Turco as if he were a business rival at a hostile takeover, turned her eyes toward the water and was lost. In a setting like this, hostility was well nigh impossible.

A large cruiser idled in the channel just outside the window.
Ah-oo-gah!
A shrill warning sounded from the drawbridge that towered over the restaurant. The gates came down, the bridge started to lift.

“That’s how this place got its name,” Kate said, never taking
her eyes off the scene outside.

“Yeah, I know. The old troll under the bridge story,” Mike agreed. “I was born in
Golden
Beach
.”