Jennifer Crusie Bundle (48 page)

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

M
ae Sullivan frowned up at the grimy old office building and shifted from one aching spike-heeled foot to the other, trying to keep the weight off her blisters. From the looks of the neighborhood, her chances of getting mugged were only slightly greater than the chances of the building falling on her. Only a loser would work in a place like this.

Good.

It hadn't been easy finding an incompetent private eye on such short notice in a midwestern city like Riverbend. But now there was Mitchell Peatwick. She could picture him, leaning back in his office chair, balding and overweight, slack-jawed and beady-eyed, no brains to speak of.

He'd patronize her because she was female.

She'd play him like a piano.

All she had to do was convince him that he was investigating a real murder case, and he'd swing his paunchy weight around, creating noise and confusion until whoever had taken her uncle's diary would be forced to either give it up or bury it forever if he didn't want to be accused of murder. Yep, that was all she had to do.
So go do it.
She took a deep breath and winced as the waistband of her borrowed pink skirt cut into her flesh. Then she pulled the veil on her hat over her eyes and walked toward the cracked glass doors of the old building, watching her reflection as she climbed the steps.

Even through the dumb pink veil, she really did look sexy. It was amazing what clothes could do.

Now, if she could just get this damn interview over with before the waistband of June's skirt cut her in two and June's heels made her lame for life, she'd be on her way to solving all of their problems.

Please let Mitchell Peatwick be dumb as a rock with a weakness for women in tight skirts,
she prayed as she rang for the elevator.
Please let him be everything I need him to be.

T
HE WINDOW
behind him was cranked wide-open, and the ceiling fan above him stirred the air, and Mitch was sure if he got any hotter, he'd die. As it was, he was pretty sure that the only thing that kept him alive was the fact that he wasn't moving. If he moved, his body temperature would rise, and he'd melt right there in his office chair.

He didn't want to move, anyway. He was too depressed to move. He leaned back in his cracked leather desk chair—sleeves rolled up, hands laced behind his head, heels crossed on his battered metal desk—and thought about the way he'd planned things and the way they'd turned out. Big difference there. Anticipation was a lousy preparation for reality. That's why he was giving it up for fantasy. Fantasy was not particularly productive, nor was it lucrative, but it beat reality hands down.

Reality sucked.

Fantasy was leaving a prosperous career to become a private detective. Reality was regretting it. He closed his eyes and tried to recapture the dream, the part where he'd be the Sam Spade of the nineties. Then the elevator cables rumbled across the hall and Mitch knew another divorce job was coming his way. He hadn't had many illusions about relationships before, he thought sadly, but he had absolutely none now. Even the people who weren't married had him investigate to see if the people they weren't married to were telling the truth. And of course, they weren't. That was the one irrevocable truth Mitch had learned in a year, the only thing, he realized now, that he'd taken away with him.

Everybody lied.

Sam Spade would have understood that part, but he would have spit on the divorce work. Mitch had the uncomfortable feeling that he should be spitting on it, too, instead of making a precarious living at it. Too precarious. He had one week left in the year, one week to earn the last of the twenty thousand dollars and win his stupid bet and go back to his regularly scheduled life, but to do that he needed a client who would shell out $2,694 before Friday.

It wasn't going to happen. Prying money out of clients was the second least favorite thing he'd learned about this job.

So when he heard the elevator cables rumble in the hall opposite his office door, he didn't leap to his feet with enthusiasm. It wasn't just because the heat would kill him if he moved. It was also because it had been a long time since he'd done anything with enthusiasm, and he'd forgotten how it worked.

If I was Sam Spade, this would be Brigid O'Shaughnessy.
The ancient ceiling fan creaked above him, and buttery sunlight spattered over him, and in spite of himself, he began to feel optimistic again. Maybe hope wasn't dead yet. Maybe this was a Brigid heading his way, a woman uninterested in marriage and commitment, willing to seduce him to get what she wanted.

He was sure as hell willing to be seduced.

She would come into the office, cool, slender, lovely and lethal, in one of those white suits with the wide lapels and a tight skirt that was slit to the hip. She'd have incredible legs. And maybe she'd be wearing a hat over her glossy red curls, a dark veil that dusted over blue, blue eyes and a straight little nose above moist, pouty lips. And in between the lips and the legs would be the best part. Her jacket would be tight under her breasts. Round breasts. Full, round breasts. High, full, round breasts.

With an effort, Mitch pried his mind off the breasts.

And she'd come in and say, “I need you to find the Maltese Falcon,” and her voice would be throaty and soft. And somewhere along the way, she'd take off her hat, and they'd have passionate, steamy, slippery, sweaty sex…

Mitch lingered for a moment on the sex…. and then he'd find out that she'd been the guilty one all along. “I won't play the sap for you, baby,” he'd say, and they'd take her away for murdering his partner. Okay, he didn't have a partner unless he counted Newton, and nobody ever counted Newton, but still…. No wonder that book was a classic. Sam Spade got to nail her without a commitment and still feel good about himself when he dumped her. First, great sex, and then he walked out on her, free as a bird, a hero instead of a schmuck.

Now
there
was a fantasy.

Then the door opened, and he looked up, and she came in.

Her hair was dark brown, and so were her eyes behind the veil, and her suit was pink instead of white, but everything else was pretty much his fantasy. The nose, the lips, the…

“I'll be damned.” With enormous effort, Mitch raised his eyes from her breasts to her face.

“Probably.” Her low voice reverberated straight into his spine. “Are you Mitchell Peatwick?”

“Uh, yeah.” Mitch swung his feet to the floor and stood up, wiping his sweaty palm on his shirt before offering her his hand. “Mitch Peatwick, private investigator. Listen, did you ever read
The Maltese Falcon?
”

“Yes.” She ignored his hand as she surveyed the dingy office, her pout deepening as she took in the cracks in the upholstery and the dust. “Is this really your office?”

That was the way the world worked. Anticipation tripped him up every time. If she'd just kept her mouth shut, she would have been perfect, but no…

Reality. Nature's downer.

Mitch sighed and pulled his hand back. “Think of it as atmosphere. I do.” He sank into his chair and put his feet back up on the desk. “Now, how can I help you? Lose your poodle?”

She quirked an eyebrow at him. “Would you be able to find it if I had?”

“Just what I needed—a snotty client.” Mitch tried to keep the annoyance out of his voice, but it was hard. There was something about being snubbed in the middle of a heat wave by a beautiful woman with fantasy breasts that brought out the worst in him. And anyway, she wasn't that beautiful. Her nose was actually pretty standard, and her lips didn't really pout on their own, and her breasts…
Don't think about the breasts,
Mitch told himself.
It'll only depress you.

“From the looks of things, you could use any kind of client.” She surveyed the bottoms of his feet, propped up on the desk in front of her. “I've never actually seen paper-thin soles before. It's amazing. I can tell the color of your socks from here. They have holes in them, too.”

“Big deal.” Mitch smiled, world-weary and invulnerable. “Now tell me something really tough, like the color of my underwear.”

“You're not wearing any underwear,” she said, and Mitch put his feet down.

“What do you want?” He glared at her through the dusty sunlight. “If you just stopped by to screw up my day, you're done.”

She looked around the office again and walked over to the coatrack with a hip-rolling step that strained the fabric of her tight skirt and lessened Mitch's annoyance considerably. Then she picked up his linen jacket, walked back to the chair he kept for clients and dusted off the seat with it. Mitch would have been annoyed again, but she bent over to dust the seat, and while the lapels on her jacket were crossed too high to make the view really breathtaking, everything sort of moved forward against the loose, soft fabric, and he remembered that he really didn't like linen that much, anyway. Then she walked back to hang up his jacket, and he watched her from the rear and thought again what amazing creatures women were and how glad he was that he was male.

Then she sat down, and he tried to pay attention.

She blinked at him, her eyes huge. “This has to be confidential.”

Mitch snorted. “Of course it does. Nobody ever walks in here and says, ‘Listen, I want everybody to know this.”' He pulled a yellow legal pad toward him and picked up a pen. “Let's start with your name.”

“Mae Sullivan,” she said, and he wrote it down.

“And what seems to be your problem?”

She glared at him. “Someone
seems
to have murdered my uncle.”

Her voice was snottier than he'd imagined a really sexy voice should be. It wasn't easy being aroused and annoyed at the same time. It took a lot of energy, and he needed that energy to not think about the heat, which was another reason to dislike her. “Murder. Well, you know, the police are excellent at that sort of thing. Have you reported the body yet?”

“The memorial service is day after tomorrow.”

“So this isn't exactly news to the police.”

“The police aren't interested.” Her brown eyes met his blue ones evenly. “Are you?”

Mitch looked into those eyes and thought about murder instead of divorce work and sighed. “Yes. I'm going to be sorry, but yes, of course I'm interested.”

She shifted in her seat, all her moving parts meshing in elegant, erotic motion, and Mitch thought,
Thank God I don't have a partner or she'd off him for sure.

L
YING WASN'T
Mae's strong suit, but she was considerably cheered by what she saw. Blinking up at her, groggy with the heat that blanketed his office, Mitchell Peatwick didn't look as if he'd catch on if she told him she was one of the Pointer Sisters. He just lounged behind his Goodwill desk, his shaggy blond hair falling in his eyes, and smarted off to her while she snubbed him. When he wasn't talking, he was sort of endearing in a dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks kind of way, but he had an office right out of a dime-store novel, and his mind was obviously still in one.
The Maltese Falcon?
What a dreamer.

But that was good. It was going to take a dreamer to buy her story. And he wasn't completely impossible. He wore beat-up clothes of no particular style, and his hair could have used a trim, and his face had more jaw than it really needed, but he was solidly male, with that broad-shouldered, non-gold-chain-wearing, let-me-lift-that-car-for-you-lady kind of doofus sexiness that made women think that maybe they'd been too hasty with the liberation movement.

And then, of course, he opened his mouth, and all those women went looking for the nearest lamppost to hang him from. If he'd just kept his mouth shut…

“Tell me about your uncle,” he said, and his voice was patient, and she thought she saw sympathy in his eyes, which made her feel guilty for using him. Of course, maybe it only looked like sympathy. Maybe it was really a hangover.

“He was murdered.” Mae leaned forward a little, just enough so that her breasts moved under her jacket. It had worked on him before, although she had to be careful not to overdo it. Sometimes men became jaded after too many minutes of shifting silk crepe. Or they got that glazed look. She peered into his eyes. Still fairly alert. Full speed ahead. “But nobody believes me when I tell them that.”

“Including the police?”

Mae tried to look defeated and vulnerable. He looked like the type who would go for defeated and vulnerable. Brigid O'Shaughnessy had done well with defeated and vulnerable. “I haven't gone to the police. They wouldn't have believed me. His doctor signed the death certificate. There's nothing the police can do.”

He picked up his pen again. “What was his name?”

“Armand Lewis.” Mae watched as his hand moved across the yellow pad, making slashing strokes with the pen. He had strong, broad hands, and his movements were sure, and she was well down the road to her own fantasy when she realized what was happening and put a stop to it. There was too much at stake to blow on a nice pair of hands, particularly a pair hooked to a brain lame enough to buy her story.