Ms. Simon Says (7 page)

Don’t start thinking about that again, he warned himself. Then, for further distraction, and because he hadn’t eaten all day, he took the next exit and quickly located a fast-food drive-thru.

His passenger stirred, stretched, and blinked. “Hungry?” he asked her.

“Mm. Starving.” She peered out the window. “Is this the place with the Double Whammy burger?”

“This is the place,” he said.

“Well, if you’ll order me a Double Whammy, fries, and a large diet cola, I’m going to go inside to the rest room.”

While she spoke she was rummaging through her handbag. She came up with a twenty, and then handed it to Mick, saying, “My treat, Callahan.”

His first instinct was to decline her offer. What? Did she think he couldn’t afford a couple burgers? But then he decided he was being a macho jerk, so he took the bill and said, “Thanks. Keep your eyes open inside, okay?”

She laughed and her eyes widened in mock fear. “Ooh. You mean there might be a letter bomber lurking in the handicapped stall in the ladies’ room?”

“I mean just be aware of your surroundings. That’s all.”

He watched her walk to the front door of the building as much to make sure that no one accosted her as to enjoy the way she moved. Her stride was smooth and long, and there was a beguiling sway to her backside. Not a come-and-get-it wiggle. Nothing overtly sexual. Just a pleasant, eye-appealing motion. She walked with just the right amount of confidence. Fearlessly. Probably too fearless for her own good, he thought.

Still, he’d been aware of the surrounding traffic when they’d left Chicago, and he’d switched lanes often enough to ditch anybody who might be on their tail. He doubted that the guy was close. Letter bombers struck from afar. It was their M.O. At least that appeared to be this guy’s opening gambit.

Or not. Right now speculation was only good for covering all the bases in order to keep her safe. Which he had no doubt that he’d do even though it wasn’t his usual work. Five or six years ago he’d assisted a federal marshal while he baby-sat serial killer Joe Earl Moffett during his month-long trial. Mick had been bored out of his skull, hanging out in the courthouse day after day, forced to listen to Moffett’s continual Bible quotes and sick jokes. Compared to that, baby-sitting Ms. Shelby Simon was going to be like a vacation at Club Med.

He drove ahead to the pickup window for their order, and then parked where he had an unblocked view of the restaurant’s front door. The delicious fumes from the French fries wafted out of the bag, making his mouth water and his stomach growl, but he decided it would be rude to start eating without his companion, especially since she was the one who’d paid.

How much did a syndicated advice columnist make? he wondered. Plenty, judging from her place at the Canfield Towers. A hell of a lot more than a lieutenant with nearly seventeen years on the job, he was sure.

His fingers drummed on the steering wheel. Why couldn’t women just take a piss and leave the bathroom? Over the years, he’d probably spent a total of two or three days waiting for Julie. “I’ll be right back” translated to a guaranteed ten minutes, often fifteen or twenty if she did the whole makeup repair and hair brushing routine. He’d always groused at her, but in truth he hadn’t minded all that much. It was nice, seeing his wife coming out of the john looking so pretty and pleased with herself, watching heads turn as she walked in his direction.

He caught himself smiling, and immediately adjusted his face to its normal, antisocial mein just as Shelby Simon came strolling out the restaurant door. End of day sunlight streaked her long hair with tones of red and gold. She waved when she spotted him, and started toward the car when all of a sudden two women rushed out the door behind her and raced in Shelby’s direction.

Mick was out of the car already, his hand on the gun stashed in his waistband, when he realized the women were simply enthusiastic fans who wanted autographs. They were laughing and waving pens and copies of newspapers in the air. Then, while the famous Ms. Simon graciously smiled and schmoozed and signed her name, Mick breathed deeply to dilute the adrenaline that had flooded his system and to coax his heart back to a regular beat. He got back in the car and slammed the door.

Dammit. He kept forgetting what a celebrity this woman was with her face in scores of daily papers as well as slapped onto the sides of buses. That notoriety certainly didn’t make his job any easier. If anybody bent on doing her harm wanted to locate Shelby Simon, it wouldn’t exactly be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Maybe he should convince her to wear some kind of disguise, at least until he had delivered her to the safety of her parents’ place. He tried to picture her in thick black glasses with bushy eyebrows and a bulbous false nose. Or maybe a platinum blond wig and big wax lips. Even so, the woman still looked pretty good in his imagination.

Finally, after shaking hands with her happy little fan club and bidding them farewell, the famous Ms. Simon sauntered toward the car. “Oh, God. Those French fries smell so good,” she exclaimed, barely in the seat before she plunged into one of the paper sacks and came up with a handful of greasy shoestring potatoes.

“Knock yourself out,” he said.

She did. He’d have thought she hadn’t eaten in a month the way she attacked her Double Whammy, wholly oblivious to the Secret Sauce that was running down her chin, and all the while making little orgasmic mews of pleasure so distracting that Mick could hardly swallow his own burger and fries. When her tongue peeked out to catch an errant crumb in the corner of her mouth, he felt the unsettling turn of his appetite away from food in the direction of more visceral pleasures.

He gulped three-fourths of his large soft drink to put out the sudden and unexpected flames, then finished his meal staring straight ahead out the windshield without a single sidelong glance at the woman in the passenger seat, tuning out her sensual little noises as best he could. When he was done, he pitched his empty cartons in the backseat and started the car.

“Next stop—your folks’ place. What’s the name of the nearest town?” he asked, easing out of the parking lot and back toward the highway.

“Shelbyville,” she said, licking the last of the salt from her fingers.

“Excuse me?”

“Shelbyville. That’s the name of the town nearest to Heart Lake.”

“Shelbyville,” he repeated, thinking he’d heard her wrong. “Like your name?”

“Yes,” she said somewhat defensively. “Just like my name. What’s wrong with that? The town was founded by my great-great-grandfather, Orvis Shelby.”

“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it, did I?” He shook his head. “Hell, if a man wants to name a town for himself, more power to him. And if a family wants to recycle a dumb name, that’s okay, too.”

Now she was more than defensive. She was indignant. “My name’s not dumb or recycled. It’s tradition, Callahan. Who were you named for? Mickey Mouse?”

He laughed. Again. That made at least four or five times she’d managed to cut through his normal gloom in the space of a few hours. And that hadn’t happened to him in a long, long time.

Shelby stared out the window, seemingly entranced by the beautiful autumn colors along the roadside while she was actually trying not to laugh out loud at the lieutenant’s earlier remark. It
was
a dumb name. Despite her protest to Callahan, she’d hated her name when she was a kid and not only considered it dumb but embarrassing to boot, especially when the local kids at Heart Lake, who attended school in nearby Shelbyville, teased her.

For years she’d wished she’d been born second instead of first, and that her sister, Beth, had been graced with the family moniker. It was good she and Beth didn’t have a brother. The poor guy probably would’ve been saddled with Orvis.

Still, she wasn’t about to admit those feelings to Callahan. Damn him. Where did he get off, anyway, criticizing her place of residence and then her name? The jerk.

The only good thing at the moment, as far as Shelby could see, was that with every mile she was getting closer to Heart Lake, the place she loved more than any other in the world.

It wasn’t the house itself that claimed her heart, although she knew and loved every square inch of the huge old Victorian mansion. And it wasn’t the lake itself with its ever-changing water, which could be cold and gray in the morning, but azure and warm by afternoon, or smooth as glass only to turn wild with whitecaps in a sudden wind. It wasn’t the trees she climbed or the frogs and butterflies she chased or the thousands of marshmallows she’d toasted over the years or her very first kiss under a full moon on a long-ago Fourth of July, or...

It was all of that. And so much more.

Considering her love for the place, it seemed strange that she hadn’t been back there in this past year, after her parents had sold their house in Evanston and moved permanently to Heart Lake following her father’s retirement from his law practice. She’d been horrendously busy this past year, but that didn’t seem like such a good excuse at the moment. Even her sister Beth, who lived in California now, had been back to Heart Lake more recently than Shelby had.

Poor Beth. Shelby may have been cursed with the family name, but her sister seemed to have been cursed with bad luck from the cradle. She’d started out as a preemie in an incubator. At age two she needed night braces on her feet. Ten years later came the braces on her teeth. For a while the poor kid was allergic to everything. The list went on and on. If life seemed a breeze to Shelby, it was more a battle waged daily for Beth.

Several years ago, when Beth was again between careers, it had been her dream to renovate the hundred-plus-year-old house from its rugs to its rafters, and then to turn the place into a bona fide as well as profitable Victorian bed and breakfast. Her parents didn’t object. They were wild about the idea, and even subsidized the renovation. There was plenty of room, after all, for vacationing family as well as paying guests.

Bethie worked her ass off for the better part of a year—stripping, sanding, painting, staining, repairing old furnishings, acquiring new when the old stuff wouldn’t do. She lived in a sea of turpentine, paint chips, fabric swatches, and plaster dust for month after month. Heart Lake froze over, melted, and froze over again. Then, finally, when she was done, the house looked so spectacular that her parents had promptly declared it their ideal retirement home. They’d recompensed their younger daughter handsomely for her efforts, but still...

In a righteous snit, Beth had run off to California with one of her painting subcontractors, yet another in a long string of bad choices in men. Undeterred, Mom and Dad had moved in, and as far as Shelby knew, they were loving every minute they spent in the big old Victorian hulk on the eastern shore of Heart Lake.

Given Callahan’s proclivity for speed, even on fairly narrow two-lane state roads, they weren’t all that far away from the lake right now. The rural landscape hadn’t changed all that much during Shelby’s thirty-four years. White frame farmhouses and double wides hunkered down amid the acreage of corn and sugar beets and fruit trees. Over there on the right, by the side of the road, was the dilapidated fruit stand where her mother would always stop on the way to the lake for tomatoes and cucumbers. Off in the distance she glimpsed the bulbous white water tower, which always was and probably always would be the tallest edifice in Shelbyville.

She was used to seeing everything colored a summer green rather than the vivid reds and yellows and golds that predominated in October. Even the occasional cows and pigs looked a little different. Maybe they were chilly. She imagined the house would look a little different, too, and quite spectacular nestled against its hillside of evergreens and birches that would seem less like trees now than glowing candles, their yellow flames flickering against a darkening sky.

Callahan reached out to turn on the headlights just then, making Shelby realize how late it really was. Since the clock on the dashboard registered a permanent twelve thirty-five, from an afternoon in 1980 no doubt, she squinted to check her watch. It was nearly six-thirty. Already? How could that be?

“Long day,” the lieutenant said as if reading her mind. She murmured her agreement. “Shelbyville’s just down the road. The lake is only three or four miles beyond that. We’re almost there.”

“Great.”

He sounded tired. Actually, he sounded like he was trying hard not to sound exhausted. It suddenly occurred to her that there was no way she could simply let Mick Callahan drop her off at the house and then send him on his way back to Chicago, a long and grueling five-hour trip. Even if he was a total jerk, Shelby didn’t have it in her to be deliberately rude or cruel. And anyway, jerk or not, the guy had put himself in harm’s way today on her behalf. She remembered the way he’d whisked her away from the explosion in front of her building, the way he’d sprung out of the car when her eager fans had accosted her not too long ago, and it hadn’t escaped her attention that he’d spent an inordinate amount of time this afternoon consulting the rearview mirror just in case someone was following them. She was grateful to him for that. The least she could do was see that he got a good night’s sleep before he went back to Chicago.

“Listen,” she said. “Why don’t you plan on staying at my folks’ house tonight, Callahan. There’s plenty of room.”

He flashed her a quick, rather quizzical look, as if he were surprised by the offer, before he said, “Thanks. I’d appreciate that.”

“Okay. Well, good. Then it’s settled.”

Except...

Oh, Lord. How was she going to explain him? There was no way she was going to tell her mother and father that he was a cop assigned to protect her because she was the target of a crazed letter bomber. In the first place, she didn’t want to worry them, and in the second place—and in all honesty—she really, really didn’t want to deal with their possible overreactions to her current plight.

Now she was almost glad she hadn’t been able to reach them by phone earlier today, when she probably would’ve blurted out the truth. Her visit was going to be a surprise. That meant she had to come up with a legitimate reason why now, when her schedule was still jammed, she suddenly felt compelled to drop in at the old homestead. To drop in not alone, but with a gorgeous guy.