Sweet Liar (18 page)

Mike didn't speak for a moment, so Samantha wrote,
Why me?
and handed him the note.

Mike looked pained. “I don't know why I didn't think about others knowing the old story. In underworld circles the legend of Half Hand's money is like the Lost Dutchman Mine. There are a great many people who suspect that Maxie took it and that's why she disappeared that night. She wanted to get away from Doc and the gang; she saw an opportunity and she took it. Doc told you that Half Hand took a bullet in the head and died instantly. Some people said that Half Hand had been hit in the head so often by his father that a bullet couldn't pierce his skull. They say that he lived long enough to tell Maxie where the money was.”

Turning, Mike looked at her. “What neither Doc nor Scalpini knew until years later was that the money they had, had been marked by the FBI. If it hadn't disappeared that night, whoever used it would have been holding evidence that could have convicted them. Whoever took it from Doc saved him from prison.”

Was it found?
Samantha wrote.

“Sort of,” Mike said. “A hundred-dollar bill turned up in Paris in 1965.”

Samantha had been listening to him intently, but the date jolted her. Her eyes widened.

“Right,” Mike said. “That's the year after your grandmother Maxie left her husband and family. That was thirty-seven years after the massacre, and no one was looking for the money. The old bill was spotted by a sharp-eyed clerk in the treasury office. After that one was found, they kept a lookout for more bills, but no more showed up—not that anyone caught anyway. The clerk who spotted that one had just returned from a six-month leave of absence, so for all anyone knows the entire three million could have come through the treasury and not been seen.”

There was too much information for Samantha to take in at one time.

Mike took the tray from her lap and started for the door. When he came back into the room, he said that he wanted her to sleep, that she needed rest after her ordeal and that her throat needed to heal. But as he started to tuck her in, he stopped. “When was the last time you cried?” he asked softly.

Samantha looked away from him, frowning.

Taking her chin in his hand, Mike turned her back to face him. “I'm not going to go away and I'm not going to allow you not to answer me.” He handed her the pencil and notepad.

After a fierce glare of defiance, she wrote,
I was crying the day the principal came to tell me that my mother was dead.

S
amantha didn't leave New York that afternoon, but she had to promise Mike she'd obey him if he allowed her to stay with him for two more days—the amount of time Blair said it would take her throat to heal enough to speak. The truth was, she had a decision to make and she thought she could make it better if she stayed where she was than if she went to yet another unfamiliar place.

Mike wasn't easy to convince because he wanted her out of the city, wanted her in a safe place. He no longer wanted her to have anything to do with Doc or Maxie or any of what he was researching. Samantha wrote him a note asking him if he was going to continue writing his biography. When Mike said he was, Samantha did not point out that he wasn't any safer than she was, that someone might think he knew about Half Hand's money as well as she did. Nor did she mention that it was her grandmother involved, not his.

She simply didn't want to leave Mike's house, didn't want to get into a car with another man and drive to yet another place. She didn't want to leave Mike.

When she woke it was midafternoon and Mike brought her lunch on a tray. He looked tired and he hadn't shaved in two days. He wanted her to go back to sleep, but she pantomimed that she'd keep her lips zipped and throw away the key if he'd just let her sit on the couch and not have to stay in bed.

After reluctantly agreeing, he picked her up and carried her into the library and settled her on the couch as though she were helpless, a light blanket wrapped around her legs. When she was settled, he went back to his desk and started looking through his bundles of papers.

As Samantha watched him, she knew that she wanted to know more about the man who may or may not be her grandfather, so she wrote Mike that she'd like to type more of his notes. Refusing to allow her to sit at the desk at the computer and type, he asked her if there weren't small computers and she described a laptop. He asked her to write down what she needed so he could order it. Even though Samantha said a laptop computer would be too expensive and that she could sit at the desk, Mike refused to listen to her. At last she wrote down the name of a powerful little laptop, and on impulse, she wrote “King's Quest V and a mouse.” Mike called a store and within two hours the equipment was delivered to the door.

After the equipment arrived, she got off the couch and installed the mouse and the graphics game on the color screen of the big computer while Mike was in the shower. When he entered the room, he was damp from his shower and wearing nothing but a pair of white tennis shorts. For a minute, Samantha thought her heart was going to stop at the sight of him, but Mike's eyes were on the computer screen and the opening graphics of the game. As though he were hypnotized, he walked toward the computer, touched the mouse on its pad, and when he saw the little man in the game move he was caught. Smiling at his beautiful, broad, bare back, Samantha saw that he couldn't figure out how to type notes, but within minutes, he had mastered the principles of a computer game.

That night, she found herself nodding off, and only when Mike started to pick her up did she wake. Out of instinct, she began to fight him, but he held her close. “It's me,” he whispered. “Me, Mike, no one else.”

It took her a moment to relax against him, sleepy, her throat still painful. But when he put her in his bed, she panicked, trying to get away from him.

Startled, Mike stepped back from her, his face full of anger. “I am
not
a rapist,” he said through clenched teeth. “I'm not going to hurt you and I am not going to bed with any woman who doesn't want me in bed with her.” Turning away, he went to the doorway, his hand on the light switch. “If you need me, I'll be next door in the guest bedroom.” There was no warmth in his voice.

Samantha lay awake for a while in Mike's big bed, on pillows that he had slept on, and looked up at the ceiling. Inadequate, she thought. She had always been inadequate when it came to men.

When Sam woke in the morning, at first she didn't know where she was, but when she realized it was Mike's bedroom, a feeling of safety came over her. Someone, and she knew it was Mike, had placed clean clothes over a chair for her. Getting out of bed, she pulled on the jeans and T-shirt he'd left for her—there were no shoes, as though he thought she'd run away if given shoes—and went into the bathroom. This was Mike's bathroom, and the countertop had several bottles and jars on it, all neatly arranged, all clean. Picking up a bottle of aftershave, she smelled it, smiled, and put it down again, then found herself sliding back the glass door to the shower and looking inside to see his shampoo.

There was another door that opened into the bath, and when she opened it she saw another bedroom. The bed was rumpled, recently slept in. Obviously, Mike had spent the night in this room, the room closest to her.

After her inspection of the bathroom, she went back into the bedroom, and after telling herself she shouldn't, she opened his closet door. It was a large, walk-in closet and had been fitted with built-in cabinets to hold his clothes, which were all neatly arranged. He didn't have a lot of clothes, but what he had was all of the best quality. Touching the sleeve of a cream-colored jacket made of raw silk, she lifted the jacket from the rack, looking at the shoulders that were as broad as Mike's shoulders and the waist as narrow as his. There was no way on earth that he'd bought this jacket off a store rack; it had to have been made for him. Inside the jacket was the label of a store in London.

She put the jacket back, ran her hands across shirts and trousers, then touched perfectly polished shoes lined up on slanted shelves, each shoe with a cedar shoe tree inside it. Closing the closet door, she went back into the bedroom.

There was a big chest against one wall in the bedroom, and after a moment's hesitation, Samantha opened the drawers. Underwear, sweaters, a drawer full of workout clothes, socks. It was when she opened the bottom right-hand drawer that she saw a silver frame turned face down. She could no more have contained her curiosity than she could have willed herself to fly. Picking up the frame, she looked at the photograph of a very pretty young woman with lots of dark hair and an intelligent, almost aristocratic-looking face. “All my love, Vanessa” she'd written on the photo.

As Samantha put the photo back in the drawer the way she'd found it, she wondered why Mike had hidden the photo, why he hadn't wanted her to know that he had a steady girl who gave him all her love. Of course a man liked for a woman to think that she was the only one in his life, didn't he? She remembered last night and Mike telling her that he wasn't a rapist. He hadn't been making a pass at her, but Sam had thought he was.

After she finished dressing, she went into the kitchen where she found Mike sitting at the breakfast table. When she greeted him, he was distant to her, saying only that she should be in bed. She wanted to apologize to him for last night, for fighting him after he'd saved her life. She wanted to tell him that it wasn't him but her, that she was the one with the problems, but she couldn't bring herself to write what she felt. Quietly, she went back to bed and picked up a book, but didn't read it.

Later in the morning, Blair came and examined her throat and said she'd be all right by the next day, but if she could, she'd like for Samantha not to speak for another day. Blair went into the living room with Mike and minutes later Samantha got out of bed and followed them.

Blair was leaning over Mike and examining his head. Neither of them saw Samantha, so she slipped upstairs and put on some makeup. When she came down, Mike was in the garden, sitting at the picnic table, lunch food before him.

“You want something to eat?” he asked, but he didn't look at her.

Samantha opened her mouth to say something, then closed it. How could she explain something that she herself didn't understand?

The sunlight glistened on his hair, and she could see the bare place where his scalp was white. When she stepped closer to him, reached out, and touched his hair, he didn't move. Encouraged, she stepped even closer and examined the wound. There were ten stitches holding the gash shut, and she knew without a doubt that his injury had something to do with why her throat was a mass of bruises.

On impulse, she kissed the sewn cut. Mike sat still, for once not grabbing her, not trying to wrestle her to the ground, not tearing at her clothes. His acquiescence encouraged her, and she smoothed his hair over the place, covering it completely.

Moving away from him, she went to take her seat on the opposite side of the table. He was looking at her oddly, as though trying to figure her out. She wanted to tell him to not try to figure her out, that she wasn't like other people, that she didn't fit into any mold.

Mike didn't say anything, just ate and kept his thoughts to himself.

At one o'clock the telephone rang and when Mike answered it, he broke into a smile. “That's great,” he said, grinning. “Congratulations. Wait a minute and I'll ask Sam.” Putting his hand over the phone, he turned to her. “Are you up for some company? A friend of mine just passed her bar exam and she's celebrating today. She and some others would like to come over.”

Smiling, Samantha nodded yes, although she was leery of more of Mike's friends. So far she'd met strippers and rednecks. What kind of bar had this woman passed? Bar
tending
?

Not wanting anyone to see the bruises on her throat, Samantha put on a turtleneck knit shirt. An hour later, when she met Mike's friends, she was pleasantly surprised. There were four of them, one married couple, Jess and Anne, who had been married all of six weeks, and an engaged couple, Ben and Corey. It was Corey who had just passed her exam that allowed her to practice law. She said that she'd grown up in the same small town of Chandler, Colorado, that Mike had.

When the four ecstatic people, carrying bottles of champagne, entered the town house and saw Samantha on the couch, they immediately assumed that she and Mike were living together.

It was Mike who set them straight. “Samantha is my tenant,” Mike said. “She has an apartment upstairs.” He told them she'd fallen against the banister and injured her throat so she couldn't speak. Sam fiddled with the turtleneck, afraid they would see the bruises that looked exactly like fingerprints.

When Mike said Samantha was no more than his tenant, his four friends looked from one to the other and wiggled their eyebrows. It wasn't the usual tenant-land-lord relationship that had the tenant ensconced on the library couch wrapped in a quilt.

For Samantha it was good to have the presence of the other people, for their laughter broke the tension that had developed between her and Mike, and she got to see Mike as he was around other people.

Since she'd been twelve years old, Samantha had led an isolated life. Her mother had been the more social of her parents, the one who was always organizing barbecues, dinner parties, and church socials. After she died, Samantha had been left with her father, who rarely saw other people. Then there had been Samantha's marriage to a man who liked his socializing in private.

But Mike was a gregarious creature who was at ease in groups.

Jess liked computers, and when he saw the new equipment in Mike's library, he couldn't wait to turn it on. Mike gave Samantha all the credit for having chosen the equipment and for doing whatever had to be done to it to make it work.

Looking at the directory, Jess brought up the Sierra game and within minutes, the three men were moving the mouse about on the pad and arguing over bees and ants and robbers.

Lying on the couch behind them, Samantha watched Mike, thinking that it was odd that in such a short time all other men seemed to pale beside him. She watched him move, watched the way his muscles moved under his thin T-shirt, looked at the dark curls of his hair.

Suddenly, it hit her how close she had come to death. Remembering the man's hands on her throat, she could almost feel her life being squeezed from her. Yet, in the middle of that, she had known,
known,
that Mike would come to her if she could just make some sort of signal.

Now that she thought of it, she knew that hitting the wall with her heel was a very weak signal to send to someone who was asleep. How had Mike heard her three puny knocks? How had he known they were cries for help and not just normal sounds? She could have turned over in her sleep and hit the wall.

Yet somehow, Mike had heard her and he'd come to her rescue. When she thought of the door to her apartment with the hole in it, she felt chills run up her spine. Mike had put his foot through the panel and had reached inside to the lock. He had come through a solid oak door with the force of a bulldozer. Or a superman, she thought.

Now, she looked at him, at his profile. Was he actually the most beautiful man on earth, or was that just the way
she
saw him?

Looking down from his face to his strong neck, to his bare arm, the tricep well defined, to his small waist, his stomach hard and flat, her eyes moved downward to his legs, hairy and brown beneath his shorts.

When she looked back up at his face, Mike had turned to her and was watching her. Samantha looked away from his eyes, not wanting him to know that she had been looking at him.