Sweet Liar (4 page)

Trying not to think of her father, trying not to ask herself why he had done this to her, and especially trying not to think of her husband—correction, ex-husband—she forced herself to look at the sidewalks and the street before her, forced herself to look at the people, at the men dressed in jeans and the women in outrageously short skirts. Even in New York, the air seemed to be full of the laziness of a Sunday afternoon.

This man, this Michael Taggert, had said he wanted to start over, she thought. If she could, she'd like to start her life over, like to start from the morning of the day her mother died, because after that day nothing in her life had ever been the same. Today, having to be here, was part of all the pain and trauma that had started that day.

Looking at her watch again, her first thought was that maybe she could pawn it, but the watch had cost only thirty dollars new, so she doubted that she could get much for it. Noticing that it was twenty-five after four, she thought that maybe, if she rang the bell now, Michael Taggert would answer and maybe he'd give her back her bag so she could find a place to stay. The sooner she got started on this year-long sentence the sooner she could get out of this dreadful city.

Taking a deep breath, smoothing her skirt, making sure her hair was tightly in place, she put her finger on the doorbell.

W
hen the man opened the door promptly at Samantha's ring, she stood for a moment blinking at the change in him. He was wearing a clean blue dress shirt, partly unbuttoned but still neat, a loosened silk tie, dark blue tropical weight wool trousers, and perfectly polished loafers. His thick growth of black whiskers was gone and the black curls of his hair had been tamed into a conservative, neatly parted style. Within minutes he had gone from resembling the sexy, rather dangerous leader of a gang of hoodlums to looking like a prosperous young banker on his day off.

“Hello, you must be Miss Elliott,” he said, extending his hand. “I'm Michael Taggert. Welcome to New York.”

“Please give me back my bag.” She ignored his outstretched hand. “I want to leave.”

Smiling, acting as though she hadn't spoken, Mike stepped aside. “Won't you please come in? Your apartment is ready for you.”

Samantha did not want to enter this man's house. For one thing, she found it disconcerting that he could change his looks so quickly and so completely, that within minutes he could go from looking like a muscle-bound jock who'd never done anything more intelligent than memorize a few football plays to looking like a young professor. If she had met this man first, she wouldn't have guessed what he was really like. As it was now, she wasn't sure which man was the real one.

When Samantha saw her tote bag at the foot of the stairs, she stepped inside the house to get it, but as her hand touched the handle of the case, she heard the door close behind her. Turning toward him in anger, her lips were tight, but his glance didn't meet her eyes.

“Would you like to see the house first or just your apartment?”

She didn't want to see either, but he was standing in front of the door, blocking her exit, as big as a boulder in front of a cave entrance. “I want to get out of here. I want—”

“The house it is, then,” he said cheerfully, as though she'd answered positively. “The house was built in the twenties, I don't know the exact year, but you can see that the rooms have all the original moldings.”

Refusing to move away from her bag, she stood where she was.

But Mike forced her to participate, however reluctantly, as he put his hand on her elbow and began to half pull, half push her out of the foyer, propelling her toward the living room. She saw a large room, with big, comfortable-looking black leather chairs and a couch strewn about, a rough, hand-woven carpet on the floor, folk art from all over the world tastefully scattered about the room, as well as two enormous palm trees in the corners by the windows. Several masks hung on the walls, as well as Chinese tapestries and Balinese paintings. It was a man's room, with dark colors, leather, and wooden objects—the room of a man of taste and discrimination.

The room didn't look much like a bordello as she would have thought from her first impression of him. In fact, the man beside her, the one wearing the banker's clothes, looked more at home in this room than the jock she had first met.

Aware that Mike was looking at her face, she sensed that he seemed to be pleased with what he saw, because the pressure on her arm lessened. Reluctantly, but with less anger, she followed him from room to room, seeing a dining room with a large table from India and a magnificent cinnabar screen against one wall, then a powder room papered with Edwardian caricatures.

Relaxing more every minute, she was shown a library paneled in oak with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books. She was impressed by the sheer number of books until she saw that, as far as she could tell, all the books dealt with American gangsters: their origins, biographies, even books on the economics of being a gangster. Looking away from the books with a grimace of disgust, she saw in the corner of the room, near a big desk heaped with papers, large white cartons labeled with the names Compaq and Hewlett Packard. Surprise showing on her face, she turned to look at him.

“Your rent,” he said in answer to her silent question. “A whole year's rent is in those boxes, and I have no idea what to do with the damn things.”

“I could—” Samantha stopped herself, knowing she was feeling a computer aficionado's heartfelt lurch at seeing powerful computer equipment sitting unused in boxes. It must be how a doll collector would feel at seeing boxes in an attic labeled, “Great-Granny's dolls” and not being allowed to open the boxes.

“You wouldn't by chance know which end of a computer to use, would you?” he asked innocently, knowing full well that she was a whiz with computers. He'd bought what Dave Elliot, in one of his letters, had told him Samantha said he should buy.

“I know a little about them,” she said vaguely, slowly turning away from the boxes.

Leading her upstairs, he showed her two bedrooms, both of them decorated with plants and art from around the world, one of them furnished with wicker chairs with pillows printed with ivy vines.

“You like it?” he asked, not attempting to control the eagerness in his voice.

Samantha smiled before she caught herself. “I do like it.”

When he grinned in response to her assertion, Samantha almost felt her breath leave her. He was even better looking when he smiled like that, such a smile of pleasure, untainted by any other emotion. Feeling that it had suddenly become very, very hot in the room, she started toward the door.

“Want to see your apartment now?”

Looking away from him, looking at anything but him, she nodded.

She followed him up the stairs to the third floor. When Michael opened the door to the first room, Samantha forgot all about New York and this man who unsettled her, for she could feel her father in this room. Her father had always said that if he had to start from scratch, he would decorate his house in green and burgundy—and this living room had been made for her father. A dark green couch had been placed at an angle to a green marble fireplace, with two big, comfortable-looking green-striped chairs across from the couch, all of them set on an Oriental rug handwoven in colors of green and cream. Around the room were pieces of dark mahogany furniture, not one piece having spindly legs that would make it easy for a man to knock over.

Walking to the mantel, Samantha saw several framed photos of her family: her mother, her parents together, her paternal grandfather, and herself from infancy to one year ago. Tentatively, she picked up a silver-framed photograph of her mother and, holding it, she looked about, closing her eyes for a moment. The presence of her father was so strong in the room she almost expected to turn and see him.

Instead, when she turned, she saw a stranger standing in the doorway—and he was frowning at her.

“You don't like it,” Mike said. “This room's not right for you.”

“It's perfect for me,” Samantha said softly. “I can feel my father here.”

Mike frowned harder. “You can, can't you?” As he spoke, he looked at the apartment with new eyes, seeing that it wasn't a room for a pretty blonde female. This was a man's room. Specifically, it was David Elliot's room.

“The bedroom's through here.” As Mike walked behind Samantha, he saw every corner through different eyes. His sister had decorated these rooms as well as the ones downstairs. At the time, Mike had bragged to Dave that all you had to do was tell his sister what you wanted the finished product to look like and she could do it. Dave had said he wanted his apartment to look like an English gentleman's club, and that's what it looked like. Now Samantha looked as out of place amid the dark colors as she would have in an all-male club.

In the bedroom the walls were painted dark green and the windows leading onto a balcony were hung with curtains of green-and-maroon-striped heavy cotton velvet. The bed was a four-poster with no canopy, and the linens were printed with plaids and sporting dogs. Watching, he saw Samantha lovingly run her hand over the comforter. “Did my father ever stay here?”

“No,” Mike said. “He did everything by mail and telephone. He was planning to come here, but—”

“I know,” she said, looking at the dog prints on the wall. Being in this room was almost as though her father weren't dead, almost as though he were still alive.

Mike showed her a wine safe next to the bedroom, then two bathrooms done in dark green marble, a sitting room with red and green plaid chairs and bookshelves filled with the biographies her father loved. On the fourth floor was a guest bedroom, and a study with a heavy oak desk and French doors opening onto a balcony. Opening the doors, she stepped out and saw the garden below.

She had not expected a garden in New York—certainly not a garden such as this one. In fact, looking at the lush green lawn, the two tall trees, the shrubs about to burst into bloom, and the beds of newly set annuals, she could almost forget she was in a city.

Turning back to look at Mike, her happiness showing on her face, she didn't notice his frown. “Who takes care of the garden?”

“I do.”

“May I help? I mean, if I were to stay here, I'd like to help in the garden.”

His frown gave way to a slight smile. “I would be honored,” he said and should have been pleased by her words, but for the life of him he couldn't figure out what was bothering him. He wanted her to stay, but now he was almost wishing she wouldn't, and his ambivalence had something to do with the way she moved about the rooms—Dave's rooms. Something about the way she was still gripping that photo of her mother to her breast made him want to tell her to leave.

“Would you like to see the kitchen?”

When Samantha nodded, he went to the west side of the room and opened a door, exposing a narrow, dark stairway leading downward. “It's the servants' stairs,” he explained. “The house hasn't been remodeled into apartments, so you and I will have to share a kitchen.”

She looked at him sharply.

“You don't have to worry about me,” he said, annoyed that once again he was defending himself. Maybe he should give her a police statement that swore to his clean record, swore he wasn't a rapist or a murderer or had ever had so much as a speeding ticket. “I know less about kitchens than I do about computers, so you won't be running into me in there very often. I can work a refrigerator and that's about it. Even toasters confuse me.”

Saying nothing, she continued to look at him, letting him know that she was far from convinced of his good intentions.

“Look, Sam, maybe the two of us got off on the wrong foot, but I can assure you that I'm not a…a whatever you seem to think I am. You'll be perfectly safe here with me. Safe from me, that is. All your doors have good, sturdy locks on them, and I don't have keys to the locks. Your father had the only set. As for sharing the kitchen, if you want, we can set a schedule for use. We can arrange our whole lives around a schedule if you want, so we don't have to see each other at all. Your father paid me a year's rent in advance, so I think you should stay here. Besides, I've already spent the rent money on that pile of metal downstairs, so I wouldn't be able to refund your money.”

She wasn't sure what to answer, whether to say she'd stay or not. Of course she shouldn't stay, not after the way they'd met, but right now she could feel her father's presence more strongly than she could remember this man's touches. Maybe she shouldn't stay here with him, but could she leave the second home her father had created? She had lost her home in Louisville with all those memories and all those ghosts, but here she could feel the beginning of new memories.

Reluctantly, she put the photo of her mother down and started walking down the stairs, all the way to the ground floor where the kitchen was. For all that this man said he knew nothing about cooking, someone did, for the pretty, spacious, blue and white kitchen looked to be well equipped and highly usable.

She started to ask questions, but then she looked toward the end of the kitchen across a charming little breakfast room and saw the double glass doors leading into the garden. Turning away from him, leaving the kitchen behind, she went out the doors and into the garden. As backyards go, the space wasn't very large, but it was surrounded by an eight-foot-tall solid wooden fence, so the yard was private and secluded. Upon closer inspection, she could see that the garden was prettier than it had seemed from the fourth-floor balcony, with pink climbing roses just budding, growing over the fence. They were the old-fashioned full-blown fragrant roses that she had always loved, not the modern tight scentless roses.

Turning, she smiled at Mike. “You have done a beautiful job.”

“Thank you,” he said, seeming to be truly pleased by her praise.

As she inhaled the fragrance of the roses and thought about the rooms upstairs—her father's rooms—she whispered, “I'll stay.”

“Good. Maybe tomorrow I could show you a few places to buy furniture. I'm sure you'll want to change the rooms, since they're not exactly what a female would want. My sister is an interior designer, and I can get things wholesale through her so—”

Turning toward him, her face was stern. “Mr. Taggert, thank you so much for your offer, but I want to make myself clear from the start. I am not looking for a friend, a lover, or a tour guide. I have a job to do in this city and when it's finished I'm leaving, and between now and then I have no desire to…start anything. Do you understand?”