The Fiance Thief (3 page)

Alec. Claire stabbed at a piece of lettuce in her salad, picturing his face. His regrettably handsome face. When he called to offer her the job with the paper, she’d had a clear vision of him, almost like someone was beaming his photograph to her. She’d imagined his thin, ashy hair, his unassuming build, his Adam’s apple constantly bobbing up and down. He could have been straight out of central casting, an actor who plays the peevishly sensible fiancé in a romantic comedy, destined to get thrown over by the last scene.

Two days after his phone call, she’d stumbled into the real thing. More specifically, she’d tripped him as he got on the elevator, and she caused him to shut his tie in the door. He was nice enough about it as she blundered through her apologies, but throughout the elevator ride, she’d prayed that she’d never see this man again. There was something about him—his curly black hair, fabulous blue eyes, the way his lean body seemed to fill the whole elevator with his presence. It was the kind of chemistry they posted warning signs about in laboratories. When they’d gotten off the elevator together, she’d hoped he was just a visiting salesman. When she’d asked for Alec Mason and heard him say “I’m Alec,” she saw in his eyes that he was as disappointed as she was. Since that first fateful stumble, their nonrelationship had only gotten worse.

She slipped the paperback mystery out of her purse and opened it, noting with pleasure, that the first victim had many of Alec’s traits. Arrogance. Looks to kill for.

“Drowning your sorrows in ranch dressing?” Claire looked up to see Lissa take a seat across from her.

“Low-cal buttermilk, actually,” she said, closing her book. She liked Lissa in spite of herself, especially since in many ways the other reporter reminded her of Missy. Or Miranda, as she might as well get used to thinking of her. They were both a little shallow, and neither could hold a secret any longer than it took it to go from her ears to her lips. But both of them had some sparkling quality that made it easy to forget how unreliable they were.

Lissa waved the waitress away, and leaned across the table towards Claire. “He’s not worth it,” Lissa said. “No man is worth all this trouble.”

Claire sighed and pushed her half-eaten salad away. “I know. It’s ridiculous to go through this. Even if I couldn’t get another job with a paper here, I could go back to school, become qualified to do something. And I’ve always got waitressing experience.”

Lissa was staring at her. “Do you think I’m talking about Alec?”

“Aren’t you?”

Lissa shook her head. “Of course not. You need this job with Alec. I’m talking about Scott.”

If Mick was right, and spunk really was a tangible thing, then hers had been stolen by Scott. If it had existed at all, then it had long ago been hocked in some New York City pawn shop, probably to pay his rent.

Miranda had been the only person who understood how much she loved Scott. Although that had proven to have its disadvantages, the good part of it was that no one else ever thought to mention him. To her other friends and relatives, he blended in with the string of boys Claire didn’t marry. Today was the first time anyone had spoken his name to her in a while, and she was flooded with memories.

Their first meeting, in fact, had been too much like her first meeting with Alec. She hadn’t shut his tie in an elevator, but she’d exploded a canned cola on his white oxford
shirt on the first day of class, managing to get all food and beverages in the classroom banned by the professor. The other students were a little upset, but Scott hadn’t minded. Whatever she did only seemed to endear her more to him. Back then, in her early twenties, she’d had the confidence that came with knowing she was loved. Now, at twenty-six, she had the skittishness that came with knowing she’d been dumped and betrayed.

“Claire.” Lissa snapped her fingers. “Come out of fantasy land and decide what you’re going to do. You cannot let this shallow, arrogant, deceptive scum keep you from participating in one of the singular experiences of your life.”

“Scott’s not…” Claire started to say. “Well, he is, actually, all of those things. But there was more to him than that.” There was no way, she knew, that she could communicate his charms to Lissa. How could she describe his killer smile, or the way his eyes used to light up every time he saw her? Considering what he’d done to her, what could she say to redeem him? He indulged all of her whims. He never found anything about her to criticize. He seemed to love her completely right up until the day he left.

“I’m sure he had his good points,” Lissa said soothingly, “Before his betrayal of you made you forget them. My point, though, is that you now have an opportunity other people only dream about.” At Claire’s questioning look, she said, “Okay, let’s do this. Imagine you’re looking at a group picture from the third grade.”

Claire obeyed. She could see them all, lined up on the gym bleachers. Wild print shirts and wide-legged jeans were in style, and half the girls wore their hair like Princess Leia’s.

“What were some of their names?” Lissa asked.

“Shelly, Darrell, Starr,
Kelly…”
Her voice trailed off. “What’s the point of this?”

“Wherever those kids are, they’re telling everyone they know that they went to school with Miranda Craig. In this town right now, someone’s claim to fame is that he pulled Miranda’s pigtails.”

“That would be Joey Bradley,” Claire said.

“Right now, old Joey’s down at the auto store, bragging about Miranda being his childhood sweetheart. Shelly and Kelly are gossiping about her at the Laundromat. But do they have invitations to this retreat?”

“I see your point,” Claire said. “But I can’t go. I don’t want to see Miranda again.”

“You don’t have to forgive her for what she did. That’s not part of the invitation.”

“To tell you the truth,” Claire confided. “I don’t want to see Scott. It’s not like I’m still in love with him, but I just don’t want to see him again.”

Lissa was shaking her head even before Claire finished. “Scott’s not going to be there.”

“He was a significant person in her life,” Claire said.

“Not.
Your best friend from first grade to freshman year in college—that’s the kind of person who belongs in a tribute to you. Not the guy you left behind when you made it. He’d have lots of lovely things to say for the cameras.”

Like Miranda, Lissa had at the core of her personality a hard-as-nails pragmatism and a well-trained eye for the main chance. If Lissa said Miranda wouldn’t have asked him, then Claire believed her. Lissa rose, smoothing her linen skirt out as she stood.

“Come on back to work,” she told Claire. “Even if you don’t change your mind about going to the filming, Alec’s not really going to fire you. If he did, you’d just have to go crying to Mick. After all, he’s the one who signs the checks.”

That, Claire thought, epitomized the difference between them. Lissa was the kind of woman who noticed
who signed the checks, while she, Claire, let those details slip by. Maybe it was time to start paying attention.

“Even if you don’t want to work for Alec anymore, you’re still holding a ticket for an all-expense-paid trip to Miranda Craig’s spread. You should use it.”

She should use it. As she bid goodbye to Lissa, Claire felt the first shivers of a great idea coming on. She signaled the waitress for more coffee and slipped a notebook out of her purse. She would meet with Alec, but she wouldn’t be as unprepared for this encounter as she had been for their first one. This time, she would know what to expect. This time, she had a plan.

2

“I B
ROUGHT YOU
something, Alec.” As Lissa dropped a wrapped sandwich on his desk, Alec shoved her purloined copy of the biography in his top desk drawer and hastily picked up the
Wall Street Journal.

“Lots of interesting human-interest stuff in here today,” he told Lissa, unwrapping the layers of aluminum foil and biting into the sandwich, so hungry he didn’t care whether it was liverwurst or lean roast beef. “Lots of lifestyle features,” he told her, gesturing at the paper. “You should read it sometime.”

“Yeah, well, if they come up with a new way to say the bride wore white, be sure and let me know.”

Turkey with mustard. A good choice, he thought, as his tastebuds finally identified the meal he was gulping down. “Did you happen to see Claire?”

“She wasn’t at the deli,” Lissa said, and left it at that. Alec waited at his desk, his whole body tuned to the sounds of the building, waiting for Claire’s light step on the stairwell or the ping of the elevator as it rose. He got his hopes up when the elevator stopped at their floor, but it was only Mick, returning from his lunch.

It didn’t take Mick long to spot what was wrong with the picture. “Where’s Claire?”

“Claire is…umm.” There was no use lying about it, Alec realized. Lissa would rat on him in a second if he didn’t come clean. “We’re not exactly sure.”

“You didn’t fire her, did you?”

“In a manner of speaking, no.”

“But in another manner of speaking, maybe?” Mick asked. “You’d better come to my office.”

No one ever had the heart to tell Mick that his office was meant to be a utility and supply closet. Extra pens, computer paper and all the other supplies the staff needed had to be stacked in boxes along the floor of the larger office, or hidden in the paper’s basement office with the production and four-person advertising staff. Last year, at Christmas, Alec had taken up a collection to put heating and air-conditioning vents in Mick’s quarters, but he only had raised enough for a clearance-model ceiling fan. He sat down in one of the room’s two chairs and began to fill Mick in, the fan whirring above him noisily as he spoke.

He glossed over the part about how he’d learned what was in Claire’s letter, but he could tell that even without hearing about that particular breach of ethics, Mick didn’t approve of what he’d done.

“You fired her because she wouldn’t take you to a party?” Mick asked him.

That wasn’t how he would have put it, but it seemed to be what he’d done. He tried to justify his actions. “It’s not that. It’s that she had this valuable connection, and she never mentioned it.”

Mick seemed puzzled. “I know Miranda Craig is from here, and I know you want to pull one over on the daily, but I just don’t see why America’s eating her up. She’s kind of horse-faced, isn’t she?”

Alec sighed. He could feel the day’s adrenaline rush seeping out of him, leaving him subdued and depressed. He’d chased a story and lost it. That had never happened before to Alec, and he didn’t like the feeling.

“Mick,” he said. “Girls look like that now.”

“What? You mean like their genes are changing or something? All that radiation we’ve been fooling around
with since the war?” He shook his head. “Claire’s a hell of a lot prettier, if you ask me.”

Alec stood abruptly. “I guess I’d better get back to my desk.”

“It’s a red-letter day when a man who gets paid for his powers of observation can’t see the obvious.”

“Thanks for that vote of confidence,” Alec said, opening the door.

“Alec.” He was halted by the unusually firm tone in Mick’s voice. “Sometime, every reporter loses a story he really wants.”

Alec stopped, halted by a vision of the stories he might be tracking if he had remained at the Atlanta paper. That could have led to him becoming the Southeast correspondent for the
New York Times.
Or maybe he would have ended up working for the
Washington Post,
taking an occasional break from investigative reporting to enjoy movies, restaurants and rock bands that would never make it to Ridgeville.

Instead, he’d gambled it all away on the chance to do something worthwhile as the editor of his hometown paper. If the closest thing he could find to something worthwhile was an interview with Miranda Craig, he wasn’t going to let it slip out of his hands.

“Not me,” Alec said. “Not yet.”

Hank left right at five, his work up to its usual impeccable standards. Lissa left with forty more words to go on her write-up of a fashion show that had taken place at a local tearoom.

“Forty words,” Alec told her. “Just put more adjectives in.”

“I’ve used all the adjectives I know,” Lissa said. She glanced at her watch. “You put in your share. Either that or tell production to leave extra spaces between the words.”

Lissa’s stories were already set in such large type that they were in danger of looking like society news written for the visually impaired.

“Where do you have to be?” Alec asked.

“I’ve got a blind date with the law partner son of one of the women I met at the show.”

He didn’t even try to talk her into staying. Lissa’s job took second place to her social climbing, and the fact that the two occupations so often coincided was probably the only thing that kept her there. He had gone out with Lissa in journalism school, until she learned that he wasn’t heir to some Mason family fortune. She was the first person he thought of when he needed to hire a society writer, but he wasn’t going to be able to keep her forever. She was only honing her skills in the relatively small pond of Ridgeville before taking them to places where the fishing was better. When that happened, he’d have to replace her with someone who was just as eager as she was to claw her way into the lives of the people she wrote about.

That’s not Claire, he thought. It didn’t matter what she had fought with Miranda about. If Claire had been anyone else, she’d have been so impressed by Miranda’s fame and wealth that she would have called her up a long time ago. He’d only skimmed her biography, trying to spot Claire’s name, but the gist of the thing was that Miranda had found it to be a cold, cold world once she’d become one of Hollywood’s most photographed faces. She wanted to have someone she could trust the way she had trusted Claire.

Mick left just a few minutes after Lissa, and Alec was alone in the office. He knew it was useless to stay a second longer. He no longer believed Claire would come back to work. It was a shame, really. Not only was she the only person willing to drive out to surrounding counties to file
stories about two-headed garden snakes and quilting bees, she also wrote the best prose on the paper—excepting his, of course.