Attractive Nuisance (Legally in Love Book 1) (9 page)

Yeah, that would work fine, except for Falcon’s midnight ghost stories. Everyone had to stay for those. And to be honest, Camilla wasn’t a great night driver. Going down an unfamiliar canyon alone in the dark, even to avoid all manner of humiliation and potential Death By Bears, smacked of stupidity—and lethality.

She sighed and plunked her chin onto her hand, suddenly realizing Zane had asked her a question some time ago.

“Yeah, I don’t have any camping equipment. Not a sleeping bag, canteen, nothing. And to be honest, I’m a little concerned about sleeping on the ground.”

At this, Zane snickered.

“What? Beware, counselor. You’re minimizing the legitimate concerns of others with that derisive laughter.”

“I’d hardly call it derisive. It was genuine.”

“The problem being?”

“Being that for thousands and thousands of years, humans have slept on the ground. It’s kind of funny that now we’re afraid of that. It’s like people are afraid of seeing an animal butchered nowadays. They want a hamburger at the drive through, but they don’t want to think that it came from a cow. That bothers them. Or a thousand other things that modern society has insulated us from. Childbirth, death, the natural order of things. I guess sleeping on the ground just seems the least of those.”

He was weird. It’s not like Camilla didn’t know her burger came from a cow. She grew up in ranching country, Prescott, after all. She frowned.

“Now, don’t go getting all pouty on me, Miss Camilla. I didn’t mean to irritate you.”

“Just buzz off.” She waved him away and went back to writing a brief to the opposing counsel asking again for a shot at interviewing the suspect. They hadn’t gotten back to her when she asked before. They were supposed to respond in a timely fashion. Two weeks? Not timely.

Zane crouched down next to her, rested his chin on the edge of her desk and looked up into her face. She’d never seen him from this angle. He had a chicken pox scar just below his right eye. Wow, and those eyes were really dark brown. Like the sixty percent cacao chocolate bar sitting in her desk drawer for emergencies.

“Hey, Cami. I’m really sorry. You’re right. I was going too far.” He put his hand on top of hers, which was on top of her knee. Man, she really should have straightened her pencil skirt before she sat down. The side of his pinkie touched her bare knee. Dang—why did she have to shiver whenever he made contact with her skin? “Listen. I have a lot of options for you.”

If one of them was for her to vanish and not reappear until after the campout, she was listening. Speak on.

“First, there’s the obvious: we can fold up a bunch of extra sleeping bags. You can be like the princess and the pea. Second, I’ve got all different kinds of inflatable mattresses—but none come with a guarantee that they won’t spring a little leak and end up deflating slowly in the night leaving you on the ground with your shoulder blade gouging into a rock by morning.”

That didn’t sound great. But if it didn’t deflate, it might be an option. “Go on.”

“Okay. Let’s see.” He took a breath and looked at the ceiling as he spoke. He was stretching his creative problem solving skills for her here. Aw, nice. She got a little warm spot inside as she watched the gears turning. “If I pack my eight man tent instead of my five man tent, we can probably set up a hammock for you. I’ve got one that fits on a stand. Two, actually. We could be like Gilligan and Skipper.”

“But not stacked up like that, right?” She didn’t relish the thought of having him either collapse onto her in the night, or having him beneath her staring at her backside at bedtime. “I mean, even an eight man tent isn’t as tall as a bamboo hut.”

“So you do know about tents.”

“No. What are your other options?” She needed him to stay on task.

“Okay, fine. Other options.” He drummed his fingers on her knee. Each impact sent a thudding through her nervous system, like a mini-shock. She felt it strongest in the tip of her upper lip. Why was that? Could the knee be a pressure point? She’d have to cyber search that later. He snapped his fingers. “I know. The truck. Of course. If you don’t want to sleep in the tent, we’ve got the fold out seat in the crew cab of the truck. I can stack a few blankets in there and you’ll be all cozy and safe. And tent-free.”

“And no bears, right? Bear-free?”

He nodded slowly. “So this was about bears.”

“And other predators,” she murmured. But then she brightened. “Thanks, Zane. I appreciate it. I really do.”

Oh, great. Now was she not only riding in his truck, she was going to be sleeping overnight in the thing. She wondered if it smelled like old socks. Or dead animals—since Zane was clearly such a fan of butchering. Or of one of those awful pine tree shaped air fresheners. The tropical fruits ones were the worst. She’d have to crack a window if the rear view mirror sported one of those.

Worst of all, it could smell like diesel fumes and make her see Zane through that brain fog.

No. She’d have to steel herself against it.

CHAPTER TEN

Domicile

Friday afternoon, the office got eerily quiet. Camilla wouldn’t have noticed, so steeped she was in her case files, but someone had forgotten to set the main office line to auto-answer, and it rang about a thousand times with no one picking up.

For Pete’s sake. She got up and went to the front desk to answer, which was when she glanced up at the clock and saw it was twenty after two already.

The campout! She was supposed to be at home getting ready.

Dread of dreads. Since the other day when Zane promised her a cozy bench seat in his truck as her sleeping zone, she’d tamped down sleep-related fears to a manageable degree. However, new irrational worries had zoomed in on her like swarms of biblical locusts.

How and where would she use the bathroom? Last year there had been no facilities, with or without running water, at the campsite Falcon picked. She didn’t know what everyone else did. She’d had to hotfoot it out of there fast when Statutory Sam had gotten out of hand. She “held it” until they came to an official campground an hour down the mountain.

Besides that, ticks lived on sagebrush and other scrubby plants, and weren’t they the source of Lyme Disease? Camilla simply didn’t have
time
to contract an autoimmune disease. Especially one as avoidable as that by the simple act of
not going camping.

And there were other insects to worry about: chiggers, for instance. And mosquitoes. Low elevations in Arizona had relatively few mosquitoes, due to the dryness, but up high, near a lake like Horsethief, they could breed in the cool air and at the water’s edge. And then bite her and give her malaria.

She needed malaria like she needed a hole in her head.

Worst of all, what was Falcon’s plan for ghost stories? Because, ghost stories? That was code for something far scarier. It wasn’t ghosts that came out in his storytelling session but everyone’s closets’ skeletons. It was like a colossal game of truth or dare.

Horrible idea, if anyone asked her. Which they didn’t. Moreover, it sounded like a libel suit waiting to happen. Or was it slander? Slander. Libel had to be in print.

Great, this anxiety was muddying even her legal thinking. She had to get out of here.

After setting up the answering service, she headed out the door and toward her mountain outing fate.

* * *

Just before she arrived at her apartment, a cat dashed out in front of her car. Camilla slammed on the brakes—the BMW did not need dead cat on it. And she didn’t like to kill things. Two very good reasons. Boy, this thing had good stopping distance. Just a few feet, and at residential speed. Not bad. She patted the dash and sighed for Veldon Twiss. Poor guy. Too bad he couldn’t just work hard, get a good job and buy a BMW the right way—with an enormous auto loan.

Camilla cringed.

Pulling into her parking spot at the apartment building, she looked over at the passenger seat. Avoiding the cat had made her stack of case files go careening onto the floor. Great. Please say none of the paperwork got mixed up into the wrong file. It was a stretch to shuffle them all back together, and she didn’t have time to straighten it out. Zane would be here any minute to pick her up in that awful truck, and she still had on her platform sandals and her narrow skirt. Not great for camping. Or for picking up spilled files, obviously. They kept fluttering back to the floor.

Suddenly, her eye fell on a photo she hadn’t seen before. Dropping all the other stuff, she plucked the picture out of the mess.
Shoe Sales Report,
came the heading. And there below was a photograph of the shoe Veldon Twiss wore at the scene of the crime, according to the footprint they had in evidence.

This sales report, though—where had it come from? She sifted through the other papers and found a cover letter. “Ms. Sweeten. Here are the sales statistics you asked for.” And then there was a signature from one of her paralegals, Maeve. Why hadn’t Camilla seen this?

Well, there were a lot of papers in this case. She’d tried to familiarize herself with all of them, but an avalanche can be hard to sift through.

Her eyes scanned the report.

Huh. That shoe, which the detectives claimed was a distinct and unusual make—wasn’t. Even though it was a man’s shoe with a weird pattern on the sole in the shape of a paw print, as though it were a child’s shoe, in fact, according to Maeve’s research, it had been sold in bulk. At WalMart. To the tune of six million pairs in Arizona alone.

Six. Million.

Oh, man. Chances were
Zane
owned a pair of them, if this was the case. Ew, and they were pretty ugly, too. Why did people choose ugly shoes? Unsolvable mystery of the universe.

These statistics blew a hole in one of the key building blocks of the prosecution. Camilla punched the dashboard, then gasped. “Oh. Sorry, baby. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.” She patted the spot she’d just smacked.

Great. If this was the case, maybe there was less rope to hang this guy. And he had to be hanged. At least figuratively. For her own little sweet BMW’s sake.  Maybe there was something she’d missed in that blog of his. She’d found the Robin Hood references, and the brief mention of the Beemer Bandit, but she might have missed something in the comments. She whipped out her phone and checked the blog site. Huh. At least the defense attorneys hadn’t spotted this yet and made him take it down. If they knew about it, this thing would vanish in two seconds!

Aha. There. She pulled it up.

And just then, Zane pulled into the driveway. The purple road warrior had a definite roar, with that seductive rattle of the diesel engine. It made her insides get a little fizzy. If only the vehicle that housed that engine didn’t look like it was a monster truck in embryo.

Behind her, the truck’s door slammed. She just had to see this comment. They were taking forever to load—

“Hey, chickadee. My, but what chic shoes you have on for hiking.” His eyes snaked up and down her legs. Camilla tugged at her skirts. Seriously, when was she going to have time to shop for something more appropriate? She’d been an idiot when she let herself think above the knee—no, above the ankle—had any level of professionalism. “I’ve always been a sucker for women’s shoes. On attractive women, of course.”

Of course he had. Which reminded her. She ought to tell Zane about the shoe thing.

Or not.

“Just a sec.” She had to see what this strand of comments said on Veldon Twiss’s post about the Beemer Bandit. There were more comments on this post than any of his others, and she needed to read—

“Uh, no. Just a sec. Whatever it is, it can wait. The whole staff is already at the campsite. I’ve gotten three messages from Falcon asking where you are. Move it.” He aimed a thumb at his truck.

“Well, I’ve got to change, at least.”

“Change in the car.”

“Right.” She rolled her eyes and dug through her purse for her apartment key. As if she’d unclothe and re-clothe in his presence. “Give me ten minutes.”

“Two! You have two minutes. Now go! Chop-chop!” He was at her side moving her along with the strength of his arm. “Don’t make me lie to Falcon again.”

He lied for her? Well, it wasn’t ideal, but the sentiment did have a certain charm. She stutter-stepped up the stairs and into the entryway. “Just a second,” she turned around to say to Zane on the doorstep, but instead she found him grinning six inches behind her.

Her blood petrified. He was in her house. Oh, snap. Did she have any embarrassing articles of clothing strewn about on furniture? Were her dishes moldering in the sink? She sniffed the air—did it smell like rotten bananas in here? Oh, geez. This was not a good thing.

But Zane didn’t seem to care. He stalked past her, around the divider wall, and plopped himself onto the sofa. He had to move a pile of junk mail and an empty bowl with a spoon in it from last night’s dinner of cold cereal. Camilla despaired as she took inventory of the room. It looked like a Tazmanian devil and a whirling dervish had spun through the whole apartment and upended everything. Books had fallen off the bookshelves, no one had watered the wilting houseplants in weeks, and there was a miniature mountain of fast food wrappers and sacks on the floor to the right of the recliner.

“Oh, weird. I must have entered the wrong apartment,”
she was dying to say.
“A pack of fraternity boys raised by wolves lives here. Not me.”

Again, Zane didn’t seem to care. He eased back against the cushion of the dark brown sofa and leaned his head back. Good instincts. That was the most comfortable spot in the whole room. Maybe the whole house. He stuck a boot up on her coffee table. Well, that was taking liberties with propriety, wasn’t it. But it was a table she’d thrifted, so truthfully it didn’t matter. Besides, how could his boots harm it through the sedimentary layers of offers for Dish Network?

“What are you waiting for? I said two minutes.” Zane cracked an eye long enough to command her, and Camilla snapped to attention. It was just that seeing him there so casual and comfortable in her house—it should have jarred her. But it looked right instead. And she despised him for it. No, she despised herself for thinking it. With a huff she stomped off to her room and peeled off her clothes.

“Zane Holyoake,” she muttered under her breath while she rifled through her pants drawer to find a clean pair of jeans. “You are dangerous. You are ridiculously dangerous. It is ridiculous that you are dangerous.” There were no clean jeans. She’d have to salvage some from the laundry pile. She dug through and found a pair she liked a lot. She sniffed them. Ew. She shook them to air them out. They’d have to do. “You don’t even have a work ethic. I could never be with a guy who doesn’t have a work ethic.”

“What was that?” He was at her door, looking in. “You were saying something to me?”

Camilla glanced down. She’d managed to slide her jeans over her hips, but her shirt wasn’t buttoned. She clutched at it.

“Oh, sorry.” He put a hand up to his eyes, but he left his fingers apart and peeked through them. “I didn’t know you were changing.”

“Really? Come on.” Of course he did. He sent her in here specifically to change. Gave her two minutes as a deadline. “And no, I wasn’t talking to you.”

“You got someone else in here?” He leaned in and looked around. Why did he have to use the word “got” that way? It wasn’t correct English. Do you have. That would be correcter. Er, more correct. Oh, great. Bad grammar was contagious now?

“Move along. Nothing to see here.” She shoved him out.

“I totally disagree. There’s a lot to see here.” He grinned that wicked grin, and Camilla blushed. He hadn’t actually seen anything. She was wearing an undershirt beneath the button up. Layering—it was required for camping, right? In case of wide temperature swings in mountain climates. She needed her sweater, too. “Ooh, what’s that? Do you have a fly fishing pole?” He pushed the door open and came into her room, and did a go-toward-the-light float toward her best fishing rod. The nerve!

“Yo, pal. What do you think you’re doing? You never enter a woman’s bedroom uninvited.” And she did not invite him. Nor did she want him to see her rod and reel, relics from a different phase of her life.

“I just want to see this one thing.” With eyes fixed on the Orvis reel attached to the Headwaters bamboo rod leaning in the corner of the room, he pressed past her, deftly avoiding the piles of skirts and shoes and blankets on the floor. Oh, her bed wasn’t even made, she’d been in such a rush this morning to get to the office. Humiliation turned her whole body into an inferno. “Wow. Do you really fly fish?” Zane ran a light hand down the pole. Luckily he had the reverence not to pick it up.

Unfortunately, his eyes shot over and saw her picture at Horsethief Lake, the one of when she broke the state record. Great.

“Interesting. And look at that. A catch and release record. Impressive.” He reached up and took the photograph off the wall. “I mean, look at that. It’s not a normal rainbow trout, is it? That looks like a Gila trout. Aren’t they endangered?”

“Wow. If you know that, you really are a Boy Scout.” Emphasis on
boy.
It was not something she wanted him inspecting.

“Well, honestly, I didn’t peg you for the outdoorsy type. I mean, you’re the one who’s afraid to sleep on the cold hard ground.”

“I’m not. I mean, whatever. Fishing does not necessitate camping. Besides, it was just a one time thing.” Not true. She’d practiced casting and fly tying and wading and patience for  years with her dad to get to the point where that photo was taken. When he retired he doused himself in fly fishing, and it was Camilla’s best shot at spending any time with him. But then, when college started, she let it go. And then he passed away. “I should probably just get rid of that picture. It’s not me anymore.”

“But it should be. Look at you!” He stared at the picture and then back up at Camilla. “You’re a rock star. Who can say they hold a state record for catch and release of the Gila trout? Uh, one person. And that’s you.”

“Not really. I was lucky. For that shot, at least.”

Zane narrowed his eyes a minute, thinking, and then said, “I don’t think you believe in yourself nearly enough.”