Baby, It's You (6 page)

“Where are you from?”

“Houston.”

Gus shook his head. “Houston’s a hellhole. Crime. Pollution. Clogged-up freeways. Take my word for it, honey.
This
is the kind of place you need to be living.”

Kari wasn’t completely sure about that. She’d always been a big-city girl. But it did seem like a really nice place to visit.

“So where’s the valley from here?” she asked.

“There’s an overlook down Rainbow Way a piece. That’s the best place to get a good look at it. You can’t go into the valley itself, of course. It’s off-limits.”

“How about you? Do you believe the legend?”

He shrugged. “Sure. Why not? Nobody knows what happens to us after we’re gone. Or to our pets. I figure that’s as good an explanation as any.”

“But do you believe the Rainbow Bridge is in
this
valley?”

“I guess you’re thinking,
Why there?
”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Maybe a better question is,
Why
not
there?
Maybe Mildred knew something the rest of us didn’t.”

Good point.

“How about Marc?” Kari asked. “Does he believe the legend?”

“Marc doesn’t believe much of anything he can’t see with his own two eyes,” Gus said. “But he knows tourists like it, and he likes tourists.”

Kari rose from the stool. “Thanks so much for the sandwich. It was nice of you to think of me.”

“It was Marc’s doing. He told me you hadn’t eaten much in the past few days, and he wanted to make sure I fixed you something.”

For the first time Kari stopped to think about just how much Marc had done for her that night. Taken her into his house. Found her car. Retrieved her luggage. Taken her to a place to stay for the night. Helped her up the stairs. Unbuttoned her dress. Asked Gus to make sure she ate something. And he was going to make sure somebody took care of her car.

She remembered once how she’d asked Greg to pick her up at the airport, and he made the kind of face that said she was inconveniencing him. She’d wanted to shout,
I’m not asking for a ride to Montana!
But in the end, she’d just called a car service and had a nice chat with the driver all the way from Houston Intercontinental to her apartment. But now a man she didn’t even know had gone out of his way to make sure she was safe and secure, and it gave her the kind of warm fuzzies she hadn’t felt in a long time.

“It was no coincidence, you know,” Gus said.

“What?” Kari asked.

“You could have gone off the road just about anywhere, but you ended up at Marc’s place. That means the good Lord was looking out for you tonight.”

Kari was so exhausted from dragging that god-awful wedding dress around for hours that the moment she crawled into that glorious king-sized bed with the pillow-top mattress and the softest linens on the planet, she went unconscious. When she woke the next morning, it was almost eleven o’clock.

She threw back the covers.
My car. I have to check on my car.

Half an hour later, she was heading downstairs, this time wearing a tropical print dress and turquoise sandals, more clothes from the resort wear collection in her suitcases. Gus was at the front desk.

“Morning, Kari,” Gus said.

“Good morning,” she said with a smile. “Sorry I missed breakfast. I just couldn’t drag myself out of that wonderful bed. Those linens are
amazing
.”

“Estelle would love to hear you say that. They cost more than the beds did, but she insisted.”

Kari leaned over and gave Jasper a pat, and he gave her a happy pant in return. “I need to go to Rick’s Automotive and check on my car. Can you tell me how to get there?”

Gus gave her directions, and she said, “After I see him, I think I’ll grab some lunch at the cute little café I saw on the square.” She started toward the door.

“Uh, Kari…”

She turned back. “Yes?”

“We’ve got a little problem,” Gus said.

“What?”

“I ran your credit card this morning. It was declined.”

Kari froze. “Declined? Why?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that the bank declined the charge. Is there any reason you can think of why that might happen?”

“No. Of course not. There’s no way—” She stopped short, putting her hand to her mouth. “Oh, wait a minute! Yes, there is. I charged a whole bunch of stuff for my honeymoon. I probably reached my credit limit.” She walked over to the desk, pulling out her phone at the same time. “If you’ll give me a minute, I can transfer some money from my checking account, pay the card off, and then you can charge my room to it.”

A minute later, Kari had her account pulled up on her phone. She looked at the balance. Looked again. It couldn’t be.

Her account had a zero balance?

No. That was impossible. There should have been thousands in there, and yet there was nothing?

“Is something the matter?” Gus asked.

“No, everything’s fine,” Kari said, even as her stomach turned over with apprehension. “There’s just a glitch of some kind. I’ll give my bank a call.”

But Kari had a horrible feeling that everything wasn’t fine. She looked up her bank’s telephone number and called them. She was shocked when the customer service rep told her what she already knew.

She had no money.

“All the funds were transferred out of that account,” the man said.

“That’s impossible,” Kari said. “It’s my account, and I didn’t touch it. There must be some mistake.”

“No, ma’am. There’s no mistake. That account was emptied last night.”

Kari felt a rush of anxiety. Identity theft?

She’d heard those commercials over and over about the dangers of somebody stealing her identity. She’d always thought maybe she should get one of those services that alerted people of any suspicious activity on their accounts, but like everything else, she’d always put it off.

Maybe that had been a big mistake.

“I’m afraid somebody’s stolen my identity and emptied my account,” Kari said.

“I suppose that’s possible, but in this case, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because it was someone with your last name who transferred the funds.”

“My name? What are you talking about?”

“His name is Stuart Worthington.”

K
ari froze. Her father? Her
father
had emptied her bank account?

“Wait a minute,” Kari said. “I never authorized my father to move that money.”

“No authorization was necessary, ma’am. Stuart Worthington is a signer on the account.”

For a moment, Kari was confused. She hadn’t authorized that, either.

Then she remembered. It was an old bank account, the first one she’d opened as a teenager. At the time, her father had insisted on being a signer. She’d never taken his name off it. And now he’d cleaned it out. But
why
?

There are consequences, Kari. For everything you do—good and bad—there are consequences.

In a blinding rush, she saw what he’d done. If he made sure she was broke, she’d be forced to return to Houston, where he’d use his overbearing influence to try to get her to marry Greg. She knew her father was demanding and domineering and just a little bit underhanded, but she never imagined he’d do something like this.

She hung up the phone, her mind spinning. What was she supposed to do now?

“Kari?” Gus said. “Is something wrong?”

“Uh…no. It’s just going to be a little while before they complete the transaction. I hope that’s not a problem.”

“No. No problem at all.” Gus smiled. “Just let me know.”

Kari sat down in the parlor and opened her wallet, at which time she discovered she had exactly $162.54 to her name. That probably didn’t even come close to what she needed to get her car fixed. It would barely pay for the one night she’d stayed at Animal House that she already owed, which meant her plan to stay in Rainbow Valley until she decided what to do next had just been shot to hell.

“Well, look at that,” Nina said, standing at the cash register and flipping through an Excel spreadsheet. “Two more cases of Sex Kitten out the door.” She pushed a strand of her long, dark hair behind her ear and looked at Marc innocently. “Who would
ever
have thought it?”

“Damned stupid name for a wine,” he muttered.

“Most of our names are damned stupid,” his sister said. “But you can’t argue with the bottom line.” She tossed the spreadsheet aside. “So you got Angela settled in the dorm?”

“Yep.”

“What’s her roommate like?”

“If Ozzy Osbourne and Courtney Love had a kid…there you go.”

Nina smiled. “So she’s a little alternative? Tattoos? Piercings?”

“Yes and yes.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve met some pretty normal kids who look like that.”

“Not around here, you haven’t.”

He went to the back room to retrieve a case of wine, while Nina rang up a customer buying an electric corkscrew. Sales had been good lately, and with the festival coming up soon after harvest, they were on track to have a record year. By the time he turned the management of this business over to Daniel, he was determined that it be in the best condition in its history.

“Oh. I almost forgot,” Nina said, when Marc came back and the customer was out the door. “Tell me about the bride you undressed last night.”

Marc nearly dropped the two bottles of wine he held. “Where the
hell
did you hear about that?”

“From Gus. He dropped in for a minute this morning.”

Marc was going to kill Gus. One bullet. And then he was going to turn himself in, confess, and spend the rest of his life in a five-by-eight-foot cell in Huntsville knowing he’d done the world a favor.

He shoved the two bottles of wine onto a rack. “She had an accident on Highway 28 last night. She walked to the house and asked for help. I took her to Animal House to stay the night.”

“Yeah. I heard that.” She smiled. “And other stuff, too.”

“She couldn’t get out of her dress, somebody had to help her. That was all there was to it.”

Nina gave him a sly smile. “I would have paid any amount of money to see the look on your face when she showed up at your door.”

“She needed help. I helped her.”

“Gus says she’s really pretty.”

“She’s nuts. She ran away from her own wedding.”

“He wasn’t commenting on her mental capabilities.”

“Yeah? Well, being beautiful is worthless without a brain to go with it.”

Nina laughed. “If any other man said that, I’d call him a liar. But not you.”

“You know how I hate chaos, and that woman has it in spades.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Marc. You’re so damned uptight. You
need
a little chaos in your life. Angela is gone. You have that big ol’ house all to yourself. Live a little, will you?”

“Daniel will be home soon.”

“Like Daniel doesn’t approve of having a good time?”

She was right. Unfortunately, everything that was wrong with his brother started with good times. He played things loose. Shot from the hip. That was Daniel, through and through, which was why his brother fit in really well with the dot-com crowd. They were a bunch of young, live-for-today people who never looked past the next deal. Daniel might be a millionaire right now, but it wouldn’t surprise Marc if he eventually blew every penny.

He shoved more bottles onto the rack. “I intend to have plenty of good times. But not one of them is going to involve a crazy woman.”

“She may have had a good reason for leaving her wedding. Did you ask her why she did it?”

“She decided she didn’t want to get married.”

“Besides the obvious.”

“None of my business.”

“Think about it, Marc. How many young, eligible women show up in this town? Might want to take notice when one does. You never know when the next one might happen along.”

But Marc was leaving Rainbow Valley, which meant he had no intention of starting any kind of relationship with a woman, which meant Nina was barking up the wrong tree.

Marc’s phone rang. He grabbed it, looked at the caller ID, then hit “answer.”

“Hey, Rick. What’s up?”

“I towed that Lexus in this morning, but the owner hasn’t been by. Any idea where she might be?”

“No. She was supposed to come by your place first thing.”

“Took me a while to get that thing out of the ditch. Ate most of my morning.”

Marc sighed. “I’ll check on her. See where she is and get her over there. What’s the condition of the car?”

“Not good. There’s body damage all along the right side. It’ll cost thousands to fix, but I can do it. What I can’t fix is the bent frame. She’ll have to get an insurance adjuster out here to make it official, but trust me, that car is totaled.”

Marc winced. He had no idea what Kari was going to do when she found out her car was a total loss, but that was her problem.

“I’ll get her over there soon,” he told Rick.

“Thanks. Appreciate it.”

Marc hung up, letting out a breath of frustration. Where the hell
was
she?

He thought about just calling Animal House and talking to her, but Gus would have to put the call through, and the less he was in the middle of all this, the better. Instead, Marc decided he’d head over there just in case something was wrong. After all, he’d been the one to ask Rick to take the time and trouble to tow Kari’s car in to his shop, so if there was a problem with her getting over there to get his estimate of the damage and pay him for his time, he needed to find out what it was. They would carry on a one-minute conversation. It would be business, nothing more. And then he’d be on his way.

“I have to go straighten this mess out,” Marc muttered.

“So you
are
seeing her again?” Nina said.

“I owe it to Rick to make sure this gets taken care of. That’s all.”

Nina smiled. “Uh-huh.”

Marc thought about biting back, but that only encouraged her to be even more of a pain in the ass. She was one of those believers in soul mates, one man for one woman, love everlasting. That was the kind of relationship she and her husband Curtis had. Ever since his death in an industrial accident a year ago, she hadn’t so much as looked at another man. It was only now that she’d even begun to smile again. So at least if she was bugging Marc about his love life, she was back to being the sister he remembered.

Marc left the shop, walked the two blocks to Animal House, and trotted up the steps to the porch. He went inside and walked to the front desk. Gus was nowhere to be seen.

Marc turned and looked across the entryway. Glancing through the parlor door, he saw a woman sitting on the sofa. She had her head in her hands and her elbows resting on her knees. She wore a dress in a bold floral pattern that was so bright it just about blinded him, with tiny straps that went over her suntanned shoulders. His gaze traveled from the spot just above her knees where her dress stopped all the way down to her sparkly blue sandals and her toenails, which were painted an iridescent pink, admiring the most beautiful legs he’d seen in some time. But it was her hair that really caught his attention. It cascaded in wild waves over her shoulders like a copper waterfall. Nice.
Very
nice. Then she lifted her head.

Good God, it was Kari.

He couldn’t have imagined her looking like
this
today when she’d looked like
that
last night. When she’d been muddy and wet, he would have had a hard time guessing her age. Looking at her now, though, he could see she was probably in her late twenties.
Too young for you
, he told himself, but he just couldn’t seem to stop staring. So this was the woman who’d been hiding under dirt and rain and that ridiculous wedding dress?

Stop gawking. You’re here for a reason.

But before he could go into the parlor to talk to her, he heard the door to the inn open behind him. He turned to see a man and a woman come inside. The woman was tall with blond hair pulled into a ponytail. She wore a pair of jeans and a tank top, and in her arms was a small dog that looked like a cross between some kind of terrier and a rag mop. The man wore slacks and a polo shirt, looking as if he’d been heading to a country club and lost his way.

Kari stood up. “Jill!”

The woman turned at the sound of Kari’s voice. She let the dog down, and he ran to Kari. She scooped him up, and he licked every inch of her face, squirming like a worm on the end of a hook.

“Boo! Sweetie! I missed you so much!”

Then Jill came into the parlor, and Kari hugged them both at once. Marc had no idea who these people were, but her friends showing up could only be a good thing.

“I’m
so
glad to see you,” Kari said. “But what are you doing here? I told you I’m not going back to Houston. Not yet.”

“I know, but…”

“But what?”

“Well…”

“
What?
”

“Greg came with me.”

The man walked into the parlor, and Kari’s mouth fell open. “Jill! I told you not to tell him where I was!”

“I’m sorry,” Jill said. “But I thought you two needed to talk.”

“I don’t
want
to talk!”

“No,” Greg said as he walked toward Kari. “We definitely need to talk.”

Kari hugged her dog closer and refused to look at him. He stopped in front of her.

“Kari, I love you,” he said. “Don’t you know that?”

Kari was silent.

“Do you know how I felt when I realized you were gone?”

“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I know it wasn’t the best way to deal with it, but—”

“Never mind. Forget it. All I want is for us to be married.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“You thought it was a good idea when I gave you the ring,” Greg said, his voice edging into impatience. “And when we had our engagement party. And during our rehearsal dinner. So where along the way did it stop being a good idea?”

“I’m sorry. I really am. But…” She exhaled. “Think about it, Greg. Are we really right for each other?”

“Yes. Of course. We’re very compatible. The minister who married us said so, didn’t he?”

Marc could tell Kari wasn’t convinced, and Greg clearly wasn’t happy that she didn’t share his point of view.

“If you’re worried about being embarrassed when you come back,” Greg said, “it won’t be a problem. Your father and I covered for you.”

“Covered for me?”

“We told everybody you were sick.”

Kari drew back. “You lied?”

“Would you rather we’d have told the truth?”

“The truth? Do you even know what the truth is?”

“You got cold feet. A lot of brides do.”

“But
why
did I get cold feet? Did you stop to think about that?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Greg said. “We’re getting married, and that’s the end of it.”

Even at the distance Marc was away from them, he sensed the guy’s undercurrent of anger. Patient on the surface, pissed underneath. A tiny shiver skated between Marc’s shoulders, telling him trouble was brewing. He stood up tall, watching intently as the guy inched closer to Kari.

“So here’s what’s going to happen,” Greg went on. “You and I are getting in my car, and we’re driving back to Houston. Then we’re going to the justice of the peace. He’s a friend of your father’s and very discreet. We’re getting married. Then we’re going to send out announcements to everyone who showed up to the wedding that day, letting them know we’re man and wife. And then we’re going to pray your father overlooks the humiliation you’ve put him through.”

Kari swallowed so hard Marc could see her throat move at twenty paces. “I don’t care how my father feels about it.”

“Really?” Greg snapped. “You don’t care? Well, you’d
better
care. See how far you get when you don’t have your daddy to give you a job!”

“I don’t need that job,” Kari said, her voice quivering. “I’ll get another one.”

“Right. This economy stinks. If people with actual skills can’t get a job, what hope do you have?”

Kari looked away, stroking her dog nervously.

“He pays you about twice what you’re worth at a job that could be cut from that company tomorrow. Try to find another employer who’ll do that.”

Kari was silent. Then Greg got a calculating look on his face. “Tell me, Kari. Have you checked your bank account lately?”

She drew back. “You
know
about that?”