Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You (v1.2) (25 page)

“Shelley? Are you all right in there?”

She had to stay cool, calm, not give herself away. Not until she knew what she was going to do next. “I—I’m fine, fine. I just thought I should lock the dead bolt,” she called dirough the closed door. “We’re… we’re just not as security conscious as we should be in East Wapaneken, don’t you think? Many days Brandy doesn’t lock the door at all. Isn’t that silly?”

She bit her lips together between her teeth as she realized she was babbling. So she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and said, “Thank you, Quinn, if I haven’t already said it. Thank you so much. But I really want to be alone for a while, if you don’t mind. Take a long bath, get the feel of that man’s hands off me.”

“Okay,” he said after a moment, his tone more inquiring than agreeable. “Do you want me to go tell Tony you won’t be in today? I’m sure he’d under—”

“No!” Shelby winced. “I mean, no, thank you. I really think I’d feel better if I were working, rather than just sitting here thinking. I’ll see you later?”

There was another pause, during which time Shelby wondered wildly if he was contemplating breaking down the door, before Quinn said, “I’ll see you for lunch, as always. And you have a free day tomorrow, remember? Maybe we can go on a picnic or something?”

“Or something,” she said, then closed her eyes and leaned against the door, waiting to hear the sound of his door closing on the other side of the hallway.

“Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered as she raced through the living room, stripping off her clothes as she went. Everything was falling into place, even as it all fell apart. Everything was suddenly making sense.

Quinn had been sent to find her, then stay and protect her.

While she had her little “fling.”

“Does he get a bonus for being a
part
of that fling?” she asked herself as she turned on the taps and poured bath salts into the tub. “How would he write that up on his expense sheet? How much would he charge, for crying out loud!”

But you had to hand it to the guy. He really knew how to go that extra mile for his client.

He’d gotten himself an apartment right across the hall.
The better to watch you, my dear.

She’d so wanted to be out on her own for a while, just living her life like other people,
normal
people. But she’d never been alone, not really. Never been on her own, not since that first day. Without knowing it, she’d had a safety net all along, someone close by, watching, waiting for her to stumble, ready to pick her up if she did.

Bodyguard. Babysitter.

Same thing.

He’d made up a story about being a writer—a writer, ha!—so that he had a reason to be free all day, free to sit at Tony’s and watch her. Always watching her.

He was so damn good at his job that he’d fooled Brandy and Gary into having him tag along for dinner. They’d even set him up with her, on a sort of blind date.

Well, Shelby now knew who the blind one had been in that scenario, didn’t she?

And the threatening letter. And that clumsy, failed abduction. The police didn’t need to talk to her? No wonder, as Quinn most probably hadn’t
told
them about it.

It was all so clear to her now. So horribly transparent. Quinn had sent the letter. Quinn had arranged the sloppy kidnap attempt, and all to scare her into packing up and going home, going back to being sweet, obedient, stifled Shelby.

“What’s the matter, Quinn, are you that bored here in East Wapaneken? Are you that bored with
me?
Were my kisses that repugnant? Was I that much of a disappointment to you in bed?”

She pressed a hand to her mouth, holding back the sob that had risen in her throat, tamping down the hysteria that threatened to overcome her.

“You took me to bed,” she said, rubbing at the tears that wouldn’t stop falling. “How could you have done that, Quinn? How could you have
done
that?”

IF YOU WILL NOT LISTEN YOU CAN BE SHOWN. LEAVE NOW.

Quinn read the note he’d lifted from Shelby’s pile of mail and stuffed into his pocket before putting the rest on the table, before Shelby could discover it, be frightened by it. Then he crumpled the single page and threw it in the general direction of his makeshift desk.

“Stupid, melodramatic crap!” He exploded as he collapsed onto the couch, grabbed his chin in his fist, and rubbed at the morning beard he hadn’t gotten around to shaving yet today.

“Dangerous crap,” he added, thinking out loud. He looked at the phone sitting in front of him, its cord dragging across the carpet from its anchor on the wall beside his desk. He’d been looking at the phone for nearly an hour, thinking, rethinking, knowing he needed help, reluctant to ask for it.

Grady would insist he take Shelby home now. Today. That was practical, logical. He would point out, as Quinn already knew, that his first responsibility to the client was to keep her safe, period. Letting Shelby walk around East Wapaneken after two threatening letters and one obviously halfhearted abduction? That was contrary to everything he knew to be right, knew to be ethical. Especially as he was there, on the spot, and could have her out of harm’s way in an hour, back behind the sturdy iron gates of the Taite mansion.

That was the professional side of him.

The human side of him was thinking something else entirely.

The human side of him told him that he was falling in love with Shelby. Hell, he
was
in love with her.

How strange.
She certainly wasn’t the woman of his dreams, far from it. His single brush, in college, with what he imagined to be real love had ended in heartbreak when Barbara’s daddy had offered him twenty-five thousand dollars to leave town.

That was what dealing with the superrich got you: a warm smile, a hearty handshake, and a warning that while he might be a real nice guy, he wasn’t one of
them.
He wouldn’t fit in, wouldn’t be given the chance to try. So thank you very much for escorting our Barbara home from college, and good-bye.

Now, looking back on that time with older eyes, with more experience under his belt, Quinn knew that Barbara had never loved him. She couldn’t have loved him; otherwise she would have disobeyed her father, eloped with Quinn to Maryland, and the devil with all that money.

Yeah, right.
All he’d asked of her was to give up her family, her home, her cushy existence, her country club, her future, to take on a college sophomore with five hundred bucks in the bank and five thousand dollars’ worth of student loans. Oh, and no job, only a vague idea that he might want to practice law. Or become a policeman.

That was what had really put Barb’s father over the top. His son-in-law, a cop? Quinn hadn’t even flinched when the man heard that, then upped the bribe to thirty thousand, even.

Still, although his love for Barbara had faded, to be replaced by a tough shell around his heart that had lasted for a long, long time, he had at last forgiven her. He’d asked her to give up too much, for too little return on her investment.

What rankled, what still got under his skin and itched like hell, was that the rich thought they could buy their way in or out of anything. Any problem, any trouble, any situation. He’d seen that during his years as a cop, too, when he’d been a lowly patrolman on the beat and was either offered money not to write a ticket or warned that the speeder knew the mayor of Philadelphia personally.

By the time he’d been promoted to Robbery and Homicide, his dislike of the rich had been firmly ingrained, with nothing he’d seen or heard changing his mind. Three years in Robbery and Homicide had been the clincher. The rich
were
different. They could buy a better brand of justice, and they could buy their way out of trouble that would have put a poor man’s son behind bars.

It was one of the reasons he’d left the force when Grady had asked him to go into partnership with him, probably the driving reason. Sure, Grady was rich. Rolling in it. But Grady, Quinn believed, was the exception that proved the rule when it came to the Rich and Repulsive.

So what was he doing now, sitting here like some damn dumb jackass, hip-deep in love with one of them?

He picked up the phone, punched in the numbers, and waited for Maisie to go through her welcoming spiel.

“How are you doing, sweetheart?” he asked her. “Please tell me we aren’t tending giraffes this week, or standing guard on the hospital book sale.”

“Ah, honey, you know I wouldn’t let you boys do that,” the receptionist said, laughing. “But did you know that a giraffe’s tongue is about a foot long? Gives you something to think about, doesn’t it?”

“Not sober,” Quinn answered, grinning into the phone. Leave it to Maisie to cheer him up, at least temporarily. “So what else is new?”

“Well, honey, let’s see, shall we? Grady landed a new client, which means Burns and Arquette are off to Saudi Arabia this week.”

Quinn raised his eyebrows. “Saudi Arabia? Not too shabby.”

“If you like heat, oil, and sand, I suppose not, honey. Oh, and Selma quit. She says she can’t possibly come back to work and leave her sweet little baby boy in day care.”

“What? Selma? My secretary? Great. Now what am I going to do?”

“Well, honey, for one, I bought her a baby gift and signed your name to the card. You forgot that, you know. Probably because you don’t have Selma around to do that stuff for you. And two, you can try not to laugh when you see Selma’s pictures of little Zachary Semple. Honey, last time I saw ears like that, they were on a cocker spaniel. You want me to connect you with Grady?”

Shaking his head, caught between regret that Selma had left him and trying not to laugh at Maisie’s description of the Semple heir, he told her that, yes, he did want to speak to Grady.

A moment later his partner was on the line. “Sullivan’s Security and Dating Service,” Grady said into the receiver after Maisie told him who was on the line. “Rent a security stud, and make your life a better place. How may we help you?”

“Swallowing your tongue works for me,” Quinn shot back. “Listen, I’ve got a bit of a situation here, nothing I want to go into on the phone, but I need your help.”

He could hear the front legs of Grady’s chair hit the floor, and pictured his partner losing his smile as he picked up a pen and searched his desk for a piece of scrap paper. “Go ahead; I’m ready.”

“I need you to track down a license plate for me and I’ve only got a partial. Pennsylvania license. I’m betting it’s a rental, but we have to check it out, okay?”

After he told Grady the partial, and the make and model of the car, he sat back on
the
couch, waiting for his friend to start grilling him. Surprisingly, Grady just said, “Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Quinn said, closing his eyes. “And this is going to be sticky, and pretty illegal, I suppose. I want you to do a full work-up on Parker Westbrook the Third.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Wrong. From the cradle until next month, and everything in between. I want full financial records, what he eats, who he sleeps with, who he talks to—in person and on the phone, including his cell phone. Rumors, innuendo, personal opinions, anything you can ferret out of anybody. Use all your hotshot connections at the country club for the gossip. A to Z, Grady, soup to nuts, whatever you want to call it, and all off the record, with no way to trace any of it to us. How long will it take?”

Grady, who had been scribbling on the scrap paper, quickly committed the partial license plate to memory, then fed the paper into the shredder he kept under his desk. “You couldn’t have asked me to sneak into the Oval Office in Washington and plant a ‘Kilroy Was Here’ sign, could you, or anything else that has to be easier than breaking the thick green wall of silence that holds the Main Line together? What’s up? This sounds important. Quinn Delaney doesn’t ask for just this side—and maybe the other side—of legal unless it’s important. Is our gal safe?”

“She’s safe,” Quinn assured him, looking across the room at the door to the hallway. “Never out of my sight. And I don’t want to go into it any more than I already have, Grady. I’m just scratching an itch, playing a hunch.”

“Uh-oh,” Grady said. “Last time you did that you ended up on the wrong side of a thirty-eight and your mom made you promise to get out of the field once and for all and shuffle paper. Your leg still give you hell when it rains?”

Remembering all too well the day he’d had to disarm a loyal follower of some obscure religion as he planned to save the world by killing the rock star he’d been guarding, he began absently rubbing at his left thigh, the site of his wound. “No,” he answered lightly, “but it throbs like hell in warning every time you tell me I’m going to have a simple assignment because you have a hot date and need me to fill in.”

“Yeah, like you’re hating every minute of this,” Grady replied, laughing. Then he became serious again. “Give me three days before you call again, and call me at home, all right? That’s for the easy stuff, like tracing a partial license plate without first asking ‘Mother may I.’ The rest is going to take longer, if you’re looking for what I think you’re looking for. It’s always harder to find buried stuff, and these people really know how to burrow in deep.”

Quinn heard Shelby’s door open and close, looked at his wristwatch, and swore. “Damn it, I’ve got to go. No more than a week, Grady, okay?”

He pulled on his sneakers and managed to catch up with Shelby by the time she’d reached the pavement, then turned and headed toward Tony’s. “How are you doing?” he asked, falling into step beside her.

“Did you go to the police station?” she asked, looking at him levelly with a lack of expression in her eyes that he’d hoped never to see again. “What did the officer say?”

He hadn’t gone to the police. Going to the police would only muddy the waters. He knew that. Hell, Shelby knew that, considering she was trying to keep her identity a secret. Was that it? She was worried about the police? “Nothing much, just that he’d have the part-time officer make more drive-bys for the next couple of days. In the meantime he asked us not to say anything to anybody, that it was probably an isolated incident. I take it he doesn’t want to alarm the populace.”