Dangerous Disguise (4 page)

The nurse reluctantly accepted the disclaimer, but he still glanced at him over his shoulder one last time as he walked away.

Maren’s expression was difficult to fathom as he turned back to face her. “He sounded pretty convinced that he knew you.”

Jared laughed shortly, relieved that the man had stopped pressing. “I guess I’ve just got one of those faces people think they’ve see before.”

Maren’s eyes slowly washed over him. He could have sworn he felt the path they took. “Just your average Joe, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Not hardly, she thought. The average man was passable, not handsome, and Jared Stevens’s features were as close to godlike perfection as any she’d ever seen. She searched for a flaw, something that would render him less than perfect, and finally saw one. He had a tiny little scar at the corner of the left side of his mouth.

“Where did you get the scar?”

He didn’t know what she was talking about, only that when she moved around the room, he didn’t know which part of her was more lyrical, her swaying hips or her body in its entirety. Maybe she was involved with someone with underworld ties and that was what this was all about, he thought.

He found he didn’t really like that theory. For a number of reasons. “What?”

“Your scar. This one.” She lightly touched the corner of his mouth. Their eyes met and held for a second. Maren felt something shimmy up her spine, dragging a torch as it went. Momentarily self-conscious, she dropped her hand to her side. “Sorry, none of my business. I’ve got a call to make.” She began digging in her purse for change.

“April’s parents might want a heads up.” Jared handed her a couple of quarters he found in his pocket. “Here.”

“Thanks. And April’s parents live back east. No sense in calling them until it’s over. They can’t do anything three thousand miles way.” She began to walk toward the double doors. “I’ll only be a minute.”

“It was a cat.” Her hand on the double doors, she was about to push them open when he mentioned the feline. “The scar.” He came toward her. “I was on the floor, playing with my mother’s cat, baiting it with some yarn. The cat batted at it, caught my lip with her claw.”

Maren cringed slightly, as if she could feel the blow. “Ouch.”

He laughed at the empathy he saw there. “I believe I said something a little more forceful than that.”

She felt bad about asking. “It’s hardly noticeable, you know. The scar.”

His lips twitched in a smile he didn’t bother suppressing. “You noticed.”

She paused a moment, debating just how honest to be. She decided there was nothing to risk. “I was looking for imperfections.”

His eyebrows pulled together quizzically in confusion. “Why?”

Because she didn’t want him perfect. Not if they were going to work together. Perfect was a place for people like Kirk to reside. “It’s what makes us all human.” The words hung in the air as she went to make her phone call.

“I’m not good at waiting,” Maren said when he mutely raised his eyes toward her. Three other people had come and gone, and they were still waiting to hear how April was doing. In the background, a talk show had given way to a soap opera whose dialogue she was attempting to block. “I always have to know things. Now.”

They had that in common, Jared mused. What else did they have in common? He dropped the magazine he was pretending to read on the chair beside him. It slipped on his apron and slid to the floor. Jared bent to pick it up and this time, tossed it on the small table where the other magazines were sitting.

“Why don’t you go back to the restaurant?” he suggested. “No point in both of us waiting around.”

If she drove off, that would leave him stranded. “How will you get back?”

“I’ll get a cab.”

“Why would you do that? Wait here to find out how she’s doing?” Maren was trying to understand, but unless she was missing something, it didn’t make any sense to her. “You don’t even know her. April’s my responsibility.”

Despite her innocent appearance, the lady was highly suspicious, he decided. “She looked afraid. I felt bad for her. You’ve got the restaurant to run. This is just my first day, how indispensable could I be? You, on the other hand, are very indispensable.”

It made sense, she supposed. She was surprised he saw things in that light. “Do you always know the right thing to say?”

He shrugged casually, playing a part, although he did pride himself on having a knack of knowing what people wanted to hear. When he was growing up, his father had said more than once that he sincerely hoped his middle son would go into law enforcement. Otherwise, the life of a con artist seemed inevitable for his quick-witted progeny. “I just say what I feel.”

“Uh-huh.” The man was too good to be true, Maren thought. And she knew all about men like that. If they seemed to be too good to be true, then they weren’t good at all.

She had the scars to prove it.

Not like the one on his mouth, where anyone could see. But inside. On her soul. Scars that would never heal no matter how much time passed.

She was about to urge him to leave again when the inner doors of the emergency room opened. A tall, gray-haired man in green livery entered the waiting room and walked toward them. “Are you the ones who brought April Turner in?”

Jared was on his feet, crossing to the physician. Maren was right behind him. “Yes. How is she?” he asked before Maren had the chance.

“Very lucky.” There was sincerity in the doctor’s voice, devoid of any melodrama. “I’m Dr. Johnson. I was the one who operated on her. She could have easily lost that finger if you hadn’t acted so quickly. We managed to sew it back on. You got her here just in time.”

Jared grinned, knowing where to give credit. And how to work the scene. He looked at Maren. “You should see her drive.”

The remark had an extremely personal sound to it, Maren realized, as if they’d been friends for a long time instead of two people who hadn’t even known each other three days ago. She knew she should take offense at the tone, knew that there were extreme precautions to take against men who looked like Jared Stevens. And yet, at the same time, he sounded so genial that she found it difficult to erect the concrete barriers necessary to sustain her.

Not that she was a pushover in any sense of the word. Kirk had made her afraid to trust anyone, least of all a man who made words like “delicious” pop up in her head. For once the word wasn’t to describe anything that he might be able to whip up in the kitchen.

She had a hunch that the only ingredients involved in that sort of whipping were a male and a female.

“I’d like to keep her overnight,” the surgeon was saying, “just to be sure no infection sets in.” The doctor looked at Jared, as if he was the one to field his questions. “Ms. Turner said she didn’t know if that was covered by her policy—”

“It’s covered,” Maren injected. And even if it wasn’t, she thought, arrangements could be made. She and Papa Joe would put their heads together to come up with something. “Can we see her now?”

“She’s still sedated. I doubt if she’ll wake up for another half hour or so. She was so terrified, it seemed best to give her a general anesthetic rather than use a local,” he explained. He looked a little uncomfortable as he added, “If you wouldn’t mind stopping at the outpatient registration desk with her insurance information…”

Maren nodded. “No problem.”

Jared thanked the doctor then turned toward Maren. They started walking toward the registration desk that Dr. Johnson had pointed out. “I guess it’s a lucky thing I didn’t talk you into going back to the restaurant.” He held the door open for her. “I haven’t got a clue when it comes to insurance.”

Maren stepped through, nodding her thanks. She sincerely doubted that Jared Stevens was clueless on any subject.

Chapter 4

“I
hear the new guy’s pretty resourceful.”

Maren had barely touched the doorknob before she heard the deep voice. She grinned as she entered the office she shared with her favorite person in the whole world.

As she opened the door Joe Collins turned to face her. It was the accountant’s first visit to the office in two days. Things never seemed quite right without him. In his later fifties, Joe still gave the impression of being larger than life. His very presence filled up a room for her, the way it had from the very beginning when he had been her entire world.

She owed him everything.

Maren paused to kiss his cheek before tossing her purse onto her desk and stripping off her jacket. “Nobody told me you were coming in today.”

“I sneaked in like the wind,” he said, winking.

After hanging up her jacket, she pulled her chair away from the desk and sat down. Slowly she felt the tension leach from her body, the way it always did whenever Papa Joe was around. He made her feel that everything was going to be all right, as long as he was close by.

“The wind, huh?” She raised one amused eyebrow. “Then how did you hear about the new guy?”

“Wind with ears?”

His big, booming laugh wrapped itself around her, just as his arms had all those years ago when he had taken her home from the hospital. From the hospital and into his heart and life. He’d saved her from a system that could have very easily stripped her soul if she’d been placed with the wrong people. Or put her in one foster home after another.

She never tired of hearing the story, even though it had gone through many phases over the years. When she’d first asked the man she always thought of as her father why she didn’t have a mother when all the other girls in her kindergarten class had one, he’d told her that she was secretly a princess.

As she listened with wide eyes, he’d gone on to tell her that her mother had been a queen in a distant land. A queen who had saved her from a big, bad ogre, but she’d gotten mortally wounded in doing so. He was the knight who had come by, found her and slain the ogre. Maren remembered always applauding when he came to this part. The dying queen entrusted her infant daughter to him, making the knight pledge to guard her always.

Periodically, as she grew older and brought her questions to him, Papa Joe would revise the story, trimming away the fairy tale and replacing it with a little more of the truth. Then came the time when she’d turned thirteen. After he had swallowed his embarrassment and gone with her to purchase her very first bra, because she’d pressed so hard, he’d told her the complete truth.

Taking a shortcut through a dimly lit alley to his apartment one rainy night, he’d happened across a teenage prostitute named Glory just after she’d given birth. Her pulse was reedy and she’d lost a great deal of blood. He’d known she was dying. Without hesitation, he’d hailed a cab and taken both mother and child to the hospital. He’d left the complaining cabdriver with a huge tip.

But it had been too late for Glory. She’d lost too much blood and had died within the hour. Because there’d been some misunderstanding at the hospital, the attending physician and emergency room nurse had both thought that he was the newborn’s father. Something had stopped him from setting the record straight. Alone, with no family of his own, he’d impulsively gone along with the error.

“You wrapped your perfect little hand around my finger and I was just a goner,” he told her time and again. That part of the story never changed.

For three days, he’d come back to see the baby. On the fourth day, she’d been discharged into his care. He’d paid the medical bills out of his own pocket, making arrangements with the cashier to make monthly payments. And then he’d taken his new daughter home with him.

Papa Joe had also paid for her mother’s funeral. For three months after that, he’d tried to locate Glory’s family. Even hired a private investigator to look into the matter, all to no avail. After three months, he’d stopped holding his breath and finally given up. The baby he’d saved from suffering the same fate as her mother was his.

He’d called her Maren after his mother and given her the last name of “Minnesota” because that was the state they’d been living in when he’d found her. He’d given her her own last name so that she could always feel independent, even though he’d promised to always be there for her if she needed him.

She’d grown up adoring him.

For a second Maren leaned back in her chair, not realizing until this moment just how tired she actually was. But there was no time to kick back. The unexpected run to the E.R. had put her at least three hours behind in her work. There were phone calls to return and orders to place if the restaurant was to keep on running.

She addressed the question Papa Joe had first posed. “The new guy’s cool under fire.”

Saving the figures he’d just input, he studied his adopted daughter’s face as he asked, “Speaking of which, I hear he put out a grease fire yesterday. What was that all about?”

She’d looked into the fire mishap as thoroughly as she could and had drawn a conclusion she didn’t intend to repeat to either restaurant owner, Shepherd or Rineholdt. Although it was the former who was most likely to show up. To her knowledge, Rineholdt had never put in an appearance, either here or at the other branch of the restaurant. He was the epitome of a silent partner, which was fine with her. Over the years she’d come to think of the restaurant as hers to run. Hers to make thrive. She thought of it as a living entity.

“That was just Max being careless.” He had been the one who’d left the oil standing next to Rachel’s elbow.

Joe frowned. Maren had too soft a heart despite the tough-as-nails image she attempted to project. “You’re going to have to have a talk with that man.”

“Already done,” she responded crisply. The man had been warned and had promised to be more careful in the future.

Going into the desktop, she pulled up the software program she needed.

Both she and Joe knew that the head chef hated being taken to task about anything. But the man knew better than to throw a fit or to threaten to leave Rainbow’s End. He was too afraid that he might be called on his threat and subsequently replaced. Maren had made it known that although she was easygoing, she suffered no prima donnas at the restaurant. That was how Max had gotten promoted in the first place. The head chef before him had decided not to show up in protest over a raise he’d felt hadn’t adequately reflected his talents. A severance package had been her answer to his attempt at blackmail.

“Okay.” Joe nodded. “That explains yesterday, what happened this morning?”

“April got carried away with the chopping knife. Severed her index finger.” Maren closed her eyes for a second without realizing it. Just talking about it sent a shiver down her spine.

“Ouch.” Joe pretended to shake in response. “She okay?”

Maren nodded. It was accompanied by a half-muffled sigh. “According to the doctor who treated her, we got her to the hospital just in time. He says that she should be good as new. Thanks to ‘the new guy.’” She smiled as she used the term. “He took over. Wrapped up April’s wound, barked at me to put the finger in a bag packed with ice and we took off.”

“Where was Max all this time?”

“Over in a corner, turning white as a sheet and looking as if he was going to throw up his breakfast.”

Joe’s expression indicated that he would have expected nothing more from the head chef. “Good thing you hired this guy. Looks like he’s going to come in handy for more reasons than one.”

Papa Joe made it sound as if they were in for a spate of trouble, she thought. “I think we’ve used up our share of bad luck for a while.” She scrolled down the page, looking at last month’s inventory. “The worst thing I want to face right now is a head of romaine lettuce that wilted before its time.”

Referring to his notebook, Joe input several more numbers, then asked casually, “So what’s the new guy’s name?”

She looked up. Their desks were butted up against one another, allowing her to look directly into Joe’s face. “Jared. Jared Stevens. Why?”

The wide, powerful shoulders rose and fell in a quick shrug. “Just curious. You had a funny look on your face when you talked about him.”

She wasn’t aware that she had any sort of expression at all when she answered Joe’s questions. Maren felt something defensive in her spring forward. “Funny? What do you mean, funny?”

“Softer?” he suggested, not entirely certain himself what was behind Maren’s look.

She dismissed the observation. “That’s just nerves, winding down, Papa. I really don’t care for the sight of blood, especially when it gushes. April passed out and Jared had to carry her to the car.”

He closed his notebook and studied her for a second. “Why didn’t you just call 9-1-1?”

“Didn’t feel like being put on hold and waiting.” She frowned slightly. “Why all the questions?”

The smile she saw on his lips was genial. “I just like staying on top of things, honey. With me splitting my time between the two restaurants, I feel like the man on the outside most of the time.”

“You? Shepherd and Rineholdt don’t make a move without you. You’re the most ‘inside man’ the place has, Papa.”

“I can always count on you to flatter me.” He laughed, rising. He stepped outside the office, going in the direction of the kitchen. Before Maren could catch her breath, Joe returned. “You didn’t tell me he was good-looking,” he said.

Maren kept her eyes on the monitor as she scrolled to another page. “Is he? I hadn’t noticed.”

Joe bent down slightly, as if to peer at her face. “Maren, your nose is growing.”

It was an old game they used to play when she was little and had tried to fib her way out of situations. Maren raised her eyes to look up into hazel-green ones that had never been anything but kind in her estimation. “Must be the lighting.”

But for once, he didn’t smile in response. He looked serious. And worried. “Is this going to be a problem for you?”

Papa Joe must have noted the resemblance between Kirk and Jared, just as she first had. “The lighting? No, I’ll just turn it up.”

He came to stand by her desk and took her hands in his. His were so much larger, they all but dwarfed hers. “You know what I mean.”

Yes, she knew what he meant. Kirk. And the baby who was no longer there. She raised her chin, dismissing the subject before it was even framed. “That was five years ago, Papa. I’m over it.”

The look in his eyes told her he knew better. In a way, she supposed he always did. “You never get over losing a child, Maren, you know that. You just learn to cope with it better as time goes on.”

She didn’t want to talk about it any longer. She wasn’t some fragile little doll. Scar tissue had formed, protecting her. She was safe.

“Jared Stevens had good references.” She’d already checked on the first and gotten nothing but praise in response. The man she’d spoken to had told her to encourage Jared to come back if he found that California wasn’t to his liking. “And even as I was beginning to turn him down—don’t give me that look, Papa, I was just going with instincts—he jumped into action to kill the grease fire while Max just stood there, frozen. My instincts had a change of heart. I couldn’t very well tell Stevens that I wouldn’t take him on on a trial basis. There was no reason not to. And I wasn’t about to tell him that he reminded me of someone rotten in my past.”

Joe nodded his agreement. “Not every good-looking man is going to turn out to be a bastard.”

“I know.” And then she flashed him a smile. “Look at you.”

“Right,” he laughed, “look at me.” And then he waved her off. “I’ve got work to do, stop distracting me.”

“Yes, Papa,” she murmured dutifully, playing along. She went back to her own work.

Nothing. He’d come up with nothing.

Jared sighed to himself as he quietly made his way to the door at the rear of the kitchen. His footsteps echoed in his head, heightened by the silence around him. Everyone else had gone home, even the cleaning crew. He’d waited around, keeping out of sight, until the silence of emptiness had embraced him.

It had been a full week. A week of suffering through Max’s tutelage and ingratiating himself to the food servers, busboys and cooking staff, delicately working everyone for information.

All he’d come up with so far was that it looked as if the salad girl had a crush on him. She’d come back to work two days after the incident and looked at him like an adoring puppy every time their paths crossed. Aside from that, Lynda, one of the waitresses, was a major babe and seemed ready to party with him at a moment’s notice. If he weren’t on the job, he might easily consider it.

But he was on the job and would be until he either came up with some evidence of money laundering or cleared the establishment of unfounded allegations. One week on the job and he knew everyone by name, knew a little bit about their lives, or a lot, in April’s case. Getting people to open up to him was not a problem.

Unless, of course, he was thinking of Maren. She’d reverted back to closemouthed the moment they’d returned to the restaurant from the hospital. He still couldn’t figure out why.

Restaurant owner Warren Shepherd had come by on a couple of occasions. He was the visible partner of Shepherd and Rineholdt, and liked to come in around dinnertime to greet guests and take in what was going on. The man, with his dapper, expensive suits and east coast way of talking, reminded him of an aging Mafia chieftain from some old, stereotypical movie. He had a feeling that Shepherd liked playing the part and that perhaps Shepherd’s role-playing had set off the man who’d come to them with unsubstantiated stories.

If this was a wild-goose chase, Jared thought, at least it gave him an opportunity to practice his cooking.

“Hey, who put Beef Wellington on the menu?” Shepherd asked on his last visit into the kitchen the other night. He’d stood there, a tiny piece of the freshly baked serving caught between his thumb and forefinger as he’d sampled the dish.