McCloud's Woman (4 page)

Constantina threw an Italian curse after her as Mara
slammed the bedroom door. Nothing like a good fight to start the
day—just like home.

Clattering down the stairs of the antebellum B&B, Mara
waved at Katy Richards, the proprietress, and hurried out the front
door before being forced to indulge in chitchat. She’d rented the entire
establishment for her staff so they wouldn’t have to run a gauntlet of
sightseers every time they left their rooms.

Leaning against the limo door, her driver snapped to attention at sight of her striding down the drive, but she waved him off.

“I’m walking, Jim. I’ll call if I need you.”

This wasn’t Hollywood. She didn’t need bodyguards.
Striding briskly from beneath the elongated limbs of Spanish-moss-draped
oaks, she donned her sunglasses and headed in the direction of TJ’s lab
on the quaint street of old storefronts and new boutiques leading down
to the harbor. Surely, they could reach some rational agreement. What
were old friends for?

Might depend on the definition of friends, she admitted.
Sid had always said that the Hollywood kind of friends were good for
publicity or parties or stabbing a person in the back. In that vein, she
supposed the Brooklyn kind could be considered good for resentment and
prejudice. TJ was from Long Island, but that didn’t mean he had a higher
standard.

So, all right, she didn’t have any real friends. Maybe
only stupid, naïve people actually believed in friendship. She’d live.
There were far worse things in the world than not having friends. Her
mother was one of them.

Wow, why did she keep heading down that tangled path? Had
running into Tim reminded her too much of home? She shivered at the
picture of her future in Brooklyn if she didn’t make this film work.

Glancing in a darkened store window, Mara caught her blond
reflection and let her mood swing upward again. For thirty-three, she
looked damned good in jeans. Let’s see what her old teenage idol
thought.

Whistling, she swung around—and slammed straight into TJ McCloud’s impressive chest.

Catching the long-legged femme fatale felt as familiar as
looking at her. A memory tugged at the back of his mind, but TJ didn’t
have time to pin it down. He had to conquer an armful of pliant female
curves and a starving libido run amok.

Slanted, cat green eyes peered up at him, and for one dread moment, he thought she purred.

“Well, hello, handsome. Imagine running into you like
this.” She didn’t immediately step back, but lightly rested her long
fingers on his shoulders, and regained her balance with a little shimmy
that brushed her breasts close enough to smoke his shirt buttons, and
slid her feet more securely into her shoes. Then she released him but
didn’t step away.

The fragrance of gardenias lingered. The women TJ knew
tended to smell of chalk dust or musty books or, in Cleo’s case,
mechanic’s grease. Overseas, in the pits of hell he’d lived in, they
tended to smell of sweat or fear. Gardenias were as foreign to him as
wedding bouquets.

“Excuse me,” he said politely, stepping to one side. If nothing else, he’d learned the value of self-discipline.

“Excuse you for what? Living?” she teased, fluttering her
lashes. “That’s probably an unpardonable sin, but I’m willing to
overlook it.” She tilted her head, and a few silky curls fell from the
stack. “Once upon a time, you had the vestige of a sense of humor. Did
it all dry up?”

His brothers had always called TJ the professor and swore
he never laughed. In these past years he’d learned that humor and human
remains didn’t mix well. If she wanted a comedian, he’d send her to
Jared. Maybe his brother was the one who she was remembering. Jared had a
way with women.

TJ took another step away, diverting his gaze from
tantalizing curves revealed by an open button on her blue shirt. “In my
profession, humor tends toward the macabre, so if I was supposed to
laugh, I apologize. If you would excuse me, I have to go to the office. I
have no one answering the phone today.”

“That’s why God invented answering machines.” She swung into step beside him.

Her height and stride fit comfortably beside his. Reaching
his office door, TJ unlocked but didn’t open it. “Are you applying for
the job of my assistant?”

“Do you think I’d look good in a lab coat?” She patted her
blond upsweep and batted her long lashes outrageously. “What else is
your assistant required to do?”

“Work independently and leave me alone,” he answered gravely.

An imp of interest played havoc with TJ’s restraint as she
began whistling an inane song from an old television show while giving
him an appraising once-over as if he were a centerfold of
Playgirl
. The song rang clarion warnings in his mind, but her admiring stare was messing with his head, and he didn’t heed the alarm.

“Honey, you’d better hire yourself a man if you want to be
left alone. I don’t think you’d be safe even with a blind woman.” Her
hand did an imitation of pitterpatter above her right breast, then
transferred to repeat the gesture on his shirt pocket.

TJ dodged her marauding fingers and shoved open the door.
“If you’re not applying for the job, then I’ll leave you here. We’re not
open to the public.” He couldn’t—wouldn’t—let her distract him.

She leaned against the frame and crossed her arms,
preventing him from closing the door. “I didn’t come out here for the
pleasure of torturing you—although that holds a certain appeal. We need
to talk.”

Another piece of the puzzle popped from his memory. Patsy
used to say that. Her worst arguments started with “We need to talk,”
accompanied by exactly the same body language.
Do-wa-diddy-diddy
,
that was how the song went. She used to wail it off-key at the top of
her lungs when she followed him and Brad down the street.

Patsy? TJ squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head to
free the cobwebs. Why in hell had he thought of that skinny geek of a
child when faced with this full-grown blond bombshell? Patsy had brown
braids, thick glasses, and lurked a hundred years and a thousand miles
in his past. She was probably a lawyer tackling the Supreme Court by
now.

Resolutely, TJ opened his eyes, determined to dismiss the
puzzle and start sorting through the evidence boxes as he should have
done when they’d arrived a few days ago.

Green eyes stared back at him. Patsy had green eyes.
They’d been her best feature, although no one had noticed them behind
her cheap horn rims.

“Timothy John, if you don’t quit looking at me like I’m a Martian invader, I’ll kick your shin.”

Patsy
. TJ closed his eyes again and shuddered. No way. Not now. Not here. Not looking like
this
.
A voice from his past speaking through the luscious lips of a movie
star had to be a hallucination. Maybe his crazed brain thought he needed
a sharp jab in the eye to get him focused.

The apparition caught his elbow and steered him inside,
letting the door snap closed behind them. She was tall, reaching past
his shoulder. He’d always liked that about Patsy—her height made him
feel less awkward. He inhaled gardenias again and rejected the image.
The Patsy he remembered had smelled of Tootsie Pops and cheap mouthwash
and looked at him with adoration.

Patsy had been sixteen the last time he’d seen her. She hadn’t smelled of Tootsie Pops then.

“I’m really having fun with this charade, Tim, but I don’t
have time to play anymore. Do you really need me to tell you who I am?”
Impatience tinged her voice.

With his eyes closed, he could hear his boyhood nemesis
clearly enough. The New York accent had blurred over the years, but her
clipped words defined it better than the sexy drawl she’d been using.
Maybe if he kept his eyes closed...

He opened them to narrow slits and studied the stunning
woman propping her hands on her hips and glaring at him. The hair wasn’t
Patsy’s. Neither was the nose. He cocked his head thoughtfully. He was a
trained anthropologist, knew bone structure inside and out, and could
identify sex, race, and age of a skeleton with relative accuracy at a
glance. He just had some difficulty seeing bones through creamy skin and
tempting curves.

Right height, right limb proportions. Patsy had been as
tall as her brother. She should have gone to a school with a woman’s
basketball team, but her parents were fixated on sending Brad to an
exclusive prep school that would prepare him for Harvard. They’d sent
Patsy to the expensive school only because Brad had refused to go
without her.

Brad. Why did he have to be reminded of that tragic
failure in judgment at a time when he had to make a worse choice
involving another friend? TJ winced at the searing memory.

“What the hell did you do to your hair?” With that gruff
acceptance of the improbable, he stalked toward his lab, grabbing his
white coat off a hook as he passed by. He’d never be able to concentrate
now. He would have to do the mundane stuff—like answer unanswered phone
calls.

Mara breathed a sigh of mixed relief and trepidation at
TJ’s recognition. So much for hoping for fond reminiscences. The
arrogant jock still carried the burden of guilt.

“Bleached it, like any sensible female,” she retorted,
following him in. “Will you stop ignoring me and sit down and talk a
minute?” she demanded when he reached for his box of slides and pulled
his glasses out of his lab coat pocket. “Couldn’t we at least have a cup
of coffee and get reacquainted?”

“What do you want, Pats? I’m on a tight schedule and short an assistant, if you haven’t noticed.”

Pats. It had been seventeen years since anyone had called
her that. Her first husband had called her lots of names, but none of
them as friendly as Pats. She’d dropped the whole ugly Patricia thing
when she’d taken the job at Bloomingdale’s.

She didn’t do trips down memory lane. She wasn’t into hair
shirts either. “My schedule is not only tighter, but more expensive,”
she answered angrily. “I have half a dozen high-priced, high-strung
actors descending on this fair city in the next few weeks, and I need to
get my scenes set.”

The look he shot her from beneath those sexy eyebrows
awakened every ounce of femininity in her. TJ McCloud had grown into a
hunk with smoldering dark eyes and shoulders a linebacker would envy.
Why in the name of heaven had she ever settled for a spineless worm like
Irving and an aging roué like Sid when there were men like TJ
available?

Because men like TJ McCloud were never available to the
Patsy Simonettis of the world. In a huff of impatience at that thought,
Mara blew a straying curl off her forehead.

“Then I advise you to go set scenes,” TJ answered, turning
his back on her again to sit on his lab stool and pull his microscope
from a cabinet.

Mara thumped the back of his head with the rolled up
newspaper she’d picked up at his door. “If you don’t start behaving,
Timothy John, I’ll tell your mother on you!”

He snorted something remarkably like laughter before
swinging the stool around and propping his elbows against the battered
wood counter behind him while he studied her from head to toe. His
buttoned shirt strained across his chest and his too-knowing eyes
stripped her of all disguise.

“What did you do to your nose?” TJ demanded.

“Cut it off,” she replied tartly. “It got in my way.”

“I’m sorry to hear your parents are dead.”

“My parents aren’t dead!” Damn, but he had her behaving
just like the frustrated teenager she’d once been. She wanted to stamp
her feet and pelt him with Milk Duds. “What in hell makes you think they
are?”

“I figured if they weren’t already rolling in their graves, they’d have dropped dead in shock when you came home like that.”

Mara grabbed a book from the shelves behind her and
started to fling it at his fat head. Something in TJ’s expression
stopped her. Carefully setting the book down on a desk, she studied him.
He almost looked disappointed that she hadn’t thrown it.

“Obnoxious bastard,” she muttered. “You want to drive me
away. That’s what you did to that idiot who flounced out of here
yesterday, isn’t it? You got a thing against women, TJ?”

“Not if they stay out of my way. I have work to do. What do you want, Patsy?”

“It’s Mara now. Mara Simon now that I’ve got rid of the Rosenthal.”

His crooked eyebrow raised. So he wasn’t completely oblivious after all. He’d heard of Sid, at least.

She nodded at the assortment of bones and other relics scattered across the counter. “What are you working on?”

“Not pirate bones,” he answered in satisfaction. “So if you want a PR break, you’ll not find it here.”

She’d hoped the rumor of pirate remains had been true. It
would have been great publicity, but she could survive without it. She
couldn’t survive without that beach. “Unless you’ve uncovered one of the
Lost Tribes, I hope you’ll cut me some slack and let me take my
equipment through that access road you’re blocking.”

“It’s private property, and I have federal permission to
dig. I’ll be done in a few months. Come back then.” He remained
immovable.

Not totally immovable. She was aware of the way he studied
her over the top of his half glasses. When his gaze dropped to her
shirt, she realized she’d have to break the bad habit of leaving that
extra button open. This wasn’t LA, and she didn’t need his attention on
her breasts right now. “The weather won’t be as cooperative later. I
have six months to complete this film, and I have to shoot these scenes
now. We won’t disturb your excavations. We just need to take trucks past
your fence.”

“I can’t allow that dune to be destroyed by heavy vehicles
any more than I can let you tear up the excavation until I’ve located
all the remains. There are dead bodies buried there. You don’t drive
through cemeteries in semis.”