Beckett's Convenient Bride

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“Where’s that?” And then her eyes widened. “You mean the one in South Carolina?”

“Yep. Last time I saw it, it was.” He appeared to be breathing easier now that the coughing fit had passed.

“I’m certainly not going to drive you to Charleston, but if you’re staying somewhere around here, I’ll help you get there.”

“Nags Head last night. Checked out this morning.” He named a hotel about three mileposts from where she’d worked last summer.

Shaking her head slowly, Kit made up her mind. Lord, if she ever wrote an autobiography, no one would believe it. Not that anyone would be interested.

“You’re coming home with me,” she said firmly. Lord knows she’d taken home scruffier-looking creatures. Four-legged ones. Besides, her home was within shouting distance of practically everyone in the village. “It’s not much, but at least you can rest up until you feel like telling me what this is all about.” The man knew her name. She wanted to know what else he knew about her. “You can rest on the couch until you’re feeling better. It opens up and I can let you have a spare pillow.”

Carson wanted to refuse. Hell, he wanted to be back in Charleston in his own bed, with the telephone off the hook and a solid week to do nothing but sleep.

At the moment, though, if she’d offered him a doormat, he would gratefully have accepted. “Need to talk anyway,” he said. He could rest up for a few minutes, speak his piece, hand over the goods and by that time he’d be good to go.

Good enough, at any rate.

“You wait here,” she said. “I’ll move my car off the road—nobody’ll bother it. I can drive a stick shift, you don’t have to worry about that.”

He shook his head, winced and said, “Automatic.”

“Whatever. I just don’t want you on my conscience. You’re in no shape to drive and my car will be all right here. There’s no crime around these parts.”

Hearing her own words, Kit wondered just when she had stepped through the looking glass. How about murder? And no matter how peaceful it might look on the surface, Gilbert’s Point saw it’s share of drug traffic, not to mention the occasional Saturday night celebration that got out of hand. So far as she knew, the Coast Guard took care of the drug runners and a night in jail took care of the boozers. But murder—that was scary.

“Give me the keys,” she growled. “I’ll help you in and—”

He helped himself in, moving as if he’d been stretched on a rack, but moving under his own steam. That was encouraging.

“You can take a nap if you want to, I don’t have to be at work until five and it’s only four-twenty. Are you allergic to aspirin? How about chicken soup? Jeff at the Crab House makes really good chicken soup.”

She could hear her mother now. “Katherine, do you have to drag home every stray creature in the world? I’m not running a zoo, you know,” she would say. At least, she would when she was sober enough. Or when she was home. Perhaps if she’d been home more often, or sober more often, Kit wouldn’t have adopted every stray she saw, from homeless cats to tailless lizards to broken-wing birds.

It had never worked out, anyway. Her father had seen to that. He made her watch once while he stuffed a litter of abandoned kittens into a sack and drowned them in the Chesapeake Bay.

And then she’d had to serve her term in the closet for defying his orders. It was usually only a matter of a few hours, but once, after one of her strays had infested the house with fleas and they’d had to get the exterminator in, she’d been locked in the closet for twelve hours straight. She had cried herself sick, then she’d begun making up stories.

She probably had her father to thank for her career.

“Hot tea’s supposed to be good for colds, too. And onions. Not together, of course, but…”

Carson let her babble. All he wanted to do was lie down and close his eyes. He never got sick, never. Been busted up a time or two, but he’d never caught any of the bugs going around. Until now.

By the time she stopped the car in front of a house that was about the same vintage as his own, it was all he could do to slide out of the car. His overnight bag was in the back, but he lacked the motivation to reach for it.

Passing by an assortment of bowls and pans on the front porch, she opened the door and pointed toward the back of the house. “Bathroom’s back there, last door on the left. Couch is through there, help yourself. I’ll put the kettle on and call to see if today’s chicken soup’s ready. Jeff makes it fresh every day.”

Her voice had a soothing quality, which was surprising coming from a woman who was at worst a dangerous psychotic, at best, a compassionate flake. “There’s an afghan on the back of the couch. When you’re feverish, you probably don’t need to be chilled. Or is it the other way around?”

She left, muttering something about starve-a-cold, feed-a-fever, but by that time Carson was down and nearly out. A moment later he could sense her presence, even though his eyes were closed. Don’t talk any more, he wanted to say, it hurts my head.

“I won’t talk any more, you probably just want to sleep. Why don’t I go get my car now, and I’ll stop by the restaurant and bring you some chicken soup before I go to work.”

He felt a drift of something light and wooly over his body. She hadn’t tried to remove his coat, but she tugged at one of his boots briefly before giving up. He could have told her that there was a knack to pulling off boots, and she didn’t have it. At that point, he didn’t care.

Bye-bye, angel. Wake me up in a few weeks, all right?

Three

This is the right thing to do, Kit thought in an effort to reassure herself. After running the man down, she could hardly walk off and leave him there. He was injured, possibly even ill. It was only natural to be uneasy—any normal person would be uneasy.

All right, so she was more than uneasy, she was scared stiff. But she was still functioning, and under the circumstances that was pretty cool.

With shaking fingers, she dialed the Crab House. “Look, Jeff—I might be a few minutes late coming on shift, but I’m going to stop by first, and could you please have a quart of chicken soup ready to go?” She listened, darting quick glances toward the living room. “Uh-huh—that’s right, he found me.”

Someone had been asking questions about her? And she’d been fool enough to drag him home with her. Maybe her grandfather was right—she was a clear case of arrested development.

But the man had known her full name. That had brought her up short, and before she could come to her senses curiosity had outweighed fear, and now she was stuck with him.

Fortunately, he was out like a light, as she simply wasn’t up to the job of dragging him out and dumping him beside the road.

Raking her hair from her forehead, she thrust her car keys in her pocket and hurried down the path, wondering if she’d left enough room for Ladybug. Without thinking, she’d parked the Yukon in the place she usually parked her own car. Second thoughts, and third ones, dogged her steps as she hurried along the road. How could she have walked out and left a strange man asleep in her house at a time like this?

Even under normal circumstances Kit never invited men to sleep in her house. Sleeping over implied involvement, and Kit had a whole series of rules concerning getting involved with a man, starting with No Way and ending with Just Say No.

Growing up in a family that was everything proper on the outside and totally dysfunctional behind closed doors had left scars that she was still trying to heal—or if not to heal, at least to hide.

In other words, she mocked silently, you’re a chip off the old block.

Early on, it hadn’t been quite so evident that once her father left for his office, the whole house seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. Back then, her mother would wait until just before dinner to take the first drink. During the day they would go places, just the two of them. Movies, museums, shopping…to the zoo. On rainy days they might play Fish or cut paper dolls from old fashion magazines. She’d loved that, making up stories about each one.

For Kit’s eighth birthday her mother had given her a bride doll. In later years Kit always connected the doll in her mind with a large, gold-framed wedding picture that had hung in her mother’s sitting room. The bride in the picture wore a full-skirted lace gown and pearl-seeded veil, her eyes aglow in a classically beautiful face. Standing beside her, but not touching her stood the groom, Christopher Dixon, looking handsome and chillingly un-involved. That was before her mother’s drinking spiraled out of control.

Oh, they’d been a pair, all right. According to her grandfather, Betty Chandler had set out to trap herself a rich husband, and in a weak moment, the judge’s only son had allowed himself to be caught.

So far as Kit knew, her father had never had a weak moment in his entire life. If the judge was known as Cast Iron, then her father, a junior partner in a prestigious law firm at the time of his death, could surely have been called Stainless Steel.