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He hid another smile of satisfaction and amusement. He’d managed to identify the scratchy feeling on the heel of her hand, finally. A Band-Aid. Just now, he had sneaked a look and had discovered that it was the kind made for children, printed with red, blue and yellow dinosaurs.
Another tiny clue as to who she really was, another thing to pique his interest. Wearing a Band-Aid like that, she had to spend a lot of time with kids. It didn’t fit the character she was trying to portray, and she knew it, which accounted for her nervous reaction to his discovery. Strangely, it didn’t seem to fit the fortune-hunter stereotype, either.
“Will you be staying long?” he asked now.
“No, I don’t expect so,” she said quickly. “I’ll leave as soon as I can. I have to, uh, be somewhere else later in the evening. You know, one’s busy social whirl.”
“You’re talking about the ball. I meant staying in Philly.”
“Oh. Right,” Cat repeated thinly.
Drat! Again!
It was as if a cloak had slipped. She gathered her artificial role around herself once more and cursed the dropping of her guard. It kept happening, when she’d been so confident that she had it down pat. There was something about Patrick Callahan that was way too distracting.
And he was way too observant, as well. That darned Band-Aid! Yesterday evening, she’d cut her finger at the twenty-four-hour child-care center where she worked, slicing some fruit for the kids’ late-night snack. She had meant to exchange the dinosaur Band-Aid for a plain one today, but had forgotten in the flurry of getting ready.
“How silly of me!” she trilled with an effort. “Of course you meant this wonderful city of yours. But I’m afraid I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Somehow I thought you might be,” he murmured. “Flying first-class?”
“Naturally. To Paris.”
“Wonderful. Where do you usually stay when you’re there?”
“Oh, just an exclusive little hotel downtown.” She gave a vague wave, which accidentally brushed his neck. It was warm, and suddenly she caught the waft of a musky male scent, a mixture of him and his soap, released by the brief brush of her fingers. “You wouldn’t know it,” she finished hastily.
“Probably not,” he agreed. “Interesting, though. I’ve never heard anyone refer to Paris as having a ‘downtown’ before.”
“No, well, I didn’t know if you knew the city or not,” Cat said, trying to infuse a note of arrogant condescension into her tone. Paris didn’t have a downtown? How was she supposed to know that, since she’d barely been out of Pennsylvania?
The man was really starting to make her nervous. That glint in his eye. That little smile that came and went in his face. It drew her attention far too often to his extremely kissable mouth.
Yikes, no! Not kissable! Good gosh! Note to self: No more Mirabeau champagne tonight!
“I know Paris,” he was saying. “I was wondering if you do.”
“Well, of course I do!” she claimed, then added with sketchy logic, “Didn’t I just say I’m about to go there?”
“So you did.” Again, he smiled at her, creasing all the tiny laugh lines on his face in a way that made him look far less intimidating, far more human. Then he slowly pulled her closer so that she had no choice but to rest her head against his shoulder as they danced, and there was that fresh, musky scent again.
She could feel his legs, now, getting tangled in the layers of her dress, and his arm was no longer safely in the middle of her back but much farther round, in the curve of her waist, just below her breast. As they moved, she could feel the weight of her fullness there, nudging softly against his hand. It didn’t feel anywhere near as unwelcome as she wanted it to, and she was melting inside. Was he flirting with her?
A silence fell. She would have spoken, only she was too afraid of saying something that would betray herself to him, too afraid that she had betrayed herself already.
Darn it, she knew she had! He had guessed who she was—or at the very least, who she wasn’t—and he was playing along with her.
Instead of hating him for it as she should, she found herself responding at first. Responding to that little half-smile of his, as if they shared a delicious, creamy, edible secret, instead of a secret that could blow her whole plan to smithereens if he revealed it to Councillor Wainwright.
How much, exactly, did he know? The detailed truth about who she was? Surely not!
Not the fact that she’d been kicked out of her home by her mean-spirited stepmother Rose six years ago, the moment she hit eighteen. Not the fact that her stepsister Jill, almost the same age, had been kicked out right along with her because Jill was pregnant and unmarried and the baby’s well-heeled, well-connected father didn’t want to know about it.
Not the fact that Jill’s older sister Suzanne had refused to remain in a house where her sisters weren’t welcome, so that all three of them, plus Jill’s little son Sam, had ended up struggling to survive in a no-hope trailer park for several years.
Yes, a trailer park, and not the kind where the other residents troubled to grow flowers and put drapes in their windows.
Thanks to Cousin Pixie, that life was behind them now. Cat was well on the way to completing her nursing degree and she was loving it. After turning her back on a career as a show skater following a disastrous six weeks in Las Vegas earlier in the year, Jill was training in computers and administration while she worked in the ice-rink office part-time. Infiltrating tonight’s ball under deep cover had been her idea. Suzanne had recently gotten her degree in library science. They each had hopes for the future. Still, they counted their pennies every single day.
Patrick Callahan knew Cat had as much right to call herself Lady Catrina Willoughby-Brown as she had to claim she could fly. But did he know how important this evening was to her? Did he know it wasn’t a game or a scam? Did he know that she and Pixie, Jill, Sam and Suzanne would all lose their home if he blew her cover tonight?
Of course he didn’t, and even if he did, if he’d somehow guessed why she was targeting Councillor Wainwright so assiduously, she doubted that he’d care. His type never did. From bitter experience, she knew this all too well.
There was a whole roll call of such people who’d impinged on her life. Curtis Harrington III, the Ivy League college boy who’d fathered Jill’s son. Barry Grindlay and his ruthless devotion to the bottom line. Her stepmother Rose, too, had given Cat many an unintentional lesson about the gulf that separated the privileged and the strugglers of this world.
The dance came to an end at last. Patrick led Cat from the floor, his fingers linked loosely through hers, and she was so relieved that this was ending that she didn’t spot his intention until it was way too late.
He’d taken her back to Earl Wainwright’s table and suggested cheerfully to the councillor, “That was fun. Why don’t you and Mrs. Wainwright take a turn now? There are a lot of couples out there now.”
Mrs. Wainwright’s eyes instantly lit up. “Oh, Earl. Why don’t we? He’s right. It isn’t just young people, and they’re playing our sort of music.”
Seconds later, Cat had to watch her elusive quarry stumble across the ice under the escort of a seventeen-year-old skate bunny. Patrick sat back in his seat, meanwhile, openly enjoying her poorly disguised chagrin.
“They’re serving more supper,” he said, then gestured at Jill, who was swishing by with a tray of filled plates.
She came to an elegant halt—she really was a beautiful skater!—and laid two plates down in front of them with a beaming smile. This quickly turned into a confused glare at Cat when she thought Patrick wasn’t looking.
Why are you wasting your time with this guy? the glare said.
Cat gave a tiny frown back and shook her head, as if to say, “Believe me, I’m trying to shake him off!” then Jill swished away with her tray once more.
“She skates well,” was Patrick’s comment.
“Yes, she does, doesn’t she?” Cat began warmly, then corrected her tone quickly. “That is to say, she seems more skilled than most of the people one sees on the outdoor rink at Gstaad.”
“Ah, we’re back to Gstaad,” Patrick murmured.
He tortured her without mercy as they ate. Cat hated herself for appreciating every moment of his cleverness. Never once did he say straight out that he knew she was a fraud. That would have been too easy. But he broke her cover again and again.
He trapped her and let her go again like a cat toying with a mouse, and she almost begged him, “Okay, you win. Call management and get me thrown out, if you’d enjoy the sight of my humiliation. I won’t bother to tell you why it matters so much. You’d only shrug.”
But he didn’t make his first move, and in the end she didn’t ask him to. Instead, she held desperately to the faint, fading hope that it would turn out all right. What other choice did she have?
Some minutes later, however, the Wainwrights came back, and despite Mrs. Wainwright’s suspicious glare, her husband gallantly whirled Cat away to dance at last. Patrick, surprisingly, didn’t interfere.
Suddenly, when she’d really believed all hope was lost, it was easy. Oh, it was so wonderfully easy! Here she was, out on the dance floor with a perspiring councillor, who was like putty in her hands.
One eager question from him about her ancestral home led her smoothly into the subject of chemical contamination of the poor, dear ancestral trout stream and consequent tragic demise of the poor, dear ancestral trout.
The councillor’s open-jawed interest in everything she said then allowed her to run on about the charming bed-and-breakfast mansion she was staying at in upper Highgate Street, and how the owner of the bed-and-breakfast was very concerned about the proposed rezoning of one block of lower Highgate Street, where, she understood, the houses had been built on the sight of a former tannery.
The ground, according to the bed-and-breakfast owner, was hopelessly contaminated from the tanning chemicals below the surface of added top soil and rock fill, and it would be a tragedy, quite simply a shocking, frightful tragedy, if the contamination—not known about by the general public, by the way, because it had been hushed up—was brought to the surface through reckless bulldozing by developers.
In any case, the heritage value of the old Victorian houses on that particular block was, “like my own ancestral estate of Dungrove Castle,” absolutely priceless and must on no account be sacrificed to the frightful greed of commercial interests.
“Lady Catrina, you are absolutely right,” said the councillor eagerly. “You couldn’t have known this, of course, but environmental contamination and deliberate hushing up of its presence is one of my most strongly felt issues, and it’s the most amazing coincidence that I should meet someone like you who shares my concerns.”
He took a moment to mop his brow with a big, plaid handkerchief, as if the fluency of his oratory was exhausting him, then said, “As for the heritage values, of course I wish we, here in the United States, had the sensitivity of you British nobles in that area. Rest assured, however, that this city—as well as you personally, my dear—”
He really did have a very pleasant smile, Cat noted.
“—can count on my influence in council to hold these forces of darkness at bay, and council is going to know that at the very next meeting, because I am not going to hold my cards to my chest any longer. The rezoning in lower Highgate Street is off!”
The music ended at that moment, and a very breathless Councillor Wainwright escorted Cat off the floor and back to the table.
Before he reached it, he was waylaid by his wife Darlene, saying urgently, “Earl? Earl! Grab that waitress. She’s missed our table, and I’m ready for my supper. Those canapes wouldn’t have fed a bird. Earl? Go after her!”
He loped off obediently in the wake of the waitress, almost forgetting about the ice in his eagerness. His wife, evidently not trusting either his persistence about supper or his immunity to any of the beautiful women here tonight, followed him.
Cat turned from the councillor and reached the table, her success glowing in her face and making her smile helplessly.
She’d done it. She had actually done it! Pixie’s home and the other gracious Victorian houses in lower Highgate Street were safe, as were the other families who lived in them. Seven and a half weeks from now, when the vital council meeting was due to take place, sleazy Barry Grindlay would have no more reason to try and con poor, frail, simple-hearted Pixie out of her one and only asset.
Now, if she could only find Jill, tell her the good news and get out of here…
“Pleased about something, Lady Catrina?” said Patrick’s darkly amused voice just a few feet away.
Cat dropped into her seat, knocked hollow by the man once more. Everyone else from this table was dancing or greeting friends, and he sat here alone. His long body was draped in his seat in a lazy sprawl and just one corner of his mouth was lifted in a smile.
Of course she hadn’t forgotten about him. Somehow she suspected she wasn’t going to find it very easy to do that, even after this event was over. His voice, his smile, the feel of his arms around her as they danced, his clever way with words and the searching, half-amused, half-cynical look in his blue eyes were all things that would haunt her, waking and sleeping, for weeks. And there was another quality to him, as well. Or maybe it was a quality in the air between them. Either way, she couldn’t put a name to it.
But at least until a moment ago she had kidded herself that his involvement in her evening was done.
It was instantly apparent that he didn’t agree. When she stammered out something inane about a frightfully pleasant conversation with Councillor Wainwright during the dance, he laughed aloud. It was a complicated sound, more than the simple expression of amusement.
“While there’s no one else around,” he suggested, leaning forward, “let’s be a little more honest about this, shall we?”
“Wh-what do you mean?” she said, although she knew quite well.
“You have about as much right to call yourself Lady Catrina Willoughby-Brown as I would have to call myself Prince Patrick of Kalamazoo,” he answered. “Sorry, Lady C, but I’ve blown your cover. I know why you’re really here, and I’m not going to let you get away with it….”
Chapter Three
“Unless,” Patrick continued in a less threatening tone, “you agree to spend the next couple of hours with me.”
The moment the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. He’d already beaten off several ambitious young beauties while “Lady Catrina” was dancing with the councillor.
Beaten off. The expression fitted. They were like mosquitoes. Persistent and annoying, with buzzy little voices and blood-sucking intent. For a moment, the notion of spending time with a gold digger who hadn’t targeted himself was appealing, but that moment soon passed.
To find her briefly fascinating was one thing. To open himself up to having her chase him was something very different.
Because if she was any good as a fortune hunter, she’d soon work out that he was a better target than Wainwright. He’d then have to endure the tedium, and the disappointment of listening to her simper and coo as she tried to draw his interest. Just another mosquito….
“Don’t,” she begged, in answer to his impulsive demand, and he was surprised out of his complacent remorse when he heard the real anguish in her voice.
Also, for mercy’s sake, what was happening to those big brown eyes? Were those actually tears making them glisten?
“Please don’t,” she went on, her voice shaky. “I mean, I assume you’re connected somehow with the council or the zoning authority, or whoever, but…but…Oh, damn, why am I begging?”
She dropped her head so that her mass of gorgeous hair fell forward like an avalanche of silk and screened her emotion-filled face.
“As if begging is going to do any good!” she muttered. “If you’re serious about that bargain of yours, of course I’ll spend two hours with you. To think you’d ruin or spare people’s lives on the basis of some faint interest in my company!”
“Actually, I’m viewing you more as a kind of insect repellent,” he drawled, masking his true reaction to her dramatically changed mood.
“Insect repellent?”
“Here comes another mosquito now.”
“Patrick!” squealed Tiffany de Saint. “Patrick Callahan! It’s been a hundred years!”
She minced up to the table on impossible heels and bent to kiss him, offering a deliberate glimpse of breasts that had been professionally inflated to more than generous size. When she straightened again, Patrick noted that not a hair on her blond head had moved, it was so stiffly styled.
He didn’t know what favor she’d called in to get a ticket this evening, but she certainly wasn’t here on the strength of service to charity, public profile or talent. He only knew her because she’d worked as the personal assistant to Anna Tarrant, a publicity consultant he’d dated for a while. She’d lost that job after sleeping with one too many of Anna’s married clients.
Running into people like Tiffany was one of the things that made Patrick regret the litany of short-lived relationships with interesting women that formed his past. He now found that he knew too many people, and too many of those people he didn’t like.
“Hi, Tiffany,” he said. “Meet Lady Catrina Willoughby-Brown.”
He slid an arm around Lady C’s shoulders and saw Tiffany’s face tighten. Her baby-blue eyes narrowed and went as hard as two diamonds above a rectangular smile that she couldn’t sustain.
“Lady Catrina,” she echoed. To her credit, she recognized defeat at once. “I’m just so utterly thrilled to meet you.” Her voice was like damp cardboard. Seconds later, she had moved on.
“See,” he said to Lady C. “Mosquito repellent.”
“Yes, I see,” she answered at once. “But if you think that makes it any better, I—I don’t agree. Just because you have your own agenda. What are you doing? Selling your silence? It’s…it’s…just wrong!”
The phony accent had disappeared completely, replaced by pure, native Philadelphian, and either she hadn’t even noticed or she didn’t care anymore. It appalled Patrick to see how upset she was. Hell, she was shaking! He could see it and feel it, beneath the arm that he still had draped lightly across her shoulder.
“Hey!” he said urgently, straightening and taking his arm away. “Hey, Lady C!”
“Don’t call me that.”
“What should I call you then?”
“Just Cat, okay? No…” She shook her head, quickly changing her mind, and he saw the Wainwrights returning with their steaming supper plates. “Can you stick to Lady Catrina, please, as if you believed me? Please! Or else, if this means anything to you, five of us will lose our home.”
“What?”
