скачать книгу бесплатно
“What brings you back to town, Darcy?” he asked. “Dave isn’t sick or something, is he?”
“He’s fine, Joe.”
“Well, I haven’t seen him around much. And last I heard you were hanging out in San Francisco with Pete Willis.”
Darcy kept her voice even, but it took an effort. “That’s old news, I’m afraid.”
“You and Pete called it quits? Well, let me buy you a beer and you can bring me up-to-date. Must be a year since I’ve seen you.”
Behind him, Trey said levelly, “She’s drinking iced tea, and she’s with me tonight.”
Joe cocked his chin forward. “I don’t see any ownership tag hanging around her neck. No ring on her finger.”
“Check again tomorrow and you might be surprised,” Trey said. He stepped between them.
“Later, Joe,” Darcy called. She took her iced tea and considered dumping it over Trey’s head. Which was surely an odd reaction, considering that she was relieved to have Joe’s interrogation short-circuited. Still, just because Joe asked questions didn’t mean she intended to answer them, and it wasn’t up to Trey to decide who she talked to. “You want to tell me what that was all about—besides disgustingly primitive primate behavior?”
“He was hassling you.”
“He was asking how I was.”
“Who’s Pete Willis?”
“Oh, is that what’s bothering you? He’s the man I worked with in San Francisco. Nobody you need to be worried about.”
“He’s not going to be coming around wanting to hire you back?”
“Not in this lifetime.” Her voice was steady. “Let’s get our business taken care of before Joe has another beer and decides to find out whether you can whip him.”
Trey seemed only mildly interested. “Who are you worried about coming out the worse for wear—him or me?”
“Neither. I don’t want Dave to have to come bail everybody out of jail, because I’ll end up doing the paperwork. Tell me about the ad campaign.”
Trey leaned back against the vinyl seat. “Since we’d already started with Caroline and Corbin, the ad department is having to revamp the entire shooting schedule.”
“Corbin. What a name.”
“It fits him. The idea is to minimize setup time for each photo by working through the store in a logical way, not necessarily in the same order the ads will appear. We’ll do the engagement ring tomorrow, of course, because that’s the first ad which will run and they need the art right away. But then we may do household linens and lawn furniture, because they’re in the same section of the store. You know how the departments are laid out in sort of a rough circle.”
“Actually,” Darcy said, “no, I don’t. I haven’t been in a Kentwells store in years.”
Trey blinked in surprise. “Oh, of course. All our stores are in Chicago, and you’ve been out west.”
She said, very slowly, “Yes.” It was true, as far as it went. And there was no point in alienating him by telling the whole truth—that she’d always preferred to do her shopping with Kentwells’s competition. You wouldn’t volunteer that information if you were interviewing for a job, she reminded herself. This isn’t much different.
“We’ll have to start early in the morning,” he warned. “There’s still a lot of prep work to be done because we’re starting from scratch with you.”
Starting from scratch… “You’d better smile when you say that, partner. I’m not exactly in the frame of mind to play Cinderella.”
Trey sighed. “I do keep putting my foot in my mouth, don’t I? I just meant that the clothes which were chosen for Caroline won’t work for you, and the hairstyle and makeup you need will be much different, too.”
A woman in a white jacket deposited a pizza on the table between them and went away without a word. Trey looked at it in puzzlement. “Did we order this?”
“Sort of. It’s my standing order—I just wave at Jessie in the kitchen whenever I come in.” She took a paper plate from the stack on the table and slid a steaming wedge onto it. “Try it, it’s the best hand-thrown pizza in town. Since you brought up Caroline, I had a question. She does understand this is all made up, right?”
“Of course.”
“Because she seems to be a bit of a dreamer. She’s not serious about the engagement party, is she?”
“Of course she is. The best way to make it convincing is for everyone around us to act as if it’s real. Caroline throwing a party, Dave giving a toast to the happy couple—it all adds a touch of reality.” He helped himself to a slice of pizza. “Now—let’s get down to business. Tell me everything I could possibly need to know about my wife-to-be.”
CHAPTER THREE
NO SOONER had his request popped out than Trey regretted it—or at least he regretted the way he had phrased it. Asking a woman to tell him all about herself—what had he been thinking?
He’d never met one yet who wouldn’t take that as a blanket invitation to share an entire evening’s worth of self-analysis. By the time Darcy finished her Freud act, he’d probably known what she’d had for breakfast on her first day of school, and all about the lasting wounds it had left on her psyche.
Why hadn’t he settled for asking simple, straightforward questions that would elicit the facts he needed without including hours worth of padding—explanations that would make it practically impossible to keep his eyes open?
“Age twenty-seven,” Darcy said crisply. “Born and raised in the west suburbs of Chicago, parents died eight years ago in a car accident. I finished my degree, worked at a PR firm downtown, then spent some time in San Francisco, and came back here. Anything else?” She tore another slice of pizza from the pie and took a big bite, obviously finished talking for the moment.
Trey was too stunned at the machine-gun approach to comment.
She obviously took his continued silence for a lack of further questions, because she swallowed and said, “If I’d realized that’s all you wanted to know, I’d have given you one of my job applications this morning and saved you the trouble of asking. Are you all right?”
“I was just thinking that if I’d asked Caroline how she felt, I’d still be sitting here listening in a couple of hours. Ask you for a rundown of your life and you’re finished in fifteen seconds.”
Darcy shrugged. “Mine hasn’t been a terribly exciting life.”
“Normally for a female that’s no bar to talking about it at length,” Trey said dryly.
“Oh, so that must be why you’re not interested in actually getting married—because women are boring and self-centered and don’t know when to shut up.”
He knew better than to think there was a safe answer to that. “I’ve known a few talkative types,” he admitted. “But the fact is I’m not established well enough to even think about marriage just now.” She’d never believe that he was telling the truth, but at least it might distract her.
Darcy rolled her eyes. “Right. A hundred-year-old department store chain isn’t stable enough to support a wife…And I trusted you to set me up in business? I knew I needed my head examined.”
“You made an agreement,” Trey pointed out.
“And I’ll hold you to your end of the bargain. In the meantime, however, I suppose there are some things we should work out before we go public with this act.”
“Like what?”
“Like when we supposedly met. How long we’ve supposedly been dating. When we’re supposedly getting married.”
“Maybe we could agree to leave the supposedly out of this and act as if it’s real.”
She shrugged. “If you like. I thought perhaps you’d feel more comfortable if I was continually reminding myself that it wasn’t real. But you’re the boss. Which reminds me—you said the photo crew had already started working with Caroline and Corbin as the models. How are you going to explain the sudden change?”
“Corbin’s been called out of town on business.”
“Really?”
“No, but I expect he’ll decide to make himself scarce until I’ve cooled off enough not to kill him.”
Darcy sat back in the booth seat and looked him over thoughtfully, her lips pursed.
“What?” Trey asked.
“I was just noticing this violent streak in you. First you threaten Joe, who might be a nuisance but is certainly nothing more. And even though Corbin sounds like the worst kind of bad guy—”
“I didn’t threaten your pal Joe. You’re the one who suggested if he had another beer he’d be threatening me. I was merely commenting that I’m perfectly able to take care of myself if he does. And where Corbin is concerned, I was talking about what he’s thinking just now—that if he lies low for a while, it’ll all blow over. Personally, I’d much rather send him to jail, and then ruin him when he finally comes out, than to actually end his miserable existence.”
“Oh, that’s comforting.”
“Good,” Trey said. “Glad we got that settled. So after your parents died, it was just you and Dave? No wonder he pulled the parent act, telling you to be careful who you dated. And that must be why he never talked about having a little sister, either. He felt responsible for you.”
Darcy smiled. “Or else he didn’t trust his frat brothers. I wouldn’t know which it was. But that’s all ancient history. When are we supposedly…”
He wagged a finger at her.
“Oh, all right. When are we getting married?”
A cold trickle edged down Trey’s spine. It made him sit up just a little straighter.
“What’s the matter?”
Trey shook his head a little and smiled. “Nothing. Just for an instant there, I had the same sensation I felt one night right before I realized I was being stalked by a mugger.”
“Thanks very much. I love being bracketed with muggers.”
“Don’t take it personally. It’s just a tingle—a sense of danger lurking. My grandmother used to say someone was walking over her grave.”
“Now there’s a cozy thought for you. What happened with the mugger?”
“Well, I didn’t marry him,” Trey said calmly.
“So we can assume it’s not quite the same feeling after all? Good. You were going to tell me when the wedding’s going to be.”
“Since I don’t plan to put the event on my calendar, I don’t see why we have to set an actual date.”
“You are a skittish one, aren’t you? Because people will ask when the wedding is, that’s why—and if you don’t have an answer, they’ll think it’s odd. And then they’ll expect to be invited—when it comes up to the time when the invitations should go out, they’ll be hurt if they don’t receive one. It won’t occur to them to think that no one else has been invited, either.”
“I hadn’t thought about it quite that way.”
“Well, of course you hadn’t. Since you’re planning to wrap up this ad campaign right at Christmas, let’s set the date for Christmas Eve.”
Trey frowned. “Wouldn’t that look suspicious? I mean, right on the holiday?”
“It’s a great excuse for keeping the whole thing small. We can say that we’re inviting just a few people and having the ceremony at a time when the few relatives I have will be home for the holidays.”
“Will they be? Your relatives, I mean—home for the holidays.”
“Probably not, but it’s still a good explanation for why we’re not sending hundreds of invitations.”
Trey shook his head. “I don’t know. Society’s apt to ask what we’re hiding—especially after the big splash all the way through the engagement.”
“After sharing all of that with the public, we’ll tell them we deserve a little privacy. Besides, the fewer invitations you actually send, the fewer people you’ll have to notify when you call it off at the last minute. Why invite the world and then have to phone them all to cancel? Why draw attention to the fact that you’re not carrying through with your plans?”
“We could just set the date for sometime next year, and not bother with invitations at all.”
“And exactly what would be the point of the ad campaign if it just trickles off with a vague promise of a wedding to be held some indefinite time in the distant future?”
Trey rubbed his jaw. “You’re saying the campaign needs a climactic moment, so to speak.”
“All ad campaigns do. At the least, you don’t want it to have an anticlimactic moment.”
“All right, you’ve convinced me. Christmas Eve it is. I suppose that does make everything easier. Holly and red velvet for the bridesmaids—”
“That would be such a cliché,” Darcy said. “Every woman in the city would see that one coming. I hope your ad department people are more creative than you are.”
“Thanks,” Trey said.
“But then they must be,” Darcy said kindly, “because they’ve kept the stores in business for a hundred years. Right? How many stores do you have?”
But she didn’t seem to be listening for an answer. She looked past him just as he opened his mouth to reply, and he watched her eyes widen. The sense of danger trickled down his spine again. It was odd that he hadn’t thought of his grandmother’s old saying in years, only to find himself contemplating it twice within a few minutes. So what was it this time?
“What’s up?” he asked. “Has your pal Joe finally consumed enough liquid courage to challenge me?”
“He’s not my pal, he’s Dave’s.”
Trey looked over his shoulder. Three paces from the table, Joe stopped almost in midstep. For a moment an internal war showed on his face, and then he turned on his heel and shuffled away.
“Very impressive,” Darcy said. “Cowing him like that without uttering a word.”
“Oh, you should see them run when I’m wearing a tie.” He kept his voice dry. “If I actually pull the knot loose to get ready for action, you can hardly get out of their way, they scamper so fast.”
She nodded. “You should have told me that making you give up your necktie was about the same as taking a cop’s gun away from him. Look, I’ve pretty much lost my appetite, and as long as we’ve got the important things settled—”
“You’d like to get back to that will you were struggling with.”
She sighed. “Something like that.”
At the door of the cottage, he held out a hand for her key, but Darcy ignored him and unlocked the door herself. “I’ll meet you at the store in the morning, then,” she said.
It was so plainly a dismissal that Trey had to smile. What did she expect, that he’d try to force his way in and stay the night just so he just could take her to work with him the next morning?
He wondered idly whether seducing her would be worth the trouble. Probably not, he decided. This woman was dangerous enough without taking her to bed and giving her all sorts of new ideas.
