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The waitress greeted them with a smile. “Table for two?”
Anamaria gave him another glance, quick but seeing more, he’d bet, than others saw in twice the time. “Are you going to skulk nearby if I don’t invite you to share my table?”
“Calloways don’t skulk.” Then he added, “Yes, I am. We’ll take a table in the back room, Carmen.”
Anamaria opened her mouth as if to object, glanced around the dining room, then closed it again. Ellie’s was a busy place, the main room nearly full, and more than a few people were watching them. Wondering who she was. Wondering what he was doing with her.
Carmen led them to a wrought-iron table on the glassed-in back porch, set out menus and silverware, then left to get iced teas for them both. Anamaria chose the chair facing out. He sat where he had a great view of brick wall and her.
“How many brothers do you have?” she asked as she spread a white linen napkin over her lap.
For a moment, he closed his eyes, aware of her slow, even breaths and that sweet, exotic fragrance, of warmth and desire and need. When he opened them again, she was giving him a level look. “I was projecting the answer. You didn’t get it? Some mind reader you are.”
“I don’t read minds. I read futures.”
Reaching across the table, he held out his hand, palm up. “Read mine.”
“No.”
“Why not? Am I not gullible enough?”
“Because you’re a skeptic. I don’t waste my time on skeptics.”
“How convenient, to deal only with people who already believe your mumbo jumbo.”
She studied him a moment, a cynical smile curving her lips, then opened the menu and turned her attention to it. One instant she was focused entirely on him; the next, she wasn’t. The difference was as obvious as turning off a light.
Carmen returned with the teas, delivered a loaf of warm dark bread and soft butter, then left with their orders. Anamaria continued to ignore him. He didn’t like it.
“Three,” he said at last. “Rick lives in Atlanta, Mitch in Mississippi and Russ here. We look alike, we talk alike, we sometimes act alike, but I’m the charming one.”
Finally she shifted her attention back to him. “I doubt everyone who knows you would agree.”
“Maybe their wives would argue the fact.” Rick’s wife, Amanda, certainly would. Jamie might adore him, and Mitch’s wife, Jessica, hardly knew him, but Amanda tolerated him only for Rick’s sake. Robbie couldn’t even blame her. He’d given her plenty of reason to despise him.
“Why aren’t you married?” she asked.
“How do you know I’m not?”
She nodded toward his left hand and the bare ring finger. He held out his hand, fingers spread, gazing at it. “Rumor has it that my old man had so much practice at removing his wedding band that he could do it with just his thumb, and so quickly that a prospective one-night stand never even noticed his hand moving.”
“I bet he was your hero.”
“I hardly remember the bastard. I was five when he dropped dead of a heart attack. I never missed him.” He sounded callous but didn’t care. “Tell me about your father.”
She gave another of those cynical smiles. “Don’t disappoint me and tell me you didn’t check out my birth records.”
He shrugged. “Mother—Glory Ann Duquesne. Father—Unknown. That’s officially. Unofficially, did you ever meet him?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Did you ever miss him?”
She waited until Carmen had served their meals to answer. “The last marriage in the Duquesne family took place more than two hundred years ago, and the only children born since then have been girls with gifts. Men have little place among us. We have no husbands, brothers, uncles or sons, no fathers or grandfathers. We don’t miss what we don’t have.”
“So your only use for men is to bed them and forget them.” Somewhat similar to his own policy for women. He didn’t indulge in one-night stands; that would be too much like his father. He preferred pleasant, short-term relationships that ended amicably on both sides. In a town like Copper Lake, with its twenty thousand or so citizens, the “amicable” part was important.
“Not forget,” Anamaria disagreed. “The Duquesne women love well.”
But temporarily. It sounded as if the two of them were a good fit, on that issue, at least. But the Duquesne women, apparently, made little to no effort to avoid pregnancy. Robbie made every effort. Adults might not owe each other anything after an affair ended, but a baby…that changed everything.
“Are you planning to move back to Copper Lake?”
She shook her head.
“Sell the house?”
Another shake.
“Come back in another twenty-three years for a visit?”
She speared a tiny tomato and a chunk of cucumber on her fork and dipped them in dressing before shaking her head. Her earrings, silver chains that cascaded from a diamond-shaped shield, caught the sun, winking as they swung gently against her neck. “Who knows? I can’t tell you what I’ll be doing twenty-three days from now, much less twenty-three years.”
“Not a wise thing to say for a woman who claims to read the future.”
“Not my own future. I rarely see anything about myself or people I’m close to.”
“What else do you do? Do you know who’s on the phone before you look at the caller ID display? Can you pick lottery numbers?” He made his voice Halloween-spooky. “Do you see dead people?”
A stricken look crossed her face, shadowing her eyes, chasing away the easy set of her mouth and making her lower lip tremble just a bit until she caught it between her teeth.
Robbie felt like an ass. He’d forgotten that her mother had died, that seeing her dead in her casket was likely the most traumatic event in Anamaria’s life.
“I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly. “I didn’t mean…”
After a moment, she smiled, a quiet, resigned sort of gesture. “It’s all right. I should have expected…”
What? Tactless questions from him?
“I read emotions. I do numbers and charts. I read palms. I have visions. But people are always fascinated by communication with the dead, even nonbelievers. Everyone’s hoping that Grandma will pass on the location of a fortune no one knew existed or that Grandpa will tell them where the casket of priceless jewels is hidden.”
“Do they ever?”
She shrugged, unaware that the tiny action made his fingers itch to touch her. To stroke over her skin. To smooth the cotton of her shirt. To brush her neck the way the earrings did.
Or maybe she wasn’t so unaware, he thought as something came into her eyes. Heat. Intimacy. Mystery. Though a person didn’t need to be psychic to see he found her damned attractive.
“If any of Mama Odette’s clients ever struck it rich as a result of her communing with the spirits, I’m not aware of it.”
“For a seer, you seem to be unaware of a lot of things.”
If his comment annoyed her, she didn’t let it show. She was cool, serene. He liked cool and serene.
They ate in silence for a few moments, until voices became audible in the hallway that led to the room. One of them was a waitress; the other belonged to Ellie Chase. She and Tommy had had an on-again, off-again thing that started about five minutes after she’d moved to Copper Lake. They seemed pretty good together, except that Tommy wanted to get married and have kids, and Ellie didn’t. Occasionally, Robbie wondered why. Even he wanted kids someday.
Fair-skinned, blue-eyed kids with blond hair, he thought with a glance at Anamaria. He’d always been partial to blondes—icy, well-bred, blue-blood, who could fit into his life as if they’d been born to it.
Conversation finished, Ellie rounded the corner. “Hey, Calloway, who let you in here?”
He shifted in the chair to face her. “Don’t bitch, Ellie. I’m one of your best customers.”
“I’ve noticed. All that expensive schooling, and you can’t even put a sandwich together.”
“Yeah, but I work miracles in the courtroom.”
She crossed the small room, her hand extended. “Hi, I’m Ellie Chase.”
“Anamaria Duquesne.” Anamaria took her hand, a quick shake, a light touch, but more than she’d offered Robbie so far. “This is your restaurant?”
“Every table, every brick and every mortgage payment.”
“The food is great.”
“Anamaria’s in the restaurant business in Savannah,” Robbie said, pulling a chair from the next table so Ellie could join them.
“Really? Are you in the market to expand? I’m giving serious thought to selling this place and running away.”
“She threatens to do that about once a month,” Robbie said.
Anamaria smiled as if she knew the feeling. “So does Auntie Lueena. I work for her, so the headaches are hers. I just show up ready to do what she tells me.”
“I love my job. Really, I do.” Ellie sounded as if she were trying to convince herself, but Robbie knew it was so much bull. She’d worked damn hard to make the deli a success and had only recently begun the expansion into a full-service restaurant. She did love her job. “What kind of place does Auntie Lueena have?”
Anamaria smiled again, soft, affectionate. He wondered if that smile was ever spurred by anyone other than family. Friends—he was sure she had them. Boyfriends—he was sure she had them, too. Plenty of them. All that she could handle. “It’s a small family diner. Soul food. Comfort food. She’s been in the same location for thirty years and has had the same menu for twenty-five.”
“And you do a little bit of everything?”
“Wait tables, run the register, wash dishes, cook, bake.”
Robbie had trouble envisioning her in a hot, busy kitchen, hands in steaming water, prepping vegetables, stirring pots, skin dusted with fine white flour. She was too exotic, too sensual for such mundane activities. She should spend her time lounging on a beach somewhere, wearing beautiful clothes, shopping in expensive stores for diamonds and rubies and emeralds to show off against her luscious skin.
Ellie didn’t seem to notice either her exoticness or her sensuality. He supposed, her being a woman, too, that was a good thing. “You ever want a place of your own?”
“No. Not at all.” But Anamaria didn’t say what she did want. A full-time career telling fortunes? Or did “seeing” people’s futures full time require more ingenuity than she possessed? He imagined that on a regular basis it would drain the creative well pretty dry.
“Do you come from a restaurant background?” Anamaria asked.
“No, I—” Distracted, Ellie looked in the direction of the hall, where, an instant later, Tommy appeared around the corner. Right now, judging by the look he wore, if they weren’t off-again, they would be soon.
“You ought to put the boy out of his misery and marry him,” Robbie murmured.
“Worry about your own love life,” she retorted, rising easily from the chair. “Anamaria, it was nice meeting you. Come back soon. I’d love to talk more.”
She met Tommy in the narrow aisle halfway across the room. She stopped; he stepped aside. Their gazes held for a moment, their expressions equally blank, then she moved on.
Definitely off-again. Great. Robbie preferred his buddies to be happily attached or happily unattached. Anything in between was too big a pain in the butt.
Tommy watched until Ellie turned the corner out of sight, took a deep breath, then covered the last few yards to the table. “I called the dock and they said your boat was still in its slip, so I figured you’d be here.” He tossed a manila envelope on the table. “The papers we talked about.”
The case file on Glory Duquesne’s death, complete with photographs. Aiming for relaxed, Robbie slid the envelope off the table and onto his lap. “Thanks.” He gestured toward the chair Ellie had just vacated, but Tommy shook his head. “Anamaria Duquesne, Detective Tommy Maricci.”
One corner of her mouth quirked at his emphasis on Tommy’s title. “Detective Maricci,” she said with a regal nod.
He cocked his head to one side, studying her a moment before saying, “You look familiar. Have I arrested you before?”
Chapter 3
Anamaria couldn’t stop the laughter that bubbled free. “Not yet. But there’s still time.” Mimicking Robbie, she waved one hand lazily at the empty chair. “Please join us, Detective.”
This time he did so, swinging the chair around to straddle it. “You can call me Tommy.”
He was about Robbie’s age, an inch or two shorter and probably twenty pounds heavier, all muscle. Black hair, dark eyes, olive-skinned, with a stubble of beard on his jaw that gave him a slightly disreputable look. He didn’t need the badge or the pistol on his belt for his air of authority; he came by it naturally.
The sorrow hovering around him, though, wasn’t natural. A new hurt having to do with Ellie Chase, an old one connected to his mother. Anamaria couldn’t tell if Mrs. Maricci was dead; she wasn’t sure Tommy knew himself. But wherever she was, in this life or the next, she wasn’t here and hadn’t been for a very long time.
“So you’re in the psychic business,” Tommy said.
“And let me guess—you’re in the skeptic business.”
“Nah. He’s skeptical enough for both of us.” He jerked his head toward Robbie. “Besides, my great-grandma Rosa was from the old country, and she was a big believer in the evil eye and spirits and all that. Are you setting up business here in town?”
“My visit here is nothing more than that. A visit. A break from Savannah.”
“And yet the first thing you do is call Lydia.”
Who’d told her husband, who’d told his lawyer, who’d told the local cop. “If you don’t believe me, Detective, feel free to keep an eye on me.”
He glanced at Robbie. “It might get kind of crowded.”
So Robbie had already made clear his intention of doing just that. She didn’t mind. She’d been viewed with suspicion and distrust before, and would be again. She shifted her gaze to Robbie. “And here I thought it was just coincidence running into you outside River’s Edge this morning,” she said sweetly.
“No, you didn’t,” Robbie replied bluntly. “You knew when I left your house yesterday that you’d be seeing me again.”
That she would see him, and have no regrets about him when she left. Whether that meant sleeping with him—or not—she didn’t yet know.
Whether it meant trusting him—or not—was still a question, as well.
She picked up her purse and reached for the ticket the waitress had brought with their food. Robbie slid it out from under her fingers and switched it to his other hand. She smiled faintly. She could insist on paying for her share of the meal, but there would be other, more important things to argue about than a salad and half a sandwich.
