Deep Autumn Heat (42 page)

Amanda’s eyes narrowed. “What do I get if you’re wrong?”

“I’ll stop bugging you about the straitjacket.”

This was a lie, but no lapsed Catholic from Chicago’s South Side was above lying for a good cause, and Cath considered her career a good cause.

Amanda leaned forward, all excitement now, and said, “Make it three and you’re on.”

The first one was easy. Cath heard the musical clang of the ticket machine dispensing change down at street level and knew it had to be the dog guy from the park, because he always took the 7:09 from Greenwich to Bank on Fridays, and he bought his single ticket from the vending machine with cash.

“Old guy in a fedora,” she said.

He came up the steps and made his way to the empty bench next to them.

Amanda inclined her head, acknowledging one down.

Next up was tricky. Normally, it would be the girl with the two-tone hair, but it was late summer, and people took vacations. The girl had been missing all week. Cath imagined her on a beach in Spain, soaking up the sun in a red bikini. What if she was back, though?

The booming laugh of Bill at the ticket window carried up the stairs. The Merry Widow,
then. Bill was a friendly guy, but he pulled out all the stops for the Widow.

“Redhead with three inches of cleavage,” Cath said.

The Merry Widow rose into view, proud bosom bobbing.

Amanda gave a low whistle of appreciation.

Cath glanced at the station’s clock and repressed a smile. She only needed one more to complete the hat trick, and you could set your watch by the next guy.

“Tall blond man in an expensive suit,
Financial Times
under his arm,” she said, then added, “Possibly a cyborg.”

Thirty seconds ticked by, and City rose into view, punctual as ever and way too good looking to be human.

Cath had a soft spot for City. From the moment she’d spotted him waiting for the train to Bank last winter, he’d intrigued her. She’d given him the nickname as a nod to his profession, because everything about him announced he worked in the City of London, the square-mile financial district at the center of the metropolis: the dignified wool overcoat and scarf he’d worn all winter, the shined shoes, the ever-present newspaper. Aristocratically remote, he was Prince Charming in a suit.

Amanda applauded, whether for her or for City, Cath couldn’t tell. She suppressed a triumphant grin and allowed herself a moment to watch him pass. He gave her his usual stiff nod, the greeting they’d long since settled on for their semi-regular encounters.

She’d never heard City talk or seen him crack a smile. He didn’t even fidget, just stood stoically in place until the train pulled up, then stared straight ahead once seated in the car. Cool as a cucumber and veddy, veddy English. At least, that’s how she imagined him when she wrote about him in her journal. She’d bet her next paltry paycheck he had a posh accent, an expensive education, and a boring job moving piles of money around. He was her polar opposite.

Still, she always kept an eye out for him. She saw City two or three mornings a week, either here or at Greenwich Park, where both of them liked to run. In motion, he was a beautiful thing, a Scandinavian god with flushed cheeks. She loved that flash of pink on his face—such an
endearing crack in his cool perfection. It made her want to muss his hair and tie his shoelaces together when he wasn’t looking, just to see what would happen.

And now he’d helped her win access to the piece she so badly wanted for the exhibit. You really had to love him.

“When can I pick that jacket up?” she asked Amanda, turning back to face her.

“Hmm?” Amanda was still staring at City. “Oh, right.” Her mouth tightened, her eyes growing cagey. “That was a good trick. How long have you been practicing?”

“First time,” she answered honestly. Far from impressive, her ability to predict who’d arrive next on the train platform was evidence of how sad her life had become. She was a people-watcher by nature, and now that she’d cleaned up her act, she had nothing better to do than make up stories about the strangers who shared her morning commute.

The saddest part was, she didn’t always take this train. If she’d run into Amanda while waiting for the 6:43 or the 7:43 instead of the 7:09, Cath still would have stood a good chance of pulling off the trick, predicting the arrival of an entirely different set of familiar strangers.

She didn’t have to tell Amanda that, though.

“You really want that jacket,” Amanda said. “It’s important to you.”

Cath stared at City’s broad shoulders beneath his suit coat and shrugged, feigning a nonchalance she didn’t feel.

Should’ve known it wouldn’t be that easy. Nothing ever is
.

“We’re friends, right?” Amanda asked, throwing an arm across the back of the bench.

They weren’t friends. They’d had a handful of mutual acquaintances a few years ago. These days, Cath pantomimed familiarity when they ran into each other around Greenwich so that she could legitimately harass Amanda for the straitjacket.

Cath didn’t have any friends. She had a roommate who didn’t like her, a socially awkward boss who did, and an empty life that revolved around her job.

“Sure,” she said, because it was what she was supposed to say.

“And you need a favor.”

Just smile and nod, Talarico
.

She tamped down her temper, refrained from pointing out that she’d just won her favor fair and square, and did as her good sense instructed.

“We’ll do a trade.” Amanda grinned, a smile that announced,
This is the best idea anyone’s ever had
. “Eric and I are going to a concert tonight at a club with his cousin. He’s in town from Newcastle for the weekend. We could really use a fourth.”

A garbled announcement of the train’s approach came over the loudspeaker, and Cath kept her expression neutral as she stood and shouldered her bag.

Christ on a crutch. She’d walked into a blind date.

For any normal woman, this wouldn’t be a problem. No one wanted to be set up with some random warm body from Newcastle, of course, but spending an evening being hit on, ignored, or bored out of her skull ought to have been a fair exchange for getting her way.

For Cath, though, Amanda’s proposal was worse than a problem. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

She hadn’t been on a date in two years. No concerts, no bars, no men. These were the rules that set New Cath apart from her irresponsible predecessor—the restrictions that kept her from making the kind of mistakes that had necessitated the creation of New Cath in the first place.

Cath didn’t want to break the rules. She
needed
the rules.

But she needed that straitjacket more. It would be a coup for the exhibit, which meant it would win Judith’s gratitude, and Judith’s gratitude was Cath’s ticket into a permanent curatorial position.

She had to do it.

“Sounds like fun,” she said, her cheerful tone the first of many frauds the evening would no doubt entail.

Surely she could spend one night with a guy in a club without doing anything she’d regret.

Too bright.
Way
too bright. Cath buried her face in the pillow with a moan, trying to shut out the morning light. She must have forgotten to close the curtains last night.

Head pounding, she reached for the glass of water she always kept on her bedside table, but her fingers scrabbled through empty space.

No water.

Further flailing of her hand produced no bedside table. Huh.

With a groan, she cracked her eyes open and turned her face just far enough to bring the wooden corner post of a headboard into focus. A very nice hardwood headboard. Cherry maybe. Edwardian, she’d guess.

Not hers.

Shit.

She rolled over and surveyed the room, a white cube with sparse furniture—just the bed, a massive wardrobe, and an antique chair upholstered in gold brocade. Above it hung an enormous painting of a smiling girl with one arm around a dog. Cath didn’t recognize the artist, but the piece was excellent. Whoever lived here had taste. Money, too, if the furniture was anything to go by.

She sat up, wincing as she waited for the hangover judge to pass his sentence. Headache: check. Queasy stomach: check. But neither was debilitating. Certainly, neither was going to give her as much trouble as the fact she had no idea whose bed she was in.

She ran a hand through her hair, and the soft cotton of a man’s oversized white shirt brushed her cheek. Drawing the collar away from her neck, she peeked inside, then let out a breath in relief. At least she still had her bra and panties on. Maybe this wasn’t as bad as it seemed.

Bad enough, though, Mary Catherine. Bad enough
.

Unwilling to subject herself to a lecture in the voice of her dead mother, and not quite ready yet to face finding out what—or, more to the point, who—lay beyond the closed door, Cath sank back into the pillows and squeezed her eyes shut, making a polite request of the universe to remove her from this situation and put her somewhere else. Anywhere else. Aspen would be nice.

Nothing happened.

Damn it, she didn’t want to be
here
. She’d been here before, and she’d sworn she was never going to wake up in the wrong bed again. When her mother died, she’d made up her mind to be a better person. She’d planned to prove to herself and whatever was left of Mom, ghost or spirit or what-have-you, that she could pass as an upstanding human being. Mary Catherine Talarico 2.0 paid her bills reliably, drank rarely, worked her fingers to the bone, and, most important, avoided men like the plague.

Yet here she was. New Cath had obviously taken a pretty catastrophic fall off the reform wagon. The question was, how?

A sense memory from the night before offered itself up: her hand wrapped around a cocktail, and the pinched voice of the Blind Date saying, “Cheers.”

Oh, God, the Blind Date. The glass of wine with dinner that had turned into two glasses because the man was excruciatingly boring, some kind of engineer who worked for the Newcastle municipal council and kept quantifying everything. He’d told her what her meal was costing him to the penny and the exact number of calories in her wine, and she’d ordered a third glass for the sole purpose of spiting him.

That had been her limit for the evening, established in advance. Three glasses of wine. But three glasses of wine wouldn’t have impaired her memory or landed her in this bed. So what—

She smacked her palm into her forehead. The concert. Amanda hadn’t warned her they’d be venturing out to a club at the end of the Northern Line to listen to a very talented drag queen
sing Patsy Cline songs. If she had, Cath would’ve begged off regardless of how badly she wanted the straitjacket, because Patsy Cline made her cry. Always. The singer had been her mother’s favorite, Patsy’s smoky voice the perpetual soundtrack to rainy afternoons in the Chicago brownstone of Cath’s girlhood.

When the Patsy impersonator had launched into “Crazy,” Amanda had taken one look at Cath wiping her wet cheeks and sent the Blind Date up to the bar for a round. He’d come back with some cocktail called a K-12 that Cath had never encountered before, and she’d been too rattled to ask what was in it until afterward, when the tip of her nose went numb.

Cath turned her face into the pillow, which smelled of summer and clean cotton. She wondered how many different varieties of stupid one woman could be.

A great many, obviously, because she was here. Wherever here was.

God, she hadn’t gone home with the Blind Date, had she? What if he’d dragged her back to Newcastle, and she’d been too drunk to remember any of it?

Please, please, let this be Amanda’s spare bedroom
.

She pulled the summer-smelling comforter up over her face and willed her pickled brain to release the details of what had happened after the Drink of Doom.

Her brain gave her snapshots of a dodgy, solitary walk back to the Tube. The echoing clomp of her heels down underground staircases and over concrete hallways. The buzz of the fluorescent lights making her heart race as she wove her way toward the Northern Line. Waiting for the Docklands train at Bank, staring at her shoes and trying to breathe herself calm. The hot whoosh of stale subterranean air on her face as the train arrived. She’d been on her way home to Greenwich, alone. So how—

Oh. Canary Wharf. The evening unfurled more rapidly now. The thick jasmine perfume of the woman seated next to her making Cath’s mouth water, sour and vile. Rushing off the train before the doors could close. Later, leaning on the map kiosk, watching the strangers on the platform as her stomach settled.

A black and clawing loneliness had crept into her bones, eating the marrow and leaving
behind an ache she didn’t know what to do with. A million miles from Chicago, from anything resembling a real home, she’d been in tears, bleary and tired and fuzzy when she’d spotted City’s familiar face.

Then, his hand at the small of her back, guiding her onto another train. His keys in the lock of the flat.

Of all the guys in London, she’d gone home with City.

Cath relaxed, relieved to know whose bed she’d slept in—and to confirm she’d only been sleeping. Even drunk, lonely, and out of her head, she wouldn’t have thrown herself at City. He wasn’t her type at all. When she fell, it was for the bad apples, the unapologetic scoundrels with funny stories, wiry bodies, and battered guitar cases. Not for guys like City. Not for men who were
good
.

And she’d been watching City long enough to know he was definitely good. He was the sort who helped mothers carry their strollers down the station steps and gave up his seat on the train to anyone female, old, or less fit than himself.

Come to think of it, he didn’t sit much.

She flipped back the comforter and swung her legs over the edge of the mattress, scanning the floor for the outfit she’d worn last night. No luck, but the sight of the red wool rug brought back a sudden, dismaying image of herself sitting splay-legged on it, giggling helplessly, arms tangled up in her own shirt. She’d shouted for City to come and help her. She could still feel his hands at her rib cage, large and warm, pulling her to her feet. Unzipping her skirt. Smoothing his T-shirt over her shoulders, as impersonal as if he were dressing a child.