Distinguished Service & Every Move You Make (Uniformly Hot!) (21 page)

An inexplicable shadow crossed his face. “Maybe the tear was already there before you tried the dress on,” he said, his gaze flicking over her features. “At any rate, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” He walked back to the suitcase and she followed him out. “But I will, you know, need your help before I can return this to my client.”

“Help?”

“Repairing it.”

“You mean like sewing?”

He finished packing the dress and closed and locked the suitcase. “I mean like finding a professional to repair it.”

She twisted her lips. “I know how to sew.”

“An old wedding dress?”

“Socks.”

“Ah.”

She couldn’t help the smile that threatened. Okay, so she wasn’t exactly the domestic type. But she knew how to round up cattle with the best of them. And if you ever needed to catch a horse thief, well, she was your gal.

“Do you know of anyone in Houston?” Zach asked.

She blinked at him.

“You know, a qualified seamstress.”

She thought about it a minute. “I, um, no.”

He frowned.

“Oh, wait! I know someone. Only not in Houston. In Hoffland. That would be Miss Winona McFarland. Some say she used to be a fashion designer before she married Walt, who died a couple of years back. I hear tell that she takes in some sewing on the side to supplement her income.”

“You think she might be able to repair this?”

Mariah shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”

He looked skeptical.

“If she can’t, then she could probably recommend someone who can.”

He finally nodded. “Good. Good.” He picked up the suitcase. “I’ll go put this in my room while you finish up. Meet you in the hall, say, in five minutes?”

She nodded. She’d only need two.

* * *

“Y
OU
KNOW
, I’ve never done anything like that before,” Mariah said for the tenth time since she’d met up with Zach again outside her room. “I don’t know what got into me. I am so, so sorry.”

Zach followed her outside the hotel restaurant. “No harm done.”

Only they both knew that harm had been done. Namely to the dress, not to mention to Mariah’s self-esteem.

Every time she thought about having to ask Zach to unzip her out of his client’s wedding dress, she cringed straight down to her toes, and the little she’d managed to eat churned in her stomach.

Still, above and beyond all that, she couldn’t help but be happy that she and Zach wouldn’t be parting at the Houston airport.

Then again, maybe they would be.

She looked at him as he opened the passenger door to the rental car for the forty-mile drive to the airport in Huntsville. “Um, so I guess I’ll take the dress at Hobby and have it couriered to you when it’s repaired?” she asked.

He handed her into the car. “No. I’ll be staying with the dress, if it’s all the same to you.”

“At Miss Winona’s?”

“No. In Houston.”

“You know, you could always stay at the ranch with Papa and me.”

When she realized what she’d said, Mariah wanted to crawl under the car seat and die right then.

Okay, so it was the Texan way, being neighborly. But one did not invite a man she’d known for only a day to stay at the ranch along with her father.

She could only imagine how it looked to Zach.

Hootchie. That’s what she was. A through and through hootchie.

“Why, thank you,” Zach said. “I’ll put the bags in the trunk.”

Zach rounded the back of the car and opened the trunk.

Mariah closed her eyes and banged the back of her head against the seat. How was she going to get out of this one? She supposed she could make some sort of excuse when they reached Houston. Tell Zach she’d forgotten that her father had a cousin over, or was sick, or something equally lame. But wriggling out of the invite was even worse than the invite itself.

She felt for the bracelet she’d found snagged on the dress in her jeans pocket and sighed. Well, at least some extended time together would give her a chance to tell him about it. Not that she thought it made any difference. While she knew his client’s name was Denton Gawlick, that didn’t mean his wife hadn’t kept her maiden name. But was it Priscilla London?

She twisted her lips in contemplation. At any rate, someone named Priscilla London would never have ripped a beautiful dress like that. Priscilla London would be pretty and ultrafeminine and would know just what to do with a man like Zach Letterman.

She peeked through the back window and watched as Zach hoisted his suitcase into the trunk, then lifted the recovered one. Movement caught her eye to the left. She craned her neck to see a suspicious guy dressed in a black long-sleeved shirt and pants and a knit ski mask quickly approaching the car.

“Zach!” she called out, blindly reaching for the door handle, her gaze fastened on to the two men at the back of the car. “Look out!”

Zach raised his head, a puzzled expression on his handsome face as the masked man drew close and grabbed the case.

“What the hell?” Zach refused to release his grip on the bag.

Mariah was outside in a second, but by the time she reached the back of the car, the thief was gone and Zach was flat on his rear on the asphalt, rubbing his chin.

“Are you okay?” she asked, helping to him to his feet.

“Fine, except for the dent to my ego.” His grimace was as attractive as his grin. “Not only do you know I don’t know how to handle a gun, it appears I’m not good at sparring either.”

She smiled and checked his jaw. A fist-wide red splotch marred his smooth skin. “You would have wanted to trip him, not hit him.”

“Would that be Lesson One?”

She laughed. “If you’d like.” Her eyes widened. “Oh, no! The dress.”

Mariah visually searched the area for the thief, then started in the most likely direction.

Zach caught her. “The dress is fine.”

“What do you mean the dress is fine? Someone just stole it.”

He shook his head and reached inside the truck. “No, someone just thinks they stole it.” He popped opened the top of his suitcase. Inside lay the dress, the seed pearls sparkling in the sunlight. “I switched bags upstairs.”

“Oh.” She lifted her gaze to his handsome face. “Oh!”

He put the bag back inside and closed the trunk. “So, now will you believe that someone was following us last night?”

She twisted her lips and got into the car, waiting until he slid into the driver’s seat beside her. “If that’s the case, then the guy looking for a wedding dress at the Unclaimed Baggage Center wasn’t a coincidence, either.”

“Not if he knew which suitcase to take.”

“Hmm,” Mariah agreed. “The question is, who would want to steal it and why?”

“Jilted boyfriend?”

“Didn’t you say your clients were
renewing
their vows?”

“Jilted lover?”

She curved her fingers around his arm then lay her head against his shoulder. “I hope Miss Winona’s going to need some time to fix that dress, because you, Mr. Letterman, are going to need an awful lot of training in the art of private investigating.”

“Hey, I switched the bags.”

She smiled up at him. “Yeah, that you did, didn’t you?”

He curved his other hand over hers, sending a jolt of awareness rippling through her bloodstream.

What went unsaid was the rest of the agreement they’d made last night. That in return for her helping him to become a P.I., he was going to train her on how to be sexy.

Just thinking about it made Mariah hot all over.

7

“Y
OU
REALLY
SHOULD
have reported your bag stolen,” Mariah was saying from where she took the seat behind her desk. Zach noticed the way she checked it for dampness, then glanced at the ceiling. The hole that had been there the previous morning was now patched up, the plaster whiter against the remainder of the ceiling. She frowned and sat down.

“To whom should I have reported the incident?” he asked. “The police? We would have missed our flight. The hotel? They would have claimed no responsibility.”

At any rate, he didn’t have anything in the bag that wasn’t replaceable. Two changes of clothes, underwear, his toothbrush and an array of books on private investigating. The rest of his things were in his house in Indiana. As soon as he found a temporary apartment in Midland, he planned to fly back to Indiana to retrieve more of his personal items and clothing to see him through his stretch in Texas.

“They might have caught the thief,” Mariah pointed out.

“If we’re right in our assumptions, then the thief wasn’t from there, anyway. In fact, he may have been on the same flight back to Houston as us.”

Mariah grimaced. “Yeah, I thought about that, too. You think it was the old geezer in 15B?”

“I’d put my money on the blonde in 25C.”

That got a smile from her, which was a rare occurrence since he’d caught her wearing the Gawlick wedding dress earlier that morning. The change in her demeanor made him feel guiltier than hell for having torn the dress and allowed her to believe she had done it. He hadn’t intended for things to go down that way. Still, somehow she seemed more preoccupied than just mildly embarrassed, a state that seemed to increase after her impromptu invitation to stay at her father’s ranch. Presumably with her.

The mere thought of spending more private time with her was enough to make him almost uncomfortably aroused.

If she did regret the hasty invitation, he wasn’t going to make it easy for her to back out. The truth was, he wanted to be around Mariah Clayborn for as much as time as he could shake out of the deal. Yes, it was the sex. But there was something else there. Something that emerged as a mystery to him, a mystery he wanted to solve. Not just about the sexy woman herself, but his inexplicably insatiable desire for her. And it was something that left him just wanting to be in her company whether they had sex or not. He wanted to unlock all of her secrets. Find out the name of her first-grade teacher. Know what her favorite color was.

Mariah frowned then blinked up at him, her cheeks instantly coloring. “What’s Gawlick’s wife’s name?”

Zach raised his brows. “Why?”

She averted his gaze and shrugged. “Just curious.”

“Peggy Sue.”

She looked thoughtful for a moment. “Peggy wouldn’t happen to be short for Priscilla, would it?”

“I’d say no.” He squinted at her, sensing she wasn’t telling him something. “May I use your phone?” He indicated the empty desk across from her.

“Oh. Sure, go ahead. Nobody else is using it.” She took a deep breath and attacked some papers on top of her desk. “Where in the blue blazes is George anyway?”

“Lunch?”

“Is it that late already?” She glanced at her watch. “Of course. Lunch. How could I forget? Lord forbid George should arrange to eat something here while I was away.”

Zach chuckled then picked up the receiver on George’s desk and dialed Jennifer Madison’s number in Midland. When she picked up, it sounded as if things hadn’t let up any since he’d left. He explained the situation to her, promised to call Gawlick to keep him informed, then broke the connection, his mind still on Mariah’s curious questions moments before.

When he’d driven out to Denton Gawlick’s impressive estate in Odessa, he’d done so without reservations and with the sole purpose of making contact with the client and reassuring him he would get the job done. Since the dress was wanted for vow renewal, he hadn’t been surprised to find Denton and his wife in their fifties. He would have been surprised if they were in their twenties. But once he’d gotten a look at the dress itself, alarm bells went off.

He turned and watched Mariah balance the telephone receiver between her chin and shoulder and rifle through some papers. Her brow was creased in concentration and a smile was nowhere to be found, but he still found her completely irresistible. He scratched his chin, trying to recall what Gawlick had told him.

“Peggy Sue found the dress in Boston and just had to have it. She won’t go through with the ceremony without it. Do you know how much cash I have buried in that ceremony?”

Peggy Sue had a sweetly polite disposition…and she was too large to fit into the dress.

On the other hand, the dress had fit Mariah to perfection.

He leaned on the corner of the desk and crossed his arms over his chest, wondering just where in the hell that thought had come from. It seemed the ongoing case of the missing wedding dress was making him hear wedding bells all over the place. Bells he had no intention of heeding.

Mariah finished her call, then scribbled something down on a notepad. The telephone rang again. She automatically moved her hand to pick it up, then glanced at the caller display. Her hand froze before she snatched it back and used it to smooth down the soft cotton of her
T-shirt over her flat abs.

The ex. Zach didn’t have any doubt that’s who she was avoiding.

He considered the puzzle that was Mariah. Yesterday he’d guessed that she was more embarrassed than upset that her ex-boyfriend had become engaged to someone else mere days after they’d stopped seeing each other. Yet in Alabama she’d tried on the Gawlick wedding dress. Could it be that she had hoped to marry the ex? The thought was unsettling. Especially coming as it did on the heels of their explosive night together.

The thought of Mariah carrying a torch for someone else ignited other feelings in him, as well. Jealousy being front and center. That thought shocked him solely because he couldn’t recall ever being jealous of any of the women he’d dated. Not that he and Mariah were dating. Was that why the big, green-eyed monster was paying him a visit now?

“You want to catch some lunch?” he asked, breaking the silence that ensued after the phone had stopped ringing.

She blinked at him. “We just got here.”

He grinned. “Yes, I know. But we
are
here. And I was hoping you’d show me some of Houston’s eateries. Then we could take the dress in for repair.”

She blinked at him again, appearing not to know how to respond. As if of its on accord, her gaze skimmed him from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. If the deepening of her flush was anything to go by, he’d guess that food was the farthest thing from her mind just then—making it the same with him. Need snaked through his groin until he virtually throbbed with it. He looked through the same door she had earlier, seeing that the back room was empty and had lots of tabletops they could make use of.

But that wouldn’t serve his purpose. Because he wanted to go on a date with Mariah Clayborn.

* * *

L
UNCH
.

Mariah swallowed hard, thinking that after the morning’s, not to mention last night’s, events, she wanted to find a little space to come to terms with everything. She wanted familiarity. To put everything back in order.

Unfortunately she had the feeling that nothing would be normal again. And since gaining space would mean sending Zach to a hotel, she wasn’t willing to go that far, either.

She rubbed her forehead, then pushed her bangs back. She felt so…sizzlingly aware of the man standing across from her looking like temptation incarnate. So confused. So damn…conflicted.

A desperate part of her wanted to send him on his way. Tell him to go shopping to replace the items that were stolen from him. At the same time she was thinking that he was about the same height as George, though wider through the shoulders and chest, and George could probably lend him a couple pairs of jeans or something until he flew back to Midland.

She was filled with the sudden desire to bang her forehead against the desk in the hope that it would shake her thoughts straight.

“After that large breakfast, I’m not very hungry right now,” she said quietly.

His eyes twinkled at her as if he was aware of everything she’d just been thinking.

Mariah fidgeted, nearly sighing in relief when George came through the front door, a takeout bag from a Tex-Mex place up the street in his hand.

“You’re back,” he said to Mariah. “Nice to see you again, Zach.”

“Same here,” Zach said.

Mariah looked at her cousin. She’d been in the office for at least twenty minutes. It didn’t take twenty minutes to pick up takeout. “Anything interesting happen while I was in Alabama?”

“Nope.” George rounded his desk and sat down.

“No one called with leads on the Thompson case?”

“Nope.”

“No new clients?”

He seemed to hesitate. “Nope.”

Mariah supposed she should be glad. Had a new client dropped in, or one of her feelers come back, George probably would have mucked it up anyway.

She scanned the paperwork on her desk, none of it looking particularly urgent, and none of it capable of grabbing her attention. She noted Zach was watching her with one of those strikingly handsome half grins on his face. She suddenly had difficulty swallowing.

She grabbed her purse and got up. “George, hold the fort down for me, will you? I’m going to take Zach out to the ranch.”

“The ranch?” George said, his brows rising as he looked between her and Zach.

“Yeah, he’s going to be staying with Papa and me for a day or two.” She didn’t think it necessary to go into detail about how she’d nearly destroyed a client’s property and that was the reason Zach was stuck in town. “Oh, and you wouldn’t happen to have any clothes you could let Zach borrow, would you? Someone lifted his bag in Alabama.”

“Sure. I’ll bring something by the ranch later.”

“Good.”

She avoided meeting her cousin’s gaze again, not wanting to see the speculative gleam in his eyes. Let him think what he wanted. Only she had to know that she’d never invited anyone to stay out at the ranch with her. The men she had dated before had already known her father, so there had been no need for introductions.

Oh boy, what was she getting herself into?

“You ready?”

Zach’s grin told her he was. Only it seemed to indicate he was ready for much more than she was willing to consider in present company. In fact, it would be a good idea if she just avoided the whole topic altogether since they were going out to the ranch. Her father probably wouldn’t appreciate her learning the finer points of great sex under his roof.

She opened the door and Zach followed her out.

Not that she was going to tell Zach that.

She climbed into Nelly, then reached over to unlock the door for him. Why she continued to lock the moving pile of rust was beyond her, but she figured it was a good habit. After all, she wouldn’t want anyone stealing all her fast-food wrappers.

Speaking of which, she pulled out a couple of stubborn ones that had wedged into the crack of the seat, before Zach got in, then smiled at him as if he hadn’t just seen what she’d done.

“I, um, have to warn you, my father’s a pretty gruff guy.”

“I can do gruff.”

“Yeah, I bet you can.”

She had the feeling he could charm the skin off a snake with just one grin if he put his mind to it.

“Fasten your seat belt,” she reminded him. “This is going to be a bumpy ride.”

* * *

“A
RE
YOU
RIGHT
-
HANDED
or left?” Mariah asked him.

Zach squinted against the early afternoon sun to where she stood a foot away from him in a fresh pair of jeans and another T-shirt. Purple this time, with the name of a footwear company emblazoned across the front. “Right.”

“Okay then.” She slid her gun out of the back of her jeans then swiveled him to face an old wood slat fence some twenty feet away. Cans lined the top. Empty, he hoped. “You’ll want to hold the gun in your right hand, then use your left to help balance the weight and steady it.”

He held the gun out in his right and closed one eye to aim. “I can handle it pretty well with one hand.”

“You say that now.” She stepped behind him and pushed up his other hand, forcing him to hold the gun with both. “Why don’t you get used to the kick before you go around one-handed, okay?”

Kick. Now that was a word. Because, right now, feeling her soft front pressed against his back made a lot of things kick into gear. His pulse, for one, and his arousal, for two.

“Feet shoulder-width apart,” she said, positioning her booted foot between his legs and nudging his feet to the side.

Damn. He supposed he wasn’t the first guy to get turned on by a woman teaching him how to shoot a gun, but he was pretty sure he should be focusing on what she was telling him rather than how he wished the hand that rested on his hip would move a little to the right and south.

He hadn’t known what he’d expected when Mariah had brought him out to the ranch she shared her with her father. Probably that his high state of awareness would lessen a bit. But when they’d pulled up in front of the long, one-story ranch house, there hadn’t been a soul in sight. Mariah had said they’d all probably be back by five or so, but that they usually took their meals out at the ranch house where Red, a retired cowboy who now looked after the others, would have fixed dinner. When he’d asked if that’s where she ate, she’d avoided his gaze. Judging by the number of fast-food wrappers littering the inside of her truck, he’d chance a no.

The house was simple but clean, the furniture old but not ratty. There wasn’t a single plant in sight, though, and there was a silence about the place that made him want to lower his voice when he spoke. Pictures of a woman, Mariah’s mother, he guessed, were hung and set all over the house, a ghost of sorts whose eyes followed you wherever you went. He had tried to imagine a young girl in this environment and couldn’t quite capture it. While newspapers and magazines were stacked on the coffee table, they had looked out-of-date. And the only dish in the dish rack was a coffee cup. Sure, Mariah had been out of town that morning, but he’d guessed that the only addition with her presence would be another coffee cup.