Mission: Irresistible (23 page)

“We’re going to the zoo?”

“Uh-huh.”

He parked the car, paid the entry fee, and they went inside. Cassie kept glancing at him, torn in two conflicting directions. Part of her wanted to break down and tell him everything Phyllis and Ahmose had sprung on her, but her ears still rang from the echo of the explosion, and she didn’t know what to believe.

It was just before noon on Thursday. The crowd was light and consisted mainly of mothers with strollers, waving juice boxes and Lunchables.

“It’s this way.” Harrison took her elbow, guided her down the narrow asphalt path toward the rear of the grounds.

“There’s nothing out here.” She hadn’t been to the zoo in a long time, but she was pretty sure they were walking away from the animal attractions.

“Special exhibit,” he said.

A howler monkey screamed, and an eerie coldness blasted down Cassie’s spine. She was still high-strung from what had just happened at Clyde’s and still feeling mistrustful.

She glanced over at Harrison.

He was sprouting a five o’clock shadow and his hair was scruffy, but he looked kinda good. And he smelled even better. Like soap and sunshine. She caught the aroma of cigar smoke on him. She liked cigar smoke. Her daddy smoked cigars when she was little.

Duane had smoked cigars too.

Well, hell, Duane had smoked a lot of things.

They had to circle around the construction zone, and just when Cassie was certain they’d reached the end of zoo property, she saw a temporary building constructed out of a tentlike material and mesh wire.

“What’s this?” she asked.

He pointed at the sign that she’d failed to notice in her paranoia, and then she remembered reading about the two-week exhibit. In fact, there were banners up all over town advertising it. She’d just forgotten.

The building was a butterfly hatchery.

Harrison opened the screen door and they scooted into a small area, where they paid a small extra fee for the attraction and were greeted by a butterfly expert who gave them a short lecture.

“Go right on through.” The perky lady guide handed them a color brochure. “Pick out a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, watch it hatch, and you get to name it. After that, walk on through to the butterfly garden. Please make sure the doors close securely behind you.”

They walked into the hatchery area where another tour guide, this one a lanky male, greeted them. The humidity was high in this area. Cassie could just feel her hair frizzing, but she soon forgot about her hair as they watched the butterflies hatch.

“Which one do you want to claim?” Harrison asked.

Cassie heard the excitement in his voice and she was surprised to discover she was excited too, watching new life uncurl into the world.

“That one.” She pointed.

“You’ve chosen Lepidoptera
Danaus plexippus.
The monarch.” The guide grinned. “You’ve made an excellent choice.”

A few minutes later, their butterfly was born.

“She’s beautiful,” Cassie breathed.

“She’ll sit on that twig for a while to pump up her wings. What would you like to name her?” the guide asked.

Cassie looked at Harrison. “What do you think?”

“There’s only one name for her.” Harrison’s eyes met and held hers. “She’s a vibrant beauty who’s only in your life for a short while. We’ll have to call her Cassie.”

“Cassie it is,” the tour guide said and entered the name in his log.

Cassie’s throat felt full and scratchy. She blinked and had to drop Harrison’s gaze.

“Step on through into the butterfly garden,” the guide said. “We’ll bring Cassie in as soon as her wings have fully opened.”

They moved into the garden ripe with lush fruit and vegetation. The climate was tropical, warm and damp, and the air was filled with all manner of butterflies.

Cassie had never seen so many of the lovely creatures. They were every color under the rainbow. Small, medium, large. Everywhere she looked she saw butterflies.

She glanced over at Harrison. Butterflies fluttered above his shoulders, landed on his head. One was even walking along the top of his ear.

“Look at you.” His eyes crinkled.

Butterflies were all over her as well. Lightly kissing her skin with their spindly legs. She giggled and then pressed a hand to her heart. “It’s so breathtaking. Thank you for bringing me here.”

“My gift to you,” he said. “To apologize for being such an inconsiderate ass.”

“You weren’t an ass. I went schizo.”

“No. You had every right to be upset with me. In my single-mindedness I did let the cellar door close on you, and I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Harry.”

“Please, forgive me. I hate to think you’re mad at me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

“You folks want a picture with Cassie?” The tour guide came in from the other room with Cassie the monarch perched on his finger.

“Yes.” Harrison nodded. “We do.”

“Give me your hand,” the butterfly wrangler tour guide instructed.

Cassie held out her hand, and he transferred the monarch onto her finger. Cassie the butterfly flexed her wings.

“Hurry,” Harry said. “She’s about to fly.”

The tour guide snapped the Polaroid picture just as Cassie the monarch took flight. Harry was smiling and the tour guide was smiling and, aw hell, Cassie the woman was gonna cry.

CHAPTER 17

H
arrison had wanted to do something nice for her, to apologize for being such a lunkhead and scaring her. But he hadn’t expected this simple trip to the butterfly hatchery to affect her, or himself, so profoundly.

“That’s the sweetest, most romantic thing anyone’s ever done for me,” Cassie said for the fifth time and stared down at the Polaroid in her hand. She’d kicked off her sandals and propped her feet on his dashboard. She had such adorable feet.

They had left the zoo and were headed down University toward I-30 in search of lunch. He wanted to find a quiet place where they could talk. They needed to hash out the significance of what had happened at Clyde’s, but Cassie still had that goofy, sentimental expression on her face, and it was starting to unnerve him. He’d wanted to make her happy. He just wasn’t sure he’d wanted to make her
that
happy.

“Obviously that creep who blew up Clyde’s house was the same one who ransacked yours. Surely there aren’t two Nike-wearing criminals causing us problems,” he said. “What I can’t figure out is why he blew up Clyde’s place.”

Cassie said nothing.

“Unless he was trying to kill us. What do you think?”

“Harry, I can’t hide my secret anymore,” Cassie said. “There’s something important I have to tell you.”

“What?” He jerked his head around to stare at her. “What secret?”

“I can’t keep this up. Suspecting you is killing me, so I’m putting my cards on the table.”

“Suspecting me? Of what? What are you talking about?”

She took a photograph from her pocket and laid it on the console between them. “I know about you and Clyde, so you can stop lying to me.”

“What?” he said for the third time, and momentarily took his eyes off the road to glance down at the picture.

It was the snapshot of him and his brother and Tom at Adam’s college graduation in Crete.

“Where did you get this?” he demanded.

“Don’t make this about me. That’s Clyde Petalonus in the background, and you denied ever knowing him before you came to the Kimbell.”

Harrison picked up the photograph and squinted at it. By gosh, she was right. It was Clyde. “I swear to you, I had no idea Clyde was in the picture.”

“And you expect me to believe that?”

“You were snooping through my apartment,” he accused. “You got this photo out of my office.”

“Yes,” she admitted.

He stared at her, stunned. He couldn’t fathom that she would violate his privacy. He clenched his jaw. “Why?”

“I’m going out on a limb by telling you this,” she said. “You don’t know how much it’s costing me to trust you.”

“No more than what it cost me to trust you.” He waved the photograph at her. “And you betrayed me.”

“Harry, I’m sorry.”

“My name is Harrison.”

She flinched. “I can understand your anger, but I had no choice. Ahmose Akvar and Phyllis told me I’d go to prison for stealing the amulet if I didn’t spy on you. There were only two sets of fingerprints on Kiya’s display case. Mine and Clyde’s. So I spied and I found the photograph.”

“And you impulsively jumped to conclusions about me.”

“It wasn’t a big leap.”

“Why did Ahmose recruit you to spy on me? What does he suspect me of?”

Cassie’s gulp was audible. “He speculates that you’re a member of the Minoan Order.”

“And you believed him?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know,” she said miserably.

“We’re going to get this straightened out,” he said. “We’re going to confront Ahmose.”

At just that moment, a customized chrome Harley zipped around them.

Harrison did a double take, unable to believe what he was seeing. “There he is! There’s Adam!”

“Where? Where?”

“On that Harley.”

“How can you tell? It zoomed by so fast, and the guy is wearing a helmet.”

“It’s the same motorcycle I saw outside the museum last night. I would bet my doctorate on it.” Harrison made an erratic U-turn. Car horns blared. He tromped the gas pedal and followed the Harley out onto the freeway.

“Hey, slow down. I like adventure, but there’s adventure and then there’s foolhardiness.”

“I’m not letting him get out of my sight.” He gritted his teeth determinedly.

They were too far away for him to get a good glimpse of the rider to see if it was indeed his brother, but Harrison knew that was the motorcycle. He changed lanes, edging out a U-Haul with New Jersey plates.

“Get back over,” Cassie shouted. “The Harley’s taking the Rosedale exit.”

Harrison obeyed, turning on his blinker and cutting sharply in front of the U-Haul, earning himself a double-whammy middle-finger flip from the driver and his passenger. Cassie blithely waved at them, smiled broadly, and called out, “Thanks for letting us in.”

“When in doubt,” she told Harrison, “assume that getting flipped the bird is just the way people say howdy wherever they’re from.”

Ah, the sunny, illogical philosophy of Cassie Cooper.

The street they drove down was littered with potholes. Vagrants squatted outside liquor stores. Many buildings were boarded up, vacant. Women in very skimpy outfits sauntered up and down the sidewalk, waving at passing vehicles.

“Don’t worry,” Cassie said, apparently not even noticing they’d entered an unsavory neighborhood. “We’ll catch up to Adam. I can still see the Harley. Wait, wait, he’s pulling into the parking lot of that bar. Lemme see.” She rolled down the window and craned her neck out of the Volvo. “The place is called ‘Bodacious Booties.’ Hmm, is your brother into seedy strip clubs?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” he said grimly, but then again, who knew?

Nothing made sense anymore. Harrison was the quintessential reluctant hero journeying through the mythological woods with his very own, very sexy Trickster sidekick. When or how his life had started diverging wildly out of control, he could not exactly pinpoint, but all roads led right back to Cassie.

And the scary thing about it: he was enjoying the ride. Until a man in a filthy overcoat threw a brown paper bag wrapped around an empty wine bottle at his hood when he stopped for a red light.

“Asshole,” the guy swore at him.

Harrison honked his horn.

“Hey, Harry, don’t get so upset. It wasn’t anything personal. The guy was aiming for that trash can next to the streetlight. See, there.” Cassie waved at a graffitied trash barrel positioned at the curb. “He can’t help it if he’s a bad shot.”

Harrison glanced over at the bum. The guy bared his teeth and shook a fist. Yeah, right, he was just aiming for the trash can.

Not for the first or even the tenth time, he wondered how Cassie had survived well into her twenties with those rose-colored glasses glued so firmly to her face.

He didn’t even wait for the light to change. Once he was sure no traffic was coming, he floored it through the intersection.

“Whoo-hoo!” Cassie sat up straight and grasped the armrests with both hands.
“Breakin’ the law. Bad boys, bad boys,”
she sang, the theme song from
Cops
.

He wished she’d stop making him grin at the most inopportune times. He bumped into the parking lot of Bodacious Booties and cut the engine, glancing over his shoulder to make sure the bum hadn’t trailed them from the intersection.

The chrome-customized Harley sat out front along with numerous other motorcycles. In peeling paint, the silhouette of a naked woman adorned the side of the building. The provocative beat of pole-dancer music throbbed from inside the club.

“Are you certain that’s the bike you saw Adam drive away on?” Cassie asked in a squeaky voice. She sounded as nervous as Harrison felt.

“Positive.”

He had no idea why Adam was inside this den of iniquity, but he was determined to find out. No matter how scared he might be to walk through that door.

But what to do with Cassie?

He couldn’t very well leave her alone in the car in this neighborhood. Yet the thought of taking a woman like her into a place like that shoved icicles through his veins. The men in there would be on her like wolves on a newborn lamb.

It’s up to you to protect her.

Okay. He could do this. He would do this. Adam was inside. His brother could help if things got dicey. But he had to think this through, get it right in his head so he wouldn’t make the wrong move.

Cassie, however, had different plans. Before Harrison even realized what she intended, the crazy woman was out of the car and heading for Bodacious Booties, her own bodacious booty bopping up the steps.

He leaped from the car and charged after her. Lord, she’d be the death of him. He caught her elbow just as she stepped over the threshold into the smoky, dimly lighted strip bar.

A lanky, bored woman with breasts she had definitely not been born with spun listlessly on a small stage. To one side sat three pool tables. A gaggle of guys in leather and chains stood around drinking beer, chalking their cues, and occasionally casting glances at the dancer.