The Playboy Assignment. Leigh Michaels
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later—just five minutes...
The white lace curtain on Mrs. Holcomb’s bay window next door didn’t just flutter as it usually did when anything of interest happened on the street outside. This time the lace was actually folded back, and Susannah didn’t think she was imagining the shadowy face which appeared behind the glass.
And if Mrs. Holcomb could see this very interesting conversation, so could Rita and Alison—if they happened to look out the window. And if Susannah walked into Tryad with Marc Herrington in tow, she might as well issue engraved invitations to a grilling, with herself on the barbecue spit.
She sighed. “There’s a little restaurant around the corner. How about a cup of coffee?”
“I thought you’d never ask. Shall I carry your briefcase?”
Susannah surrendered it, and pretended not to notice when Marc offered his arm. She spent the couple of minutes’ walk debating with herself. Had he always been a gentleman, or was that, too, something new? At eighteen, in the midst of a revolt against her parents’ values—a rebellion which had come a little later but no less violently than that of most teenagers—would she even have noticed such things as courtly manners?
The same waitress who had been working at breakfast hour on Monday brought their coffee, and dimpled when Marc thanked her.
Susannah stirred cream into her coffee and said, “Old times, you said. All right—you go first. What have you been up to for the last eight years? What are you working at these days?”
“I’m still in manufacturing.” Marc stretched out his hands—long fingers arched, each knuckle tensed. It was a gesture Susannah remembered seeing often, though the reason for it was less vivid in her mind. She vaguely recalled that he’d said something about the need to keep his hands flexible, for the work he did...
“Welding must be paying better these days,” she said crisply, “for you to afford to dress like that. The suit you were wearing at the funeral yesterday—”
“Did you like it? I bought it just for the occasion.”
“Is that why the funeral was delayed—to let you go shopping? Nice that you thought that highly of Cyrus.”
“I didn’t, particularly. I never met the man in my life.”
That much didn’t surprise her, but it chipped away at her original theory that Cyrus’s mysterious heir was also his son. To the best of Susannah’s recollection, Marc had had a perfectly serviceable set of parents... “I must admit I’d like to know how your mother met him.”
“I’ll have to ask her sometime. As long as we’re talking about families, how’s your daughter, Susannah?”
The question came at her like a curve ball, hanging just out of reach for an impossibly long time, taunting her. She wasn’t shocked, exactly; she’d been half expecting something of the sort. Why had he fixed on a girl? “I don’t have a daughter.”
“Really? It seemed a perfectly reasonable conclusion. A professional office probably wouldn’t provide hopscotch layouts on the front walk for clients’ children—at least, not the sort of firm yours obviously is. And since hopscotch is not only a little girl’s game, but is most fascinating to girls exactly the age yours would be...” -
“Very logical,” she admitted. “Very reasonable. And very wrong. The neighborhood girls like to play there. It’s the widest and flattest walk around.”
“A son, then?”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
Marc was stirring his coffee. “Oh, I couldn’t be any more disillusioned with you than I was eight years ago. I must admit, however, I’d like to know what happened. I expected, after you told me that you hadn’t married after all, that you’d still be trying to convince the world your child was also mine, and I’d been too much of a bum to marry you. Naive of me, wasn’t it, to think that? Of course the Northbrook Millers would figure out a neater, easier way. What was it, Susannah? A convenient miscarriage?” The spoon didn’t stop moving in concentric circles as his gaze lifted to meet hers. “A very private adoption?”
“As you pointed out yourself, it’s none of your business.”
“Perhaps I should ask Pierce.”
“He doesn’t know.”
“In that case, it might be even more interesting to compare notes.”
“Be my guest. Is there anything else you wanted, Marc?”
“Oh, I could think of a few things.”
Susannah took that with a grain of salt. “Then I doubt I’ll see you again.”
“What makes you think that?” Only mild interest spiced his voice.
She shrugged, but the gesture turned out, despite her best efforts, to be more like a shiver. What was there about his gentle, even voice that scared her so? “I assume you’ll go back to your life. There must be things you can’t walk away from.”
“You mean things like the job, the mortgage, the wife, and the kids?”
Wife? Kids? But why shouldn’t he have married? Susannah could think of no good reason.
Her gaze went straight to his left hand, cupped easily on the plastic surface of the table. He wore no wedding ring, and there was no telltale pale band where one might have rested in the past....
Marc followed her gaze. His eyes narrowed, and he stretched out his hand toward her. “So you still have wedding rings on the brain. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“I see,” she said. “The machinery you work around makes a ring dangerous. Catch it wrong, and it could tear off your finger.”
“True,” he said. “Besides, it makes a handy excuse not to wear a ring. I think you’ve misunderstood, though. I’m not going back for a while. The wife—well, you know how these things go. A break sounds like a very good idea. And as for the kids—I don’t know why you’d assume that one can’t walk out on children, Susannah, considering your own record.”
She was too numb to be shocked.
“And as far as the job and the mortgage—well, it’s such a large inheritance, you see, that neither of those things matters much just now. Or at least it should be a tidy sum, if it’s properly looked after and not left to a bunch of vultures.”
“Meaning me?” Susannah managed to keep her voice steady, but it took enormous effort.
“Now why would you jump to the conclusion that I was talking about you?” Marc’s tone was soft, almost caressing. “Right now, it just makes sense to stick around and keep my eye on things—and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
CHAPTER THREE
DESPITE the effort she’d made to convince herself that Marc woutdn‘t—couldn’t—stay in Chicago, Susannah wasn’t really surprised. It was a sizable estate. One had only to walk into Cyrus’s house to realize that.
She could imagine the impact that house had had on Marc—the gleaming furniture, the solid walnut staircase, the art on the walls...even if he didn’t care for the subjects, he must have realized the paintings themselves were far above poster quality.
She could still remember his low whistle when he’d gotten his first glimpse of the Miller’s house, on that never-to-be-forgotten weekend when Susannah had brought him home on her Thanksgiving break from college to meet her family. If her parents’ house, spare and modern and all stainless steel and glass, had evoked that sort of response, Susannah could imagine the way he’d reacted to Cyrus’s exuberant Victorian.
And, once realizing the probable worth of his legacy, of course Marc would stay, watchful and protective, until everything was settled and the cash safely in his hands. He had no reason,