The Love of a Stranger Page 7

  “I’ll still stand behind that other deal. The one I tried to make you last year after you and Charlie got divorced.”

  His prurient gaze traveled from her mouth down her body. A shiver raced from her neck to her tail bone. She crossed her arms over her breasts, wishing she had thought of underwear when she scrambled into the silk jumpsuit. “The only deal I remember is the ridiculous price you offered.”

  “You know I ain’t talking about money.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “You think about it. A lot of women around here would like to be Mrs. Kenny Miller.”

  “Then, dammit, buy one of them! And leave me the hell alone.”

  Kenny laughed, a pig-like snort more than a laugh. Vintage Kenny Miller. He walked to where she stood, towering over her. Her heart stuttered inside her rib cage.

  “You got a mouth, I tell you. That’s what I like about you. You ain’t scared. Ain’t nothin’ gets past you. You ran circles around Charlie. He never knew if he was coming or going with you. I thought it was funny.”

  Alex didn’t know the words to express her disgust, but she did know she had to get him out of her house. She had seen with her own eyes he became a ruthless animal when people defied him and he had little regard for society’s rules. She stamped to the front door again and jerked it open.

  And standing no more than two feet away was Ted’s controversial friend, Doug Hawkins.

  Chapter 7

  After climbing fourteen steps—he counted them—to reach her deck, Doug had just caught his breath when the massive front door popped open and Alex stared at him with a blank expression. He had figured she would be surprised by his visit, but he hadn’t expected her to be speechless. Hadn’t she seen his headlights or heard him drive up? “Hi. Ted asked me—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, she grabbed his arm and pulled him into the house. “You’re late. I was expecting you to get here earlier.”

  Hunh? He thought he detected a tremor in her voice.

  She leaned out the doorway, made a 180-degree visual sweep of the outdoors, then stared at his pickup, which he had parked in the upper driveway beside a red RAM dually. Then she turned her attention back to him. “I appreciate your doing this work,” she said. “Did you bring the contracts? The maps?”

  Contracts? Maps? He hesitated a few seconds, looking past her shoulder to his left, into a lighted office. A man—a big man whose appearance said “blue collar”—stood just inside the room, his hands jammed against his hips.

  Doug shot her a sidelong look as she grasped his arm and urged him toward the office. Wondering what he had interrupted, he sought a signal in her eyes. He saw nothing, but as tightly as she appeared to be strung, he played along with the charade she had drawn him into. “Uh, well, they’re in my truck. Want me to get them?”

  “No,” she blurted too quickly. “No, just come in.”

  One step into the office and he could feel the tension in the air, thick as syrup. Oh yeah, she was afraid of something. Doug eyed the big dude, calculating if he could be the source of her fear. A little on the far side of forty, well over six feet tall and closer to three hundred pounds than two, the guy was big enough to terrorize a riot squad. He could break a 130-pound woman over his knee. He smelled of cologne and his face had the shine of a fresh shave, so clearly, he had dressed up for this visit.

  She made no attempt to introduce them, but the man offered a right hand the size of a baseball mitt. “Kenny Miller,” he said. “I hear you’re a cop moved up from California.”

  Remembering small town life from his boyhood, Doug didn’t even wonder how a perfect stranger knew that. He shook hands.

  Before he could say so much as his name, Alex spoke sharply to Miller. “Our conversation’s over.” She released Doug’s arm and sailed out of the office to the front door and swept it open.

  The big dude got the message, but took his time sauntering to the door. Small black eyes hard as lumps of coal moved over her body in a way meant to insult her and Doug felt an urge to throw a coat around her. A derisive snort came from the guy’s wide, lipless mouth. He stopped in the doorway and pushed his big square face close to hers. “You’re wrong, blondie. This ain’t over by a long shot.”

  A threat. And from the anxiety Doug saw in Alex, it could be a serious one.

  She didn’t say good-night, just held the door open and stared after Miller as he made his exit. Heavy footsteps clomped across the wooden deck, then down the stairs. A diesel engine, the red dually’s no doubt, fired with a clatter and she slammed the door so hard Doug feared its cut-glass panes might fall to the floor.

  She stamped back into the office straight to one of the tall two-over-two windows and looked out, watching the taillights descend the driveway. From where he stood, Doug, too, could see their red glow. He kept one eye on them and one on her, reminding himself he had already judged her to be unpredictable.

  Doug didn’t think he had interrupted a lover’s quarrel. The sleek-looking Miz McGregor didn’t seem the type to take up with the man who had just left. Still, appearances sometimes deceived and hers tonight certainly did. Obviously braless in what looked like thin pajamas almost the color of her skin, she was dressed for intimate company. He would bet all the cash in his wallet that one quick slide of the zipper in front of that clingy thing and she would be bare from neck to crotch. A charge of testosterone coursed through him and he felt himself swelling inside his jeans. Jesus Christ. His dick just didn’t seem to care that he didn’t particularly like her.

  The truck’s taillights disappeared into the monster tunnel of brush halfway down the driveway. She turned from the window and confronted him, laser blue eyes boring into his. “What are you doing here?”

  Her tone would have frozen a lake and his immediate urge was to blow her off and leave, but he had gone to the trouble of braving that obstacle course called a driveway to get here. And he did feel that same mysterious pull he had felt in Ted’s office the day Ted had introduced them. He summoned a smile he hoped would melt some of the icicles. “Ted’s request. He went to a fire in Montana. He asked me to stop up and make sure you’re okay.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

  “I don’t know. Why wouldn’t you?” Dammit, she had put him on the defensive.

  “Ted’s worse than an old maid,” she snapped as she moved to the desk and clicked off a small lamp that stood on a corner.

  Wow. And she and Ted were supposed to be friends? Doug was taken aback that she continued to be a bitch even when someone went out of his way for her. “Hey, babe, don’t knock it. He’s concerned about you.”

  “No one calls me babe, Mr. Hawkins, and that’s a fact.”

  “Nobody calls me Mr. Hawkins, either. That is, nobody who’s my friend.”

  That retort had come out sharper than he intended. How had she managed to bring out his worst for the second time? He was never rude to women. He loved women. He didn’t trust any one of them as far as he could throw the average grizzly, and he had given up on them, but he wasn’t rude to them, especially well-built blondes.

  “I’m a grown woman. I do not need someone to check on me.”

  She said that as if she hadn’t just lost their little verbal skirmish. “You sure about that? You sure were glad to see me a few minutes ago.”

  She glared at him. Then cutting in front of him, she went to the larger lamp by the sofa, switched it off and strode from the office, leaving him in the dark.

  He stood a few seconds looking after her. Difficult people had always intrigued him. Independent, self-sufficient assholes who cared not an iota what other people wanted or thought about their lack of manners. He wished he had the chutzpah to be one of them. His life would be—and would already have been—so much simpler.

  He hooked his thumbs in his jeans pockets and followed her. A stairway rose up across the entry from the office, but to the left, two wide oak steps led down into a sunken living room that spanned half the front
of the house. “What’s up with the maps and contracts stuff?” he asked, stepping down onto a hardwood floor. “What kind of game was that?”

  She didn’t answer. He couldn’t tell if she hadn’t heard him or if he was being ignored. He looked up and around as they passed through soft amber light cast from several well-placed lamps in the living room. The ceiling had to be twenty feet high if it was a foot, crisscrossed by massive rough-hewn beams. Extra-tall windows made up the whole front of the house, giving the sensation of being suspended in a giant void. “Nice house,” he said.

  “Yes. It is.”

  So much for conversation.

  Through soft amber light cast from several well-placed lamps in the living room, they crossed more hardwood floor and layers of Navajo rugs. His gaze shifted from the surroundings to her ass, the firmness of which was all too evident. Yep, he couldn’t disagree with her that she was definitely a grown woman. He put her age at early thirties, but as well-kept as she appeared to be, she could be older.

  Probably spends a fortune on face grease and spa treatments, Doug thought. Los Angeles was full of such places and he knew what beauty cost. He had shared life and an apartment for a few years with a wannabe actress who thought nothing of blowing a hundred dollars on skin moisturizer instead of buying groceries.

  They made a right turn into a long kitchen. She stopped abruptly and whirled to face him. Hands planted on her hips only emphasized the curve of her breasts and the raised impressions of nipples against whatever that thin thing she had on was. As delectable as that view was, it didn’t distract him from seeing the scabs and abrasions on her hands and fingers. He still had some leftover cuts and bruises, too, but seeing hers reminded him a week hadn’t passed since the cabin fire took her ex-husband’s life.

  She made an arc around the kitchen with one arm, a peeved expression on her face. “Would you like something?”

  Now there was a loaded question. Though he could have shaved with the edge in her voice, that curvy body covered by a whisper of fabric, those bedroom eyes and plump lips were more than a man should have to restrain himself from latching onto.

  “I meant refreshment,” she added before a wisecrack could pop out of his mouth. She must have read his wicked thoughts.

  A white, yuppie-style coffee maker beckoned him from the counter. “Uh, got any coffee?”

  “I don’t know. If you can find it, you’re welcome to it.” She exited the room through a doorway on the opposite end of the kitchen.

  Doug blanked out for a few seconds. She didn’t know what she had in her kitchen? Did she expect somebody who had never been in her house to rummage around and look for coffee? She obviously wasn’t into hospitality any more than she was into friendly chitchat.

  “Okay,” he said to the empty room and instead of further analyzing the situation, he turned his attention to locating coffee.

  The kitchen was galley-type. The upper cabinets had old fashioned glass-fronted doors through which he could see only matching dishes neatly arranged on shelves. No food. He resorted to searching the lower cupboards where he found a partial small bag of Starbucks Breakfast Blend and except for a few cans of soup, not much else. He put the coffee maker together and set coffee to drip. Soon the aroma filled the room.

  While he waited for the coffee to make and her to return, he looked around. The kitchen was great, right out of one of those TV cooking shows he sometimes watched. He didn’t know the names of decorating styles, but skillful modernization hadn’t hid kitchen’s vintage flavor.

  A long white granite cooking island took up the center of the room. Above it hung a wrought-iron frame, with hooks holding well-used pots and pans. Was she a cook? Nah. Women like her didn’t cook. Those utensils must have belonged to her ex-husband. Hadn’t Ted said the guy was in the restaurant business? And hadn’t Alex herself just shown a decided disinterest in the contents of her pantry?

  From behind the breakfast bar of varnished oak that matched the floor, he could look across a dining room and one end of the living room. The décor was eclectic, but heavy toward Western. Nothing frilly. It seemed appropriate for her. She was the least frilly hundred-percent female he had ever met.

  He saw antiques, a few Indian artifacts, with pottery and baskets thrown in. Some cowboy sculptures here and there and paintings that looked like originals hanging on the walls. Cowboys and Indians. She liked American history. He did, too. Ted had said her house looked like a museum and he was right.

  From a perch on the back of a tan L-shaped sofa that could seat six or seven people, two fluffy orange cats watched him. Well, he had nothing against cats if they were friendly. The sofa appeared to be made of leather. Of course it was made of leather. This woman wouldn’t own anything less. A packed suitcase lay open on one end of the sofa. Doug couldn’t keep from wondering where she intended to go.

  The coffee finished with a gurgle. He pulled a thick white mug from the upper cabinet and poured, then carried the coffee to the windows and looked into the night. From a distance, a long haunting howl floated on the quiet air, startling him. Both cats leaped off the sofa, raced across the room and up the stairs. He heard a second howl and wondered if it could be a wolf. Callister Valley wasn’t so far from where wolves had been reintroduced a few years ago.

  The utter isolation swallowing him struck him. He could think of no woman he had ever known who would want to live in this place. Oh, sure, anyone would enjoy the house, but most females wouldn’t like being so far away from the services and the protections society offered, like police and fire departments or for that matter, neighbors. In fact, many men wouldn’t like it, either. The cantankerous Miz McGregor was, to say the least, a little eccentric.

  He gazed across the valley to see if he could spot the lights of his own house. Sure enough, he could—some ten crow-flying miles away, he estimated.

  On a table beside a big puffy chair lay a paperback book and he picked it up. A bare-chested, buffed-up guy and a stacked redhead were locked in an embrace on the front. A romance novel. Well, well, well. What did the cranky Miz McGregor’s choice of reading material say about her? He had read a few romance novels, liked the sexy ones. Were those her preference, too?

  When he started to return to the kitchen, a piece of paper on the floor near the steps down from the entry caught his attention. He made a detour, stopped and picked it up.

  Whoa! A hand-written check for $500,000, payable to Alex McGregor. And it was signed by a Kenny L. Miller. What the hell did this mean?

  Doug turned it over, then turned it back face-up and examined it closer, judged it to be authentic. Miller didn’t look like a rich man, but if he threw around half-million dollar checks, he must be. Doug’s cop mind and Alex’s earlier behavior when she opened the front door took him to thoughts of blackmail and payoffs? Both were often motives for murder.

  He carried the check to the kitchen and laid it on the cooking island, interested to see her reaction to it when she returned.

  ****

  In the bathroom, Alex stripped off her jump suit. She was furious. In the space of an hour, two men she knew only casually had seen her wearing a thin silk garment sans underwear. The hazards of having people drop in unexpectedly. Apparently an impassable driveway wasn’t enough. She should install a locked gate across her cattle guard, maybe build a moat around her house.

  She felt both relieved and aggravated that Ted’s friend had appeared on her doorstep. She didn’t know where the meeting with Kenny would have ended if the stranger hadn’t showed up when he did.

  But at the same time she saw him as a savior, she remembered that he had ogled her in an even more lascivious way than Kenny had. Kenny’s lurid stares annoyed her and she ignored them, but for some reason that could only be classified as ridiculous, under the scrutiny of Doug Hawkins, a total stranger, a giddiness had come over her. When his eyes had undressed her, all she could think of was sex.

  Despite all that, she did want him to stay a while, at least unt
il she felt certain Kenny wouldn’t return. For another undecipherable reason that had nothing to do with this stranger’s friendship with Ted, she felt safe in his company. But what was she going to do with him?

  The smell of coffee drifted from the kitchen, so he had found some. She didn’t drink coffee. She bought it only for Ted’s consumption when he came to visit and for Lucille when she came to clean. They had been the only outsiders in her home all summer.

  She armored herself in a pair of faded Levis and an oversized blue T-shirt that hung to her knees, the plainest clothing she could think of, then studied her face in the mirror. She didn’t look like a different person, but she felt like one. She hadn’t put on makeup all week or even styled her hair. For Charlie’s burial, she had simply shampooed it, combed it back and clasped it with a gold barrette at her nape. Now she brushed it vigorously, added a couple of flicks of mascara to her lashes, then a swipe of rose lipstick to her lips, all the while wondering why she was going to the trouble.

  From the hallway leading from her bedroom to the kitchen, she saw her latest uninvited visitor standing beside her favorite chair at the living room window. His back was to her. A light blue T-shirt stretched across his back. She had to admire the long triangle formed by wide shoulders and a trim waist. His knee-length khaki shorts fit well, too, over a tight bottom and long, tanned and hairy legs. He would be the same age as Ted, which put him at thirty-seven or thirty-eight. She could think of few men in that age range who didn’t have spare tires around their middles and most, for sure, didn’t have biceps that bunched when their arms moved.

  She stopped herself. She never gawked at men’s bodies. And if she ever felt a need to, she would buy a magazine.

  He turned toward her and a smile quirked one side of his mouth. “I made the coffee. Want some?”

  His voice was raspy, like he had just awakened. She had noticed it the day she met him in Ted’s office. It sounded—she hated thinking it—sexy and seductive. “I don’t drink coffee.”