Hoodwinked (6 page)

“Well, you do see, don't you?” she asked, with a wistful, faraway look in the green eyes behind her glasses. “That's the kind of life I wish I could live. The most adventurous thing I do in a day is to feed Bagwell a grape and risk having my finger decapitated.” She sighed. “I'm twenty-four years old, and I've never done anything risky. My whole life is like a bowl of gelatin. It just lies there and congeals.”

He burst out laughing. “What a description.”

“It suits the situation,” she murmured. “I thought coming out here to Kansas and starting over again might change things, but it didn't. I'm still the same person I was in New Orleans. I just changed the scenery. I'm the same dull stick I used to be.”

“Why do you want to climb mountains and go on safari?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Because it's there?” she suggested. “I don't know. I just want to get out of my rut. I'll die one day, and I've never lived.” She grimaced. “The most romantic thing I've ever done with a man was help change a tire.” She threw up her hands. “No man who's seen me will risk taking me out!”

He chuckled deeply. “I don't know about that. I wouldn't mind taking you out.”

She stared at him. “No. I don't need pity.”

“I agree,” he said easily. “I'm not offering any. You've got enough self-pity for two people as it is.”

She glared. “It isn't self-pity, it's reality.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. How about a movie? I like science fiction and adventure and police drama. How about you?”

She began to smile. “I like those things, too.”

“Got a newspaper?”

“No,” she groaned. “Only the weekly. I can't afford a daily paper.”

He let out a whistle. “I haven't been here long enough to get one started. Well, we can drive around and look at the billboards.”

She felt like a new penny, bright and shining. “A matinee?”

“Why not? They're wasted on kids. I hate going to pictures at night and trying to see around couples making love in the seats. The heavy breathing makes it hard to hear.”

“You cynic,” she accused, daring to tease him.

He smiled at her as he got to his feet. “What about your green friend there?”

“Bagwell, it's early bedtime for you tonight,” she told him.

“Apple,” Bagwell said and let out a war whoop when she nudged him into his cage. He began to scream.

“Now, now.” She calmed him while she cleaned his cage and gave him fresh water, seeds and a vitamin additive.

“He's a pretty bird,” Jake remarked.

“I think so. He's a lot of company, anyway,” she replied as she covered his cage. “I don't know how I could manage without him. He's sort of my best friend.”

That touched him deeply. He knew that she was rather a loner at the plant, but he hadn't realized that this was true of her private life, as well. He scowled, watching her rush around the apartment before she excused herself to change into a white sundress and tie her hair back with a ribbon.

He'd suspected her from the beginning of being involved in the problems with the Faber jet, and he still wasn't convinced that she was totally innocent. But she didn't fit the picture of a saboteur. Then he reminded himself that they rarely did. He couldn't afford to let himself get too involved with her at this stage of the game. First, he had to find out a little more about her. And what better way than to involve himself in her private life?

“I'm ready,” she said, breathless as she stopped just in front of him, almost pretty in her white spike heels, white sundress with its modest rounded neckline, and white ribbon in her hair. Despite the glasses, she wasn't bad to look at, and she had great legs. She grinned at her good fortune. Imagine, having him actually ask her out. She could find out a lot about him this way. Playing the role of superspy was making her vibrate like a spring. She was having the time of her life. It was the first dangerous thing she'd ever done, and if he really was a saboteur, it was certainly that. She had one instant of apprehension, but he smiled and she relaxed. It was just a date, she told herself firmly. She wasn't going to try to handcuff him and drive him down to police headquarters. That thought comforted her a little. She could always tell Mr. Blake what she found out.

“Let's go.”

He put her in the pickup truck, noticing that she didn't complain about the torn seats and the cracked dash. She smiled at him as if he'd put her in the front seat of a Rolls-Royce, and he felt a twinge of conscience. He knew for a fact that none of the women in his world would have smiled if he'd asked them to go on a date in this ancient, clattering iron
rattrap. But Maureen looked as if she were actually enjoying it, and her smile wasn't a suffering one at all.

“You don't mind the pickup?” he fished.

She laughed. “Oh, not at all! My dad used to have one. Of course, it was in a lot worse shape than this one. We went on fishing trips in it and threw our tackle in the boot with the ice chest.” Her eyes were dreamy. “I remember so many lazy summer days on the bayous with him and my mother. We didn't have much money when I was a child, but it never seemed to matter because we had so much fun together. Both my parents were educators,” she explained belatedly. “That should give you an idea of their combined incomes.”

“Yes.” He put his almost finished cigarette to his lips. “Ironic, isn't it, that we pay garbagemen in the city more than we pay the people who educate our children and shape the future. Football players are paid millions to kick a pigskin ball around a stadium, but teachers are still being paid like glorified babysitters.”

“You don't sound like a football fan,” she said.

“I like ice hockey,” he mused. “And soccer.”

“You're built like a football player,” she murmured shyly.

He flashed her a smile. “Believe it or not, the school I attended didn't have a football team. My father refused to let me participate in what he saw as an educational wasteland.”

“You didn't participate in sports at all?” she persisted.

“I did join the wrestling team,” he said with a grin. “I was school champion two years running and graduated undefeated.”

Her eyes ran over his muscular, fit body. “I can understand that,” she said.

“I don't have anything against sports,” he added. “They're good for kids, too. They teach sportsmanship.”

She hesitated. “You aren't married…?”

His eyebrows arched. “When would I have the time?” he asked honestly, and then realized that in his current role, it was a particularly strange answer. “I mean,” he corrected, “I've been moonlighting until just recently.”

“Oh. The way you talked about children, I just wondered if you might have any of your own,” she said.

He shook his head. “I haven't found anyone I wanted children with,” he replied, his dark eyes narrowing as he saw images of sleek, sophisticated women whose life-styles didn't mix with diapers and baby food.

“That's sad.”

“How about you?” he asked.

“I like children,” she replied easily. “I don't suppose I'll ever have any of my own, but I like other people's.”

“Why won't you have your own?”

“You have to get married to have kids,” she said.

“Not these days.”

Her green eyes searched over his profile. “Maybe other people feel that way. I don't. I had religious parents. I was raised to believe that marriage came before children.”

“Or anything else,” he remarked with a teasing glance.

She shrugged. “I'm not suited for this century. Maybe I was supposed to be born in ancient times and the calendar got mixed up. I think I'm really a rebel at heart, but I don't have the stomach for some of the more modern attitudes.”

The cigarette in his fingers had become a fireless stub. He tossed it into the already full ashtray. “Modern attitudes aren't all that modern. Since the beginning of time, people have defied convention. It works for a percentage of the population, it doesn't work for the rest.” He glanced at her. “Do what you feel comfortable doing. Don't confuse rebellion with conforming to ideas you don't even like.”

“That sounds deep,” she said softly.

“Does it?” He pulled into a small shopping center that boasted an indoor theater. “If you want to be a rebel, you could start by doing something outrageous.”

“Such as?” she probed, smiling.

“We'll think of something,” he replied dryly. He parked the truck and cut off the engine, nodding toward the theater marquee. “See anything you like?”

She did. “The science-fiction thriller. Unless you'd rather see the spy film,” she said with a smile, flushing when she thought how like a spy film her own life had just become.

He shook his head. “Science fiction suits me very well.”

He got out and opened her door for her, grimacing when a loose spring on the seat caught her hose and snagged it.

“Damn,” he said roughly, extricating her ankle. “I'm sorry…”

“I snag a pair a day at work,” she said gently. Her hand touched his lightly where it rested on the truck door. She smiled at him. “It's all right. Really.”

She made him feel odd. He remembered once when one of his dates had caught her stocking on a rosebush at the front of his home, and she'd raised hell for half an hour and demanded that he buy her another pair to make up for having ruined one. But Maureen was different. Very different.

“I'll get you a new pair, anyway,” he offered.

“No. You've got enough to do, paying your own bills,” she said quietly. “A pair of stockings isn't going to hurt my budget.”

Her thoughtfulness made him feel more guilty with every passing minute, because he was deliberately letting her think he was something he really wasn't. But he had to find out about the jet. It was his job.

“Want some popcorn?” he asked after he'd paid for the tickets and they were in the lobby.

“Yes, please. We could share a bucket of it,” she hinted.

“Not the buttered kind.” He chuckled. “I've just taken off fifty pounds. I don't want to put them back on.”

“Unbuttered is fine. And a small cola, please.”

He got their order and led the way down the darkened hall to the theater, situating them in the center section halfway down. The movie was just starting.

Maureen munched popcorn and sent shy, fascinated glances at the big man sitting beside her. It was new and thrilling to have someone take her to the movies—especially someone she really liked and wanted to be with. She was going to be sad if he
turned out to be the disreputable man he might be. All the same, she hoped that this date wasn't going to be a once-in-a-lifetime day. It would break her heart to have him go back to his cold self after this. She liked him, despite his possible flaws.

On the other hand, she worried. What if he felt guilty because of the things he'd said to her at first, and this was his way of making up for it? She muddled this thought around in her brain until he'd finished the popcorn and suddenly slid his big hand around hers. She stopped worrying. The feel of his warm, rough skin against hers made it impossible for her to think at all.

Later, she couldn't remember a single scene in the movie. He walked her to her door, because it was dark by the time they'd had a hamburger in a fast-food restaurant and then gone home.

“That was fun,” she said shyly. “Thank you for taking me to the movie.”

“I enjoyed it, too,” he replied. He meant it. He couldn't remember a date being so much fun. “Do you like to bowl?”

“I…well, I've never been bowling,” she confessed.

“We'll go next Saturday.”

Her face brightened. She could hardly believe he'd said that. It was like a dream come true. He must like her, surely, to ask her out twice in a row! Men usually left her at her door and made vague promises and ran like the devil. She forgot her spy mission in the first flush of delight at his invitation.

“I'd like that,” she said, sounding and feeling breathless.

He smiled down at her. His big hand touched her cheek, very lightly. “I haven't been to a movie in a
long time,” he said. “I seem to have spent the past few years trying to work myself to death.”

“While I've spent the past few years trying to break out of the prison I live in.” She sighed. “I have a great mental life, you know. In my own mind, I'm vivacious and daring and adventurous.” Her shoulders rose and fell. “It's only in the real world that I have problems.”

“The real world isn't so bad,” he told her. “As for breaking out of your mold, that's easier than you realize. You can be anything you want to be. All you have to do is take the first step.”

“With my luck, it will be into quicksand,” she mused.

“No negative thinking,” he retorted. “That's a mistake a lot of people make. If you expect bad things to happen, they will. You have to start with an optimistic viewpoint.”

“I don't feel very optimistic, most of the time,” she said. “Maybe I jinxed the Faber jet just by going to work for the company.”

“Don't be absurd,” he said, but his dark eyes were steady and curious.

She glanced at him carefully. “I keep wondering why Mr. MacFaber doesn't start an investigation or something.”

“Well, MacFaber's hired a private detective,” he informed her carefully. “Or so I hear. I guess he's worried.”

Her heart skipped. So the old man wasn't just sitting back doing nothing. She wondered who the private detective was, and if this man knew. She became suddenly perturbed, worrying about her new friend winding up in jail.

He saw that worry and misinterpreted it. So she was nervous. Good enough, he told himself. She might make a mistake and fall into the trap.