Authors: Stan Crowe
He caught up with her quickly, but her only acknowledgment was to stiffen, and quicken her step.
“Sullivan. Hey. What’s going on?”
More silent treatment.
He stepped directly in front of her—but not too close— and she stepped around. Barely resisting the reflex to grab her by the shoulders, he jumped into her path a second time. She dodged, but he persisted until she turned down a side street.
“Look, just tell me what’s wrong, Sully. Please.” She stopped, and as he approached, he could see her trembling slightly. An urge to comfort her, to embrace her, welled inside, but he kept his arms down.
“Talk to me, kid. It’s pretty obvious there’s something on your mind.”
“I’m not a kid,” she muttered.
“Term of endearment, Sully. But that’s beside the point. Seriously—I’m listening.”
“I need to go back to the motel. I don’t have time for this.”
Clint nodded. “Fine, fine. The diligence is cool. So what’s the real issue?”
“There is no ‘real issue.’ I was hired to find a person, and I’m going to work on that until the job is complete. Period.”
“Alright. I can take a hint. You can tell me about it on the way back. I’ll call and cancel dinner.”
“What?”
He smiled. “Surprise. Or, well, it would have been a surprise. Great little place on the pier, too. I hear the eats are great.”
“You got
dinner reservations
? What were you thinking?”
Clint cocked an eyebrow. “Like I said, I owe you. I appreciate all you’ve done for me, and I wanted to use an unexpected boon of good fortune to show that. Is that a bad thing?”
Sully shot a finger in the direction of the car. “
You rented a limo
.”
He shook his head. “Actually, no. I won the limo. Or, well, I won use of it.”
Her mouth froze before she could speak, and then she eyed him warily. “You…
won
… the limo?”
“Use of it, yes. For the evening. And later, if we need it.”
She dipped her shades, and he could tell she’d been crying. He wondered why. “What are you not telling me?” she asked softly.
He shrugged, and walked past her toward where Jonathan stood waiting. “Doesn’t much matter. We need to get you back. I don’t want to stand in the way of a working professional.”
She huffed, and trailed him back toward the limo. “Look, Clint, I don’t know what kind of games you’re playing, but they’re not funny. We came here to do work.
Not
to play some twisted version of
Love Connection
. I asked you a question and if you’re so indebted to me, then I expect you owe me at least a straight answer if nothing else.”
He whirled on her with a smile. “I’ll make you a deal. You get your cute little self back in that store, pick out a nice dress, and I’ll tell you the whole tale over dinner. I promise it won’t hurt the budget.”
Before she could say another word, he climbed into the car and pulled the door closed behind him.
SIXTEEN
By any, sane standards the evening should be perfect—a romantic fantasy. To Lindsay’s left, the waters of the Puget Sound rippled like a sheet of ice and fire mere feet below the low, glass wall rimming the outdoor eating space. She was grateful for the glass wall—knowing her luck, she’d probably drown if she fell in. Beautiful Bainbridge Island basked in the sunlit water a few miles off and she could see the evening lights coming on in some of the homes peeking between the pines that lined the beach.
The restaurant Clint had chosen was nestled in a luxurious hotel perched literally on the water’s edge. The décor was a remarkable blend of “Alpine Lodge” and “Star Trek.” Normally the place would have been captivating despite its bizarre name—some sort of fraction. Though Lindsay was great at math, number crunching did not mix well with dinner. A healthy dose of humiliation meant her food was merely “almost wonderful,” though a part of her acknowledged the filet mignon was the best she’d ever had. The meat melted so perfectly in her mouth that she didn’t actually need to wash it down with a sip of chardonnay made bitter by the stares of strangers; she did anyway. Clint looked better than she’d ever known. He was polite enough not to slurp his chowder, thankfully. In fact, he’d been unflaggingly polite since he’d abandoned her at the clothier. That was where things had gone downhill fast.
Playing “dress up” had been fun for a while, but once she came to her senses it was painfully obvious that there was no way she could afford anything she’d tried on. Mom wouldn’t have thought twice about buying any or all of the outfits, but had Lindsay been shopping with Mom she’d have come out with a high priced monstrosity that Mom adored but that made Lindsay look more like her mother’s pet than the independent, classy woman she was.
No.
So, carefully, she had rehung the clothing, waited until the coast was clear, and then made a break for it. Clint, that luscious, desirable idiot, had stopped her and sent her back into the store in shame, forcing her to pick out a dress all alone. She found something acceptable—midnight blue with sequins, in a more-or-less Mandarin cut. The mirror showed that it brought out her eyes well, even when bloodshot. When she’d finished, her attendant summoned other women who went to work burying Lindsay’s sleepy appearance under a Hollywood-perfect mask of makeup. This robbed her of any cover excuse for acting as haggard as she felt.
When she’d served her time as the salespeople’s dolly, she’d returned to find Clint talking baseball with a man toting a measuring tape over his shoulder. The tailor had seen her first, and seemed to forget what he was in the middle of saying. Clint turned around to gawk at her—totally embarrassing, though her stupid heart betrayed her by fluttering—and from there, it was off to dinner, and never so much as a whisper about payment.
Restaurant patrons had watched her come in. They watched her sit down. They watched her order her food. Clint had watched her as well, almost non-stop. She’d excused herself to the ladies’ room three times in the first half hour, simply to keep from leaping over the table and doing something to him she knew she’d regret, no matter how enjoyable it would be. When she returned from a fourth trip, Clint’s look of worry deepened.
“Sully? Think I should get the check and box the food?”
Lindsay shook her head as she sat. She could still feel all those unwelcome eyes on her. “No, no. I’ll be fine. Must… have been something I ate. Yesterday. This is delicious.”
He chuckled lightly. “Yeah, well, fast food will do that to you. But seriously, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. Then she looked at him. “Alright, something
is
wrong. You said that you’d tell me the whole story at dinner.”
He hunched a shoulder. “I never said specifically
when
at dinner.”
She scoffed.
He laughed gently. “I’ve never told you this, but you’re very attractive when you’re angry. And you’re even better looking when you smile.”
Lindsay couldn’t find her tongue at first, and by the time a good comeback came to mind, he’d moved on.
“Do you want the long version or short version?” he asked.
She glared at him. “Get to the point already.”
He nodded and smirked. “Like I said earlier, I won this.”
She stared at him. “Won… what?”
He motioned vaguely with his hand. “All of it.”
She growled. “All of
what
exactly? You only ever mentioned the limo as a prize.”
He laughed. “Okay. I’ll give you the longer version. So I went to Seattle, of course. I was climbing out of that old Russian submarine they have moored at the pier. The tour was
so
cool. They even had this little sonar ping button that you could push to hear the—”
“The
point
, Clint.”
“Right. Yes. So I’d barely gotten back on the pier, when this short guy comes up to me and asks me if I’d be interested in taking a survey. He looked harmless, and so I said okay. One thing led to another, and next thing I know I’m signing up for a timeshare.”
She glowered. “Says the man who can’t afford his own dinner?”
“I’m going to cancel,” he replied dismissively, “don’t worry. Anyway, so I was in the presentation, and the sales guy had a little contest, and I won. Limo service, new clothes, the dinner, new cell phone, etcetera. All on the house.”
Lindsay squinted at him. “The clothiers knew me when I arrived. They barely even took my measurements. It was as though they were expecting me.”
“They were.” He shrugged. “I told them I’d have a ‘plus one.’”
“How did you know my dress size?” she asked accusatorily.
“I didn’t. I just guessed, and told them to go a size smaller.”
Lindsay gasped. “You did
what
?”
“I guessed.”
“I heard what you said! W-what size d-did you tell… You know what? Never mind, I don’t even want to know.”
“Sully—it looks great on you. Perfect, even, just the way it is.”
She gaped at him, and sat on her hands to avoid slapping him. She counted to fifty, and focused on controlling her rage. “Let’s pretend we can ignore your little lapse in judgment for now and focus on the fact that this is simply too good to be true. Aside from the fact that you signed up for a timeshare you can’t afford, what were the other conditions on this little getaway? There’s a price for everything.”
“Eh, he only wanted my soul,” he replied. “But I found some church in Seattle that said they could get it back for me easy.”
“Har, har.”
“But hey—we’re here, right? I did have to sign enough forms to close on a new home, of course, but I thought, ‘Why not?’”
She shook her head. “I’m sure your heart was in the right place—even if you left your brain somewhere else—but even if this is all on the level, right now isn’t the best time to be doing this. Fey’s close, but who knows for how long?”
“True. But we do have access to reliable transportation for the week. And we won’t need to buy gas for the Corolla.”
“Nevertheless, Clint, this still
feels
wrong. I think we need to back out of this as quickly as possible.”
He winked. “That’s your ‘detective sense’ tingling, right?”
She sat back, and stared hard out at the water. “Life’s just one, big joke to you, isn’t it, Clint?”
There was a long pause. At last, he spoke quietly. “Hey. Look at me.”
She didn’t want to. She did anyway, and felt her whole body jerk toward him. He didn’t flinch. He was leaning forward, his face surprisingly tender.
“I’m trying hard to make things up to you, Sully. I’m not a man of means, and I know I’m clueless about women in general. That’s what got me into this mess in the first place. And, yes, I know I come off as an insensitive jerk. C’mon. Give this tiger a chance to change his stripes, alright? I’d like to move on with my life once this all wraps up. Something tells me I might like to move on with you.”
Again, words caught in her throat. He held her eyes gently for a long time, and all noise of the restaurant faded into nothingness. Here she was, on an honest-to-goodness date with Clint Christopherson. After all these years. The hurt worked itself to the surface, but rather than exploding, it effervesced in the warmth of his eyes. Looking into those deep, sincere eyes, her first instinct was to forgive him everything. Actually, it was to tackle him and carry him off into the sunset, with or without his permission, but she forced that thought away. Instead, she concentrated on how real, how… vulnerable… he suddenly seemed. Even in high school he’d never opened up to her like this before. He was always the cocky, calm, confident Clint who could paint and sing and play guitar like it was no one’s business. Lindsay always wondered how Clint had managed to make it through high school without at least
one
girlfriend. Still, to know that deep beneath that, though, there was someone that needed help…
“We could start now,” he interrupted. “I’m pretty sure man hunting isn’t your only pastime. Tell me a little more about yourself. I think we can get away with that much at least. We got off to a great start on the drive here.”
Before she could stop herself, she was talking. The next thing she knew, they’d made their way to the pier, walking beneath a summer moon, meandering through a mélange of conversational topics. The air rolling off the water was moist, but warm—so much like home. The evening felt so right, lost in chat, and for a long while she let herself forget that she was there on business and that this man next to her was nothing more than a client.
Lurking close under the surface of her dream, however, claws flailed against the mental cage she’d built to contain her inner dragon. Every day, the pull of his curse grew stronger. She
wanted
to give in.
Needed
to give in. When she was honest with herself, she figured she had a day, maybe two, before she ended up as loony as those women from the bus in San Francisco. She could even understand the crazy Chinese lady they’d been running from, and that worried her most of all.
But even above the din of the magical… whatever it was, she could no longer deny that those old feelings for him had resurfaced in full bloom, and in a more mature way than she’d felt in high school. She wasn’t quite sure when it had happened, really. There was so little to recommend him to her beyond his good looks, his odd, clueless charm, and those little hints of kindness that popped out more often than she really cared to admit. And, of course, that smile.
Besides
, she thought,
he’s working on his problems. Maybe he’s finally waking up to the fact that he’s been a grade-A louse. If I could help him through that process…
Of its own accord, her hand reached out to take his. All she touched was empty air. His sidestep had been almost smooth enough to make it look natural. Almost. For a moment she almost felt the old hatreds. Then she remembered his… situation. All at once, he seemed beyond unobtainable. So close. She was
so
close, and still, she couldn’t have him. To pretend otherwise would be like a knife to her innards. But would it change once he was free again? Best not to think about it. Better to force herself to hate him.