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The Pregnancy Affair
Elizabeth Bevarly
A billionaire, a baby—and a family secret that changes everything!Renny Twigg's job is simple: locate a mobster's long-lost grandson—not end up in witness protection with him! But after informing self-made billionaire Tate Hawthorne of his unknown family ties, that's exactly what happens. It's clear the sable-haired heartthrob doesn't want to be the next Iron Don. Still, he's more than game to be her temporary lover. But when baby makes three… He's having enough trouble keeping famiglia out of his life. What's he supposed to do with a family?


A billionaire, a baby—and a family secret that changes everything! Only from New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Bevarly!
Renny Twigg’s job is simple: locate a mobster’s long-lost grandson—not end up in witness protection with him! But after informing self-made billionaire Tate Hawthorne of his unknown family ties, that’s exactly what happens. It’s clear the sable-haired heartthrob doesn’t want to be the next Iron Don. Still, he’s more than game to be her temporary lover. But when baby makes three... He’s having enough trouble keeping famiglia out of his life. What’s he supposed to do with a family?
“It’s not a good idea,” she said quietly.
He circled her wrists with deft fingers and moved both their hands behind her back, then leaned in again. “Oh, I think it’s a very good idea.”
He started to lower his mouth to hers, and, God help her, Renny stood still for the merest of seconds and waited for him to make contact. He was just so unbelievably… So extremely… So totally, totally…
His lips brushed hers lightly… once, twice, three times, four. Heat splashed in her belly, spilling through her torso and into her limbs, warming parts of her she hadn’t even realized were cold. Then he stepped closer and covered her mouth completely with his, and those parts fairly burst into flames. For another scandalous, too-brief moment, she reveled in the fantasy that was Tate Hawthorne and the wild ride it promised. Then, nimbly, she tugged her hands free of his and somehow broke away to scurry to the kitchenette.
“Hey, are you as hungry as I am?” she asked when she got there.
Belatedly, she realized the glaring double entendre of the question.
* * *
The Pregnancy Affair is part of the Accidental Heirs series: First they find their fortunes, then they find love.
Dear Reader (#ulink_eeaec578-11c2-5799-9cf9-b5be49ab8ee9),
If you’ve read my older books, you know I have a not-so-secret fascination with the mob. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s because of the stories my grandmother told me about her mobster neighbors in the Chicago apartment house where she lived in the 1930s. Maybe it’s because of nicknames like “Baby Fat Larry,” “Vinny Carwash” and “Willie Potatoes.” Maybe it’s the hats.
Anyway, I shouldn’t have been surprised when the mob popped up in a book again. What did surprise me was realizing my hero was a made man. Okay, a made toddler. Fortunately, Tate Hawthorne escaped into the witness protection program with his parents at the age of three. Just as well, really. “Tate the Venture Capitalist” doesn’t have the right ring.
Unfortunately, his government-assigned identity has been blown, so he’s taken into protective custody again. Worse, he’s trapped there with Renny Twigg, the woman who accidentally outed him, threw his entire existence into turmoil and potentially endangered his life. Worst of all, the feds have hidden them in the wilds of Wisconsin without so much as basic cable or dial-up internet. Or a post-1999 issue of Maxim. Or a decent wine list. Or, you know, clothes.
It’s going to be a long five days. Whatever will Tate and Renny do to pass the time? Especially when the Scrabble game is missing most of its vowels? And what happens when Renny gets home and discovers she’s brought a fairly life-changing souvenir with her? It’s going to be a long nine months…
Happy reading!
Elizabeth
The Pregnancy Affair
Elizabeth Bevarly


www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ELIZABETH BEVARLY is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of more than seventy books. Although she has made her home in exotic places like San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Haddonfield, New Jersey, she’s now happily settled back in her native Kentucky. When she’s not writing, she’s binge watching British TV shows on Netflix or making soup out of whatever she finds in the freezer. Visit her at www.elizabethbevarly.com (http://www.elizabethbevarly.com).
For my grandmother,
Ruth Elizabeth Hensley Bevarly,
who told me some really great stories when I was a kid.
I miss you, Nanno.
Contents
Cover (#udba15bdc-8b52-5f19-9231-006fcb660f77)
Back Cover Text (#u978a8f7c-5f77-59c7-addc-ae6bbdb28f1a)
Introduction (#u5c0e4a46-d102-5d76-819c-3b47d9418df7)
Dear Reader (#ulink_2a10f2cf-9819-5482-b3d0-abcfd8df03f6)
Title Page (#u5213ae2b-5751-58cd-8259-e7af16df51ea)
About the Author (#u5c74da47-31e7-5a77-a236-720cf62e9297)
Dedication (#u426e88bf-11c0-53b9-b4d8-e80105ad9efd)
One (#ulink_83aa7e69-3902-5b2e-90d8-67f035a197e3)
Two (#ulink_7f445b03-6eb0-5010-acf1-ce18426a6a9c)
Three (#ulink_edb83245-3653-54e4-aafb-a4b9008d2c35)
Four (#ulink_6ea15e5c-c881-57f9-9d57-dd7631aaee6c)
Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#ulink_0398fb84-c983-5a97-8e87-3fa54d0af45e)
Renny Twigg threw her car into Park and gazed at the Tudor-style house beyond her windshield. Or maybe she should say Tudor-style castle beyond her windshield. Its walls were made of majestically arranged stones and climbed a full three stories, and they were tatted here and there with just the right amount of ivy. Its stained glass mullion windows sparkled in the late-morning sunlight as if they’d been fashioned from gemstones, and its turrets—one on each side—stretched even higher than the slate roof, looking as if they’d been carved by the hand of a Renaissance artist. The lot on which the mansion sat was nearly a city-state unto itself, green and glorious and landscaped with more flowering shrubs than a Spring Hill catalog.
There was rich, and then there was rich. The first was something with which Renny had a more-than-nodding acquaintance. She’d come from a long line of powerful attorneys, financiers and carpetbaggers, the first of whom had arrived in this country hundreds of years ago to capitalize on the hugely exploitable land and its even more exploitable colonists. The Twiggs who followed had adopted the tradition and run with it, fattening the family coffers more with each ensuing generation. She’d grown up in a big white Cape Cod in Greenwich, Connecticut, had donned tidy blue uniforms for tony private schools before heading off to be a Harvard legacy, and had worn a sparkly tiara—with real diamonds—for her debut eleven years ago. Renny Twigg knew what it was to be rich.
She eyed the massive structure and its imperious gardens again. Tate Hawthorne was obviously rich.
She inhaled a fortifying breath and tucked an unruly dark brown tendril back into the otherwise flawless chignon at her nape. Then she checked her lipstick in the rearview mirror, breathed into her hand to ensure that there were no lingering traces of her breakfast burrito and smoothed a hand over her tan linen suit. Yep. She was perfectly acceptable for her meeting with the man her employer had assigned her to locate. So go ahead, Renny. What are you waiting for?
She eyed the massive mansion again. What she was waiting for was to see if a dragon would come swooping down from one of those turrets to carry her off for his own breakfast. In spite of the colorful landscaping and bright blue summer sky that framed it, the place just had that look about it. As if its owner were some brooding, overbearing Rochester who might very well lock her away in his attic.
Oh, stop it, she told herself. Tate Hawthorne was one of Chicago’s savviest investors by day and one of its most notorious playboys by night. From what she’d learned of him, the only thing he dedicated more time to than making money was spending it. Mostly on fast, lustrous cars and fast, leggy redheads. Renny was five foot three in her kitten heels and had driven up in a rented Buick. She was the last kind of woman a man like him would want to stash away for nefarious purposes.
Even if his origins were pretty freakin’ nefarious.
She opened the car door and stepped out onto the cobbled drive. Although it was only June, the heat was oppressive. She hurried to the front door, rehearsing in her head one last time the most tactful way to relay all the news she had for Tate Hawthorne.
Like how he wasn’t really Tate Hawthorne.
Renny’s employer, Tarrant, Fiver & Twigg—though the Twigg in the name was her father, not her—was a law firm that went by many descriptions. Probate researchers. Estate detectives. Heir hunters. Their services were enlisted by the state of New York when someone died without a will and no next of kin was known or when the next of kin was known but his or her whereabouts were not.
That second option had brought her to Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago for people who were rich. Bennett Tarrant, president and senior probate researcher, had given the job to Renny because she always found the heir she was looking for. Well, except for that one time. And also because she was the only probate researcher available at the time who didn’t have anything on her plate that couldn’t be scraped off with a quick fork to the archives room. For lack of a better analogy. That breakfast burrito had, after all, been hours ago.
And although he hadn’t said so specifically, she was pretty sure another reason Bennett had assigned her the job was to offer her a chance to redeem herself for that one time she hadn’t been able to find the heir she was looking for. Locating someone who would be extremely hard to locate—like Tate Hawthorne—and doing so without screwing it up would make Renny a shoo-in for the promotion that had been eluding her, something that would make her father very proud. Not to mention make him stop looking at her as if she were a complete screwup.
In the meantime, Renny was proud of herself. It took skill and talent to find someone who had been buried in the federal Witness Protection Program along with the rest of his immediate family nearly three decades ago. Well, it took those things and also a friend from high school who had mad hacking skills and could find anything—or anyone—on the internet. But that was beside the point. The point was Renny had found the heir she was looking for, thanks to said friend. Which would, she hoped, put her back on the fast track at Tarrant, Fiver & Twigg and get her father off her back for that one tiny blip that had changed the company’s 100% find rate to a 99.9999% find rate, and jeez, Dad, it wasn’t like she’d lost that one on purpose, so just give her a break. Man.
She rang the doorbell and fanned herself with her portfolio as she waited for a response, since, judging by the size of the house, it could be days before anyone made their way to the front door. So she was surprised to be caught midfan when the door opened almost immediately. Thankfully, it wasn’t Tate Hawthorne who answered. It was a liveried butler, who looked to be about the same age as one of the founding fathers. If the founding fathers were still alive, she meant.
“Good morning,” Thomas Jefferson greeted her. “Miss Twigg, I presume?”
She nodded. She had contacted Tate Hawthorne earlier this week—or, rather, she had contacted his assistant Aurora, who, Renny hadn’t been able to help thinking, sounded like a fast, leggy redhead—and set up a meeting with him for the only fifteen minutes the guy seemed to have available for the entire month of June. And that was only because, Aurora had told her, he could cut short by a teensy bit his preparation for his regular Saturday polo match.
“Hello,” Renny replied. “I’m sorry to be a bit early. I was hoping Mr. Hawthorne might be able to squeeze in another ten or fifteen minutes for our meeting. What I have to tell him is kind of—” life changing was the phrase that came to mind, but it sounded a little melodramatic “—important. What I have to tell Mr. Hawthorne is kind of important.” And also life changing.
“All of Mr. Hawthorne’s meetings are important,” Thomas Jefferson said indulgently.
Of course they were. Hence his having only fifteen minutes in the entire month of June for Renny. “Nevertheless,” she began.
“It’s all right, Madison,” a booming baritone interrupted her.
Renny gazed past the butler at a man who had appeared behind him and who had to be Tate Hawthorne. She knew that, because he looked really, really rich.
His sable hair was cropped short, his skin was sun burnished to the color of a gold doubloon and his gray eyes shone like platinum. He was dressed in a polo uniform—equestrian, not water, unfortunately, because a body like his would have seriously rocked a Speedo—in hues of more precious materials, from the coppery shirt to the chocolate-truffle jodhpurs, to the front-zipper mahogany boots that climbed up over his knees with their protective padding. All of it skintight over taut thighs, a sinewy torso, salient biceps and shoulders broader than the Brooklyn Bridge. It was all Renny could do to not drool.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t as lucky in keeping herself from greeting him less than professionally. “Hiya.” Immediately, she realized her loss of composure and pheromones and amended, “I mean...hello, Mr. Hawthorne.”
“Hello yourself, Ms...” He halted. “I’m sorry. Aurora included your name with the appointment, but I’ve been working on something else this morning, and it’s slipped my mind. And, well...you are a bit early.”
He seemed genuinely contrite that he was at a loss for her name, something for which Renny had to give him credit. Not just because he was being so polite about her having impinged on his time after being told he didn’t have much to spare, but because, in her experience, most high-powered business types didn’t feel contrite about anything, least of all forgetting the name of a junior associate from a law firm they never had dealings with.
Madison the butler moved aside, and she murmured her thanks as she stepped past him into the foyer. She withdrew a business card from inside her jacket and extended it toward Tate Hawthorne.
“I’m Renata Twigg,” she said. Not that she’d felt like a Renata a single day in her life, because Renata sounded like, well, a tall, leggy redhead. Renny had no idea what her mother had been thinking to want to name her that, or what her father had been thinking to insist it be the name she used professionally. “I represent Tarrant, Fiver & Twigg, attorneys,” she concluded.
He took the card from her but didn’t look at it. Instead, he looked at Renny. With way too much interest for her sanity and saliva glands. And—okay, okay—her pheromones, too.
“Renata,” he said, fairly purring the word in a way that reminded her of velvet and cognac. And suddenly, for some reason, Renny didn’t mind her given name at all.
“Thank you so much for making time to meet with me this morning,” she said. “I know you must be very busy.” Duh.
She drove her gaze around the massive black-and-white-tiled foyer to the half-dozen ways out of it—two doors to her right, two doors to her left, and one more framed by a curving staircase that led to the second floor.
“Um, is there someplace we can talk?” she asked.
For a moment, Tate Hawthorne said nothing, only continued to gaze at her in that mind-scrambling, gland-addling way. Finally, he said, “Of course.”
He extended a hand to his left to indicate Renny should precede him. Which she would have done, had she had a clue where he wanted her to go. He could have been gesturing at the doors to her left, the staircase, or to the exit behind himself. He seemed to realize the ambiguity of his action, too, and threw her an apologetic smile that just made him even more charming. As if he needed that. As if she needed that.
“My office is this way,” he told her.
He opted for the exit behind himself, and Renny followed. They passed another eight or nine—hundred—rooms before he finally turned into one that looked more like a library than an office, so stuffed to the ceiling was it with books. There was a desk tucked into a corner, facing to look out the window at a green space behind the house that was even more idyllic than the scene in front, and topped with a state-of-the-art computer and tidy piles of paperwork. Also sitting there was a polo helmet that matched his uniform, so she gathered he was in here when she arrived, trying to cram in more work before heading out to play. The guy clearly took both his business and his pleasure seriously.
“Please, have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward a leather-bound chair that had probably cost more than the gross national product of some sovereign nations. Then he spun around his desk chair—also leather, but smaller—and folded himself into it.
Renny tried not to notice how his clothing seemed to cling even more tightly when he was seated, and she tried not to think about how much she suddenly wanted to drop to her knees in front of him to unzip his boots. With her teeth. Instead, she opened her portfolio and withdrew the handful of documents she’d brought with her to support what was sure to sound like a made-for-cable movie on one of the channels that was way high up the dial.
“Mr. Hawthorne,” she began.
“Tate,” he corrected her.
She looked up from her task, her gaze fastening with his again. Those eyes. So pale and gray and cool for a man who seemed so deep and dark and hot. “Excuse me?” she said without thinking.
He smiled again. She tried not to spontaneously combust. “Call me Tate,” he said. “‘Mr. Hawthorne’ is what they call me at work.”
This wasn’t work? she wanted to ask. It was work to her. At least, it had been before he smiled in a way that made clear his thoughts were closer to pleasure at the moment than they were to business. And, thanks to that smile, now Renny’s were, too.
“Ah,” she started again. Probably best not to call him anything at all. Especially since the only thing coming to mind at the moment was... Um, never mind. “Are you familiar with the name Joseph Bacco?” she asked.
A spark of something flickered in his eyes, then disappeared. “Maybe?” he said. “Something in the news a while back? I don’t remember the context, though.”
Renny wasn’t sure how far Joseph Bacco’s influence might have traveled beyond New York and New Jersey, but he’d been a colorful-enough character in his time to warrant the occasional story in magazines or true-crime shows on TV. And his death had indeed made national news. She tried another tack.
“How about the name ‘Joey the Knife?’”
Tate’s smile this time was tinted more with humor than with heat. And, gee, why was it suddenly so easy for her to think of him as Tate?
“No,” he replied.
“‘Bulletproof Bacco’?” she asked, trying another of Joseph Bacco’s distinctive monikers.
“Ms. Twigg—”
“Renny,” she said before she could stop herself. And immediately regretted not being able to stop herself. What was she thinking? She never invited clients to use her first name. And only Bennett Tarrant and her father called her Renny at work, because they’d both known her since the day she was born.
Tate’s gaze turned hot again. “I thought you said your name is Renata.”
She swallowed hard. “It is. But everyone calls me Renny.”
At least everyone who wasn’t tied to her by business. Which Tate most certainly was. So why had she extended the invitation to him? And why did she want to extend more invitations to him? None of which included him calling her by name and all of which had him calling her hot, earthy things as he buried himself inside her and drove her to the brink of—
“You don’t seem like a Renny,” he said. Just in the nick of time, too. The last thing she needed was to have an impromptu orgasm in front of a client. Talk about a black mark on her permanent record.
“I don’t?” she asked, in a voice normally used only when having an impromptu orgasm. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.
Judging by the way his pupils dilated, though, she was pretty sure he did. Even so, his own voice was level—if a tad warm—when he said, “No. You seem like a Renata to me.”
Well, this was news to Renny. No one thought she was a Renata. Even her own parents had given up calling her that the day she stripped off her pink tutu in ballet class and decreed she would instead play football, like her brothers. Ultimately, she and her parents had compromised on archery, but still. Renata had gone the way of the pink tutu decades ago.
“Uh...” she said eloquently. Damn. What had they been talking about?
“Bulletproof Bacco,” he repeated.
Right. Joey the Knife. Nothing like references to ammunition and cutlery to put a damper on thoughts of... Um, never mind.
“That doesn’t sound like the name of someone I’d run into at the Chicago Merc,” he continued.
She tried one last time. “How about the ‘Iron Don’?” she asked. “Does that name ring a bell?”
The light came back into his eyes, and this time it stayed lit. “Right,” he said. “The mobster.”
“Alleged mobster,” Renny corrected him. Since no one had ever been able to pin any charges on Joey the Knife that hadn’t slid right off him like butter from a hot, well, knife. Though she was reasonably sure that wasn’t why he’d earned that particular nickname.
“From New York, I think,” Tate said. “His death was in the news a couple of months ago. Everyone kept commenting that he’d lived to be the oldest organized-crime figure ever and died of old age instead of...something else.”
“Alleged organized-crime figure,” Renny corrected him again. “And, yes, he’s the man I’m talking about.”
Tate glanced at his watch, then back at Renny. All heated glances and flirtation aside, the man was obviously on a schedule he intended to keep. “And he has bearing on this meeting...how?”
Renny handed him the first of the records she’d brought with her—a copy of his original birth certificate from New Jersey, much different from the one he had now from Indiana, which he’d been using since the fifth grade. The name printed on it, however, wasn’t Tate Hawthorne, as he had come to be known after his stepfather adopted him. Nor was it Tate Carson, as he had been known before that. The name on this record was—
“Joseph Anthony Bacco the Third?” he asked.
“Grandson of Joseph Anthony Bacco Senior,” Renny said. “Aka Joey the Knife. Aka Bulletproof Bacco. Aka the Iron Don.”
“And why are you showing me a birth certificate that belongs to a mobster’s grandson?”
Renny started to correct him, but he hastily amended, “Alleged mobster’s grandson. What does Joseph the Third, or Joseph Senior, for that matter, have to do with me?”
She withdrew from her portfolio a photograph, one of several she had from the 1980s. In it, a man in his sixties was seated on a sofa beside a man in his twenties who was holding a toddler in his lap. She handed it to Tate, who accepted it warily. For a moment, he gazed at her through narrowed eyes, and somehow she sensed there was a part of him that knew what was coming. But he only dropped his gaze to the photo.
“The picture is from Joseph Bacco’s estate,” Renny said. “The older man is Joseph Anthony Bacco Senior, and the younger man beside him is—”
“My father,” Tate finished for her. “I don’t remember him very well. He died when I was four. But I have some photographs of him and recognize him from those. I assume the little boy he’s holding is me.”
“Yes.”
“Meaning my father was an acquaintance of the Iron Don,” he gathered, still looking at the photograph.
“He was more than an acquaintance,” she told him. “Your father was Joseph Anthony Bacco Junior.”
At this, Tate snapped his head back up to look at her. “That’s impossible. My father’s name was James Carson. He worked in a hardware store in Terre Haute, Indiana. It burned down when I was four. He was killed in the fire.”
Renny sifted through her documents until she located two more she was looking for. “James Carson was the name your father was given by the federal marshals before they placed him and your mother and you in the Witness Protection Program when you were two years old. Your family entered WITSEC after your father was the star witness at a murder trial against one of Joseph Bacco’s capos, Carmine Tomasi. Your father also gave testimony against a half-dozen others in the organization that led to a host of arrests and convictions for racketeering crimes.”
She glanced down at the record on top. “Your mother became Natalie Carson, and you became Tate Carson. You all received new Social Security numbers and birth dates. The feds moved the three of you from Passaic, New Jersey, to Terre Haute, and both your parents were given new jobs. Your father at the hardware store and your mother at a local insurance company.”
Renny handed him copies of documents to support those assertions, too. She’d received everything she had to support her story via snail mail at her condo a few days ago, from her high school friend with the mad hacking skills. They were records she was reasonably certain she wasn’t supposed to have—she’d known better than to ask where they came from. The only reason Phoebe had helped her out in the first place was because Renny (A) promised to never divulge her source and (B) pulled in a favor she’d been owed by Phoebe since a sleepover thirteen years ago, a favor that might or might not have something to do with a certain boy in homeroom named Kyle.
These records, too, Tate accepted from her, but this time, his gaze fell to them immediately, and he voraciously read every word. When he looked up again, his pale gray eyes were stormy. “Are you trying to tell me...?”
She decided it would probably be best to just spill the news as cleanly and quickly as possible and follow up with details in the inevitable Q&A.
“You’re Joey the Knife’s grandson and legal heir. In spite of your father’s having ratted out some of his associates, your grandfather left his entire estate to you, as you’re the oldest son of his oldest son, and that’s what hundreds of years of Bacco tradition dictates. What’s more, it was Joey’s dying wish that you assume his position as head of the family and take over all of his businesses after his death.
“In short, Mr. Hawthorne,” Renny concluded, “Joseph Anthony Bacco Senior has crowned you the new Iron Don.”
Two (#ulink_1e72ec95-53a6-53f3-aec0-9d8f61816c88)
It took a minute for Tate to process everything Renata Twigg had dropped into his lap. And even then, he wasn’t sure he was processing it correctly. It was just too far outside his scope of experience. Too hard to believe. Too weird.
Renata seemed to sense his state of confusion, because she said, “Mr. Hawthorne? Do you have any questions?”
Oh, sure. He had questions. A couple. Million. Now if he could just get one of them to settle in his brain long enough for him to put voice to it...
One that finally settled enough to come out was “How could a mobster want to leave his fortune to the son of a man who double-crossed him?”
“Alleged mobster,” Renata corrected him. Again. Not that Tate for a moment believed there could be any shades of gray about a guy named Joey the Knife.
“If I really am Joseph Bacco’s grandson,” he began.
“You are definitely Joseph Bacco’s grandson.”
“Then why would he want to have anything to do with me? My father—his son—turned him in to the feds. Wouldn’t that kind of negate any familial obligation that existed prior to that? Or... I don’t know...put a contract on my father’s head?”
“Actually, your father didn’t turn Joey in to the feds,” Renata said. “Or any other member of the immediate Bacco family. All the information he gave to the feds had to do with other members of the organization. And he only gave up that information because the feds had enough evidence of his own criminal activity to put him away for forty years.”
“My father?” Tate said incredulously. “Committed crimes worthy of forty years in prison?”
Renata nodded. “I’m afraid so. Nothing violent,” she hastened to reassure him. “The charges against your father were for fraud, bribery, embezzlement and money laundering. Lots and lots of fraud, bribery, embezzlement and money laundering. There was never any evidence that he was involved in anything more than that. He was highly placed in your grandfather’s business. Wise guys that high up... Uh... I mean...guys that high up don’t get their hands that dirty. But your father didn’t want to go to prison for forty years.” She smiled halfheartedly. “He wanted to watch his little son grow up.”
Tate tried to take some comfort in that. Even so, it was hard to imagine James Carson involved in corruption. His memories of his father were hazy, but they evoked only feelings of affection and warmth. His dad, from what he recalled, was a good guy.
“Anyway,” Renata continued, “because your father never fingered anyone in the Bacco family proper—in fact, his agreement with the feds stated he would absolutely not, under any condition, incriminate his family—Joey the Knife never sought a vendetta. He really loved his son,” she added. “I think a part of him kind of understood why your father did what he did, so he could be with his son. But even more important, I think Joey really loved you—his first grandson. And since you had nothing to do with what your father did, he wanted you to come back and take your rightful place in the family.”
As what? Tate wondered. What kind of nickname would suit the lifestyle he’d assumed instead? Bottom Line Bacco? Joey the Venture Capitalist? Somehow those just didn’t have the same ring. Or did they? Renata had just said his grandfather had businesses. Maybe there was a bit of Bacco in Tate yet.
“You said my grandfather had businesses?” he asked.
She withdrew another collection of papers from her portfolio. “Several. He wants to put you in charge of Cosa Nostra, for one thing.”
“Yeah, you just pretty much said that when you told me he wants me to be the new Iron Don.”
She shook her head. “No, not that Cosa Nostra. That alleged one, I mean. Cosa Nostra is the name of a chain of Italian restaurants he owned up and down the Jersey shore.”
Tate took this page from her, too, and quickly scanned the figures. Unless Cosa Nostra was a three-star Michelin restaurant that served minestrone for five hundred bucks a bowl, its profits were way too high to be on the up-and-up.
“Yeah, these places look completely legitimate,” he said wryly.
“By all accounts, they are. Joey bought them with the proceeds from his waste-management business and his construction company.”
Yep. Totally legit.
“Since your grandfather’s death in the spring, everything’s been run by his second in command, who—” she hesitated for a moment “—who’s married to your father’s sister.”
Tate remembered then that Renata had mentioned there were other members of the “immediate” Bacco family. He’d been an only child all his life and had been under the impression that both of his parents were, too. At least, that was what his mother had always told him to explain why he didn’t have any aunts or uncles or cousins, the way all his classmates did.
Of course, all these new revelations might also explain why she’d always seemed to go out of her way to ensure that he stayed an only child—not just in the birth sense but in the social sense, too. She’d never encouraged him to make friends when he was growing up and had, in fact, been wary of anyone who tried to get too close. Although he’d had a handful of friends at school, she’d never let him invite any of them home or allowed him to play at their houses. He’d never had birthday parties or sleepovers, hadn’t been able to join Cub Scouts or play team sports or attend summer camp.
His childhood hadn’t exactly been happy, thanks to his solitary state. He’d always thought his mother was just overprotective. Now he wondered if she’d spent the rest of her life watching their backs. He wished he could ask her about all this, but he’d lost her to cancer when he was in college. His stepfather—who might or might not have known about anything—had been quite a bit older than his mother and had died less than a year later. There was no one around who could verify any of this for Tate. No one except Renata Twigg.
“I have other family members?” he asked.
She nodded. “Your father had two sisters, both older than him. Denise is married to Joseph Bacco’s second in command, Nicholas DiNapoli, aka Nicky the Pistol.”
“My aunt is mobbed up, too?”
“Allegedly. His other sister, Lucia, is married to Handsome Mickey Testa, the manager of one of Joey’s casinos.”
Did anyone in the mob not have a nickname? “Do I have cousins by them?” Tate asked.
She flipped another page. “Yes. Denise and Nicky have Sal the Stiletto, Dirty Dominic and... Oh. This is different.”
“What?”
“Angie the Flamethrower. Gotta give a girl credit for that. And Lucia and Mickey have Concetta.”
“Who I assume is Connie the something.”
“Well, right now she’s Connie the economics major at Cornell. But I wouldn’t rule anything out.”
“So my entire family are mobsters.”
“Alleged mobsters. And an economics major.”
Renata gazed at him with what could have been compassion or condemnation. He had no idea. She was very good at hiding whatever she was thinking. Well, except for a couple of times when he was pretty sure she’d been thinking some of the same things he’d been thinking, most of them X-rated. Her espresso eyes were enormous and thickly lashed, her dark hair was pulled back into the most severe hairstyle he’d ever seen and her buff-colored suit was conservative in the extreme.
Even so, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the image she presented to the world had nothing to do with the person she really was. Although she looked professional, capable and no-nonsense, there was something about her that suggested she wanted to be none of those things.
“So this law firm you work for,” Tate said. “Does it handle a lot of, ah, alleged mob work?”
She shook her head. “Tarrant, Fiver & Twigg is about as white-shoe a firm as you’re going to find. But, according to my father—who’s the current Twigg in the name—Joey the Knife and Bennett Tarrant’s father had some kind of shared history when they were young. No one’s ever asked what. But it was Bennett’s father who took him on as a client back in the sixties, and Bennett honored his father’s wish that he always look after Joey.”
“So Joey must have had some redeeming values then.”
“He loved his son. And he loved his grandson. I’d say that makes up for a lot.”
Tate looked down at the sheet that had his mother’s original information on it. She had been Isabel Danson before she married Joseph Jr.
When Renata saw where his attention had fallen, she told him, “For what it’s worth, your mother’s family wasn’t connected. Allegedly or otherwise.”
“Do I have family on that side, too?”
“I’m sorry, no. She was an only child.”
At least something his mother had told him was true.
“Her parents, both deceased now, were florists.”
Finally. Something beautiful to counter all the luridness of his heritage.
“So what do my aunts, uncles and cousins think of this?” Tate asked, looking up again. “Seems to me they might all be a little put off by Joey’s wanting a total stranger to come in and take over. Especially when that stranger’s father ratted out other members of the organization.”
“Right now, I’m the only person who knows you’re Joseph Anthony Bacco the Third,” Renata assured him. “Because of the delicate nature of the situation, I haven’t even told the senior partners of Tarrant, Fiver & Twigg who or where you are. Only that I found you and would contact you about Joey’s final wishes. I haven’t told the Baccos even that much.”
“And if I decide I’d just as soon not accept my grandfather’s legacy?” Tate asked.
Since it went without saying he wouldn’t be accepting his grandfather’s legacy. He wasn’t sure yet how he felt about accepting his grandfather’s family, though. The blood one, not the professional one. A lot of that depended on whether or not they were accepting of him. For all he knew, they were already dialing 1-800-Vendetta.
“The surviving Baccos were all aware of Joey’s wishes,” Renata said. “They’ve known all along that he wanted his missing grandson to be found and take over after his death. He never made any secret of that. But I don’t know how they felt about that or if they even expected anyone to ever be able to find you. If you don’t accept your grandfather’s legacy, then Joey wants everything to go to Denise and her husband so they can continue the tradition with their oldest son. That may be what they’ve been assuming would happen all along.”
“I don’t want to accept my grandfather’s legacy,” Tate said plainly.
“Then I’ll relay your wishes to the rest of the family,” Renata told him. “And unless you decide to approach them yourself, they’ll never know who or where you are. No one will. I’ll take the secret of your identity to my grave.”
Tate nodded. Somehow, he trusted Renata Twigg to do exactly that. But he still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do about his identity. As a child, he’d often fantasized about having a family. Just not one that was quite so famiglia. He’d be lying, though, if he said there wasn’t a part of him that was wondering what it would be like to be a Bacco.
“It’s my aunt’s and cousins’ birthright as much as it is mine,” Tate said. “They were a part of my grandfather’s life and lifestyle. And I—”
He halted there, still a little thrown by everything he’d learned. He searched his brain for something that might negate everything Renata had told him. But his memories of his father were hazy. The only clear ones were of the day he died. Tate remembered the police coming to their house, his mother crying and a guy in a suit trying to console her. As an adult looking back, he’d always figured the guy was from the insurance company, there to handle his father’s life-insurance policy or something. But after what Renata had told him, the guy might have been a fed, there to ensure that his mother was still protected.
He conjured more memories, out of sequence and context. His father swinging him in the ocean surf when he was very little. The two of them visiting an ancient-looking monkey house of some zoo. His father dancing him around in the kitchen, singing “Eh, Cumpari!,” a song Tate had never heard anywhere else except for when...
Oh, God. Except for when Talia Shire sang it in The Godfather, Part III.
“There are more photos,” he heard Renata say from what seemed a very great distance. “Joey had several framed ones of you and him on shelves in his office until the day he died.”
Tate looked at the photo in his hand again. The Iron Don honestly looked like he could be anyone’s grandfather—white hair and mustache, short-sleeved shirt and trousers, grinning at the boy in the picture as if he were his most cherished companion. There were no gold chains, no jogging suits, nothing to fit the stereotype at all. Just an old man happy to be with his family. Yet Tate couldn’t remember him.
On some level, though, a lot of what Renata said explained his memories. He couldn’t recall taking a long road trip anywhere until his mother married William Hawthorne. So how could he have been in the ocean when he was so young? Unless he’d lived in a state that had a coastline. Like New Jersey. And there were no ancient-looking monkey houses in this part of the country. But some zoos in the Northeast had lots of old buildings like that.
He looked at Renata Twigg. “I’m the grandson of a mobster,” he said softly. This time, the remark was a statement, not a question.
“Alleged mobster,” she qualified again, just as quietly.
“But real grandson.”
“Yes.”
So Tate really did have family out there with whom he would have grown up had things been different. He would have attended birthday parties and weddings and graduations for them. Vacationed with them. Played with them. He wouldn’t have spent his childhood alone. Strangely, if his father had gone into the family’s very abnormal business, Tate might have had a very normal childhood.
The pounding of footsteps suddenly erupted in the hall outside his office. Tate looked up just in time to see a man in a suit, followed by a harried Madison, come hurrying through the door. When he halted, the man’s jacket swung open enough to reveal a shoulder holster with a weapon tucked inside. Tate was reaching for his phone to hit 9-1-1 when his presumed assailant flipped open a leather case in his hand to reveal a badge with a silver star.
“Inspector Terrence Grady,” the man said. He reminded Tate of someone. An older version of Laurence Fishburne, maybe. “United States Marshals Service. Tate Hawthorne, you’ll have to come with me immediately.”
“Sir, he pushed right past me,” Madison said. “I tried to—”
“It’s all right, Madison,” Tate said as he stood.
Renata stood at the same time, though she didn’t cut quite as imposing a figure as Tate was trying to achieve himself. Actually, it was kind of hard to tell if she’d stood at all, because she barely came to his shoulder. Small women. He never knew what to do with small women. They were just so...small. But Renata Twigg had already inspired a few interesting ideas in his head. Given the chance—which, for some reason, he was hoping for—he was sure he could find a few more.
Instead of responding to Inspector Grady, Tate, for some reason, looked at Renata. He expected her to look as confused as he felt over the marshal’s sudden appearance. Instead, a blush was blooming on her cheeks, and she was steadfastly avoiding his gaze.
He turned back to the marshal. “I don’t understand. Why should I go anywhere with you?”
Grady—maybe not Laurence Fishburne, but he looked like someone Tate knew—said, “I can explain on the way.”
“On the way where?”
“We need to get you someplace safe, Mr. Hawthorne.” And then, just in case Tate had missed that part before, he added, more emphatically this time, “Immediately.”
Tate straightened to his full six-three and leveled his most menacing gaze on the marshal. “I’m not going anywhere. What the hell does a federal marshal have to do with—”
Hang on. Didn’t federal marshals run the Witness Protection Program? Tate looked at Renata again. She was looking at something on the other side of the room and fiddling with the top button of her shirt in a way that might have been kind of interesting in a different situation. Under the circumstances...
“Renata,” he said softly.
She was still looking at the wall and twisting her button, but she lifted her other hand to the twist of dark hair at her nape, giving it a few little pats, even though not a single hair was out of place. “Yes?”
“Do you have any idea why a federal marshal would show up at my front door less than an hour after you did?”
“Mr. Hawthorne,” Grady interrupted.
Tate held up a hand to halt him. “Renata?” he repeated.
Finally, she turned her head to look at him. This time he knew exactly what she was thinking. Her eyes were a veritable window to her soul. And what Renata’s soul was saying just then was Oh, crap.
In spite of that, she said, “No clue.”
“Mr. Hawthorne,” Grady said again. “We have to leave. Now. Explanations can wait.”
“Actually, Inspector Grady,” Tate said, returning his attention to him, “you won’t have much to explain. I’m guessing you’re here because my grandfather was Joseph Bacco, aka the Iron Don, and now that he’s gone, he wants me to be the new Iron Don.”
“You know about that?”
“I do.”
Grady eyed him warily for a moment. “Okay. I wasn’t sure you were even aware you had a WITSEC cover, if your mother ever made you privy to that or if you remembered that part of your life. The other thing I came here to tell you is that your WITSEC cover has been compromised, thanks to a hack in our files we discovered just this morning. We need to put you somewhere safe until we can get to the bottom of it.”
Tate barely heard the second part of the marshal’s comment. He was too focused on the first part. “You knew my mother?”
Grady was visibly agitated about his lack of compliance with the whole leaving immediately thing, but he nodded. “I was assigned to your father and his family after he became a state’s witness. The last time I saw your mother or you was the day your father died.”
Okay, that was why he looked familiar. The man in the suit that day must have been a younger Terrence Grady.
“Look, Mr. Hawthorne, we can talk about this in the car,” he said. “We don’t know that there’s a credible threat to your safety, but we can’t be sure there isn’t one, either. There are an awful lot of people interested in taking over your grandfather’s position—the one they know your grandfather wanted you to assume—and it’s safe to say that few of them have your best interests at heart. Last week, someone accessed your federal file without authorization, so your WITSEC identity is no longer protected. That means I have to get you someplace where you are protected. Immediately.”
“Um, Inspector Grady?” Renata said nervously. “I, uh... That is, uh... Funny story, actually...”
“Spit it out, Ms...” Grady said.
She began patting her bun again, but this time kept doing it the entire time she spoke. “Twigg. Renata Twigg. And, actually, the person who compromised Mr. Hawthorne’s WITSEC identity? Yeah, that, um...that might have been, ah...me.”
Grady eyed her flatly. “You’re the one who told Mr. Hawthorne about his past?”
Something in his tone made Renata pat her bun harder. “Um...maybe?”
Tate was going to tell Grady that she absolutely had been the one to tell him about that, but he was kind of enjoying how her bun patting was causing strands of hair to come loose. Her hair was longer than it looked.
“You have access to federally protected files, have you?” Grady asked. “Or do you have hacking skills that allowed you to access those files? Because hacking a federal database is a Class B felony, Ms. Twigg. One that carries a sentence of up to twenty years.”
She looked a little panicked by that. “Of course I don’t have hacking skills,” she said. “Are you kidding? I majored in English specifically so I wouldn’t have to do the math.”
“Well, which is it, Ms. Twigg?” Grady asked. “How did you discover Mr. Hawthorne’s identity? And why did you go looking for him in the first place?”
She bit her lip anxiously. Tate tried not to be turned-on.
Quickly, she told Grady about Joey the Knife’s will and his intentions for his grandson. Grady nodded as she spoke, but offered no commentary.
When she finished, he asked again, “And just how were you able to locate Mr. Hawthorne?”
At first, she said nothing. Then, very softly, she asked, “Class B felony, you say? Twenty years?”
Grady nodded.
For a moment, Renata looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights, right down to the fawn-colored suit and doe eyes. Then her expression cleared, and she said, “Craigslist.”
Grady looked confused. Tate wasn’t surprised. He’d been confused since seeing Renata at his front door.
“Craigslist?” Grady echoed.
Renata nodded. “I found a computer whiz on Craigslist who said he could find anyone for anybody for the right price. He helped me locate Mr. Hawthorne.”
“His name?” Grady asked. Dubiously, if Tate wasn’t mistaken.
Renata briefly did the deer-in-the-headlights thing again. Then she told him, “John something, I think he said. Smith, maybe?”
Grady didn’t look convinced. “And do you know if Mr., ah, Smith did anything else with this information he found for you? Like, I don’t know...sold it to someone else besides you?”
“I’m sure he’s totally trustworthy and kept it all completely confidential,” Renata said.
Now Grady looked even less convinced. “A guy on Craigslist who says he can find anybody for anyone for money and calls himself John Smith is totally trustworthy,” Grady reiterated. Blandly, if Tate wasn’t mistaken.
Renata nodded with much conviction and repeated, “Totally.”
Grady looked at her for a long time, as if weighing a number of scenarios. Finally he growled, “We don’t have time for this right now. We need to get Mr. Hawthorne somewhere safe. And until it’s all sorted out, you’re coming, too, Ms. Twigg.”
That finally stopped the bun patting. But it restarted the button fumbling. So much so that Renata actually undid the button, and then another below it, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of lace beneath. Which was weird, because in light of developments over the last several minutes, the only thing Tate should find tantalizing about Renata Twigg was thoughts of her having never entered his life in the first place.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t go anywhere with you,” she said to Grady. “I have a red-eye out of O’Hare tonight.”
“You don’t have a choice, Ms. Twigg,” Grady said emphatically. He turned to Tate. “And neither do you. We’re all leaving. Now. Once the two of you are settled in a safe house, we can get this all straightened out. But until we know there’s no threat to Mr. Hawthorne, and until we get to the bottom of this security breach, both of you—” he pointed first at Tate, then at Renata “—are coming with me.”
Three (#ulink_be93bad1-6b1a-5180-ae46-0019cbd1bf38)
Renny sat in the backseat of the black SUV with Tate, wishing she could wake up in her Tribeca condo and start the day over again. They’d been driving for more than two hours nonstop—pretty much due north, as far as she could tell—and Tate had barely said a dozen words to her during the entire trip.
He’d spoken to the marshal often enough early on—or, at least, tried to. Grady had responded to every question with a promise to explain once he was sure Tate and Renny were settled at a safe location. He’d replied the same way as he hustled the two of them out of the house earlier. He hadn’t even allowed Tate time to change his clothes, hadn’t allowed Renny to bring her handbag or portfolio and had made them both leave behind their electronics due to their GPS.
On the upside, the fact that Grady hadn’t allowed them even basic necessities might be an indication he didn’t intend to detain them for long. On the downside, the fact that they were still driving after two hours was a pretty decent indication that Grady planned on detaining her and Tate for some time.
She just wondered how far from Chicago Grady thought they had to be before they’d be considered safe. They’d crossed the Wisconsin state line less than an hour after leaving Tate’s house and had kept driving past Racine, Milwaukee and Sheboygan. Like any good Northeasterner, Renny had no idea which states actually abutted each other beyond the tristate area, but she was pretty sure Wisconsin was one of the ones way up on the map beneath Canada. So they couldn’t drive much longer if they wanted to stay in Grady’s jurisdiction.
As if cued by her thoughts, he took the next exit off I-43, one that ended in a two-lane blacktop with a sign indicating they could head either west to a place called Pattypan or east to nowhere, because Pattypan was the only town listed. In spite of that, Grady turned right.
Okay then. Nowhere it would be.
The interstate had already taken them into a densely forested area, but the trees grew even thicker the farther they drove away from it. The sky, too, had grown darker the farther north they traveled, and the clouds were slate and ominous, fat with rain.
This day really wasn’t turning out the way Renny had planned. She braved another look at Tate, who had crowded himself into the passenger-side door as if he wanted to keep as much space between them as possible. He wasn’t turning out the way she’d planned, either. She was supposed to have gone to his house in her usual professional capacity, relayed the terms of his grandfather’s will in her usual professional way and handled his decision, whatever it turned out to be, with professionalism.
Any personal arrangements Tate wanted to make with the Bacco family would have been up to him. Then Renny would have gone back to her life in New York having completed what would be the most interesting case she would ever handle in her professional career and try not to think about how early she’d peaked.
Instead, all her professional responses had gone out the window the moment she saw Tate, and every personal response had jumped up to scream, Howdy do! And those responses hadn’t shut up since, not even when the guy was giving her enough cold shoulder to fill a butcher’s freezer.
The SUV finally turned off the two-lane blacktop, onto a dirt road that sloped sharply upward, into even more trees. The ride grew bouncy enough that Renny had to grab the armrest, but that didn’t keep her from falling toward Tate when they hit a deep rut. Fortunately, she was wearing her seat belt, so she only slammed into him a little bit. Unfortunately, when they came out of the rut, he fell in the other direction and slammed into her, too.
For one scant moment, their bodies were aligned from elbow to shoulder, and Renny couldn’t help thinking it was their first time. Um, touching, she meant. Arms and shoulders, she meant. Fully clothed, she meant. But the way her heart was racing when the two of them separated, and the way the blood was zipping through her veins, and the way her breathing had gone hot and ragged, they might as well have just engaged in a whole ’nother kind of first time.
She mumbled an apology, but he didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, he gripped his armrest as if his life depended on it. After another few hundred jostling, friction-inducing feet of what may or may not have once been a road, the SUV finally broke through the trees and into a clearing.
A clearing populated by a motel that was clearly a remnant of mid-twentieth-century, pre-interstate travel culture—single story, brick and shaped like a giant L. There was a parking space in front of each room, but there wasn’t a single car present. In fact, the place looked as if it had been out of business since the mid-twentieth-century, pre-interstate travel culture. The paint on the doors was peeling, the brick was stained with mold and a rusty, mottled sign in front read The Big Cheese Motor-Inn. In a small clearing nearby were a half-dozen stucco cottages shaped like wedges of cheese. It was toward one of those that Inspector Grady steered the SUV.
“Seriously?” Renny said when he stopped the vehicle and threw it into Park. “You’re going to hide us in a cottage cheese?”
“We’ve used this place as a safe house since nineteen sixty-eight,” Grady said. “That’s when we confiscated it from the Wisconsin mob. These days, no one even remembers it exists.”
“There’s a Wisconsin mob?” Renny asked. “Like who? Silo Sal Schlitz and Vinnie the Udder?”
“There was a Wisconsin mob,” Grady corrected her. “The Peragine family. Shipping and pizzerias.”
Of course.
The marshal snapped off his seat belt, opened his door and exited, so Renny and Tate did, too. The moment she was out of the vehicle, she was swamped by heat even worse than in Chicago. Impulsively, she stripped off her jacket and rolled her shirt sleeves to her elbows. Her hair, so tidy earlier, had become a tattered mess, so she plucked out the pins, tucked them into her skirt pocket and let the mass of dark hair fall to the center of her back. Then she hastily twisted it into a pin-free topknot with the deftness of someone who had been doing it for years, drove her arms above her head and pushed herself up on tiptoe, closing her eyes to enjoy the stretch.
By the time she opened her eyes, Tate had rounded the back of the SUV and was gazing at her in a way that made her glance down to be sure she hadn’t stripped off more than just her jacket. Nope. Everything was still in place. Though maybe she shouldn’t have fiddled so much with her shirt buttons earlier, since there was a little bit of lace and silk camisole peeking out.
But come on. It was a camisole. Who thought camisoles were sexy these days?
She looked at Tate, who was eyeing her as if she were clad in feathery wings, mile-high heels and a two-sizes-too-small cubic-zirconia-encrusted bra. Oh. Okay. Evidently, there was still at least one guy in the world who found camisoles sexy. Too bad he also hated her guts.
As unobtrusively as she could, she rebuttoned the third and second buttons. Then she followed Grady to the giant cheese wedge, telling herself she only imagined the way she could feel Tate’s gaze on her ass the whole time.
“Oh, look,” she said in an effort to dispel some of the tension that had become thick enough to hack with a meat cleaver. “Isn’t that clever, how they made some of the Swiss-cheese holes into windows? That’s what I call functional design.”
Unfortunately, neither man seemed to share her interest in architectural aesthetics, because they just kept walking. Grady pulled a set of keys from his pocket as he scanned the tree line for signs of God knew what, and Tate moved past her to follow the marshal to the front door, not sparing her a glance.
Renny deliberately lagged behind, scanning the tree line herself. Though for different reasons than Grady, she was sure. In spite of the weirdness of the situation, and even with the suffocating heat and teeming sky, she couldn’t help appreciating the beauty surrounding her. The trees were huge, looking almost black against the still-darkening clouds, and there was a burring noise unlike anything she’d ever heard. She recognized the sound as cicadas—she’d heard them on occasion growing up in Connecticut—but here it was as if there were thousands of them, all singing at once.
The wind whispered past her ears, tossing tendrils of hair she hadn’t quite contained, and she closed her eyes to inhale deeply, filling her nose with the scent of evergreen and something else, something that reminded her of summers at the shore. That vague fishy smell that indicated the presence of water nearby. If they really had traveled due north, it was probably Lake Michigan. She wondered if they were close enough to go fishing. She’d loved fishing when she was a little girl. And she’d always outfished her father and brothers whenever they went.
She listened to the cicadas, reveled in the warm breeze and inhaled another big gulp of pine forest, releasing it slowly. Then she drew in another and let it go, too. Then another. And another. Bit by bit, the tension left her body, and something else took its place. Not quite serenity, but something that at least kept her panic at bay. She loved being outdoors. The farther from civilization, the better.
She felt a raindrop on her forehead, followed by a few more; then the sky opened up and the rain fell in earnest. Renny didn’t mind. Rain was hydrotherapy. The warm droplets cooled her heated skin and tap-tap-tapped on the leaves of the trees and the hood of the SUV, their gentle percussion calming her even more.
With one final breath, she opened her eyes. Tate stood inside the door of the cottage looking out at her, his expression inscrutable. He was probably wondering what kind of madwoman he was going to be stuck with for the rest of the day—maybe longer. Renny supposed that was only fair, since she was wondering a lot of things about him at the moment, too.
Like, for instance, if he enjoyed fishing.
* * *
As Tate gazed at Renata, so much of what had happened today became clear. The woman didn’t even have enough sense to come in out of the rain.
He must have been nuts to have thought her professional, capable and no-nonsense. Then again, he’d also been thinking she didn’t seem to want to be any of those things. Now he had his proof. Even when the rain soaked her clothing, she still didn’t seem inclined to come inside.
On the other hand, her saturated state wasn’t entirely off-putting. Her white shirt clung to her like a second skin, delineating every hill and valley on her torso. Just because those hills weren’t exactly the Rockies—or even the Grassy Knoll—didn’t make her any less undesirable. No, it was the fact that she’d disrupted his life and gotten him into a mess—then made a literal federal case out of it—that did that.
Actually, that wasn’t quite true. She was still desirable. He just didn’t like her very much.
He heard Grady in the cabin behind him opening and closing drawers, cabinets and closets, and muttering to himself. But the activity still couldn’t pull his gaze from Renata in the rain.
Renata in the rain. It sounded like something by a French watercolorist hanging in the Musée d’Orsay. But there she was, a study in pale shades, and if he were an artist, he would be setting up his easel right now.
She really was very pretty. Not in the flashy, showy, don’t-you-wish-you-were-hot-like-me way that the women he dated were. Her beauty was the kind that crept up on a man, then crawled under his skin and into his brain, until he could think of little else. A quiet, singular, unrelenting kind of beauty. When he first saw her standing at his front door that morning, he’d thought she was cute. Once they started talking, and he’d heard her breathless, whiskey-rough voice, he’d even thought she was kind of hot—in a sexy-librarian way. But now she seemed remarkably pretty. In a quiet, unrelenting, French-watercolorist kind of way.
“Mr. Hawthorne?” he heard Grady call out from behind him, raising his voice to be heard over the rain pelting the roof.
Yet still Tate couldn’t look away from Renata. Because she started making her way to the door where he stood. She stopped long enough to remove her wet shoes, then continued barefoot. The dark hair that had been so severe was sodden and bedraggled now, bits of it clinging to her neck and forehead, and the suit that had been so efficient looking was rumpled and puckered. Somehow, though, that just made her more attractive.
“Mr. Hawthorne?” Grady said again, louder this time.
“What?” Tate replied over his shoulder. Because now Renata was only a few steps away from him.
“Sir, I’m going to have to go into town for some supplies. This place hasn’t been used for a while, and I didn’t have any notice that we’d be needing it. I did turn on the hot-water heater, so there should be hot water in a few hours. But the place is kind of light on fresh food. I shouldn’t be gone long.”
Renata was nearly on top of Tate now—figuratively, not literally, though the literal thought was starting to have some merit. So he stepped just far enough out of the doorway for her to get by him, but not far enough that she could do it without touching him. She seemed to realize that, because she hesitated before entering, lifting her head to meet his gaze.
As he studied her, a drop of rainwater slid from behind her ear to glide down the column of her neck, settling in the divot at the base of her throat. He was so caught up in watching it, to see if it would stay there or roll down into the collar of her shirt, that he almost forgot she wasn’t the kind of woman he found fascinating. It wasn’t Renata that fascinated him at the moment, he assured himself. It was that drop of rainwater. On her unbelievably creamy, flawless, beautiful skin.
When he didn’t move out of her way, she arched a dark eyebrow questioningly. In response, he feigned bewilderment. She took another small step forward. He stood pat.
“Do you mind?” she finally asked.
“Mind what?”
“Moving out of the way?”
Well, if she was going to speak frankly—another trait he disliked in women—there wasn’t much he could do but move out of the way.
“Of course,” he said. And moved a step as small as hers to the side.
She strode forward at the same time, but she moved farther and faster than he did so her shoulder hit him in the chest, and they both lost their footing. When Tate circled her upper arm with one hand, he discovered Renata Twigg had some decent definition in her biceps and triceps.
Muscles were another thing he wasn’t crazy about finding on a woman. So why did finding them on Renata send a thrill of...something...shooting through his system?
“Sorry,” he said.
“No problem,” she replied. In a breathless, whiskey-rough voice that made him start thinking about sexy librarians again.
She kept moving, but even after she was free of him, his palm was still damp from her clothing, and there was a wet spot on his shirt where her shoulder had made contact. Those would eventually dry up and be gone. What wouldn’t leave as quickly were the thoughts circling in his brain that were anything but dry.
He watched her as she continued into the cabin, noting how the rain had soaked her skirt, too. The skirt whose length barely passed muster for proper office attire. The dampness made it seem even shorter—though it could just be Tate’s overactive imagination making it do that—and it, too, clung to her body with much affection. Whatever Renata lacked in the front—and, really, no woman ever lacked anything up front—she more than made up for behind. The gods might have made her small, but they’d packed more into her little package than a lot of women twice her size.
“Mr. Hawthorne?”
Reluctantly, he returned his attention to Grady. The marshal was looking at him in a way that indicated he knew exactly where Tate’s gaze had been, and if he were Renata’s father, he’d be hauling Tate out to the woodshed.
“Did you hear what I said?” he asked.
“You have to go into town for some supplies,” Tate replied. See? He could multitask just fine, listening to Grady with the left side of his brain while ogling Renata with the right.
“And I won’t be gone long,” Grady added as he made his way to the front door. “There’s a phone in the bedroom, but if either of you uses it to call anyone other than me, this is going to turn into a much longer stay than any of us wants. Get it?”
“Got it.”
“Good.” Without another word, Grady exited.
Leaving Tate and Renata truly alone.
Four (#ulink_310f8f7f-fa53-59ed-9f1c-50b70cf84684)
Renny watched Inspector Grady leave, then scanned the cottage and decided things could be worse. The place was actually kind of cute in a retro, Eisenhower-era kind of way. The walls were paneled in honey-colored wood, and a fireplace on one side was framed by creek stone all the way around. Doors flanked it on each side, one open and leading to a bedroom and the other closed, doubtless a bathroom. The wall hangings were amorphous metal shapes, and the rugs were textile versions of the same. The furniture was all midcentury modern—doubtless authentic—with smooth wood frames and square beige cushions. On the side of the cottage opposite the fireplace was a breakfast bar and kitchenette, whose appliances looked authentic to the middle of the last century, too.

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