Sweet Liar Page 6

  “No. No choice at all. You’re not very good at listening, are you? You obviously didn’t listen to your attorney when he told you to read your father’s will.”

  “I am an excellent listener and I meant to read it.” He was spreading pâté on warm toast nearly as fast as she could eat it.

  “Like you meant to take a bath?” He wanted to insult her and make himself believe that she wasn’t the sexiest female he’d ever seen. But even when she should have been so unappealing, he had several thoughts about what he’d like to do to her delicious—perhaps that wasn’t the right word just now—little body. If she could read his mind, she really would be afraid. He’d like to see that tongue of hers on something besides the piece of pâté that had fallen to her wrist.

  “If you don’t want to be around me, you could always leave. You have my permission,” she said. Now that she was fully awake, now that her fear of him was lessening, she was looking at him. He had on a soft, dark brown cotton shirt and jeans, and he should have looked respectable, but she could see the outline of his chest muscles under the shirt. While he was slathering pâté on bread and handing pieces to her, he was eating just as much as she was, and when he chewed, his lower lip—that beautiful full lower lip—moved. She looked away.

  “I’m not going to leave until you’ve heard everything. When were you planning to start looking for your grandmother?”

  That startled Samantha into looking back at him. How did he know about that? “I am an adult and I—”

  Mike grunted. “That’s what I thought. You had no intention of looking for her, did you?”

  “It’s not any of your business, is it?”

  “It’s entirely my business. Did it ever occur to you to wonder who was to check your research? Who was to approve what you’d done and say you’d done enough searching so you’d get the money your father left you?”

  Samantha paused with a piece of toast on the way to her mouth and stared at him. No, not one of those questions had entered her mind.

  Knowing he had at last piqued her interest, Mike got up, went to the wine safe and took out a cool bottle of white wine. He knew there were several bottles of wine in there because he had put them there in preparation for Samantha’s arrival. Now, he had correctly guessed that every bottle would still be there. She may have problems, he thought as he looked in the safe and saw every bottle he’d put in there still sealed, but she was no drinker. Opening the bottle, knowing exactly where the corkscrew was, he took the wine back to her bedroom and poured two glasses full, frowning at the look on her face. “This is not a prelude to a seduction, so you can stop looking at me as though I’m a satyr. Drink it or not, your choice. I’m sure that someone as uptight as you is probably too prudish to do something so wild as drink a glass of wine.”

  Curling her upper lip at him in a sneer of what she hoped looked like contempt, she took the glass, drained it, then handed it back to him for a refill.

  Mike laughed. “A real sailor, are you? Any tattoos?”

  Samantha didn’t bother to answer him, but she wished she hadn’t drunk the wine. She had not eaten very much, and the wine was already going to her head, yet she desperately needed to be alert right now, not fuzzy-headed and relaxed as the wine was making her feel. “Not any tattoos I’m going to show you,” she heard herself say, then grimaced, for she had always been the very easiest of drunks. Half a glass of wine and she was dancing on tables—or at least thinking about dancing. It was something about her that had always disgusted Richard, but he had managed to cope with the problem. As always, he figured out a solution to all of Samantha’s “problems”: Because she had no head for drinking, he didn’t allow her to drink.

  Looking down at the tray across her legs as he lifted the cover, she saw a fat, succulent steak smothered in sauce. “I don’t eat meat,” she said, looking away.

  “Why not? You don’t like it?”

  “Where have you been for the last century? Haven’t you read the reports on meat? Fat content. Hardening of the arteries. Cholesterol. No fiber.”

  “Is that all? The air’s worse for you than any steak. Eat it, Sam.”

  “My name is Samantha, not—” She didn’t say any more because he shoved a piece of meat into her mouth. When she chewed, she found the flavor to be divine, really truly divine. Continuing to chew, she remembered that she had first given up meat as a way to cut down on their grocery bill.

  “Hated that, didn’t you?” he said smugly, watching her.

  She ignored his comment. “I thought you wanted me to listen to you. Would you say what you have to say, then get out of here?” Cutting another bite of steak, he started to feed it to her as though she were a child or, perhaps, as though they were on far more intimate terms than they were, so she took the fork from his hand and fed herself. He didn’t seem to notice the look she gave him when he picked up her salad fork and began helping himself to part of the steak. Samantha tried not to think of the scene: her sitting at the head of the bed, him sprawled across the middle, his head near her knees as they both ate from the same plate.

  “Ever hear of Larry Leonard?”

  “Yet another person we do not have in common,” she said jauntily, pointing her fork at him. She definitely should not have drunk that glass of wine.

  “Larry Leonard is—was—a writer of murder mysteries. He didn’t write very many of them and they didn’t sell well, but they received some critical acclaim because they were so well researched. All of them were about gangsters.”

  Her mouth was full of steak and she kept sipping on the second glass of wine. “The two of you should have gotten along splendidly as that’s all you read about.” As soon as she said it, she blushed.

  Mike grinned knowingly. “Been snooping, have you? By the way, thanks for putting my clothes away the day Tammy had to leave.”

  Samantha looked down at her plate so he couldn’t see her red face.

  “Anyway,” Mike continued, “Larry Leonard was actually named Michael Ransome, and he was my honorary uncle, a friend of my grandfather’s, and I was named after him. Uncle Mike lived in a guesthouse on my father’s land in Colorado, and I spent a lot of time with him when I was a kid. We were…buddies,” he said softly.

  Samantha stopped chewing when she heard the barely concealed pain in his voice, for she understood all too well how it felt to have people you loved die. Reaching out her hand to him, she pulled back before touching him.

  Mike didn’t seem to notice as he kept eating and talking. “When Uncle Mike died three years ago, he willed everything he owned to me. There wasn’t any money, but there was his library of books on gangsters.” He smiled at her teasingly. “The books you’ve seen.”

  “I’m sure they’re your own taste in literature.” She speared a cherry tomato before he could take it.

  “He also left me work he’d done on a biography of a big-time gangster named Dr. Anthony Barrett.”

  “The man you think I know.”

  Raising one eyebrow in praise of her memory, Mike didn’t answer directly but made a stab at the last bite of steak, then just as he was about to eat it, offered it to her.

  Samantha almost took it, but then shook her head. “I really wish you would finish this story and leave.” The intimacy of this shared meal was not something she wanted to continue.

  Removing the last cover from the tray, Mike revealed a deep dish of chocolate mousse. Samantha started to refuse, but it looked so rich and dark and creamy that before she knew what she was doing, she had dipped her spoon in it at the same time that Mike dipped his.

  “Where was I?” he asked, leaning back, licking his spoon while Samantha watched him, wondering if he was always so at ease. “Oh yes. The biography. I read what work Uncle Mike had done and became interested in this Tony Barrett. I’d just finished the course work at school and I was at loose ends, so I thought I might continue what Uncle Mike started. So I decided to move to New York and continue researching. When I was moving Uncle Mike
’s books, I found the file folder.”

  When he said no more, Samantha looked up at him. “Is that supposed to intrigue me? Am I now supposed to ask, ‘What file folder?’ ”

  “I could stand a little interest on your part, yes. But I can see that I’m not going to get it.” He filled his spoon with mousse. “The folder was simply labeled ‘Maxie’ and inside was a newspaper photo of you, your grandmother, and your dog.”

  Samantha put her spoon down with a clatter. “My grandmother ran away when I was eight months old. There is no photo of the two of us.”

  Leaning on his elbow, he looked at her intently, without blinking, as though trying to relay some message to her.

  “Oh,” Samantha said. “That picture.” It had taken her a while to remember, not that she remembered the incident, but her grandfather had told her what happened. “Brownie,” she said at last. “I was staying with my grandmother, and I crawled into a pipe in a ditch in the backyard.”

  “And you got stuck, and your grandmother called the fire department.”

  “And a bored newspaper reporter looking for a story happened to be at the station that day so he came with the firemen, but it was Brownie who saved me.”

  “Your dog crawled into the pipe, bit into your soggy diaper, and pulled you out of that pipe. The reporter took a picture of you, your grandmother, and Brownie, the wire services picked the photo and story up and sent it around to papers all over the country, where it was seen by my uncle Michael Ransome as well as the rest of the world. Uncle Mike cut the photo out and wrote Maxie in the margin. All through his notes a woman named Maxie is mentioned.” He looked up at her, studying her.

  “Maxie was Barrett’s mistress.” When Samantha didn’t jump out of her skin at this news, as he was hoping she would, he leaned back on the bed and put his hands behind his head. “I think Maxie and your grandmother are one and the same.”

  When Samantha didn’t say anything, just kept cleaning out the dish of mousse as though he’d said nothing, he looked back at her. She was looking sleepy again. “Well?” he asked impatiently.

  She put down the empty dessert bowl. “Are you finished? Have you told me what you wanted to tell me? You think my grandmother was the mistress of a gangster. Okay, you’ve told me, now go.”

  For a moment, he could only blink at her. “You don’t have an opinion on this?”

  “I have an opinion on you,” she said softly. “You have been reading too many of those gangster books. I didn’t know my grandmother, but she was a regulation grandmother, cookie baking, that sort of thing. And her name was Gertrude. She was not a gangster’s moll—is that the right term?” She put her hand up when he started to interrupt her. “And besides that, what does it matter if she was? Now will you leave?”

  Rolling over to his side, he frowned at her. “It matters because I think your grandmother was in love with Barrett and bore him a child. Tony Barrett just may be your real grandfather.”

  At that Samantha very slowly, very carefully, set the tray to one side, got out of bed, and walked to the door. “Out,” she said as though talking to someone who didn’t understand English. “Get out. In the morning I will find another place of residence.”

  As though she hadn’t spoken, Mike rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. “Your father thought Barrett was his real father.”

  “I don’t want to hear anymore,” she said louder. “I want you to leave.”

  “I’m not going to leave,” he said without looking at her.

  Samantha didn’t say a word, but if he wouldn’t leave, she would. Stepping out of the room, she started down the stairs.

  Mike caught her in his arms before she reached the bottom of the stairs. She struggled against him, but he held her easily, his arms about her body, her back against his front, and as she struggled against him, Mike felt his desire for her growing. He could feel her body against his, her hips, her breasts, her thighs, all touching him. “Be still, Sam,” he whispered, sounding desperate, which he was. “Please, please be still.”

  There was something odd in his tone that made Samantha stop struggling and go perfectly still in his arms.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, his voice ragged, his lips near her ear lobe. “You have nothing to fear from me. All of this was your father’s idea, not mine. I told him he should ask you to help me find Maxie, not force you to do it.” Still holding her close to him, he moved his face to touch her neck, not kissing her, but feeling her softness, smelling her skin.

  With a sharp jerk, Samantha pulled away from him, then leaned back against the stair rail. Her heart was pounding in her breast, her breathing deep and irregular. When she looked at him, she saw that his heart was pounding too and his skin was flushed.

  “You want to sit down somewhere and talk about this?”

  “No,” she answered. “I don’t want to talk about anything, nor do I want to hear anything you have to say. I don’t want to hear your made-up stories about my father or my grandmother or about anything else for that matter. All I want to do is leave this house and never see you again.”

  “No,” he said, pleading, but there was something else in his eyes. “I can’t allow you to leave. Your father gave me the care of you and I mean to be worthy of his trust.”

  Samantha blinked at him several times before she was able to speak. “ ‘Gave you the care of me?’ You mean to be ‘worthy of his trust’?” She didn’t know whether to laugh or run away. “You sound like something from the past, something from the Middle Ages. I am an adult woman and I—”

  Abruptly, Mike’s face changed. “Oh the hell with it. You’re right. Who am I to take any of this seriously? I told Dave this was a dumb idea. I told him he should give you your inheritance with no strings attached, but he insisted that this was the only way. He wanted you to find out the truth.”

  Mike threw up his hands, palms up in surrender. “I give up. I’m not a good jailer. First I let you stay alone in a room until, as far as I can tell, you’re on the point of suicide, then I play the heavy and try to make you do what you don’t want to do. You are an adult and you can make your own decisions. You’re not interested in any of this, so go on back to bed. Put a chair in front of your door if you want—that should keep out even a dedicated pervert like me. In the morning I’ll call a real estate agency and help you find somewhere else to live and I’ll give you back your rent money. Why don’t you take that computer equipment with you because I don’t know what the hell to do with it. Good night, Miss Elliot,” he said, then walked down the stairs, turned, and went into the living room.

  Shaking from her wrestle with him, shaking from all of it, Samantha slowly went back up the stairs.

  5

  As Samantha entered her father’s apartment, her first instinct was to pack a suitcase, but she didn’t. She felt so very tired. Closing the door, she wedged a chair under the knob, removed the chair, then climbed back into bed.

  She couldn’t sleep. She did her best not to think about her father and his will, but it was no good. It was the old “don’t think of elephants” dilemma.

  At three in the morning, she got out of bed and began to search for her father’s will. She had purposely not read it, for she hadn’t wanted to know the details of his after-death rules, hadn’t wanted to know what he had planned for her to do.

  She found the will among some other papers, then sat down to read it. Her father’s lawyer had told her everything that was in the will except for the single sentence that said she was to report all her findings to one Michael Taggert, and on Taggert’s approval of her research, she was to receive her money—money that should have been hers unencumbered.

  Samantha’s first instinct was to tear the document into a thousand pieces, but controlling herself, she smoothed it and replaced it with the other papers. Her father was dead; she had never been angry with him when he was alive, and she was not going to get angry at him now that he was gone. That he wanted someone to take care
of her after he was dead was a sign that he loved her. It made no difference that Samantha didn’t know this man, because her father had and he had approved of Michael Taggert—just as he’d approved of Richard Sims as her husband.

  Getting up, Samantha went to the bathroom where she took a long, hot shower and washed her hair. When she emerged, she felt better. She dressed in gray cotton slacks and a long, loose pink sweater, combed her hair, tied it back from her face, and even put on makeup. It was still dark outside, but there was the feeling of dawn approaching, so she opened the doors leading onto the balcony and breathed the fragrance of the roses in the garden below.

  Hearing something that she couldn’t place, for a moment she stood still, listening. It was the sound of a typewriter being punched with heavy fingers. The sound made Samantha smile, for she hadn’t heard a typewriter in years.

  She knew she should stay in her room, knew she should pack her suitcase, but she didn’t. Going to the door, she opened it and went down the stairs.

  It was easy to follow the sound of the typewriter. Michael was in the library, the room dark except for a light over the desk, and he was punching away on an ancient typewriter that looked like something a war correspondent had used during World War II. He typed with his two index fingers, and he typed as though he were furious.

  All at once feeling cowardly, Samantha started to leave the room.

  “If you have something to say, say it,” he said without turning toward her.

  She blurted her words. “My granddad Cal was my father’s father. He was a wonderful man and I don’t believe he wasn’t.”

  As he turned to look at her, she was surprised to see that he looked tired. Just like her, he had obviously been up all night.

  “Believe what you want,” he said, turning away to pull the paper out of the typewriter and insert another sheet.

  “Why are you typing?” She took a step toward him.

  Glancing at her over his shoulder with a look that said she’d been born without a brain, he said, “Because I want something typed.”