The Wedding Assignment Page 10

  “Your big brother might be better off if somebody rapped him upside the head every now and again,” she said. “He seems to think he knows what’s best for everybody, without bothering to consult them about it.”

  “You’re right.” The cab was coming to a halt in front of the steps Rae-Anne had descended in her fairy-tale dress and shoes yesterday afternoon. “The only thing is—”

  He was out the door before he finished the sentence, leaving Rae-Anne far more impatient to hear the end of it than she wanted to admit. She had to wait until they were both outside the cab before he finished.

  “The thing is that every once in a while Wiley does know what’s best for other people,” he said. “He tracked me down when even I didn’t know where the hell I was. And maybe the Cotters aren’t exactly all over each other, but if you tried to pull us apart, you’d have a hell of a fight on your hands. Wiley gets the credit for that. He put us back together, and he’s what keeps us together.”

  He was lifting her small suitcase out of the back seat. RaeAnne frowned at him.

  “Why are you telling me this?” she couldn’t help asking.

  Anyone watching from the house would have assumed from Sam’s casual stance that he wasn’t talking about anything more urgent than the cab fare. But the slight glint down deep in his blue eyes told Rae-Anne a different story.

  “He’ll drive you crazy at times,” he said, “but I’d hate to see anybody hurt him. That’s all.”

  The comment was timed so perfectly that Rae-Anne didn’t have a chance to come up with a retort. If she was going to play her part convincingly, she couldn’t very well stand here on the ranch house steps arguing with the cabdriver.

  So there wasn’t time to say there was no danger of her hurting Wiley Cotter because she didn’t really mean anything to him.

  Were all the Cotter brothers so self-contained, so hard to know? she wondered, as she turned toward the house. Wiley, as Sam had said, could drive you crazy at times. Jack had at least seemed straightforward, but then, she’d only been dealing with him on a professional level. She wondered if his manner would change if his heart was involved.

  And now Sam was adding to the Cotter mystique, as though there wasn’t enough of it going around already.

  “One thing at a time, Rae-Anne,” she reminded herself as she pushed the doorbell next to the big green door. “You can only worry about one thing at a time.”

  It was Renee, the housekeeper, who opened the door. Her round, lined face was a complete blank for a moment, and then she lifted her hands in the air.

  “Oh, my,” she said, almost laughing. “I told Mr. Rodney you would come back. He didn’t believe me, but I told him, with that little one on the way—”

  She stopped herself, then seemed to decide the damage was done. “I know I’m not supposed to know,” she said, putting a hand on Rae-Anne’s forearm, “but I’m right, aren’t I?”

  As she admitted that Renee’s guess had been on target, Rae-Anne decided she couldn’t possibly take Sam Cotter up on his offer of a quick escape. She was committed to sorting out the mystery surrounding Rodney Dietrich, if only because the child growing inside her gave her an undeniable connection to this place and the people who lived here.

  So she returned Renee’s hug, and asked if she could borrow some money to pay off the cab. She would tell Sam the coast seemed to be clear, she thought, and she would face the rest of this adventure on her own.

  “You can’t possibly be serious about going in to work.”

  “Why not? We were only going to take the weekend off for a honeymoon, anyway. And I’ll be better if I have something to do. You know I hate sitting around—I think maybe that’s one of the reasons I got so antsy last week. I’m always happier if I’m working.”

  They were sitting in the big dining room of Rodney’s ranch house, with the remnants of breakfast between them. It was another hot day, and Rodney’s newly washed sandy hair looked sleeker and more prosperous than ever in the bright sunshine that flooded the room.

  His face, though, was anything but sunny. “You should be resting,” he insisted. “Renee, tell her a pregnant woman needs all the rest she can get.”

  The rotund housekeeper was clearing the dishes, but she paused as her employer appealed to her. She looked from Rodney to Rae-Anne, who was wearing a bright yellow shirtwaist dress with a wide white belt and cotton espadrilles, and feeling like anything but a pregnant woman in need of coddling.

  “In my experience, Mr. Rodney, sometimes being pregnant gives a woman more energy, at least at the beginning,” she said. “And I don’t know about Rae-Anne, but I’m always happiest when I’ve got something to occupy me, and that’s the plain truth.” She hid her quick smile. “Sorry I can’t tell you what you wanted to hear.”

  Rodney waited until Renee had left the room, then cautioned Rae-Anne, “I don’t want you working a full shift. You still look tired.”

  They hadn’t gone much beyond the obvious subjects last night. Rae-Anne had explained why she’d lost her nerve before the wedding, and Rodney had told her he understood, and felt bad for insisting on a big wedding when he’d known it wasn’t her first choice.

  He’d also said he’d been doing some hard thinking in the twenty-four hours she’d been gone. “When I had to face the possibility that you wanted out of this whole thing, it put things into a different perspective,” he’d said. “The one thought I kept coming back to is that we could be so happy here—you and me and the baby. I hadn’t realized until yesterday just how much I was looking forward to showing a fifth-generation Dietrich around his—or her—territory.”

  He’d told her before what a wonderful place to grow up the ranch was. And that sense of belonging—of connection with a place—was one of the things Rae-Anne most wanted to offer her child. After eighteen years of being moved from one country to another, from one ornate embassy to the next, she was determined that her child would never have to make a new set of friends only to lose them two years later, or come to know the feeling of being at home just in time to start packing for the next move.

  They’d been small tragedies, those childhood uprootings, but they still loomed large in Rae-Anne’s memories. She loved the thought of settling down on this hill-country ranch, with the quick-flowing river winding through stands of cypress trees and the rocky, open landscape of the scrubby grazing land. And she’d been happy to hear Rodney’s enthusiasm for it last night.

  “Did I tell you I was having that old barn rebuilt this week?” he’d asked. “I can’t count the number of hours I spent down there when I was a kid. I learned to ride in that paddock when I wasn’t much more than four years old. I want to fix it up so our kids can enjoy it when they get old enough.”

  Last night she’d been too tired to press any of the uncomfortable questions she needed to ask Rodney. Today, though, she knew it was time to remember the real reason she’d come back here. Without settling the question of Rodney’s guilt or innocence, there wasn’t much point to dreaming about a happy hill-country childhood for her baby.

  “I’ve been wondering,” she said, as she finished the last of the enormous glass of orange juice Renee had brought her. “Why didn’t you and Danielle ever have kids? Didn’t she want them?”

  He stiffened a little, as he always did when she asked him about his first wife. “Let’s not talk about Danielle,” he said.

  “But that’s one of the things that’s been bothering me.” She looked into his hazel eyes, trying to read his thoughts. “One of the reasons I got such cold feet was that I felt as though you and I don’t really know each other in a lot of important ways. I don’t know anything about Danielle, or how you felt about her—”

  “I loved her. Obviously, since I married her. We didn’t have children because we didn’t feel the time was right yet.”

  “And her death—that accident—”

  “Do we have to talk about this, Rae-Anne?”

  It had been barely two years since
Danielle’s death, RaeAnne knew. And it was entirely plausible that the sudden strain in Rodney’s voice was due to the fact that it still hurt him too much to talk about what had happened.

  But it could also be caused by an uneasy conscience. RaeAnne wished there was a simple way to tell guilt from grief, but if there was one, she wasn’t coming up with it.

  “I just—wish I knew more about it, that’s all.”

  “Hell, I do, too.” He drained his coffee cup. “I had the police go over that damn ski boat with a fine-tooth comb, looking for some reason the towrope broke, but they couldn’t come up with any answers. Just a freaky accident, they called it.”

  Jack Cotter had called it something quite different. And Rae-Anne had to wonder whether Rodney had deliberately mentioned the police search because he’d detected a hint of suspicion in Rae-Anne’s manner.

  She didn’t have time to decide. Rodney was looking at his watch and standing up briskly. “I have a meeting at ten,” he said. “I need to get going.”

  This was the first she’d heard of any meeting at ten. She could have sworn he cut off the conversation to avoid talking about his deceased wife, but she couldn’t think of a way to continue her questions without sounding too obvious.

  And during the forty-five minute drive to San Antonio, he kept the conversation firmly on social matters, talking about a barbecue he wanted to host for the new work crew who would be rebuilding the old horse barn on the ranch. When they reached the downtown hotel that was the flagship for Rodney’s chain, Rae-Anne still hadn’t figured out whether she needed to be pushier or gentler in going after the answers she needed.

  “How about a late lunch, and then head back home?” he asked as they entered the impressive three-story lobby.

  “Sounds good.” With luck, she would be able to gather the information she needed by then.

  “Don’t wear yourself out.”

  “Stop worrying. You sound more like a mother than my own mother ever did.”

  “Just figured I’d supply some of what you’d missed, that’s all.”

  He gave her a quick kiss and a casual wave as she stepped into the elevator on her way to the bar on the top floor.

  Rodney could supply so much of what she’d missed in her own childhood—a permanent home, a sense of belonging, a stable parental presence in the life of her child. If only she loved him more…

  Without any warning at all, the image of Wiley Cotter’s suntanned face pushed itself into her thoughts, smiling and suggestive and sexy as hell. “Get out of here, Wiley,” she said out loud, shaking her head to chase the mental picture of him away. “Why the hell should I be thinking of you in the same breath as home and stability and all that good stuff?”

  It couldn’t have been because she was also thinking of love….

  The thought distracted her as the elevator glided to a halt at the twentieth floor. Love wasn’t really the issue here, she told herself firmly. The issue was Rodney’s guilt or innocence. And if she was going to set her mind at rest about that, she needed an excuse to go digging around in the central personnel files for the hotel chain.

  She was still trying to come up with one as the elevator doors slid open and she started to step out, turning automatically toward the long, carpeted corridor that led to the rooftop lounge where she’d presided as head bartender for the past two years. But the two businessmen in front of the elevator door weren’t moving aside to let her pass, as she’d expected them to do.

  In fact, they were heading straight for her.

  By the time the first one had shouldered her toward the open elevator door, it was too late to protest. The second man grabbed her elbow, and the two of them hustled her into the elevator just as the doors were closing.

  It all happened too quickly to make sense of it. The elevator started smoothly downward again, adding to the plummeting feeling in Rae-Anne’s stomach as the two men muscled her into one corner of the small, enclosed space and leaned in on her.

  She felt suddenly three feet tall, and utterly helpless. The certainty that that was how they wanted her to feel didn’t help even a little bit.

  “Heard you’re in the family way.” The man who spoke sounded casual, almost genial.

  “Who told you that?” Her voice was sharp with anxiety. “Did Rodney tell you?”

  There was a pause, as though the two men were exchanging glances over her head. Then the second stranger said, “No. And he doesn’t know anything about this visit, either. This is just between you and us. Best to keep it that way, all right?”

  “Why?” She had to force the word out.

  “Because, Rae-Anne, that fiancé of yours is already in a world of trouble. You don’t want him losing his temper, and digging himself into an even deeper hole, do you?”

  Dear God in heaven, what were they talking about? All of Rae-Anne’s vague suspicions about the Dietrich family business came alive in her mind again, more insistent and ominous than ever.

  Had Rodney been talking to these strangers about her pregnancy? If he hadn’t—

  Rodney’s housekeeper Renee knew about the baby. And that meant Renee’s husband probably knew, too. And perhaps the rest of the ranch staff, for that matter.

  Suddenly the circle of suspicion around her seemed to widen, taking in people whose names she didn’t even know, people who seemed to know a lot more about her life at the moment than she knew herself.

  Just like Wiley did…

  Wiley… She mouthed his name silently, half-turned in on herself beneath the looming shoulders of the two men. The thought of Wiley Cotter—his unfailing nerve, his devilmay-care smile—was enough to give her some extra strength, some extra courage.

  But it wasn’t enough to keep her knees from shaking badly. And there was nothing she could do to hold in her gasp of fear as the second man leaned a little harder on her and pressed something flat and hard against her belly.

  “Now listen up,” he said. His slow, hoarse voice made Rae-Anne shiver. “It doesn’t matter where we found out about the baby. The point is, it’d be a damn shame for anything to happen to the little guy. Wouldn’t it.”

  It wasn’t a question. And Rae-Anne was beyond answering anyway, because she’d just turned her head enough to look down and see what was in his hand.

  It was a knife. A long, gleaming knife, with the blade pressing flat against the part of her body next to her unborn child. All be had to do was twist the blade a quarter turn—

  His words made the thought even more chilling. “Poor thing,” he said smoothly. “So little, and so helpless.”

  “What—why are you doing this?” She couldn’t make her voice operate as anything more than a whisper. And she couldn’t get her hands free, no matter how hard she struggled, because the brawny bodies of the two strangers had her blocked completely. Everything in her mind was screaming at her to cover her belly, to protect her child.

  And she couldn’t do it.

  Just as she thought the tension might tear her apart, she heard the soft bing of the elevator bell announcing that they had arrived wherever they were going. Rae-Anne braced herself to fight, in case they tried to drag her out of the elevator. But instead she felt the pressure of their weight lessening.

  That didn’t take away the threat in what the first man was saying. He moved his face very close to Rae-Anne’s just for a moment and said, “Remember what we’re telling you, all right? And don’t go asking questions about what doesn’t concern you.”

  They were out of the elevator almost as soon as the doors slid open. Rae-Anne leaned against the back wall, fending off her sick feeling of helplessness and the curious stares of a family of tourists who were waiting at the parking garage level to get on. It took her a moment to realize that someone in the elevator was asking what floor she wanted, and another few seconds to get her voice working well enough to tell them to push the button for twenty.

  Chapter 7

  Wiley had always hated rooftop bars. He liked to keep his feet
on the ground and all his escape routes open, and he couldn’t do either one to his satisfaction on the twentieth floor of this upscale hotel.

  But he made himself stay in his place at the end of the long polished wooden bar, because this was where Rae-Anne was. Or at least this was where she was supposed to be.

  He’d watched her leave the ranch house with Rodney earlier and had busted his tail to get to his vehicle and arrive at the downtown hotel ahead of them. He’d been sitting inconspicuously next to a potted palm in the lobby when they’d come in, and was in the very next elevator after the one Rae-Anne had taken. Ordering a drink at the classy top-floor bar hadn’t taken long.

  But Rae-Anne hadn’t shown up yet, and Wiley was beginning to wonder if he should go looking for her. He’d told himself he was going to keep an eye on her, even if she didn’t want him to. And he couldn’t very well do that if he was just sitting around nursing a beer he had no real intention of drinking. Yet the elevator she’d been on had come straight up to the twentieth floor—he’d watched the lit numbers with his own eyes. She should be here, somewhere.

  The hotel was far too big for him to do a floor-by-floor search for her. Wiley gave a frustrated growl and decided that if he was going to be stuck here, he might as well get on with the next part of his plan.

  The daytime bartender was a young man with jet black hair and a relaxed gait. Wiley caught his attention with an upraised finger, and said casually, “I heard there might be an opening for a bartender around here. Any chance of applying for it?”

  The young man looked him over. “You got experience?” he asked.

  “Sure do.” With luck, the guy wouldn’t ask for particulars, since the experience Wiley was referring to consisted mostly of popping the tops off beer bottles for his brothers at their occasional backyard get-togethers.

  “Where’d you hear we were looking for somebody?”

  “I kind of deduced it.” Wiley put on his most selfdeprecating grin. “Heard your head bartender was getting married to the owner of the hotel chain last weekend.”