Darcy Maguire – The Bridal Chase (страница 3)

They were going to have the perfect life together. She was everything he’d always wanted.

Roxanne dropped her head on to the desk, lifting and dropping it again for good measure. Why?

What was wrong with her?

Why had she even tried to pick the guy up with only minutes before his fiancée turned up? As if he was going to do anything then anyway…he wouldn’t have even been considering her. There would be no way even the most daring man would risk it.

She couldn’t stop thinking about it.

She rubbed the sore spot on her forehead. Maybe his impending date wouldn’t have mattered to him if her dress had been shorter, sexier, red?

She sighed, dropping her head again on to the desk and staying there, covering her face. She was hopeless.

What sort of professional was she? She hadn’t even looked at her watch to check out how much time she had…hadn’t even thought about it after he had walked in that door, towering above the mortals, looking like a god in that tailored suit.

She would have thought it would have been easier, especially after all those detective novels she’d read and the shows she’d watched on TV.

She stared around the small office in the two-storey walk-up that her sister, Nadine, had found to run her business. It wasn’t exactly typical of an investigator’s office.

It was small, the size of a small apartment, with enough room for two desks, a couple of wastepaper baskets and three walls of filing cabinets that Nadine’s daughter, Rory, had decorated with crayon.

A small pile of toys sat in the corner on a miniature desk where Rory came to help out when pre-school was out and the holidays were on.

One window looked out on the neighbouring office block’s western wall and had floral curtains and the other faced the street with pink blinds that wouldn’t go down.

The outer office was painted a soft peach with the paint that her sister had left over from painting her daughter’s bedroom, with a sofa that had seen better days and a pile of magazines from the Dark Ages.

Despite appearances, Nadine said the business was going quite well…if you didn’t count today’s disaster or the fact that Roxanne had been left to hold the fort—and she had no experience in this type of fort at all.

What she was going to do now with the Cade case she had no idea. Half of her wanted to shove the thing into the filing cabinet and forget about it, the other half hankered to go and see the guy again, to try again.

Could she?

No. It would be too obvious and far too awkward for her, and the fact that her track record with men was a disaster had to be taken into account.

The door burst open.

Nadine rushed into the room, carrying an armload of files. ‘What are you still doing here?’ She glanced at her watch. ‘It’s late.’

Roxanne looked at the clock on the wall. ‘Yes.’ But she hadn’t wanted to go home and face her sister until she’d worked out what to do.

‘Don’t think you can weasel overtime out of me.’ Her sister shot her a smile that looked a lot like her own, like her hair and her eyes—if there hadn’t been three years between them they could have been twins.

Nadine flicked back the wisps of her auburn-tinted brown hair. ‘How’s it going anyway? Are you finding everything okay? Taking notes for every call? Being polite?’ She dumped the files on to the desk. ‘Can you file these while you’re hanging round?’

Roxanne rubbed her forehead to ease the pain and sat up straighter. ‘Sure, but shouldn’t you be at home with Rory? I’ve got this all covered.’

Her sister scooped up the papers from a tray on her desk. ‘I’ve got a sitter with her for an hour so I haven’t got much time…I just wanted to catch up on paperwork… Are you sure you’re all right with this? I know I sort of dropped this on you, but you were jobless…’

Roxanne stood up. ‘I’m fine. Everything’s fine. I’m handling everything. I’ve had plenty of experience in office management.’

Nadine nodded, heading for the door. ‘Not this kind of office, I’ll bet.’

Roxanne’s mind shot to the scene earlier in the bar. That was for sure.

‘And I forgot to tell you, if there’s anyone who can’t wait until next week just pass them on to the private investigators that I wrote there in the appointment book.’

Roxanne’s gaze wandered over to the number scrawled on the top of the book. Just great. She could have told her that earlier.

The elegant woman had come in first thing this morning, insisting on getting the job done at the soonest possible time, threatening to take her business elsewhere if Roxanne couldn’t guarantee an immediate start.

‘And ring me if there’s a problem at all; I can track down a sitter for Rory for an hour or so while she’s sleeping. I can be a mother and troubleshoot messes at the same time.’

Roxanne froze. Her messes. She could hear Nadine’s accusation as clearly in her tone as every other time that her sister had come and saved the day for her, whether she wanted saving or not.

Since their mother had passed away Nadine had taken over the role with a vengeance. Well, she wasn’t a teenager any more and Nadine didn’t need to know she’d gone and tried to do a job herself and made a mess of it.

So, she had messed up the first time. She wasn’t going to run to Nadine at the first sign of trouble, she wasn’t going to pass the buck and she certainly wasn’t going to show that she wasn’t prepared to go out there in the real world again and put herself on the market.

She could face Cade Taylor Watson again.

Roxanne was up to the task, just not today, not without some more preparation and planning. She’d blundered in earlier, but not again.

She straightened the papers on the desk with quick, jerky movements, avoiding her sister’s gaze. Saying no to that client wouldn’t have been good for Nadine’s business anyway and the business was all her sister had after her jerk of a husband ran off with his secretary.

Nadine had taken up where her ex’s investigating business had left off. She didn’t just do the general private investigating work that her husband had done with a few marital jobs thrown in. Marital was her speciality.

Roxanne was behind the idea of testing a man’s fidelity one hundred and fifty per cent. She wished she’d known about it years ago—her life would have been so different if she had.

Nadine yanked open the door. ‘So, call me if you have any problems. In the meantime, just make appointments and take messages.’

Roxanne nodded, clamping down on the urge to confess her foray earlier. ‘I’m here to help,’ she blurted, plastering a smile on her face.

She would have come to help her sister earlier, but she had been committed elsewhere, in another state, with her own life, job, apartment and lover…

Now, she wasn’t.

She should have come as soon as she heard Nadine was starting up her own business and saved herself a lot of distress instead of staying in Melbourne.

‘How’s Rory?’ Roxanne blurted. If her daughter hadn’t been sick Nadine would have been here when the client had come in. She would have known exactly what to do and how to pull it off without a hitch, first time round. ‘Better?’

‘Not really.’ Her sister glanced behind her, frowning. ‘I’ve got to get back just in case she wakes up and needs me.’

Roxanne nodded.

‘And don’t hide here all night. You have to have a life too. You’ve got to put your chin up and get on with it, you know.’

She held her tongue as her sister swept out, closing the door firmly behind her. There was nothing wrong with staying late at work. It didn’t mean anything. She was so over Aaron.

Her belly twisted at the thought of him, of what he could be doing—whether he thought of her at all, or not.

She lifted her chin. She had a problem to solve and she had a duty to not distract Nadine from her daughter. They needed time together and her niece needed her mother more than her mother needed to worry about work.

That was her job, for now, and she was going to manage the office and keep the place ticking over until Nadine got back, and she was going to do it no matter what it took, even baiting handsome men.

If, in the process, she managed to prove to her sister that she wasn’t the total cock-up that she thought she was, it would be a bonus. Sure, she was useless in keeping a relationship with a guy, keeping a house tidy and keeping a fridge sanitary, but she could do this.

If someone wanted to prove that Cade Taylor Watson was a womaniser, a man likely to roam, a man who was going to betray his girlfriend, then she was the woman for the job.

She wasn’t a quitter.

She was going to nail the guy.

She couldn’t help but smile, the vision of Cade Taylor Watson’s handsome face coming to mind.

Her body warmed. Who could call it work?

All she had to do was get him to show his true colours… How hard could it be? He was a man.

The job was as good as done.

CHAPTER THREE

THE restaurant was perfect. The lighting soft, the twinkling candles on the tables, the gentle strains of the lone lute player filling the room, curling around her.

The mood was gentle, romantic, inviting love, inviting intimacy…cripes, inviting sex. She couldn’t have done it better.