Dangerous Disguise (9 page)

She turned to Jared as Joe walked away, her hands on her hips. “You’re cooking?”

The woman did not seem happy about the turn of events, he thought. “Looks like.” Much as he wanted the opportunity to get in closer to both Joe and Maren, he knew he had to at least sound as if he was willing not to come.

And as long as he phrased it right, she wouldn’t let him cancel, he thought.

He added pepper to the soup, his voice was casual with just a hint of disappointment. “Listen, if it makes you uncomfortable having me at dinner, I’ll just tell Joe I can’t make it.”

She stiffened, just as he figured she would. “No, I won’t be uncomfortable.” Her tone was both defensive and accusing. “Why should I be?”

Adding garlic, he gave her an innocent look, then backtracked. “Well, I thought…never mind.”

Maren cut him off, not wanting the conversation to go any further down the path he was obviously on. If she was uncomfortable in his presence, he’d think that she’d felt something and that was the last thing she wanted him to believe.

“Papa Joe seems to have taken a liking to you for some reason and dinner is at his place, so he gets to say who he invites.”

A commotion in the front of the restaurant terminated any further discussion on the topic. A loud, booming voice was hailing and greeting people as it came closer.

The next moment, Warren Shepherd swept into the kitchen.

At approximately five feet, ten inches, the dapper, gray-haired man cultivated an old-world courtliness in his appearance. It was mingled with the aura of someone who had once grown up on the mean streets of New York City and was now intimately street savvy.

Warren Shepherd was a product of another era. Even when he smiled, there was a deadliness that was hard to mask. He’d spent years perfecting that exact look. People were always quick to give in to him. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

Calling out to April and nodding at Max, Shepherd made his way over to Maren.

“Moxie! How’s my favorite manager?” he asked, giving her a hug that to Jared seemed warmer than the situation warranted.

Why did he call her Moxie? Jared wondered. Was it some term of affection? Any thoughts that something intimate went on between the two vanished. Jared could see that Maren forced a smile to her lips.

“Just fine, Mr. Shepherd.”

“Mr. Shepherd.” Shepherd laughed, shaking his head.

“I can remember a time when you called me Uncle Warren.” Releasing her, he glanced at Jared. Recognition entered his eyes and the thousand-watt smile followed. “Jared, right?”

“Right.” He decided he didn’t like the man on principle.

Shepherd nodded toward Maren. “I’ve known this girl since she came up to here—” he brought his hand up to his waist “—and wore Band-Aids on her knees. A real daredevil, this one. Used to come here after school and do her homework in Joe’s office.” He stood back, as if appraising her. Or showing her off, Jared thought. Did Shepherd think of Maren as his possession? “Who knew she’d turn out to be such a looker? And steal half the office away from her old man?” The questions were all rhetorical. It was clear Shepherd wasn’t looking to start any kind of a dialogue with him. The man scanned the room. “Speaking of which, did Joe get in yet?”

“Papa Joe is in his office.” She waited a moment. When the owner made no comment on the information because he was too busy looking her up and down as if she were a piece of merchandise, she asked, “Do you want me to go get him?”

“Nah, don’t bother.” He waved a hand at her offer. “The mountain’ll go to him.” But as she dutifully fell into place beside him, Shepherd shook his head. “Do me a favor, Moxie, stay out here and crack the whip a little. I want some time alone with your old man.”

Maren stepped back. Jared could see she wasn’t pleased about it, but she hid it well enough beneath a guise of respectfulness. He couldn’t help wondering what she was thinking.

“Of course.” Maren inclined her head, deferring to Shepherd.

Jared waited a beat until the other man had left to see Joe. “You don’t like him, do you?”

Maren continued to watch Shepherd leave. “He’s the owner.”

Jared stirred the soup, then took a container of garlic powder and added it to the liquid. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

She allowed herself a small sigh. No, she didn’t like Shepherd, hadn’t liked him since he’d first put moves on her when she was fifteen. But she needed this job. Loved this job, so she put up with it, making sure that Shepherd knew without her saying it that angels had a better chance of redecorating hell with snow than Shepherd had of ever getting close to her.

“He can be a little abrasive,” she allowed. “And he does a really, really bad Robert De Niro impression.”

Jared stopped stirring and stared at her. “Come again?”

“Robert De Niro.” She finally turned toward him. “In
Casino
.” She could tell by Jared’s puzzled expression that he needed a little background. And she had time to kill since she wasn’t welcome in her office at the moment.

“Warren Shepherd grew up in a neighborhood where everyone either joined the police force or became a ‘wise guy’ as the euphemism goes these days. He didn’t have the stomach for the former and his connections weren’t strong enough for the latter. So he playacts the part. Sees himself as a cross between Brando in the
Godfather
and Robert De Niro in
Casino
and
Goodfellas
, with maybe a little Cagney probably thrown in. Cocky,” she added, then shrugged. “It’s harmless enough until it turns nasty.”

“Nasty?” He coaxed her to elaborate, wondering if this was the thing that would break the dam he’d been facing so far.

“I once saw him really light into a server for spilling a single drop of wine on the tablecloth. He was sitting at the table at the time with his latest ‘lady.’” She said the word as if it left a bad taste in her mouth. He knew for a fact that Shepherd was married with three kids. “I thought he was going to vivisect the poor guy right then and there.”

Jared read between the lines. “And that’s when you stepped in.”

She shrugged. “I tried to deflect Shepherd’s wrath. It was uncalled for.”

“Is that why he calls you Moxie?”

“I guess.” She sighed, then looked at him as if suddenly becoming aware of him for the first time. “Why am I always telling you these things?” She was friendly, but she never ran off at the mouth. What was it about him that made her want to talk?

“People say I’m easy to talk to.”

His smile wound its way under her skin again. She was going to have to watch that. She’d already said too much, let herself relax around him too much. She was going to have to be careful.

Maren squared her shoulders. “Well, they’re not paying either one of us to talk. Why don’t you get back to what you were doing?” She allowed herself one deep whiff. “It smells delicious.”

“Want a sample?”

That was just the problem. She wanted a sample. But it had nothing to do with what presently simmered on the range and everything to do with what simmered between them. And that, she knew she shouldn’t sample. “Not right now.”

With that, she walked out into the front of the restaurant and waited until she was allowed to go into her office again.

Chapter 9

J
oe stuck his head into the kitchen just before he left and addressed Jared. “Wonder if you could do me a favor?”

In the middle of ladling out several bowls of the soup he’d prepared, Jared paused. “Sure. What is it?”

Joe grinned. “Never agree to something until you know what it is,” he warned, then made his request. “Could you pick up Maren on your way over? She only lives a mile away from my place. Here’s her address.”

“No hardship there.” This was going to throw his timing off, but he could still manage it, Jared thought as he pocket the piece of paper. “Maren’s okay with my picking her up?”

“She will be.” Joe was already walking toward the back exit.

Alarms went off. “Hey, what does that mean? Does she even know I’m coming by?”

“I’ll leave her a message on her answering machine. She’ll get it when she gets home.” He paused a moment before disappearing around the corner. “She’s on your way. Why put added pollution into the air, right?”

“Right,” Jared said, more under his breath than for anyone else to hear. He hurried back to what he was doing.

Was Joe playing matchmaker or was there something else on the man’s agenda? He couldn’t meet with his superior this evening, but he needed to check in with Glassel to see if the man had come up with anything on either Joe or Maren.

And after that, he had to swing by his uncle’s house.

At six-thirty, Jared followed his uncle into the man’s state-of-the-art kitchen. His mouth began to water even before he crossed the threshold. The aroma was pure heaven.

“Really appreciate this, Uncle Andrew.”

“Hey, my pleasure.” After receiving Jared’s call, he’d spent the better part of the afternoon in the kitchen, adding some of his own touches to a time-honored recipe. Everything now stood packed and ready to go. “I haven’t made duck à l’orange in a long time. What’s the occasion, or shouldn’t I ask?”

Jared couched his answer in the vague terms the job required of him. “I’ve been invited to a suspect’s house and asked to cook. Since it had to be something special and I’ve only made this once before, I thought it might go better if you did the honors instead of me.”

“How are you going to explain making the duck in half an hour?”

“I told them I went home at lunch to start the process.”

Andrew nodded, obviously satisfied with whatever his nephew felt he could share. He began placing the foil-sealed dishes into one of the two large double-bagged grocery bags he’d prepared. Jared began packing the other.

“Not that I mind doing this—hell, I’ll use any excuse to putter around in the kitchen—but you could have done this yourself, you know.” Andrew laughed. “Out of all the Cavanaughs, you’re the only one who seems to have the talent.”

A little of the sauce leaked. Jared licked his fingers, then grabbed a sponge to tidy up the counter. “Maybe we’ll open up that catering restaurant you talked about when I retire.”

“Famous last words. Actually,” he said as he secured the last container, “cooking for this brood keeps me plenty busy. And there’s another one on the way.”

Jared paused and looked at his uncle. “Spouse or baby?” In the last couple of years, his cousins had been coupling up as if they’d received an edict from Noah to pair off before the flood came. What did come was a flood of marriages, followed by an ocean of babies.

“Baby. Rayne’s going to be a mother,” he confided, then grinned broadly, echoing the mantra of every harried parent. “I just hope I live long enough to see her find out what it means to have a rebellious kid on her hands.”

Jared knew Rayne had been the last word in rebel during her teen years. They’d all worried about her. For nothing, it now seemed, but her antics were still very vividly imprinted in all their minds. Through it all, Andrew had remained as evenhanded with her as he had with his other four.

“Tell her congratulations for me and that I can’t wait to see her with an extra twenty-five pounds on her body.”

Taking a shopping bag, Andrew led the way out of the house and to Jared’s car. “Tell her yourself. I don’t have a death wish.”

Jared placed the shopping bag he was carrying on the floor behind the passenger seat, then took the one his uncle had, securing it beside the first. He was running late and hurried to the driver’s side.

“Thanks,” he said over his shoulder as he got into the car. “I owe you one.”

“You owe me more than that, boy, but who’s counting?” Andrew laughed, stepping back just before Jared backed out of the driveway and sped away.

He got to Maren’s ground-floor garden apartment in ten minutes flat, catching all the lights. A couple of times he’d just barely squeaked through. The meal had stayed intact through it all.

She came to the door before he had a chance to drop his hand from the doorbell. “If I’d had your cell phone number, I would have told you not to bother coming by.”

“Why?”

“Because I was perfectly capable of driving myself. I don’t know what Papa Joe was thinking.”

Actually she did. And that was just the problem. Papa Joe was acting on his feeling that she needed to get out. That the longer she didn’t socialize with the opposite sex, the harder it would be for her to get back into the swing of things. He refused to accept the fact that the “swing” no longer had an allure for her.

“Well, since I’m here, you might as well come with me. Is Joe big on conservation?”

She followed him to guest parking, where he’d left his vehicle. “Why?”

“Because he said something about it making sense to have just one car rather than two polluting the air.”

“I guess when you don’t lie for a living, you’re hard-pressed to come up with one as an excuse,” Maren commented.

Was that for his benefit? Damn, he was starting to really hate having to examine everything twice. He missed having the luxury of being able to take something at face value. But then, he told himself, that was what tonight was about. A further investigation into Joe’s and Maren’s lives, to hopefully clear them of any connections. People let things slip when they were relaxed, and neither of them struck him as hardened criminals. Worse case scenario, they were average people in over their heads.

No, he amended, the word “average” was never going to be used to describe anything about Maren.

He unlocked his doors, opening the passenger side for her before rounding the rear to get in on his side.

The second she got into the car, her senses were surrounded by the aroma wafting from the packages in the back seat. Buckling her seat belt, she looked at Jared. “My God, what is that wonderful smell?”

Already strapped in, he turned on the ignition as he grinned. “If I said it was me…?”

She twisted around in her seat and saw the packages in the back as he pulled out of the lot. “Then I’d say that you were good enough to devour.”

“Sounds promising.”

She tried not to notice the way his eyes twinkled. “Really, what is that aroma?”

“Air freshener,” he teased.

Her eyes narrowed as she straightened in her seat. “One more time.” Her voice held a hint of warning, and Jared caught himself wondering what she was like when she lost her temper. He had a feeling that he’d find the situation more than a little appealing.

“It’s duck à l’orange. Once I knew that I was in charge of dinner, I went home during my free time to get it started.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to apologize for the command performance, but what he said aroused her curiosity. “You have duck just sitting in your refrigerator.” Skepticism filled her voice.

He knew before he began that this was going to get involved. But he was ready for it. “Let’s just say I have connections. A neighbor who works at an Asian market owes me a favor. He brought the duck by the apartment for me.”

“And broke in to put the duck in your refrigerator so you could prepare it when you got in.”

He was ready for that one, too. “We have each other’s keys.” Jared signaled for a left turn. “Are you always this suspicious?”

There was a time when she wasn’t, she thought sadly. But that felt like a million years ago now. “Fall-out from a bad relationship.”

“Does that mean we’re in a relationship? Or about to be in one?” he amended.

She knew it was a mistake getting into the car with him. “How about you don’t ask any more questions, just drive?”

The silence lasted all of a minute and a half. While a soft love song played on the oldies station, he said, “You look nice tonight.”

She wasn’t about to say that she had gone the extra mile, examining her makeup to make sure everything was just perfect. That there had been butterflies in her stomach when she’d heard Papa Joe on her answering machine, telling her that Jared was stopping by to pick her up before dinner.

She pointed to the road. “I said, just drive.”

“I didn’t put it in the form of a question,” he said.

Defeated, Maren could only laugh and shake her head. “I guess no one’s ever called you the strong, silent type, have they?”

“I come from a large family. You keep quiet, nobody notices you.” Slanting a glance to see her reaction, he saw that same wistful smile slip over her lips.

She cleared her throat, rousing herself. “And you like being noticed.”

“Depends on who’s noticing.”

His voice was almost seductive and made her squirm inside. “I can’t imagine someone not noticing you.”

“Funny,” he said softly, allowing himself a long look at her as they waited at the light. “I was thinking the same thing about you.”

Maren was on her guard instantly. It was what had allowed her to survive all these many months, kept her from becoming involved with anyone. Kept her from being hurt. “Why?”

“Because I was wondering why someone hadn’t taken you off the market yet.”

“Someone did,” she informed him tersely. “Me.” She pointed toward the curb that ran parallel to a row of condominiums. Joe’s place, a single-family home, was close by. “You can park over there.”

Joe was waiting for them.

The moment Jared parked the car, the accountant was opening his door to them. The man hurried over to the electric-blue Mustang, opening first Maren’s door, then reaching in to help with the shopping bags Jared had brought.

“Smells wonderful,” Joe declared, taking a deep whiff.

“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?” Jared agreed, but he was looking at Maren as he said it.

“I’ll go in and set the table.” Maren flushed, backing away.

“Already done,” Joe said. “But you can go inside and play with Tucker. I can’t get him to do anything.” Jared slammed the door shut and they began to head toward Joe’s home. “All he does is sit on the sofa by the window and look out, waiting for you to come up the walk.”

“God, but you are good at shoveling out guilt,” Maren said over her shoulder as she hurried into the home where she’d grown up.

“It’s a gift,” Joe confided to Jared and winked.

A little more than two hours later, Joe pushed his chair away from the dining room table.

“That has to be by far one of the best meals I’ve ever had,” Joe informed him as he patted his swollen stomach affectionately. “Only way I would be able to get in another bite is if I put it in my pocket.” He looked at Maren. “You know, if I were Max, I’d be worried about my job.”

Jared dismissed the compliment with a wave of his hand. “There’s no reason for that. I’m content being an assistant for now.”

Joe leaned back in his chair, studying Jared. “You don’t strike me as someone who’s willing just to sit back.”

“Not sit back, learn,” Jared corrected. He couldn’t seem to help himself from glancing at Maren. Every time he focused on Joe, something dragged his attention—not to mention his eyes—away. The woman was the embodiment of the word “exquisite.”

“You jump into something too early and things might turn sour on you. Slow and steady is the better way to go.”

It was obviously the right answer as Joe broke out in a wreath of smiles. “I like this guy, Maren.”

“I think we’ve already figured that out, Papa.” Getting to her feet, Maren began stacking dishes together. The moment she started to get up, Jared rose to his feet quickly. “No, that’s okay. Division of labor. You cooked—” she waved him back into his chair “—I’ll clean up. You talk to Papa,” she prompted.

“One in a million, that girl,” Joe commented as she walked out of the room.

She wasn’t out of earshot yet. “And don’t you forget it,” Maren said over her shoulder.

As he’d been doing all evening, Tucker followed her into the kitchen. The dog had spent the entire duration of the meal sitting patiently at her elbow, waiting for either an affectionate pat or a scrap of meat, whichever came his way. He accepted both with equal gusto.

Joe picked up the half-empty bottle of Chablis that Maren had brought with her. “Wine?” Joe tilted the half-empty bottle over his glass.

“Thanks, but no more for me. One’s my limit if I’m driving.” Jared placed his hand over the mouth of his glass.

“Smart boy.”

Joe poured less than half a glass for himself and an equal amount of light pink liquid into Maren’s glass before retiring the bottle. “Don’t often meet young men your age with a good head on their shoulders.” He laughed to himself as he took a sip. “At your age, I had no direction, no purpose. Took walking down a dark alley one night to give me that.” He smiled, seeing the slight confusion in Jared’s eyes.

“That’s how I found Maren. She was about five minutes old when we met.” The accountant’s voice took on a distant quality, as if he was traveling back over the years to that night. “Her mother had just given birth beside a Dumpster. I think she was going to leave Maren there, except that she was losing too much blood to even stand up. I got them both to the hospital.” For the first time, Jared saw the man’s expression grow grim. “But Maren’s mother didn’t make it.”

The leap from Good Samaritan to father was a broad one. “How did you—”

Joe second-guessed him. “The nurse and E.R. doctor thought I was the baby’s father. I started to set them straight, but something stopped me. I didn’t have any family of my own. My father took off when I was born, my mother died while I was in high school. I spent the last two years of that in foster care. Not the best of conditions. Looking down into that tiny face, I realized that I wanted to belong to someone and wanted to have someone belong to me. And I
didn’t
want her going into the foster care system. So I let them think I was her father.”