The Fiance Thief (11 page)

He put his duffel bag on the sidewalk and sat down on it before saying, “Lissa, honey, I don’t have a clue.”

6

S
HE WAS GOING TO HAVE
to get rid of that distracting dress, Alec concluded. Put on something befitting a responsible and serious adult, and shed the provocative, playful look she’d tried out today. He would tell her it didn’t suit her. Just as soon as he could make himself stop staring at her.

Claire scrambled to a sitting position on the bed and scooted away from him on the bed. “What are you staring at?”

You, he wanted to say, but he didn’t.

She flipped her hair back over her shoulders with her typical self-conscious gesture, then moved from the bed to the room’s sofa. “You can have the bed,” she said. “I don’t sleep anyway.”

Seeing her there, so distant from him, he became unaccountably irritated. He knew it was unreasonable, but the experience of Claire walking away from him made him feel like a bridegroom whose newly beloved had locked herself in the bathroom for the night. He sat up on the bed, and when he spoke, his voice was harsh.

“You know, statistics show that most of the people who claim to be total insomniacs are actually getting plenty of rest every night. They just like to complain about how tired they are. I bet you’ll sleep plenty tonight.”

He remembered the good old days of a few days ago, when his diatribes left her all aflutter. It was an endearing trait, he thought. Now she looked at him with amusement. “Alec,” she said, “we are not in a competition to
see who can down the most sleeping pills in one night’s stay. I only meant that where I sleep isn’t that big a deal to me, so feel free to take the bed. I was just trying to annoy you when I said I wanted it earlier, but now I see I’ve annoyed you even more by not wanting it.” She shrugged, as if to say, What’s a sensible girl like me to do, locked in the room with a maniac like this?

The bed no longer held its appeal for him, since he wasn’t fighting Claire for it. He got up and looked around the room, flicking the light on in the roomy bathroom, opening the empty dresser drawers. He slid the closet doors open and was greeted by a stack of fresh bed linens and a row of empty hangers. “This is the first guest room I’ve ever stayed in where the hosts weren’t using the closets and dressers to store junk.”

“I guess if you had a jillion guest rooms, you’d probably run out of junk on the first few,” Claire said.

“No. I wouldn’t have any junk to store. You, though, would probably stick something in all jillion.”

She sat up on the couch. “You saw my house. It was clean.”

“Clean, yeah, but I can tell you’re a pack rat.”

“And you aren’t?”

“If I don’t need it, I toss it out.”

“Very cold-blooded of you,” Claire said.

Alec poked around some more, coming across the refrigerator and minibar in the corner of the room. “I guess I win the five dollars,” he said.

“Certainly not. In order for you to win the five dollars, we would have had to see all those people out in the open, drinking. If they’re doing it behind closed doors, then all bets are off.”

“I can’t believe these people,” he said. “They object to seeing an open bottle of wine outside, but they’ll let people fornicate in their rooms all they want.”

Claire put her hands over her ears. “I hate that word.”

“Fornicate?”

“I’m warning you. Don’t say it again.” She shuddered.

Alec sighed and plopped himself down on the couch beside her. “This is a hell of a mess. I’m sharing a bedroom with a girl who blushes at the
word fornication.
And, you know, you haven’t been as friendly to Miranda as you could be.”

She tucked her legs under her and slid away from him a bit. “You’re wrong,” she said. “I’ve definitely been as friendly as I can be.”

“But can’t you pretend that you’re trying to get right back to being best friends with her? At least for my sake?”

“She’s not going to blame you for my behavior,” Claire said. “In fact, you could probably go up there right now and pour your heart out to her, telling her how difficult and unreasonable I am. Ask her if, as my oldest friend, she has any pearls of wisdom for you.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” he said. He was beginning to have a budding admiration for Claire’s talent for deception. Too late, he saw that he had misread her.

“Don’t you dare,” she said. Her eyes were angry, and her cheeks were flushed. She wasn’t teasing.

“Claire, calm down.” He took her hand and gave it what he hoped was a reassuring squeeze. “I was only kidding. You know I would never betray you.” Having taken her hand, he didn’t want to let it go. He held on to it firmly, hoping she wouldn’t pull it away.

She didn’t. “Anyway, I’d say that Miranda feels better with me not embracing her with open arms. I think it makes her feel like she’s paying her dues.”

He opened his mouth to disagree with her, but felt her soft hand in his and reconsidered.

“All in all,” Claire continued, “I think it’s going pretty well. This lying stuff isn’t as difficult as I believed it would be.”

That was an understatement. Claire was so good at it, in fact, that he wasn’t sure she hadn’t been a con artist in another life. No need, though, to let her get too overconfident. “You spun some elaborate tales, all right. You had my family trading gemstones back and forth so fast that I was considering opening up my own jewelry store.”

She looked at their two hands joined together and said, “Aren’t there some pearls or opals stashed at the family manse somewhere?”

“The closest thing we have to a family manse is the mining camp where my great-grandparents lived before they moved to town. My great-grandfather might have brought my great-grandmother a lump of coal and a celebratory bottle of moonshine, but that’s about it for the finer things in life.”

He wished he could read the look she gave him. “I thought you were some snotty-nosed rich kid, someone who took privilege for granted.”

He didn’t tell her that he had spent most of his life cultivating that air. By some fluke of public school zoning, he’d gone to school with rich kids, and had just naturally fit in with them, adapting their habits, acquiring their tastes. He’d never deliberately tried to pass himself off as someone with money, but he hadn’t tried to correct that impression, either.

Claire continued. “So if you aren’t from some swanky family, then why are you so hard-hearted about my land? Where’s your populist edge?”

“I don’t have one of those,” he said. “I believe in progress. Let that area develop the way it’s going, rather than sitting on your property yelling about being poor but proud.”

Playing devil’s advocate came so naturally to him that he had opened his mouth and challenged her to an argument without even thinking about the immediate consequences. It was at that moment she seemed to realize there
was something very strange about two people who were always at odds with each other sitting cozily on a couch holding hands. In an instant, she had jerked her hand away from him.

Rather than call attention to her action, Alec continued the debate by himself, trying to draw Claire in. “You didn’t stay here your whole life. You moved away…went to graduate school, if I remember correctly. What’s that if not trying to make a little progress with your life?”

She laughed. “Oh, that. Believe me, graduate school had nothing to do with progress. I wanted to go somewhere where I could get paid to read while I decided what I wanted to do with my life. After a while, I figured out I didn’t ever want to be a teacher, and I couldn’t see any other career use for an encyclopedic knowledge of the Victorian poets. That’s when I started free-lancing for the local papers. I realized I was good at it, and I decided I wanted to follow that career when I moved back to Ridgeville.”

It had never occurred to him to ask why Claire had moved back to town. He had never been interested before. “Is the house the only reason you moved back? So your family wouldn’t sell it?”

She shrugged. “That, and besides, if you’ve seen one college town, you’ve seen them all. There’s always one good bookstore, one good health food store, one arty movie house. I thought, I might as well be home.”

He had this strange need to keep her talking, maybe because of all the times he’d ignored her or treated her rudely. It was almost as though this room were a sort of magical place, one that let the real Claire shine through in such a way that he could see and appreciate her. “Victorian poets?” Alec reached way back into the recesses of his brain for information from sophomore English class. “Robert Barrett?” he ventured.

Her smile was real and warm, and if it was a bit at his expense, that was all right. “Robert
Browning,”
she said. “You were close. Actually, my master’s thesis was going to be on Ernest Dowson.” At his raised eyebrows and shrug, she said, “You might not know the name, but you know the poem.” Leaning back on the couch, one leg crossed over the other and her hands clasped over her knee, she began to recite. “Last night, between her lips and mine there fell a shadow…and I was desolate and sick of an old passion. I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”

Alec knew a few things about himself. He was cynical, and he was practical. He had never wept over a television show or a book, and he hadn’t cried at the movies since his aunt took him to see
Old Yeller.
Even the telephone company commercials that got everybody else left Alec cold. So how was it that this sentimental poem, written by a guy who’d been dead for a hundred years, could bring a lump to his throat?

Claire. Seeing her, so close to him, he was suddenly grateful that they weren’t holding hands any longer. If they had been, then it would have been the most natural thing in the world for him to kiss her. Only later would they have remembered that the two of them being together was the most unnatural thing in the world. Wooed by the luxury around him, the congenial atmosphere, Alec was letting himself slip into a daze. He’d almost forgotten that he’d come here to work, not to get all mushy and dewy-eyed over a woman who was his polar opposite.

“I’ve got to go,” he said, jumping up. “Lovely poem, really.”

She stared at him with wide eyes. “Alec,” she said. “We aren’t expected at dinner till six.”

“I know. That only leaves me a few hours to track down Miranda and start to work on this right away. First, I have to soften her up about the paper. Then the real work
starts.” He rummaged through the desk drawer, looking for a pen, and came up with one on the first try. Paper, however, was another story. The only type he could find in the desk was heavy, scratchy and expensive—suitable for writing thank-you notes to sorority sisters and starlets, but nothing any self-respecting reporter would carry around. He turned to Claire. “You don’t have a notebook I could borrow, do you?”

She opened her purse and took out a fresh one. “Good luck. And remember, don’t ask her about what I said.”

If she was sorry to see him go, she didn’t say so. Probably she was as eager as he was to nip this hand-holding and secret-whispering in the bud and get their relationship back on its usual troubled and bumpy track. Thinking, though, that he ought to say something more to her than a casual “See you later,” he thought for a second, then said, “You know, sometimes I like to argue for the sake of arguing. I don’t really have a lot of feelings on a subject one way or the other. You know that, don’t you?”

She grinned. “I do now.”

With the distinct feeling that he had just given solace and comfort to the enemy, Alec headed out in search of Miranda.

A
TIME WARP
or a parallel universe? Claire wished she were up on her science-fiction terminology. Which could better explain the phenomenon that had just happened in this room? She and Alec, holding hands. She and Alec speaking to each other as reasonable adults.

She looked down at the dress, then cringed a little, thinking of all the times that day she’d forgotten how low-cut it was. Surely that wasn’t the sole reason for Alec’s change in attitude about her? Probably not. After all, he was so handsome that he didn’t have to wait around for ugly ducklings. He always had his choice of swans.

Like Miranda? No way, she thought to herself. Alec may be handsome, but Miranda was way out of his reach. Everyone knew that glamorous Hollywood types sought out other glamorous Hollywood types. But, argued a nagging voice, what about all those starlets who are married to lawyers and restaurant magnates and CEOs? You see them in the magazines. Restaurant magnates, maybe, she thought, but not the editor of a middling weekly paper. With his skills though, the impudent voice continued, she could swing him some cushy job as a screenwriter’s consultant. But why would she want him? Claire asked herself again. The answer came immediately. Because you do.

Maybe getting down to work would shut off all these niggling thoughts in her head. Occupy her subconscious, make it work for her and not against her. Claire slipped out of her room, and headed for a stairwell opposite the end of the hall that led out to the pool. There had to be a way for her to get out without having to go through the torture of watching Alec fall at Miranda’s feet.

But why was it torture? Let’s face it—by bringing him along and labeling him her fiancé, she might as well be hanging a sign over his head saying Fresh Bait! Hadn’t she told Lissa that if she had real feelings for Alec, she’d be happy to bring him along with her, just to show how deeply she trusted him? How had Lissa ever listened to that lie with a straight face? If Claire had any real feelings for Alec, she’d be ready to shove him in the car and hightail it back to Ridgeville. Which was exactly what she wanted to do.

She crept up the steps and found herself in a large foyer. A sunny, Southwestern weaving hung from one wall, and a rough butcher’s block held a green glass jar full of flowers. Mrs. Craig had always liked the rustic look, and Claire was glad to see that her home still reflected her tastes, even if the house did cost about ten times as much as her last one. Hoping against hope that she wouldn’t set off some
kind of security alarm, Claire opened the front door and crept out toward Alec’s car.