The Next Right Thing (Harlequin Superromance) (16 page)

He supposed if she’d call him Dad, it wouldn’t matter if she made familial references to anybody else. Hell, she could call Alice Cooper Uncle Al for all he cared. But to be excluded was like a punch to his heart.

He cleared his throat. “They look like sequins.”

“No, they’re beads. She says their use in clothing goes back thousands of years and that some civilizations used beads as health amulets. Isn’t that cool?” She ran her fingers over the netting. “I need to ask for something.”

“You want me to buy you this dress?”

She took in a fortifying breath, then released it in a stream of words. “There’s an Eco-Glitter rally day after tomorrow here in Las Vegas and I really, really want to go.”

“Whoa, slow down.” He set aside his smartphone. “Eco-Glitter rally. Is that what you and Amber were discussing?”

“Her name’s
Daearen.
” She shot him a skeptical look. “Were you listening in on our conversation? I thought eavesdropping was illegal.”

“Em, one of you said
Eco-Glitter
rather loudly in a crowded room. No expectation of privacy under those circumstances, honey.” As she started to talk, he raised his hand. “Let’s save the Fourth Amendment for later. Right now, tell me about this Eco-Glitter rally and why you want to go.”

“It’s an ethical jewelry protest. Many people don’t know that mining the earth for precious jewels and metals creates environmental problems, dangerous work conditions, and if there’s no fair-trade agreement, businesses often take advantage of workers by paying them ridiculously low wages. Like, poverty wages. This is more than just a rally. This is my social responsibility.”

He blinked. “And to think I thought diamonds were a girl’s best friend.”

“I’m serious!”

“I know.” He placed his hand on hers. “Tell me more.”

She explained how there would be displays of recycled and earth-friendly jewelry, plus an awesome rock band would be performing.

“You asked me to walk the talk,” she said, “and by attending this rally, I’ll be putting my beliefs into action. Plus I want to represent those who can’t be there, like Daearen.”

“Did I ever tell you that I once gathered signatures for Frank Zappa for President?”

“Who’s Frank Zappa?”

“Let’s just say I applaud what you’re doing, and yes, you can go to the Eco-Glitter rally with a chaperone.”

“But I’m fifteen! Chaperones are, like, for people dating in Sicily.”

He bit his tongue not to smile. “We’re in Las Vegas, honey. If this rally were in Omaha, fine, go alone. Las Vegas? Two chaperones.”

“But you just said
one.
” She slumped into the couch, looking like a dejected princess.

“Okay, one. Me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Going to my first rally with my parent? I’ll look so lame.”

“I’m sure there’ll be so many people there, nobody will notice your father, Em—”

“Wow!” She bolted upright, distracted.

He followed her line of vision.

For a moment he forgot to breathe.

Cammie, swathed in a cloud of apricot, was a vision of beauty. Her long black curls had been pinned up, which emphasized the curve of her slim neck. Pink dotted her cheeks, which at first he thought was makeup until he realized she was likely embarrassed. Around her bare shoulders lay a mantle of spun gold, or that’s what it looked like. Had to be some kind of gold-threaded shawl. And lower, pushed above the tight satin bodice, the creamy mounds of her breasts.

“Huh.” He meant to say something more intelligent, but his mouth and brain were having trouble connecting.

Delilah stepped onto the stage behind Cammie. “Doesn’t she look divine?”

His head bobbed.

“Awesome!” Cammie said as she made the rock-on gesture with both hands.

“We have one more dress we’d like your perspective on,” Delilah said, taking Cammie’s hand and ushering her off the stage.

“I want to help!” Emily said, jumping up. She looked at Marc. “So you agree? I can go to the rally?”

He had to mentally shake himself back to reality. “Yes,” he said, finding his voice. “With me.”

“Thank you!” She leaned over and gave him a peck on the cheek, then ran back to wherever people went behind the mirrors.

So what if she didn’t call him Dad. She treated him like one, right?

As Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
began playing, he again picked up the report, refocusing his thoughts to the next steps of this case. He could easily prepare the subpoena this afternoon, but could they find Gwen by Thursday? He nearly laughed at that thought. He’d worked with enough investigators to know how difficult it was, even if one was top-notch like Cammie, to find a person who didn’t want to be found. Sure, people, even those on the run, often returned to where they once lived, but even surmising that Gwen once lived in Southern California, where in those several thousand acres of land and dozens of cities might she be? Hell, they didn’t even know her real name.

“What do you think of this one?” Delilah asked.

He looked up at the stage.

His mouth went dry. He vaguely wondered when jungle drums had been added to Vivaldi’s chamber music piece, then realized it was his thundering, pounding pulse.

“Marc?” Delilah prodded.

If he’d thought he’d had trouble connecting his mouth and brain before, it was damn near impossible now.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

L
OOKING
AT
C
AMMIE
on the stage, Marc recalled a favorite piece of candy he’d liked as a kid. It was called the Firecracker—a hard crimson confection that tasted like a burning, sweet fire, and he couldn’t get enough of it.

Right now, he couldn’t get enough of Cammie poured into a red dress that hugged, squeezed and clung to every inch of her body. Looking at her was like walking into fire.

The overhead lights showcased her, making the parts of her body not wrapped in red to look luminous, as though she glowed from within. With the wide cut of plunging neckline, no way she wore a bra. In fact, considering its insanely tight fit, no way she wore anything underneath that dress.

She’s naked under the red.

As if he needed that news alert sizzling along his already singed synapses that were sputtering and popping with libido-fueled power surges.

A voice from somewhere off in the milky ether of the bridal salon penetrated his consciousness.

“Marc?” Delilah asked. “How do you like it?”

“That’s a...bridesmaid’s dress?” he rasped.

“Maid of honor,” Delilah corrected.

No maid ever wore a dress like that and kept her honor. Not for long, anyway.

“In Las Vegas,” Delilah added, “anything goes, you know.”

With great effort, Marc shifted his vision to Delilah, still dressed in the peach number, standing next to Mr. Bergstrom, who held one hand airily at his side as he scrutinized Cammie.

“Red is stunning on you,” he said, walking in a half circle around her. “Definitely your color.”

From somewhere beyond the mirrors, Emily called out, “Help, I’m caught up in tulle!”

“Could you assist that lovely young girl in taking off the prom dress?” Mr. Bergstrom asked Delilah. “I’ll stay here and check any necessary fittings.”

After Delilah left, Mr. Bergstrom made some adjustments to the dress. A tug here, a pluck there. Cammie looked bored. Or perturbed. Marc tried to act as though thousands of years had passed since ridge-browed Neanderthals trundled about foraging, hunting and mating. Especially mating.

He reminded himself that the last thing he needed to be doing was entertaining hot thoughts about another coworker...and yet he’d be kidding himself to think she was only that. A coworker wouldn’t care about his family the way Cammie did—in fact, she probably had more of an inside track on what made his dad tick than Marc did. She’d known he was desperate to hire her, enough so that he flew all the way to Vegas to talk to her, but unlike other employees he’d known, she didn’t take advantage of his need to hire her by demanding more money or perks. No, Cammie had kept turning down the job until her conscience told her otherwise.

And she wasn’t just a coworker because what he felt for her went beyond an employee-boss relationship. He had feelings for her. Feelings that rattled, confused, sometimes even infuriated him.

He’d had these feelings before. Back in Denver, working late at night with Cammie on an impending trial, he’d sometimes felt unnerved, thrown off by something she did or said. Back then he’d chalked it up to litigation jitters, but now he realized it was sometimes more than that—he simply hadn’t wanted to acknowledge those desires.

Of course not. If he had, he would have been stepping into his own gray area about her. A place he stood now. Not a boss, not a lover, but somewhere in between. He didn’t like it. Made him feel out of control—the last thing he should be feeling with so much at stake right now.

Fortunately, he’d be leaving in a few days and didn’t need to figure all this out. Until then, he would try to put his feelings on ice and stay focused on why he was here—to find Gwen.

“Walk around, see how it feels,” Mr. Bergstrom instructed Cammie. “I’ll be in the back selecting another dress for Delilah.”

Alone with Marc, Cammie said, “Can you believe Delilah wants me to wear this? I look like Little Red Riding Hood gone bad.”

He picked up the sheet of paper, pretended to scan it. “Very bad,” he murmured.

“Look at this slit!” Cammie turned to the side and stuck out her leg, her foot in a sneaker. “Do you know it goes all the way up to here?” She pointed at her hip as though he might not see exactly where the slit ended.

He glanced up then back down to the paper. “Disgraceful.”

“And red!” Cammie gestured at her tightly wrapped self as though Marc might have missed the flaming color. “She’ll be in ivory or peach and I’ll be in
red?
What happened to the sugarplum-fairy dress or whatever it’s called that she wanted me to wear? Red is for harlots and roosters.”

“Well, you hardly look like a roost—”

Cammie cut him off with a loud gasp, her hands held high in a stop-the-presses gesture.

“Rooster! That’s it!” Waggling her fingers in front of her, she stepped off the stage and toward him. “Need my smartphone.”

With every move, the material shimmied and the plunging neckline teased. When she sat next to him, a long, toned leg escaped the slit.

He reminded himself, again, he needed to put his feelings on ice. Big buckets of it.

Her fingers flew over the keypad of her phone. “That rooster was riding a surfboard.”

“What rooster?”

“The one on the coffee cup that was always on Gwen’s desk. Remember?” She glanced at the paper in his hands. “How can you read that?”

“What?”

“The report. It’s upside down.” As he turned it around, she went back to typing. “Anyway, you said she and her girlfriends like to bodysurf. I recalled the rooster on some type of board, and I’ll bet my favorite autographed Nuggets baseball cap that it’s a surfboard.”

“It was fairly new. Didn’t have any chips or cracks.”

“Which tells us she got it recently—” She stilled. “Well, lookie lookie.”

He glanced at the screen, saw a picture of a rooster on a surfboard. “It’s a brand.”

“For a restaurant in San Clemente, California. The Surfing Rooster. Established 2011, which corroborates the cup looking fairly new. She either lived in or visited San Clemente right before she moved to Denver.”

“Could be a gift.”

“Could be, which still says to me that the location is significant.” Beaming, she held up her hand. “Give me five, baby! I nailed the city.”

He slapped his palm against hers.

“I have an idea how to find out her real name. Remember how Gwen liked to refer to herself as Swagtastic?”

“I’ve tried to forget.”

“I’m going to pretext The Surfing Rooster—”

“I know private investigators rely on pretexting, or fabrications, Cammie, but I’m not wild about it.”

She leveled him a look. “Marc, please, this is legit. If I were to pretext for financial information, or pretend to be a lawyer or cop,
that’d
be illegal. All I’m doing is fishing for a name, and if it makes you uncomfortable, go stand across the room.”

“I’d rather stay here,” he murmured.

“This will take me a minute. Need to punch in a spoof number so it appears I’m calling from that area code.” Cammie punched in a series of numbers, then waited.

“Oh, hello!” she said, in a kinda-dumb, California beach-babe voice. “Is this The Surfing Rooster? Far out. I’ve done, like, the silliest thing. Told Swagtastic I’d meet her there, but I’m, like, running late and her cell’s broken. She there?
S-w-a-g-t-a-s-t-i-c.
Uh-huh. Nuh-huh. Okay. Peace out, man.”

She ended the call.

“Peace out, man?”

Cammie slanted him a look. “That was me going undercover with my voice. Figured it’d work well for a Southern Cal chick.”

“Word.”

She broke into a grin. “You got it, dude.” Turning serious, she continued, “He had no idea who Swagtastic is, but he’s only been working there a few weeks. Said there were a couple of customers in the place, but they were guys.” Cammie typed on the keypad. “Let’s do a reverse on Swagtastic on the internet, see what pops up.” She scrolled through several screens. “Seems dozens, if not hundreds, of people like referring to themselves as Swagtastic. It’d take me forever to follow up on all these references.” She looked at Marc. “The convertible she drove—what kind was it?”

“Mustang GT.”

“Year?”

“Two thousand six.”

“I doubt she’d still be driving it. Better to sell the car and buy a new one than risk being tracked.” She tippy-tapped on the keypad. “Let’s run a reverse on that make of car, see if an ad pops up.” After a few moments, she gave him a look. “Bingo. There’s a Craigslist ad for the exact same car three months ago. Seller was based...drum roll, please...in San Clemente.”

He grinned back. “You’re good.”

“Word. Good ol’ Craigslist provided a cell-phone number in this ad. I’ll submit it to a telecom database, see what name it’s registered to.” Within seconds, Cammie said, “Ta-da. Laura McDonald, San Clemente, California.”

“Laura McDonald,” he repeated. “Sounds so...normal.”

“Yeah, I had fantasies of her name being Natasha or Cruella. Now let’s run her real name in the county assessor database for San Clemente.” After another short wait, Cammie put down her smartphone and flashed a Cheshire-cat smile. “Laura McDonald has owned a home in San Clemente since 2009. According to tax assessor data, she didn’t live there throughout 2011—which we know is the year she lived in Denver—but is now receiving mail in San Clemente again.”

He shuddered as a chill passed through him. The truth felt as good as it felt bad. They’d found her, and now he had the key to proving his innocence and salvaging his father’s freedom. But it disgusted him to realize that he’d loved a woman who was a shadow, and that this stranger carried his child.

“San Clemente is a four- to five-hour drive from here,” Cammie continued. “If we leave soon, we can be there and back by midnight.”

“That’s if she’s home.”

“It’s Tuesday. Most people take off on weekends.”

“I only have one thing to add to that.”

“What?”

“Who’s driving first?”

* * *

I
T
TOOK
M
ARC
FIVE
MINUTES
to write the subpoena, another five to print the papers on Mr. Bergstrom’s printer. After making arrangements for Emily to stay with Delilah, Cammie and Marc were on Interstate 15, heading west to California by 11:00 a.m.

By two that afternoon, they’d driven past Buffalo Bill’s Resort and Casino, which advertised the world’s only buffalo-shaped swimming pool, and Peggy Sue’s 50’s Diner in Yermo, California, which advertised the Buddy Holly Bacon Cheeseburger and the Mickey Mouse Club Sandwich. Along the way, Cammie ran several criminal checks on Laura McDonald, and learned the Spanx-wearing Cameron Diaz lookalike had an impressive rap sheet—theft, third-degree assault, several DUIs, time in the county jail and violation of a restraining order.

“Theft is no surprise,” Cammie said. “Wonder what she did to pick up that third-degree-assault charge. Did she ever drink and try to pick a fight?”

“The opposite. She had me convinced that she was sweet as honey and delicate as a violet. Obviously, she was on good behavior when she was with me. After all, my law firm was a theft in progress. But that assault charge accounts for the stint in county jail.”

After a pause, Cammie said quietly, “Sorry.”

“For what?”

“For what you’ve been through.”

He tapped the wheel with his forefinger, a look of intense speculation on his face. “I can chalk up my life’s mistakes to lessons I needed to learn, but...” He slowly shook his head. “There’s an innocent baby mixed up in all this. I’m going to fight for custody of that child—and I’m going to win.”

For a while after that, they drove in silence with Cammie biting her tongue to keep from telling Marc that the baby might not be his. His completely mistaken impression of Gwen as an adorable blonde innocent was enough for him to deal with at the moment. He didn’t need to be clobbered with the additional news that she’d cheated on him.

Of course, it hadn’t worked out so well the last time she withheld information from him—hiding the fact that her license had been suspended—but that issue had been a fact, something between she and Marc. The news about Gwen’s philandering, and the baby, was wrought with painful questions and betrayal—at the moment, she wanted to spare Marc that emotional minefield.

But she wasn’t so naive to think she could avoid the issue for much longer.

Around 3:40, they drove through Riverside, California, and its famous Mission Inn, which boasted such visitors as Humphrey Bogart, John F. Kennedy and Harry Houdini. Around five o’clock, they rolled into San Clemente, with its breezy ocean air, wisps of fog and Spanish Colonial architecture.

On the drive, she’d looked up directions to The Surfing Rooster, and gave instructions to Marc. Rather than show up at the place and possibly run into Laura McDonald, they parked across the street at the drive-through restaurant Mr. Taco’s, where they noshed on chips and salsa while watching the comings and goings at The Surfing Rooster, a food stand with a giant surfing rooster on its roof. Seating consisted of several outdoor picnic tables.

“According to MapQuest,” Cammie said, “Laura McDonald’s home is up in the hills above Interstate 5. Shouldn’t take us more than ten minutes to get there.”

Nodding, Marc rubbed his neck.

“Keep the motor running so we can take off as soon as I get back to the car.”

“I’m going to the door with you.”

“You’re the plaintiff. You can’t serve the lawsuit.”

“I know that, Cammie. I just don’t want you going to her door alone.”

She heaved a sigh. “Look, I’m going to pull my hair back in a bun and wear my sunglasses. She won’t recognize me. And we rarely spoke at the law firm, so I seriously doubt she’ll remember my voice, especially as I’ll be saying these four words—
Laura McDonald, you’re served
. But if you’re standing there, she’ll put two and two together and know she’s being hit with a lawsuit. That’d be the moment she’d go for another third-degree-assault charge.”