Trust Me on This Read online

  “It’s what I do best,” Alec said.

  “That’s what I figured,” Dennie said.

  “Hey,” Alec said, but she’d already hung up.

  “You know, if you were serious about trying to win me over, you’d have picked something a little snazzier than room service hot fudge,” Dennie told him half an hour later.

  Alec was puzzled by the lack of lilt in her voice, but he was willing to play along. “Ah, but because of my keen sense of character, I could tell you were the deep intellectual kind of woman who wouldn’t be swayed by fancy restaurants with fancy prices.” He picked up the desserts from the room service tray, sat down on the bed next to her, and handed her a sundae.

  “You were wrong.” Dennie stabbed her spoon through the whipped cream to the fudge. “I am easily swayed by fancy restaurants. Also by diamonds and gold. Particularly by diamonds and gold. Particularly today.”

  She licked the fudge off her spoon, and Alec tightened beside her and then forced himself to relax. “So what happened this morning?” Alec slurped his own fudge and whipped cream.

  “I got fired.” Dennie put her sundae on the table beside her, evidently not hungry after all. She wrapped her arms around herself and stared at the blank TV.

  Alec stopped slurping. “Fired?”

  “My boss warned me to stay away from Janice Meredith,” Dennie said, still staring at the TV. “So I did. Sort of. But for some reason, she had me fired anyway. My best guess was your aunt Victoria but Janice was mad before that.”

  “Aunt Vic wouldn’t have you fired.”

  “No,” Dennie said. “But she was going to talk to Janice for me this afternoon, and Janice might have decided that I was still harassing her. She decided something because she called the owner of the paper this morning.” She turned her head to look at Alec. “And that’s the end of my job.”

  Alec slid closer and put his free arm around her, balancing his top-heavy sundae in the other hand. “So we’ll fix it.”

  “No,” Dennie said. “I don’t think this one is going to fix. I don’t think I’m bouncing back from this one. In fact, I think I may even deserve this.”

  “Hey.” Alec tightened his grip on her shoulders. “You don’t—”

  “I’m thirty-four,” Dennie said. “It’s time I tried the hard stuff. That’s what this is, the hard stuff. This is the kind of experience that will make me smarter. I don’t want to bounce back the same. This is my chance to grow up. To be tough.”

  “I like you soft,” Alec said, puzzled. “And I’ve never noticed you being particularly weak or afraid, and you’re sure as hell not a quitter—”

  “I always have been.” Dennie stared at the TV again. “Afraid, I mean. You know, my best friend and I used to spend the first two weeks of every summer at her uncle’s farm. He had this big pond, almost a lake, and one side of it had this ledge hanging over it. It wasn’t much of a ledge, maybe ten, fifteen feet, but to a kid, it was high.”

  “Okay,” Alec said, trying to follow her drift.

  “Every summer, Patience would just plunge off that cliff, and I’d be too afraid until she’d say, ‘I’ll catch you. Jump, I’ll catch you.’ And she always did. And now I’m really going to jump, and she’s not going to be there.” She squinted at Alec. “That’s the only hard part. The rest of this, losing the job? That’s not so tough, really. I needed to leave that job anyway. So it’s scary, but good scary. It’s knowing Patience can’t catch me anymore because she’s got a husband to catch now. She can’t drop everything for me. I wouldn’t ask her to. I’m going to have to do the tough stuff alone.”

  “No.” Alec paused, trying to think of the right thing to say. “You’re not alone.” Alec moved his hand from her shoulder to drape his arm around her neck, hauling her closer to him, his chin against her hair. “I can cover you until you’re ninety-six.”

  “Ninety-six.” Dennie’s voice sounded flat, and Alec felt a clutch of fear; maybe she wasn’t going to come back from this one. After a moment, she pulled back from him and asked in the same flat voice, “Why ninety-six?”

  Alec tilted her chin up until she was eye-to-eye with him. “Because when you’re ninety-six, I’ll be a hundred, and I’ll be too damn old to break your fall. Until then, I’ve got you covered.”

  She swallowed, and the movement of her throat made him dizzy. He reached across her to put his sundae on the table and free up his hand for better things, and the melting cream slipped a little, a dollop falling right below Dennie’s collarbone. “Sorry,” he said, and bent to lick it from her skin. When he lifted his head again, her eyes didn’t look dead anymore, and Alec felt his heart pound. Careful, he told himself, and then thought, Screw careful.

  “Right,” Dennie said, a little breathlessly. “You’re planning on staying around until I’m ninety-six.”

  “No,” Alec said, pulling her closer. “I am not planning on it. Hauling you out of trouble is the last thing a sane man would plan on. But I’ll be there just the same.”

  Dennie seemed strangely calm. “You think?”

  Alec took a deep breath. “I know. What do you think?”

  “Oh, boy.” Dennie smiled up at him, a weak smile but a real one. “I don’t know what I think, but I know it feels awfully good to hear you say it.”

  Alec traced her lips with his finger. “Well, that’s a start. The important thing is, you know you’re not alone in this.” On an impulse, he kissed her forehead, and then her nose, and then gravity took him to her lips, and the kiss there was soft and light and comforting and made him breathless. “You’re not alone, babe,” he whispered against her lips, and then she buried her face against his neck, and he wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly.

  When she pulled back a few minutes later, her face was flushed, but she was Dennie again. “You really know how to get to a woman, Prentice,” she told him.

  “It’s my charm,” he said. “Although you seem to be pretty resistant to it in general.”

  “My defenses are down this afternoon.” Dennie snuggled closer. “God, you feel good.”

  “Remember that,” Alec said, hating what he had to say next. “Because I have to change the subject here.” She looked up at him then, and Alec said, “I need your help to get Bond.” When she didn’t say anything, he went on. “Brian Bond is a real estate con. He regularly swindles people out of their savings. He’s bad, and he should be in jail, and my boss and I would like to put him there. But we need your help.”

  “I thought you had that under control,” Dennie said, pulling away a little and frowning. “Didn’t Victoria—?”

  “We hit a snag. Bond owns the land he’s selling.”

  Dennie’s frown deepened. “So where’s the fraud?”

  “He’s telling people it can be developed, and he’s selling it for about ten times what it’s worth.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Dennie nodded. “The I’ve-got-the-EPA-fixed bit.”

  Alec shook his head. “He doesn’t even tell them that. He says the EPA will be fixed, not specifically by him. He puts nothing on paper. He’s not breaking the law.” He scowled. “Except morally. By the time the people who have bought the land have caught on, he’ll be long gone. And even if they caught him, they probably wouldn’t have much recourse. They’ll have paid prime dollar for worthless swamp, but as long as he didn’t promise them anything different—”

  Dennie broke in. “So where do I come in?”

  “One of the selling points he’s been using on me is what a great place this would be for me to settle down. And he’s seen us together. As a matter of fact”—he paused, unsure of how she’d take the next part—“when I thought you were working with him, I told him you were the perfect woman. He thinks I’m crazy about you.”

  Dennie nodded, and her curls brushed his cheek and derailed his train of thought again. “I am the perfect woman,” she said, “and you should be crazy about me. Get to the point.”

  I am crazy about you, Alec told her si