Beckett's Convenient Bride (4 page)

“Ms. Dixon?”

Astonished, she said, “You know my name?”

“Katherine Chandler Dixon?”

“Who
are
you?” She edged away. “Did my grandfather send you?”

“No, mine did,” he said, and then bent double in a fit of coughing that made her throat hurt just to hear it.

“You're sick,” she said flatly. “There's a hospital in Elizabeth City and one on the beach. I think there are some other medical facilities, too. Take your pick.”

Recovering, he shook his head. Under the dark shadow of beard, his face looked the color of raw plaster. “Don't need a hospital. On my way to recovering from a few busted bones, I picked up a bug. It's no big deal—mostly headache. I just need to sleep it off.”

“Look, if you'll tell me where you live, I'll see that you get there, one way or another, all right? The rest is up to you.”

“Charleston,” he said with another of those twisty
grins. If she didn't know better, she'd think he was deliberately trying to disarm her.

“Where's that?” And then her eyes widened. “You mean the one in South Carolina?”

“Yep. Last time I saw it, it was.” He appeared to be breathing easier now that the coughing fit had passed.

“I'm certainly not going to drive you to Charleston, but if you're staying somewhere around here, I'll help you get there.”

“Nags Head last night. Checked out this morning.” He named a hotel about three mileposts from where she'd worked last summer.

Shaking her head slowly, Kit made up her mind. Lord, if she ever wrote an autobiography, no one would believe it. Not that anyone would be interested.

“You're coming home with me,” she said firmly. Lord knows she'd taken home scruffier-looking creatures. Four-legged ones. Besides, her home was within shouting distance of practically everyone in the village. “It's not much, but at least you can rest up until you feel like telling me what this is all about.” The man knew her name. She wanted to know what else he knew about her. “You can rest on the couch until you're feeling better. It opens up and I can let you have a spare pillow.”

Carson wanted to refuse. Hell, he wanted to be back in Charleston in his own bed, with the telephone off the hook and a solid week to do nothing but sleep.

At the moment, though, if she'd offered him a doormat, he would gratefully have accepted. “Need to talk anyway,” he said. He could rest up for a few minutes, speak his piece, hand over the goods and by that time he'd be good to go.

Good enough, at any rate.

“You wait here,” she said. “I'll move my car off the
road—nobody'll bother it. I can drive a stick shift, you don't have to worry about that.”

He shook his head, winced and said, “Automatic.”

“Whatever. I just don't want you on my conscience. You're in no shape to drive and my car will be all right here. There's no crime around these parts.”

Hearing her own words, Kit wondered just when she had stepped through the looking glass. How about murder? And no matter how peaceful it might look on the surface, Gilbert's Point saw it's share of drug traffic, not to mention the occasional Saturday night celebration that got out of hand. So far as she knew, the Coast Guard took care of the drug runners and a night in jail took care of the boozers. But murder—that was scary.

“Give me the keys,” she growled. “I'll help you in and—”

He helped himself in, moving as if he'd been stretched on a rack, but moving under his own steam. That was encouraging.

“You can take a nap if you want to, I don't have to be at work until five and it's only four-twenty. Are you allergic to aspirin? How about chicken soup? Jeff at the Crab House makes really good chicken soup.”

She could hear her mother now. “Katherine, do you have to drag home every stray creature in the world? I'm not running a zoo, you know,” she would say. At least, she would when she was sober enough. Or when she was home. Perhaps if she'd been home more often, or sober more often, Kit wouldn't have adopted every stray she saw, from homeless cats to tailless lizards to broken-wing birds.

It had never worked out, anyway. Her father had seen to that. He made her watch once while he stuffed a litter
of abandoned kittens into a sack and drowned them in the Chesapeake Bay.

And then she'd had to serve her term in the closet for defying his orders. It was usually only a matter of a few hours, but once, after one of her strays had infested the house with fleas and they'd had to get the exterminator in, she'd been locked in the closet for twelve hours straight. She had cried herself sick, then she'd begun making up stories.

She probably had her father to thank for her career.

“Hot tea's supposed to be good for colds, too. And onions. Not together, of course, but…”

Carson let her babble. All he wanted to do was lie down and close his eyes. He never got sick,
never.
Been busted up a time or two, but he'd never caught any of the bugs going around. Until now.

By the time she stopped the car in front of a house that was about the same vintage as his own, it was all he could do to slide out of the car. His overnight bag was in the back, but he lacked the motivation to reach for it.

Passing by an assortment of bowls and pans on the front porch, she opened the door and pointed toward the back of the house. “Bathroom's back there, last door on the left. Couch is through there, help yourself. I'll put the kettle on and call to see if today's chicken soup's ready. Jeff makes it fresh every day.”

Her voice had a soothing quality, which was surprising coming from a woman who was at worst a dangerous psychotic, at best, a compassionate flake. “There's an afghan on the back of the couch. When you're feverish, you probably don't need to be chilled. Or is it the other way around?”

She left, muttering something about starve-a-cold, feed-a-fever, but by that time Carson was down and nearly out.
A moment later he could sense her presence, even though his eyes were closed. Don't talk any more, he wanted to say, it hurts my head.

“I won't talk any more, you probably just want to sleep. Why don't I go get my car now, and I'll stop by the restaurant and bring you some chicken soup before I go to work.”

He felt a drift of something light and wooly over his body. She hadn't tried to remove his coat, but she tugged at one of his boots briefly before giving up. He could have told her that there was a knack to pulling off boots, and she didn't have it. At that point, he didn't care.

Bye-bye, angel. Wake me up in a few weeks, all right?

T
his is the right thing to do, Kit thought in an effort to reassure herself. After running the man down, she could hardly walk off and leave him there. He was injured, possibly even ill. It was only natural to be uneasy—any normal person would be uneasy.

All right, so she was more than uneasy, she was scared stiff. But she was still functioning, and under the circumstances that was pretty cool.

With shaking fingers, she dialed the Crab House. “Look, Jeff—I might be a few minutes late coming on shift, but I'm going to stop by first, and could you please have a quart of chicken soup ready to go?” She listened, darting quick glances toward the living room. “Uh-huh—that's right, he found me.”

Someone had been asking questions about her? And she'd been fool enough to drag him home with her.
Maybe her grandfather was right—she was a clear case of arrested development.

But the man had known her full name. That had brought her up short, and before she could come to her senses curiosity had outweighed fear, and now she was stuck with him.

Fortunately, he was out like a light, as she simply wasn't up to the job of dragging him out and dumping him beside the road.

Raking her hair from her forehead, she thrust her car keys in her pocket and hurried down the path, wondering if she'd left enough room for Ladybug. Without thinking, she'd parked the Yukon in the place she usually parked her own car. Second thoughts, and third ones, dogged her steps as she hurried along the road. How could she have walked out and left a strange man asleep in her house at a time like this?

Even under normal circumstances Kit never invited men to sleep in her house. Sleeping over implied involvement, and Kit had a whole series of rules concerning getting involved with a man, starting with No Way and ending with Just Say No.

Growing up in a family that was everything proper on the outside and totally dysfunctional behind closed doors had left scars that she was still trying to heal—or if not to heal, at least to hide.

In other words, she mocked silently, you're a chip off the old block.

Early on, it hadn't been quite so evident that once her father left for his office, the whole house seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. Back then, her mother would wait until just before dinner to take the first drink. During the day they would go places, just the two of them. Movies, museums, shopping…to the zoo. On rainy days they
might play Fish or cut paper dolls from old fashion magazines. She'd loved that, making up stories about each one.

For Kit's eighth birthday her mother had given her a bride doll. In later years Kit always connected the doll in her mind with a large, gold-framed wedding picture that had hung in her mother's sitting room. The bride in the picture wore a full-skirted lace gown and pearl-seeded veil, her eyes aglow in a classically beautiful face. Standing beside her, but not touching her stood the groom, Christopher Dixon, looking handsome and chillingly un-involved. That was before her mother's drinking spiraled out of control.

Oh, they'd been a pair, all right. According to her grandfather, Betty Chandler had set out to trap herself a rich husband, and in a weak moment, the judge's only son had allowed himself to be caught.

So far as Kit knew, her father had never had a weak moment in his entire life. If the judge was known as Cast Iron, then her father, a junior partner in a prestigious law firm at the time of his death, could surely have been called Stainless Steel.

Three days after her parents' funeral—they'd died in a plane crash when she was eighteen—she had started making plans to move. They had lived only a few miles from the elder Dixons' spacious white brick house on the Chesapeake Bay. Her grandparents were more than capable of dealing with the estate. Not that they would have welcomed her input even if she'd dared offer it.

Poor Grandmother—the judge insisted on the formal titles—had been crushed by the death of her only child, but under her husband's cold, disapproving eye she had quickly rallied. By the day of the funeral she'd been her old self to all outward appearances, which was all that
mattered to the Dixons. Cool, polite and properly withdrawn.

The next day her grandfather had sent for Kit to discuss her father's will. Instead of obeying the summons, she had gone back upstairs to her room and started packing, boxing up her collection of books, her paints, her clothes and her mother's wedding photograph. Then she'd locked the front door and headed south with one hundred and thirty-seven dollars and no prospects.

And she'd done just fine. Missed a few meals along the way and spent more than a few nights in her car, but she'd learned quickly and been lucky. Before her grandfather could enlist every law enforcement officer in the Commonwealth of Virginia to track her down, she'd called to let them know she was all right. She hadn't told them where she was, but since then she'd continued to call and occasionally drop in for a brief visit.

She honestly didn't know why she bothered, since all they did was criticize and try to coerce her into returning to the fold. Her grandmother's gentle chiding was as bad as her grandfather's harsh disapproval. According to the judge, Kit was just like her mother—weak, flighty and immoral. Just look at the way she dressed, for one thing—which, of course, had made her dress all the more outrageously. And working as a waitress? No member of his family had ever worked in a menial position.

She was a darned good waitress. She'd like to see him try and keep up with orders and unruly patrons without losing his cool on a busy night at the height of the tourist season.

Still, they were all the family she had. Deep down, she probably loved them. At least, she couldn't bring herself to cut them off completely. One of these days they might even need her, and if that time ever came she would be
there for them. But she would never go back and allow them to treat her the way they had treated her mother.

Thinking always made Kit walk faster. She was halfway along Landing Road when she glanced up to see someone trying to open her car door.

Her steps faltered. Had she locked it?

Of course she'd locked it—although as a rule she didn't bother. Gil's Point was hardly a haven for car thieves.

“Hey, you!” she shouted.

The man glanced over his shoulder. Several men down at the boat dock looked up. Gil's Point was that kind of place—no more than a mile or so from one end to the other, surrounded by tidal marsh on three sides, the canal on the other. One of the things she liked best about it was the neighborly feeling among the dozen or so families, who were mostly kin and had lived there forever.

“That's my car,” she yelled, her red sneakers pounding on the hard-packed marl. If it was in the way—and it was—she would move it. She didn't need any stranger doing it for her. Ladybug had a ticklish transmission. For ticklish, read desperately ill.

“Hey, Kit, you all right?” one of the fishermen hollered.

The man who'd been nosing around her car looked from her to the fishermen and back again. Without a word, he turned and loped over to a red pickup truck with one blue fender that was parked off to one side on Waterlily Road. Climbing in, he slammed the door shut and roared off in the direction of 158.

For several moments Kit stood and stared after him, puzzled, but not wholly alarmed. Maybe he thought she'd run out of gas. Maybe he was only trying to be helpful. But then why had he run away?

And why had the sound of his truck struck a nerve?
Almost everyone around here drove trucks, and one sounded pretty much like another, at least to her undiscriminating ears.

Suddenly a chill coursed through her, like a cloud shadow racing across the marsh grass. It wasn't panic, she told herself. Panic had been when she'd found that body with a bullet hole in the forehead. Since then she hadn't had time to panic.

Well…she might have come close a time or two.

But it was broad daylight. No one with half a brain would try to steal a car in front of the whole town at a quarter of five in the afternoon. It was probably just someone who collected vintage VWs. She'd had several offers. Seeing it parked on the roadside, he might have thought it was for sale and was checking it over to see if he was interested. Maybe he'd been looking for a For Sale sign.

But then, why run away?

Because he'd recognized the Ladybug from the church parking lot and was looking for a way to silence a potential witness? Because he'd been looking for identification so that he could find out where she lived, sneak into her house late at night and smother her in her bed?

“The curse of the writer's mind,” Kit muttered. She could create drama from three ants in a sugar bowl.

On the other hand, there had been a murder—she hadn't imagined that. Fisting her hands in frustration, she wailed in the direction the truck had disappeared, “Blast you, I didn't
see
anything!”

A startled mockingbird flew from a nearby bay tree, and she expelled her breath in a frustrated sigh. What now? Hyper imagination or not, she knew better than to touch her car without having someone check it over first. She'd seen the news. She read hard-edged suspense novels. He could have tampered with her brakes or at
tached one of those thingees to the ignition that would make it explode as soon as she turned the key. Or maybe even when she opened the door.

God, what a day—and she never swore. Never!

She felt like crying, only she never cried, either, so what now? Unlock the door and risk getting herself blown up, or wait and let someone else take the risk?

Well, that wasn't much of an alternative.

Maybe her policeman would know what to do. That is, if he really were a policeman. A policeman, she reminded herself, who knew not only her full name, but knew how to find her. Not even her grandparents knew where she lived. At least, she didn't think they did.

No, it had nothing to do with her grandparents. It was just a little too coincidental, the way he'd turned up knowing her full name on the same day she'd heard a shot and discovered a body.

The trouble with being a fan of suspense novels was that it opened your mind to all sorts of possibilities.

The trouble with being a writer of children's books was that you didn't have a clue as to how to act on those suspicions.

Turning back toward the village, Kit forced herself to examine the situation logically. She could never remember which side of the brain controlled which function, but her logical mind—a legacy, no doubt, from a long line of legal types—was actually every bit as good as her creative mind.

Item one: she had witnessed a murder.

Well, she hadn't—not really. At least she hadn't seen who had done it. Not that it mattered if the murderer thought she could identify him.

Item two: she had called to report the crime. Hadn't answered any questions—hadn't even waited to be asked,
but at least she'd reported it. It was up to the sheriff to do the rest.

Item three: there was a strange man asleep on her couch, one who might or might not be who he claimed. One who probably had no connection to what had happened this morning. The key word was
probably.
He'd told her his name was Beckett on the drive to her place, and he'd known her full name and known where to find her, even though she had moved three times in the past two years.

And she'd been gullible enough to invite him into her home?

So much for a functioning brain. Putting out leftover food for the local wildlife was one thing; taking a stranger home with her and giving him a place to sleep was something else. Obviously she'd inherited her judgment from her mother's side of the family.

Think, Katherine, think! Could there possibly be some connection between her Virginia grandparents and a policeman from South Carolina? The badge might or might not have been real. She had only Beckett's word, from their conversation in the car, on who he was and where he was from. She wasn't even sure that was his real name.

It was just the sneaky, underhanded sort of thing her grandfather would do, sending in a Trojan horse. With the elder Dixons, control was always the issue. In her case, it was control of the money she stood to inherit. They'd briefly lost control of their son when he'd married someone outside their social circle. They hadn't been able to control their daughter-in-law any more than they could control their granddaughter. That had to gall a man who could control a jury with the lift of a bushy eyebrow.

Kit could have told them why, of course. In both cases, the money simply wasn't enough. Her mother had lacked
the courage to leave a hollow situation, but not Kit. She might be lacking in judgment, but she had courage.

When she had visited her grandparents, she'd been almost amused to discover that she had her own control issues. The last few times she'd been there her grandfather had made a point of promoting his protégé, a lawyer named Elliott Saddler. Kit had met him a few times before she'd left home—he was a member of the same firm where her father had been a partner.

She hadn't been fooled, not for a single minute. Not that Elliott was anything like the judge, but Kit knew how her grandfather's mind worked. She was twenty-five years old. Legally there was no way he could pull her strings, but if she were to marry someone like Elliott, who thought the judge walked on water, the old despot would have her right where he wanted her. Right where he kept his wife and where he'd tried to keep his daughter-in-law: under his cast-iron thumb.

Kit glanced at her watch as she stepped up onto the old wooden wharf and hurried to the restaurant on the far end. Twelve minutes to go before she was supposed to report for work. “Jeff, is the soup ready? I've got a houseguest, and he really needs an infusion of your chicken soup. I think he has the flu or something.”

The tall restaurateur grinned, and then frowned, looking her over. “You don't look so good. Don't you come down with nothin', y'hear?” He handed over a quart jar in a brown paper bag. “I'm counting on you for the breakfast shift startin' next week. We're getting more layovers every day.”