Hot Wheels and High Heels (7 page)

No. She couldn’t think about him now. She had to concentrate on the problem at hand—getting back what few possessions she had so she could begin to feel normal again.

“Watch your pressure gauges,” her father said. “It leaks oil.”

Darcy sighed. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. The latch is broken on the driver’s door. You’ll have to crawl in from the passenger side.”

This could
not
be happening.

Her father opened the door for her, and she climbed inside none too gracefully, putting one knee on the passenger seat, then turning around to plop behind the wheel. She started the car. It gasped and sputtered, reminding her of her great-aunt Gertie, who had continued to smoke even as emphysema was driving her into the grave.

Darcy closed her eyes. Every time she thought she’d hit rock bottom, she sank a little lower.

“The stock market’s on a downturn. Unemployment is up. Interest rates are on the rise.” John tossed the business section of the
Dallas Morning News
onto his desk. “If this keeps up, I might actually make a decent profit one of these days.”

Tony leaned against the door frame, morning coffee in hand. “In other words, what’s bad for America is good for John Stark?”

“It’s hard to stay in this business when people don’t default on their loans.”

“Hey, we already have plenty of work. You got that Mercedes, didn’t you?”

“Finally.”

“Did she give you any trouble when you went back with the tow truck?”

Now
that
put a smile on John’s face. “Not a bit.”

“Ah. A smile. Does that mean you finally got your priorities straight?”

“What?”

“You’re focusing on the woman as much as the car?”

John frowned. “I told you. She’s a nutcase.”

“So you’re not going to see her again?”

“I repossessed her car. Just how amenable do you think she’d be if I said, ‘Hey, baby, wanna go out?’” As if he’d even consider it.

“Well,” Tony said, “I agree it doesn’t usually set the stage very well, but I’ve dated women whose cars I’ve taken.”

“You’d find a way to date a woman if you shot her mother.”

“Hmm. There’s a pickup scenario I hadn’t considered, but—”

Just then the door to the outer office opened. Both men craned their necks around to see who it was.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Tony said. “Speak of the devil. What’s she doing here?”

Actually, after taking inventory of her car last night, John had been expecting her. “She had luggage in the trunk of her car. I assume she’s here to pick it up.”

“Well, then. Here’s your chance to get the Mercedes
and
the girl.”

John just shook his head. Tony’s preoccupation with the opposite sex was an amazing thing to behold. When he wasn’t thinking about women, he was drinking with them, eating with them, showering with them, or sleeping with them. Being surrounded by all that estrogen was bound to get him into trouble someday.

The men went to the outer office. John’s gaze automatically drifted to the woman’s snug little pants, which ended just below her knees, then upward to a stretchy blue top. Following her curves up and down and all around reminded him that it had been a while since he’d gotten up close and personal with a woman, but he had no intention of ending that streak with a marginally insane one.

She stood there with her purse draped over one shoulder, jingling her keys, as if she expected this visit to be a short one. Good. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted more.

Tony gave her a brilliant smile and stuck out his hand. “Hi, there. We didn’t get a chance to meet last night. I’m Tony McCaffrey.”

She shook Tony’s hand, giving him a smile of her own. “Darcy McDaniel.”

“What brings you here today?”

“Knock it off, Tony,” John said. “This isn’t social hour. You know why she’s here. She’s getting her luggage, and then she’s leaving.”

Darcy turned to John, her smile evaporating. “Well, aren’t you Mr. Hospitality.”

“Don’t mind John,” Tony said. “He’s all business.” Leaning closer to Darcy, he whispered, “He doesn’t know a thing about pleasure.”

She raised an eyebrow at John. “Is that so?”

John shot Tony a look of irritation. “Come help me with her stuff.”

A few moments later, they brought her luggage out of the back room—all five pieces of it.

“How long were you on vacation?” John asked.

“A week.”

He stopped short. “You went on a weeklong vacation and took all this luggage with you?”

“Why not?”

“It’s an awful lot to lug around.”

“I don’t
lug.
That’s what porters and limousine drivers are for.”

Of course. What was he thinking?

He handed her the form to sign that said she’d picked up her possessions and that they were in good condition. She stopped halfway through her signature and looked around the office.

“Wait a minute. Where’s my wine?”

“Wine?” John said.

“It was on the floor of the front seat. A bottle of Shiraz.”

“Never saw it.”

“It probably rolled under the seat. I want it back.”

John sighed. “How about I just give you ten bucks and we call it even?”

“Ten dollars?” Darcy said. “Are you kidding me? It’s a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine!”

“Two hundred dollars? Who in his right mind pays two hundred dollars for one bottle of wine?”

“A person with discriminating taste.”

“Who loves to throw away money.”

“You clearly know nothing about the finer things in life.”

“I know the value of a buck. Doesn’t get any finer than that.”

“Don’t worry,” Tony said. “I’ll get the wine for you.”

“Why, thank you,” she said, giving him a pleasant smile. “I do believe you’re one of the sweetest men I’ve ever met.”

Tony grinned at John. “You hear that, John? I’m sweet.”

“Just get the damned wine, will you?”

Tony gave Darcy a wink, grabbed a set of keys, and headed out the door. She turned and gave John a look that could have curdled milk. “Is there a single ounce of gentlemanly behavior inside you at all?”

“Sure there is. And it all comes pouring out the moment I encounter a lady.”

“You’re still mad because I outsmarted you and grabbed that key. Maybe it’s time you got over that.”

“Actually, I got over that about the time I drove off with your car and left you standing in the middle of the street.”

“How does it feel to take a car away from a woman who has nothing left in the world?”

“So you’re sticking to that story, are you?”

“It’s the truth.”

“Your husband actually sold your house while you were on a vacation?”

“Yes.”

“You came home to other people living there. That’s hard to believe.”

“Not when he practically gave it away.”

“Your address was in west Plano. High-rent district. And now you’re living with your parents in a trailer park?”

“With no money, what else am I supposed to do?”

“Then you don’t have a job?”

She lifted her nose a notch. “Since I’ve been married, I haven’t
had
to work.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” He grabbed a garment bag, slung it over the handle of the biggest suitcase, then took the handle of the next smallest one and headed for the door. Darcy just stood there.

“What are you waiting for?” he said. “Porters and limo drivers don’t generally happen by this way, and I’m only making one trip.”

She gave him a dirty look and grabbed the carry-on bag and another bag with wheels, and they went to the parking lot. The only car there that wasn’t his or Tony’s looked as if it was on its last leg.

“Nice ride,” John said.

She unlocked the trunk. “It’s your fault I have to drive it.”

“Steal it from a junkyard?”

“No, stealing would be
your
thing. If you must know, I borrowed it from my father.”

“So what did you do to your father to warrant a punishment like this?”

“Just put my luggage in the trunk, will you?”

He’d just finished loading up the car when Tony came around the corner of the building and handed her the bottle of wine. “Here you go, sweetheart.” He looked at the car, wincing painfully. “Yours?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“For the love of God, John. Nobody should have to drive a heap like that. Give her back her car, will you?”

“So you’d like to make up her back payments?”

“Uh . . . no.” He turned to Darcy. “Sorry.”

She smiled at him. “You’re still a very sweet man.” Then she shot John a look that said,
And you’re not.

“I’m real sorry about what your husband did to you,” Tony said. “What are your plans now?”

“I’m not completely sure,” Darcy said. “But I’ll manage.”

“That’s going to be a tough thing to do with no job,” John said.

“Some people work hard,” she said smugly. “Other people work smart.”

“I’m surprised you’re interested in working at all.”

“If you are,” Tony said, “we have a job opening here.”

John whipped around. “No, we don’t.”

“Yeah, we do,” Tony told Darcy. “John fired our clerk yesterday.”

“Well, thank you so much for thinking of me,” Darcy said, showering Tony with that glowing smile again. Then she turned to John, and the glow vanished. “But I’m afraid the management here is a little overbearing for my taste.”

“I’m quite sure it is,” John said. “And you couldn’t handle the job, anyway.”

“Handle what? Picking up a phone and saying hello? Pulling open a file cabinet and stuffing folders into it?” She made a scoffing noise. “I can’t imagine the person who
couldn’t
handle it.”

“Well, in that case,” he said with a deadpan expression, “the job’s all yours.”

“And I’ll take you up on that,” she said, “the day hell freezes over.”

With that, she circled around, got in the passenger door of that god-awful car, and shimmied over to the driver’s seat. It was a hard thing to pull off gracefully, and John had to admit she did a pretty good job of it.

Tony grinned. “She’s one of a kind, isn’t she?”

That was the understatement of the century.

John watched as she stuck her nose in the air and motored out of his parking lot, that crappy old car gasping for every inch of ground it covered. As much as she drove him nuts, he couldn’t help being curious about how she was going to pull herself out of the hole her husband had dug for her. It would be an interesting thing to watch. From a distance, anyway. Wearing body armor. With a weapon in each hand. And his brain on full alert.

No matter how beautiful she might be, behind that pretty face was a woman who could turn any man’s life upside down before he even knew what hit him.

That man was infuriating.

Darcy fumed most of the way home, wondering how she’d had the misfortune not only to have her husband leave her penniless, but then to have a man like John Stark pop up to make life hell for her. Thank God she finally had her luggage back, which meant that from now on, Lone Star Repossessions would be nothing more than a very bad memory.

It was time to concentrate on other things, such as where Warren was and how she could get back some of the money he’d taken away. She still couldn’t fathom why he’d disappeared the way he had. While their relationship had never been overly warm, they’d never been hostile to each other, and taking everything they had and leaving was just about as hostile as it got.

She’d met Warren when she went to work for the big manufacturing company where he used to be an accountant. He had just made the leap to upper management about the time he divorced his wife of twenty years.

But it wasn’t until he and Darcy had been married for several months that she realized the extent of his midlife crisis. Sometimes she’d see him looking in the mirror when he thought he was alone, checking out the hairline and the wrinkles and the love handles, and an aura of quiet desperation would fill the air around him. Warren always seemed to have the sense that time wasn’t just marching on but was running wildly around him in ever-tightening circles, closing in on him until escape was impossible.

Ironically, right now Darcy was feeling the same way. Was that why he had left? Because she wasn’t the fresh young woman he’d married? Because she was no longer enough compensation for the way he felt about himself?

And if that was true, would any other man be interested in her?

As that sickening feeling took hold, Darcy let herself entertain the fantasy that one of her mother’s theories was actually true. Maybe Warren really did have that brain tumor. It had made him go a little crazy, but in a few days he would find his way home, they’d get him a little chemo, and everything would be right with the world again. When she arrived at her parents’ house five minutes later, though, a sense of impending doom overcame her.

A police car was parked at the curb.

She pulled Gertie up behind it and killed the engine, then went into the house. Her mother was talking to a detective from the Plano Police Department.

“Mom? What’s wrong?”

Lyla grabbed Darcy’s arm, her face ghost-white. “Brace yourself, Darcy. Something terrible’s happened. It’s . . . it’s Warren.”

It’s true. The brain tumor finally caught up to him, and they’ve found his body.

But the detective quickly relieved her of that crazy scenario by offering her an even crazier one. As it turned out, not only had Warren cashed in everything he and Darcy had, an IRS audit at Sybersense Systems revealed that a few days before Darcy had returned from Mexico, he’d embezzled three hundred thousand dollars.

And now he’d skipped the country.

Chapter 5

D
arcy already knew her husband was a no-good, deserting, asset-grabbing jerk. But the last thing she’d expected was that he’d turn out to be a criminal.

The detective questioned her at length, trying to find out if she might have any idea where Warren was, but his questions only muddled her mind and made the situation seem even more surreal. They’d discovered that Warren had substantial gambling debts, which gave him all kinds of motive to embezzle. Worst of all, as a chief financial officer of a major corporation, he had the knowledge to successfully hide any money that hadn’t gone to loan sharks, which meant that Darcy would probably never see a dime of it again.