Knock Me Off My Feet (7 page)
"Not necessarily, but I need to check it out."
She nodded, swallowing hard, staring at the muscles in Quinn's chest and his little pale pink nipples. "Drew wouldn't do something like that," she breathed, letting her eyes travel down Quinn's rippled abdomen and then out over the lake, anywhere but at that body! "Anyway, there have been, what, eighteen letters now?" She let out a laugh. "Andrew Adams is incapable of that kind of scheme, Quinn. It would mean coming up with a plan and sticking to it—you know, commitment. Not his strong point."
Quinn took her hand and they walked together across the grass, toward the water, and Audie stared at his striking profile. This man left her bewildered. In a span of thirty minutes, Stacey Quinn had insulted her, aggravated her, mocked her, complimented her, made her laugh, and saved her from harm.
And now he cradled her hand with such tenderness that she couldn't bring herself to pull away. In fact, she found herself moving closer to his side.
What was he doing to her?
Quinn faced her then, the sun behind him turning him into gold, and he smiled. "You really are extraordinarily beautiful, Audie—for a Cubs fan."
"Ha!" She stood in front of him, smiling back. "And you're the most aggravating man I've ever met in my life."
He thought about that for a moment, exploring her face with his eyes. "Would you believe me if I said I don't mean to aggravate you?"
"Hell, no."
Quinn leaned his head back and roared, and the gesture reminded her of the family photo she had seen on his desk.
She wondered what it was like to grow up in a family like his, where people laughed and smiled and threw their arms carelessly around one another, sure that they were loved.
As if he read her mind, Quinn draped an arm loosely over her shoulder. "My brothers would love you. What do you say we go see the lions, Homey?"
* * *
She was running late. They shouldn't have stopped for ice-cream cones near Lincoln Park Zoo. They shouldn't have sat under the tree and talked as long as they did. Now it was after
"Can you wait while I get my clothes out of the car?"
Audie cocked her head at him, confused. "What? Your car—?"
"It's in a visitor space in the garage. I'll get a shower at your place and go with you to the book signing."
She closed her eyes to gather her patience.
"Three minutes," he said, already running off to the garage elevator, leaving Audie standing at the building's lakefront entrance, a bit confused.
She turned and stared at the water, dotted with after-work sailboats, and suddenly longed to be out on the family's forty-three-foot cutter. Alone in the wind. Alone where there were no threatening letters, no contracts, no book signings, no South Side Irish detectives who made her crazy.
He was so easy to talk to. She'd told him more in the last few hours than she'd shared with
Griffin
in the last ten years—and it scared her. She was a private person. She knew she could talk a lightning streak, but it was usually surface things. She didn't open up very easily. Yet she had with him.
"So what's the story on the column, Audie? How did you get where you are?"
He'd asked her that as they lolled in the shade just outside the zoo, licking their ice-cream cones. Seeing him apply his tongue and lips to the creamy white concoction had caused her insides to flip, and all she could think about was that wild kiss on the sidewalk. She'd probably think about that kiss for the rest of her life.
"You know how my mom died?" Audie had asked him.
He nodded, holding her gaze. "I certainly do. I know the guys that handled her homicide."
"Oh, of course," she said sadly. "Well, we'd never talked about the column, because I guess everyone just assumed Helen Adams would live forever. She was only sixty-two, still very energetic and busy—and fabulous, of course." Audie smiled a little.
"And then Marjorie called me that night to tell me she'd been mugged and beaten. So I get to see her on her way to surgery and she looks like she's dead already—she didn't even look like my mother. Her hair was all sticking up and her skin was gray and…
"
Audie closed her eyes for a moment.
"She made me promise I'd do it. She made me swear to her that I'd take over the column. We'd never even discussed it before, but, well, I agreed because I thought she'd get better and it wouldn't be an issue."
Audie looked up at Quinn and blinked. "Then she died. And poof—I'm Homey Helen."
Quinn was crunching on the sugar cone now, still watching her carefully. A thin trickle of ice cream slipped from the point of the cone and ran down his wrist. Audie watched him scoop it up with the tip of his tongue, and little black spots began to dance in her vision.
"Why would she ask you to do that? Didn't she know—?"
"That I'm a spaz?"
He frowned at her. "That the column wasn't something you were particularly interested in."
Audie chuckled and finished up her own ice cream before it liquefied in the heat. "What I wanted wasn't part of the equation. Never really was," she said, munching her cone.
Before she realized what was happening, Quinn leaned forward and licked softly at her forearm, removing a wayward pearl of melting ice cream from the fine hairs there. Audie gasped.
"So what happened with the estate?" he asked nonchalantly, as if his warm tongue hadn't just raked over her skin.
Audie blinked, trying to recover her composure. "Uh, I got the apartment, the syndication contract, the office…
"
He was licking his lips and smiling at her, which was completely unfair.
"…
the Porsche, and half of everything my mother and father had accumulated. Drew got the house on
"
Quinn gently sucked on each of his fingers, never taking his eyes off hers.
"…
and the rest of the cash." She let out a breath when she finished.
"So how much has your brother managed to lose in the last year?"
Audie snorted. "A lot of it. I don't know how bad it is, really, but if you think he wants to do the column, you're way off base."
"OK. Why's that?"
It was her turn to grin. "I think that will become obvious when you go talk to him."
"Fair enough."
Audie lay back in the grass and Quinn propped himself up on his elbow to gaze down at her.
"How long do you plan on keeping this up? How much longer can you do this?"
His words were hushed now, and the rough, musical quality came back to his voice. She liked that sound very much, and her eyes automatically followed it, entranced.
"I'm not sure," she said. In the afternoon light, she could see the fine lines around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. Those remarkable olive-and-gold eyes looked right through her. "I'm supposed to be signing a new contract within the month."
"And?"
"We really need to be heading back."
Quinn returned from the parking garage and came up behind her. She spun around to see that he had a garment bag slung over his shoulder and that he stood very close.
"I got two bathrooms," she said, a hint of challenge in her voice. "And forty-five minutes."
* * *
It was
Quinn had been ready for a while now, but he could still hear Audie cussing and bumping into things at the other end of the huge apartment.
"Oh, crap! Hell!"
He smiled to himself again. So this was Homey Helen's abode. He wondered if the original Helen was flopping around in her grave like a mackerel.
It wasn't filthy. In fact, the guest bathroom was spotless, probably because it was never used. But the rest of the apartment was in a state of utter disarray.
Newspapers, magazines, books, and sweat socks were scattered on tables. A half-filled microwave popcorn bag had toppled over on the expensive Italian couch, leaving oily streaks on the leather. He'd seen how three soccer balls had rolled to a stop in odd places, like in front of the stove. He couldn't imagine the ball was in the way since the kitchen obviously wasn't used for much—there was nothing in the refrigerator but bottled water, a jar of jalapeño peppers, and what appeared to be some kind of shriveled moss-covered ball that may have once been a citrus fruit.
A thick layer of dust had accumulated on the screen of her high-definition television set. He knew this because he'd run his finger across it.
"Quinn!"
"Yep."
"Are you ready?"
"Yep. Have been."
"Do me a favor—do you see a pair of bone pumps out there somewhere?"
Bone pumps were either medical devices or women's shoes, Quinn thought. "You mean shoes?"
"Yes, shoes! Look in the dining room and toss them back here when you find them, would you please?"
Quinn headed into the formal dining area, another room strewn with newspapers and odd bits of debris. He saw the shoes sticking out from beneath a sleek modern sideboard—blond maple, he thought. As he looped his fingers inside the shoes and stood up, he saw a few family photos on display. Like everything else, they were sprinkled with dust.
He took a second to examine them—and his eyes fell on one group shot in particular. There was Audie—fourteen maybe—gangly and wearing braces and suffering from a fatal case of Big Hair, standing as if someone were holding a gun to her head. Quinn laughed at the angry look in her eyes until he saw that her brother possessed the same expression. They must have been fighting.
Audie's father looked absolutely lost, standing off to the side a bit, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his suit trousers.
In the center was Helen, beaming into the camera like she had with Margaret Thatcher and Nancy Reagan, her hand resting on Audie's shoulder. It didn't seem to be out of affection as much as control.
And who was that? A younger, quite beautiful version of Marjorie Stoddard, standing with a protective hand on Drew's arm, holding the leash to a regal-looking standard poodle with a pompadour and a pompom tail.
Dear God. Out of the lot of them, Quinn decided the poodle looked the happiest.
"Did you find them?"
He straightened up at the faint sound of her shout and headed toward the other end of the apartment. A man could get a blister on his heel walking from one end of this place to the other.
"Whoa!" Quinn pulled back as Audie ran into the hallway outside her bedroom.
"Sorry. Thanks."
Quinn watched her balance one hand on the door frame, bend at the waist, and skip her feet into the shoes one at a time.
She looked elegant, refined, and professional. She'd chosen a simple pale pink sheath dress and wore pearls at her throat and ears. Her hair was twisted back in some complicated shape that left those little tendrils loose at the nape of her neck again. She smelled faintly of flowers and spice.
"You're lovely, Audie."
She straightened up, and her breath caught. "God, you clean up good, Stacey. You look downright … I don't know…
Protestant!"
As Quinn laughed, she checked out his lightweight gray suit, simply cut, nicely fitted, and the starched white collar and a tie of watery blues and grays. The man was dazzling.
"I'm late. Let's go," she said.
* * *
Quinn couldn't remember the last time he'd enjoyed being in a library this much. It was a decent crowd, mostly after-work types and a few older retirees. He scanned the faces, looking for anything that might catch his eye—a little too much adoration or anger or resentment, anything that didn't
fit.
"Perhaps I'm just bitter."
He couldn't get that sentence out of his head. There was something intimate in those words. He looked around the room again—was there bitterness in anyone's face here tonight? He didn't see it. These people were polite, excited, starstruck, and, at worst, a bit impatient that they had to wait in line for Audie's autograph.
But whoever was sending her those notes wasn't here tonight. Quinn was sure of it.
He moved around the large hall, watching her from every possible angle. He'd listened earlier as she stood at the podium to chat about the column and answer questions. He laughed to himself when he realized that most of her answers involved the use of club soda, baking soda, or white vinegar.