The Ring on Her Finger (12 page)

“So are you from around here originally?” Max asked suddenly, loudly, to be heard over the rumble of the engine.

“No,” Lucy said. “I grew up in Rho... Um...” Now what? she wondered, her brain scrambling frantically for some birthplace other than Rhode Island. Romania? Rome? Romulus? “Ah...” she tried again. Then, “Roanoke,” she said in a burst of inspiration, fairly shouting to be heard over the car’s thundering. “Roanoke, Virginia.”

“Is that where your fiancé lives, too?” he asked, never taking his eyes from the street.

“My fiancé?” she asked, confused.

“Yeah. The guy who put that ring on your finger.”

Oh, that fiancé. Funny, Lucy kept forgetting she was supposed to have one. And not just in her phony life, either.

She tried again to twist the gaudy ring from side to side. It was marginally looser now than it had been the night Archie shoved it onto her hand, but no amount of soap, butter, salad oil, Vaseline, ice, or any other material had led to its removal. It was almost as if the hideous thing had branded her. Branded her as the fiancé of a man with extraordinarily bad taste. So what did that say about her? Whatever it was, that was what Max thought of her.

“Uh, yes, he still lives where I grew up,” she said, congratulating herself for not lying. Not on that one answer, anyway. That one answer among the thousands of false ones she had given everyone in the past week.

She wanted to tell Max that Archie wasn’t her fiancé, either—technically, she hadn’t told him she would marry him—but something prevented her. Maybe it would be better if he thought she was engaged. And maybe it would be better if she kept reminding herself that she was supposed to be engaged. There was obviously something hot and heavy burning up the air between them. It wouldn’t be a good idea to turn up the heat on whatever it was, since it was already damned near explosive. She didn’t want to think what would happen if it got any hotter.

Well, okay, maybe she did want to think about that. Maybe she’d already thought about it. It was only thinking. Perfectly safe. Except for it making her want to, you know, stop thinking and start exploding.

“So when’s the big day?” Max asked, snapping her out of her troubling reverie and dropping her back into her troubling reality.

“Big day?” she echoed.

“The
wedding
,” he said, enunciating the word carefully.

“Oh, that. Um, it’s sort of up in the air right now.”

At that, Max did take his eyes off the road to look at her. She told herself he was only doing it because they’d stopped for a red light, and not because he was so interested in her answer to that last question. But he did look awfully interested in her answer to that last question. Too interested.

“Up in the air?” he said. With much interest.

“Uh-huh.”

“Up in the air, like, because you’re having trouble finding a reception hall? That kind of up in the air?”

“Something like that, yes.” Except that it was really, like, because they were having trouble eluding the police. Details, details. Sheesh.

He nodded slowly. Thoughtfully. Interestedly. “I see.”

Well, she sincerely doubted that. But if it made him feel better...

“We just recently got engaged,” she added, congratulating herself for yet again telling the truth. Except for the part about her not having technically said yes to the proposal, something that sort of negated the reply’s essential truthfulness. So she quickly amended, “He just proposed a couple of weeks ago.” There. That should take care of that.

Except that it didn’t take care of anything, because Max suddenly seemed oddly uplifted. “So then you must still have a lot of planning to do,” he said. “You still have lots of time before the actual ceremony. I mean, especially if he’s still in Virginia. Those long distance relationships and all.”

Actually, long distance had only improved Lucy’s relationship with Archie. Of course, that wasn’t what Max meant. Of course, she didn’t have to tell him that.

“Is he a student, too?” he asked as the light turned green. He shoved the stick shift into first gear, and Lucy tried not to swoon at how capable and confident his hand was on the gearshift. Seeing him grip the handle with such affection made her wonder how it would be to have him gripping other things with such affection, other things that weren’t on cars, for instance, other things that were on, oh say, a woman’s body, other things that were on her body, and—

“No, he’s a mor—” Thankfully, she caught herself before completing the word moron, even if it was an avocation of sorts for Archie. Probably, that wasn’t a word most women used to describe the men they’d just agreed to marry.

“He’s a what?” Max asked over the engine’s roar. “A mor...what?”

“He’s a mor...ah...mortician,” Lucy said off the top of her head. And damn the top of her head anyway. Though she supposed it could have been worse. She could have said, off the top of her head, that he was a Cobb salad.

“Really,” Max stated. Stated, not asked, clearly having no trouble believing that Lucy would be engaged to someone who made a living out of pumping dead bodies full of noxious chemicals and then styling their hair. “That’s kind of an unusual occupation, isn’t it?”

“Not really,” she hedged. “I think Archie must come from a long line of mor...ticians.”

‘Takes a special breed of man for that.”

“Oh, Archie is definitely a breed unto himself.” Moronus Bozoclownus. That would be the genus and species name for him, for sure.

“Archie, huh?” Max said.

Only then did Lucy realize she had used her faux fiancé’s actual appellation. Not that there was only one Archie in the world. But she probably shouldn’t have said even that much. So, following Max’s earlier example, she said, “Let’s talk about something else.”

His dark brows arched in surprise, but he kept his gaze trained on the street ahead. The wind rushed in through his window, lashing his long hair about his face, and coupled with the fleetly flashing lights of the city beyond, he looked dangerous and edgy and very, very tempting. Her heart seemed to vibrate with the heat and harshness of the car’s engine, her blood racing through her veins with enough velocity to make her feel dizzy. Vaguely, she recalled that she was supposed to be breathing, and she sucked in a deep breath brimming with the scents of the city. Never in her life had she felt more aware of her surroundings than she did in that moment. And never had she realized just how deeply her feelings could run.

He was so handsome. So dynamic. So potent. She wondered why he closed himself off from the world the way he did. Somehow she knew that was exactly what Max was doing, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Keeping himself distant from the world and everything in it.

“Yeah, we can talk about something else,” he said.

Only then did she remember they’d been having a conversation. For a moment, they seemed to have been communicating a different way entirely.

“I just figured a woman newly engaged would be filled with talk about her upcoming wedding,” he added. “What would you like to talk about instead?”

“You,” she replied without thinking. Once uttered, though, she had no desire to take the word back.

“Me?” he repeated, sounding surprised.

“Yeah, you. You told me you’ve worked for the Coves for five years. What did you do before that?”

He was clearly uncomfortable with the change of subject. “I did car stuff,” he said evasively.

“What kind of car stuff?”

“Pretty much the same kind of car stuff I do now. I just did it for someone different, that’s all.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. He was lying. Maybe not as blatantly as she was, but he was definitely hiding something. She wondered if he was on the lam from the Future Beauticians of Idaho, too.

“Where did you work?” she asked. “Here in Louisville?”

“No. Somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“I worked overseas.”

She could tell he hadn’t wanted to give even that vague answer, because he squeezed his eyes shut tight for a split second and muttered what sounded like... Well, like a word Lucy only used when she smashed her finger really, really hard.

“Where overseas?” she asked. “I’ve never visited any country besides this one and Canada. I bet it was fun.”

He made a strangled sound in reply, and his cheeks grew ruddy. “Yeah, well, all good things come to an end, don’t they?”

“I don’t know. Do they?”

“Yeah,” he said tersely. “They do. Trust me.”

Before she had a chance to comment further, he shifted gears again, urging the accelerator toward the floor. She watched the speedometer needle dart upward, past forty-five...fifty...fifty-five, and feared they’d be stopped by the cops, especially when he zipped through a just-turned-red light at a crowded intersection. Right when she was about to voice a warning, he removed his foot from the accelerator and downshifted, bringing their speed back into the legal range. By now they were nearly to the river, and he darted the little car expertly down a street that led beneath a bridge and through a light, taking the last curve with more speed than was necessary—or prudent.

There was something wild inside him as he rocketed the car along the river road. Something uncivilized and impetuous and quite possibly mad that he was trying hard to keep a rein on, but which obviously refused to be restrained. She wondered about where that something came from, wondered about how much of his life it spilled into. She found her gaze wandering again from his hard, uncompromising profile to the hand that manipulated the stick shift with such cool precision.

He was such a bundle of contradictions. Frantic and lawless one minute, composed and deliberate the next. Which was the real Max Hogan? she wondered.

And did she really want to know?

Max was in the carriage house, bent under the hood of Justin’s Gullwing Mercedes, when he heard the unmistakable sound of Power Puff Girl sneakers prowling around. More specifically, those sneakers—and the person who was wearing them—were prowling around the desk where he did all the paperwork involved in the maintenance of Justin’s vast car collection. Most specifically, they were prowling around the drawer in that desk where Max kept his stash of Lorna Doone cookies.

Without taking his attention off his work, he said, “I think I hear a mouse eating my Lorna Doones. I better tell the new housekeeper to call the exterminator. That’ll take care of those nasty meeses.”

“It’s
mice
, Max, not
meeses
,” said a tiny voice coming from the vicinity of the desk. “And they’re not nasty, they’re cute. And you better not let anybody exterminate them, or else.” After only a moment’s hesitation, the small voice added, “What’s ‘exterminate’ mean?”

He turned to find Abby Cove sitting on the wooden chair near his desk, shamelessly nibbling a pilfered Lorna Doone, totally unconcerned that she’d been caught red-handed. Her spindly legs swung in rabid circles, her brown eyes were even more enormous than they already were behind the round wire rims of her glasses, and her chestnut hair was half in and half out of a ragged ponytail. Along with her smudged sneakers, she wore a pair of rumpled orange shorts and a rumpled lime green and yellow plaid top.

Max tried not to squint at the color combination. Obviously, she’d chosen her own wardrobe before going to school that morning and had managed to make it out of the house without her mother seeing her. Rosemary always encouraged Abby to do her own thing and never hindered the little girl’s, ah...self-expression. Alexis, on the other hand, would never have allowed such an outfit to exist on her daughter. Of course, Alexis didn’t allow a lot of things with her daughter. Sometimes Max wondered if she’d even keep the girl if given a chance to give her back. Hopefully she would. But sometimes he did wonder.

He leaned against the chassis of the Gullwing, folding his arms over his oil-stained T-shirt, crossing his greasy, denim-clad ankles. “Exterminate is what I’m going to do to you if you don’t leave my Lorna Doones alone,” he said. He jutted his chin toward the box she held in her hand. “That’s private property you’re munching there, kid.”

“Property is theft,” Abby replied succinctly before popping the last corner of the cookie into her mouth. She chewed vigorously to destroy the evidence, then stuffed her hand into the box for more.

Max grinned. “Is it now?”

The little girl nodded as she pulled out another cookie and enjoyed a hefty bite. “Rosemary said so,” she mumbled, shooting a few soggy crumbs out of her mouth when she did.

“I think Rosemary might have heard it from someone else first,” Max told her.

“Nuh-uh, she didn’t. She made it up.”

“Mm.” Max knew it would be pointless to continue. Abby could talk rings around a person when she got riled up. She was a smart little cookie. So to speak. Unfortunately, she didn’t have that many people to talk to around Harborcourt, save Rosemary, who doted on her as much as Abby doted on the nanny. Nobody loved the Cove kid the way Rosemary did. He didn’t think anybody could.

“Rosemary also says I don’t have to go to the reading place next week if I don’t want to,” Abby added out of the blue. And there was just an edge of defiance in her voice when she said it. Which was remarkable, because, usually, Abby’s defiance was totally obvious. Not to mention boundless.

It was no secret in the Cove house that Abby was having trouble at school. Just starting third grade, she wasn’t even able to manage kindergarten-level material. Experts who had observed her when she first started kindergarten had diagnosed her as having a learning disorder. Unfortunately, they hadn’t had a chance to pinpoint which one, because Justin and Alexis—well, Alexis, anyway, since Justin hadn’t been much concerned one way or another—had diagnosed their daughter as being lazy and rebellious instead. They’d pulled her out of the study and refused to have her looked at again.

Max figured it was none of his business to agree or disagree with anyone about their own kid, especially since he didn’t know that much about any of it—kids or learning disorders. Still, if forced into a corner, he’d probably have to side with the experts. Mainly because Justin and Alexis Cove tended to see only what they wanted to see—of the world and of each other.