The Right Man Page 8

  “You love Neddie?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve forgotten about Jimmy?”

  Dangerous ground, when in truth, Susan knew nothing at all about Jimmy McGowan. She relaxed and let her instincts, which seemed to belong to Tallulah, speak for her. “I loved Jimmy,” she said. “But he’s gone, and nothing will change that. I’ve let go of him. You need to let go of him, as well.”

  She expected that would drive him away, but he simply nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m just not sure if I want to let go of you.”

  Chapter Eight

  Susan was never quite sure how she made it through that horrendous dinner. It helped that she and Mary were roundly ignored by the others. Elda Abbott had had just enough to drink to make her the glittering center of attention. She flirted outrageously with all three of the men, ignored her two daughters, laughed too loudly, talked too much and spilled cigarette ashes all over her untouched dinner.

  Ridley Abbott spent the dinner in silence, glaring at all and sundry. His few attempts at conversation were terse orders to Susan to look happier, but since Elda snapped at him the orders went unnoticed.

  Neddie was a busy man. He consumed huge amounts of the bland food, smoked between courses, drank steadily, parried Elda’s heavy-handed flirtation and cast constant, suspicious looks between Jack and Susan. Or Jack and Tallulah, Susan reminded herself. It was Tallulah they were all concerned with. Tallulah, who’d kissed her true love’s brother in the garage, who was about to marry a bullying businessman with dubious ethics.

  Jack didn’t say a thing. Hadn’t, since that surprising remark out on the patio. Susan had never even heard of a Jack McGowan in her family’s life—whatever role he’d played, it had obviously been a minor one.

  By the time the cook had begun to serve dessert, the air was blue with smoke, and Susan was feeling faintly nauseous. “I think I’ll go to bed,” she murmured. “I’m not feeling well.”

  “It’s early!” Neddie protested. “We need to talk.”

  “Now, Neddie, can’t you see Tallulah needs her beauty sleep?” Elda said playfully. “You’ll have the rest of your lives to talk. You go ahead, darling, and take Mary with you. I’ll entertain the men.”

  I’m sure you will, Susan thought, managing a tight smile. She pushed back her chair, and all the men rose, perfectly polite in their latent hostility.

  “Come on, kid,” she muttered to Mary. “We know when we’re not wanted.”

  Her room was chilly, but then, for the first tune in her life Susan was having trouble getting warm. She sank down on the bed as Mary shut the door behind them.

  “That bitch,” Susan muttered.

  Mary looked completely horrified. “Women don’t curse!”

  “I do. That woman downstairs is a bitch and a half, and I don’t care if she is yours and Tallulah’s mother,” Susan said frankly, kicking off the dreaded high heels.

  “She’s not. Our mother, that is. You’re right about the rest of it, though. She is a—” Words failed her.

  “Say bitch, Mary,” Susan ordered. “You’re old enough to use the right word when it’s called for.”

  “She’s not very nice,” Mary said reprovingly, reminding Susan of the woman she’d become. Fifty-nine-year-old Mary Abbott never spoke ill of anyone if she could help it. “Our mother died before the war, and Elda moved in on Daddy when he was most vulnerable.”

  “Then why do we call her ‘Mummy’?”

  “Because she hates it,” Mary said with a grin.

  “Good girl,” Susan murmured. “And who are the McGowans? I gather Jimmy’s dead, but who is Jack and what does he want with Tallulah?”

  “You grew up with them. Well, with Jimmy really—Jack was older. You and Jimmy were best friends growing up, and you always said you were going to get married. But you always had a huge crush on Jack, even when you were fighting with him.”

  “And what did Jack feel about Lou?”

  Mary shrugged. “You were his brother’s girlfriend. I don’t think he thought much beyond that. He was going out with real women, and you were just a kid with a crush on him. I’m not sure he even knew.”

  “Did Jimmy know?”

  “Jimmy knew Lou better than she knew herself. I don’t think he minded. He always worshiped his older brother. Don’t you remember...no, of course you don’t.”

  “Remember what?”

  “Lou showed me a letter Jimmy sent her. It arrived after he was killed, and it was kinda nice but kinda creepy. It was like he knew he was going to die. And he said that if something happened to him you should marry Jack. That Jack would take care of you.”

  “I don’t need anyone to take care of me,” Susan shot back.

  “Lou doesn’t, either. But you know men—they don’t realize that. They think women are fragile little flowers who have to be protected from life.”

  “Poor Lou,” Susan murmured. “And what does Jack think about all this? Does he know his brother thought he should take on his fiancée?”

  “I don’t think so. It wouldn’t matter—I can’t see Jack doing anything he doesn’t want to do, even for Jimmy’s sake, and he really loved Jimmy.”

  Susan leaned back on the bed, reaching up to touch her mouth. He’d kissed her. Kissed Tallulah, that was. In the garage, just as Jake Wyczynski had kissed Susan. And she wondered what it had been like. Whether it was as unsettling as Jake’s kiss had been to a much more experienced Susan Abbott.

  She felt so strange, like she was floating somewhere in space, looking down at Tallulah Abbott fifty years in the past. She touched her face, and it felt like her face and yet it wasn’t. Her body, and yet Tallulah’s.

  “You need to sleep,” Mary announced in a gently critical voice. “With any luck this is all some crazy dream. You’ll wake up tomorrow and be Lou again.”

  “I’d rather wake up and be Susan.” She shivered, still unaccountably cold. “Back in my own time.”

  “Maybe you will,” Mary said. She pulled a blanket around Susan, tucking it against her with gentle hands, and Susan looked up at her in surprise. It was so very strange, to see this little girl taking care of her with instinctive maternal care.

  “If I’m gone I want you to know something,” Susan said suddenly. “You’re a wonderful mother. The best anyone could hope for.”

  Mary grinned, suddenly looking no more than her nine years of age. “That’s encouraging to hear. And what about your father? Is he wonderful, too?”

  Susan bit her lip. “I don’t think I should tell you too much about the future. You’re probably better off not knowing.”

  “That doesn’t sound very cheerful. I want to be a world-famous diplomat, I want to marry William Holden, and I want to win an Oscar and have five children. Are you going to tell me that won’t happen?” There was humor in her young voice.

  “Those are pretty grandiose dreams.”

  “That’s what being young is all about. At least I know I can manage the five children,” Mary said. “The rest will happen if I work hard enough for it.”

  “Anything can happen if you work hard enough and dream hard enough,” Susan said. “You taught me that.”

  Mary shook her head. “Go to sleep, Lou. I enjoyed meeting my daughter, even if I think you’re a little bit screwy.”

  “I enjoyed meeting you, Mary.”

  The room was still and dark when Mary closed the door behind her. Susan nestled down on the bed, shivering slightly in the warm night air. She ought to get up and take off these horrendously uncomfortable clothes. In particular, the bra and girdle that seemed like medieval instruments of torture. She definitely wasn’t made for time travel. At least she hadn’t gone back to the time of whalebone corsets. Rubber was bad enough.

  She closed her eyes and let the night fold quietly around her. This had to be a strange, twisted sort of dream. Did people go to sleep in dreams? Did they dream within dreams? She had no idea. All she knew was that she wanted to wake up in her o
wn bed, in her own decade. She didn’t want to be here, trapped in Lou’s body. She didn’t want to marry the wrong man.

  And she didn’t want to die in less than three days.

  JACK MCGOWAN LIT a cigarette as he strolled toward his venerable Studebaker. It was an old car, prewar, and ran like a top. His mother wanted him to buy a newer one, something with a little more style, but he was resisting. Just as he was resisting all the plans they’d made for him.

  Hell, he wasn’t the only man who was having a hard time settling down after a war that had been over for four years. And he hadn’t even served—they’d told him he was too valuable as a war correspondent to waste his time in uniform.

  But now the war was over. The battles had faded, and he was stuck back in the states, covering society weddings.

  He needed to get the hell out of there. And in truth, he’d asked for this assignment. This wasn’t a café society wedding, this was a merger between a shady businessman and one of his patsies.

  And Lou Abbott was stuck in the middle, the perfect pawn.

  She’d changed so damned much he couldn’t believe it. He’d known her all his life—at one point his parents and the Abbotts had been friends. She’d always been around—a scrawny, long-legged kid with braids hanging halfway down her skinny arms, a tomboy with her heart in her eyes. He’d called her Spider when she was twelve and taller than Jimmy.

  She and Jimmy had been inseparable, best buddies from the moment they first met. There were times when he’d almost been jealous of that. Particularly when he’d come home toward the end of the war and found she’d grown up.

  She’d been seventeen then, and her coltish look had filled out into a prematurely voluptuous beauty. She’d still had that wild, boyish, mischievous streak, but it had matured along with her lush body.

  And so had the powerful crush he’d always known she harbored for him. But she wasn’t watching him anymore, she only had eyes for Jimmy.

  If she’d been a year older they would have married before Jimmy shipped out. If Jimmy had been a year younger the war would have been over before he was sent overseas, and he’d be alive today, the kid brother who’d always been some kind of anchor for Jack.

  Lots of “ifs.” But Jimmy had died, and something had happened to Lou. Some light had been turned down, so low it was barely burning. If she married a lying bully like Neddie Marsden that light would go out forever.

  The last time he’d seen her had been a little more than a year ago. Jimmy had been dead for two years, and he’d been avoiding coming home, avoiding the terrible truth that if he came back without Jimmy he’d know that Jimmy wasn’t coming back. But his mother had gotten sick, and he hadn’t been able to put it off any longer, and he’d come back...and gone to see Lou.

  She’d been in the garage behind the house, alone. Mary was in school, Elda was a clubwoman, and only Hattie was there in the kitchen, looking at him out of her warm brown eyes as she sent him to find Lou.

  Lou had always been surprisingly good at machinery, and she was bent over the engine of her blue roadster, frowning with concentration, and he stopped and watched her covertly for a moment. Thinking about what Jimmy had lost.

  Thinking about what he’d thrown away.

  And then she saw him, and her face lit up with a smile, and she dropped the wrench she was holding and ran toward him like the tomboy she’d once been.

  And then she stopped short of flinging herself in his arms, remembering. Remembering too much.

  “Hi, Jack,” she said. He’d dreamed about her husky voice—long, erotic dreams that made him feel as if he was betraying his kid brother.

  “Hey, Lou,” he said. “I wanted to come by and see how you were doing.”

  “I’m fine. College is great, I’ve got a new car, and—” Her bright voice faded, her face crumpled, and she threw herself into his arms.

  It hurt more than he could have imagined. For three years he’d held his emotions in check, and now Lou’s sobbing brought it all back. He missed his brother, damn it He missed him like hell.

  He didn’t know how he managed to end up kissing her. It just happened. The feel of her warm, soft body against his, the swell of her breasts, the scent of perfume and flowers and the hot sun. And Jimmy was dead, and Lou was alive, in his arms, and he just kissed her.

  And she kissed him back. It was no sisterly kiss, no closemouthed, Hollywood kiss simulating passion. He tipped her head back and kissed her hard, and she answered him with awkward, desperate passion. As if she knew their chances were running out and she was scared.

  He didn’t know what had broken their embrace. Maybe it was the distant slam of a car door, maybe it was the wind, maybe it was his guilty conscience for trying to steal his kid brother’s girl. All he knew was that she’d shoved him away, a look of such grief and horror on her face that his desire had vanished.

  And that was the last time he’d seen her until tonight, when he’d conned his way past Hattie and gone to her bedroom, planning to leave a note for her, only to find her sleeping like a baby in her rumpled wedding gown.

  He should have left. He should never have gone to her bedroom in the first place, and once he. saw she was there he should have slunk away like a junkyard dog.

  But she’d looked like Sleeping Beauty, and he’d wanted to kiss her awake. She looked like every dream he’d ever had, everything he’d wanted and given up on long ago. And instead he’d taken a seat by the window and watched her as she slept.

  She was a fool to marry a heel like Neddie Marsden. For three years Jack had been trying to prove that Marsden’s company had siphoned off illegal profits from the war effort, and gotten rich by doing it. Gotten rich from the blood of America’s fighting men. And old man Abbott, who’d never liked the upstart McGowan boys, had gotten rich, as well.

  Now he was trading his older daughter...for what? For more money? For protection? And Lou, with the life almost gone from her huge, beautiful brown eyes, looked as if she’d given up fighting.

  Damn, he wished Jimmy were still here. Jimmy would never have let something like this happen. If Jimmy hadn’t been killed in France during the last days of the war, he’d be back home, married to Lou, and there would already be at least one baby on the way.

  And just maybe Jack wouldn’t have minded.

  But he minded like hell a war profiteer like Marsden ending up with Jimmy’s true love. And he wasn’t about to let that happen.

  He had two days to stop it. So far he’d been unable to get enough proof that Marsden was crooked, and he was ready to give up trying. He had to get on with his life. He couldn’t bring Neddie down without toppling the mighty Abbotts, as well, and while he didn’t give a tinker’s damn about Elda and Ridley, Lou and her little sister were a different matter. He didn’t want to see their lives ruined.

  But he could keep Lou from wrecking her future by marrying the wrong man.

  Tomorrow they were holding a rehearsal dinner, and all it had taken was a little well-applied flirtation, and Elda had invited him, despite Neddie’s glower. He’d find time to talk to Lou once more, to try to convince her that she was making the mistake of her life. It was up to her whether she’d listen or not.

  At least he would know he had done his damnedest, for Jimmy’s sake and for Lou’s. He was going back overseas—he had an offer to work for one of the foreign news bureaus, and he found he’d developed a bad case of itchy feet. America didn’t seem like home anymore: There were too many places to see, too much stuff going on in a world turned upside down by the cataclysmic war.

  Most people he knew were buying those tiny little houses Levitt and Marsden and others were putting up. They were settling down to a safe, carefully circumscribed life.

  It wasn’t for him.

  Funny, but he wouldn’t have thought it was for the likes of Lou Abbott, either. As a kid she’d always been full of imagination and adventure, longing for distant lands and travel. Life must have beaten that out of her.

  Bu
t he still wasn’t going to stand by and let her tie herself to Neddie Marsden without her knowing exactly what she was getting into. Maybe Jack couldn’t pin anything on him, but sooner or later someone would, and Lou would be dragged down with him. If he gave her a chance to escape he would have done his duty.

  And then he could leave for Asia with a clear conscience, and just maybe, when he ran into her again, he’d finally be over her.

  And maybe pigs would fly.

  MARY ABBOTT PUSHED her silvery hair back with a weary hand, closing the bedroom door as she stepped back. “She must be exhausted, poor girl,” she murmured.

  Alex Donovan stood watching her, his expression giving nothing away. “She’s not sick, is she?”

  “Just worn-out. You don’t realize how much work a formal wedding is.”

  “No, I suppose I don’t. Do you suppose we would have had better luck if we’d had one?”

  Mary shook her head, a regretful smile on her face. “They never would have let us get that far. That’s why we eloped, remember?”

  “I remember,” he said. “Are they why you left?”

  “Don’t,” Mary said. She leaned her head against the closed door for a moment, taking a deep, calming breath. “I don’t need to worry about her, do I?” she asked, knowing she sounded helpless, somehow not minding. In Susan’s thirty years she’d never been able to turn to Susan’s father for support.

  “Not about Susan,” he said. “You raised her well, Mary. She’s a fighter. I think you’re right—her body’s worn-out and needs to recoup its strength. She’ll wake up when she’s ready to.”

  “She’s slept all day.”

  “She’ll be all right, Mary,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders. The touch, after so many years, was still familiar. “Trust me,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. And she knew, deep in her heart, that she always had.