The Pregnancy Affair

At first, she said nothing. Then, very softly, she asked, “Class B felony, you say? Twenty years?”

Grady nodded.

For a moment, Renata looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights, right down to the fawn-colored suit and doe eyes. Then her expression cleared, and she said, “Craigslist.”

Grady looked confused. Tate wasn’t surprised. He’d been confused since seeing Renata at his front door.

“Craigslist?” Grady echoed.

Renata nodded. “I found a computer whiz on Craigslist who said he could find anyone for anybody for the right price. He helped me locate Mr. Hawthorne.”

“His name?” Grady asked. Dubiously, if Tate wasn’t mistaken.

Renata briefly did the deer-in-the-headlights thing again. Then she told him, “John something, I think he said. Smith, maybe?”

Grady didn’t look convinced. “And do you know if Mr., ah, Smith did anything else with this information he found for you? Like, I don’t know...sold it to someone else besides you?”

“I’m sure he’s totally trustworthy and kept it all completely confidential,” Renata said.

Now Grady looked even less convinced. “A guy on Craigslist who says he can find anybody for anyone for money and calls himself John Smith is totally trustworthy,” Grady reiterated. Blandly, if Tate wasn’t mistaken.

Renata nodded with much conviction and repeated, “Totally.”

Grady looked at her for a long time, as if weighing a number of scenarios. Finally he growled, “We don’t have time for this right now. We need to get Mr. Hawthorne somewhere safe. And until it’s all sorted out, you’re coming, too, Ms. Twigg.”

That finally stopped the bun patting. But it restarted the button fumbling. So much so that Renata actually undid the button, and then another below it, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of lace beneath. Which was weird, because in light of developments over the last several minutes, the only thing Tate should find tantalizing about Renata Twigg was thoughts of her having never entered his life in the first place.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t go anywhere with you,” she said to Grady. “I have a red-eye out of O’Hare tonight.”

“You don’t have a choice, Ms. Twigg,” Grady said emphatically. He turned to Tate. “And neither do you. We’re all leaving. Now. Once the two of you are settled in a safe house, we can get this all straightened out. But until we know there’s no threat to Mr. Hawthorne, and until we get to the bottom of this security breach, both of you—” he pointed first at Tate, then at Renata “—are coming with me.”

Three (#ulink_be93bad1-6b1a-5180-ae46-0019cbd1bf38)

Renny sat in the backseat of the black SUV with Tate, wishing she could wake up in her Tribeca condo and start the day over again. They’d been driving for more than two hours nonstop—pretty much due north, as far as she could tell—and Tate had barely said a dozen words to her during the entire trip.

He’d spoken to the marshal often enough early on—or, at least, tried to. Grady had responded to every question with a promise to explain once he was sure Tate and Renny were settled at a safe location. He’d replied the same way as he hustled the two of them out of the house earlier. He hadn’t even allowed Tate time to change his clothes, hadn’t allowed Renny to bring her handbag or portfolio and had made them both leave behind their electronics due to their GPS.

On the upside, the fact that Grady hadn’t allowed them even basic necessities might be an indication he didn’t intend to detain them for long. On the downside, the fact that they were still driving after two hours was a pretty decent indication that Grady planned on detaining her and Tate for some time.

She just wondered how far from Chicago Grady thought they had to be before they’d be considered safe. They’d crossed the Wisconsin state line less than an hour after leaving Tate’s house and had kept driving past Racine, Milwaukee and Sheboygan. Like any good Northeasterner, Renny had no idea which states actually abutted each other beyond the tristate area, but she was pretty sure Wisconsin was one of the ones way up on the map beneath Canada. So they couldn’t drive much longer if they wanted to stay in Grady’s jurisdiction.

As if cued by her thoughts, he took the next exit off I-43, one that ended in a two-lane blacktop with a sign indicating they could head either west to a place called Pattypan or east to nowhere, because Pattypan was the only town listed. In spite of that, Grady turned right.

Okay then. Nowhere it would be.

The interstate had already taken them into a densely forested area, but the trees grew even thicker the farther they drove away from it. The sky, too, had grown darker the farther north they traveled, and the clouds were slate and ominous, fat with rain.

This day really wasn’t turning out the way Renny had planned. She braved another look at Tate, who had crowded himself into the passenger-side door as if he wanted to keep as much space between them as possible. He wasn’t turning out the way she’d planned, either. She was supposed to have gone to his house in her usual professional capacity, relayed the terms of his grandfather’s will in her usual professional way and handled his decision, whatever it turned out to be, with professionalism.

Any personal arrangements Tate wanted to make with the Bacco family would have been up to him. Then Renny would have gone back to her life in New York having completed what would be the most interesting case she would ever handle in her professional career and try not to think about how early she’d peaked.

Instead, all her professional responses had gone out the window the moment she saw Tate, and every personal response had jumped up to scream, Howdy do! And those responses hadn’t shut up since, not even when the guy was giving her enough cold shoulder to fill a butcher’s freezer.

The SUV finally turned off the two-lane blacktop, onto a dirt road that sloped sharply upward, into even more trees. The ride grew bouncy enough that Renny had to grab the armrest, but that didn’t keep her from falling toward Tate when they hit a deep rut. Fortunately, she was wearing her seat belt, so she only slammed into him a little bit. Unfortunately, when they came out of the rut, he fell in the other direction and slammed into her, too.

For one scant moment, their bodies were aligned from elbow to shoulder, and Renny couldn’t help thinking it was their first time. Um, touching, she meant. Arms and shoulders, she meant. Fully clothed, she meant. But the way her heart was racing when the two of them separated, and the way the blood was zipping through her veins, and the way her breathing had gone hot and ragged, they might as well have just engaged in a whole ’nother kind of first time.

She mumbled an apology, but he didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, he gripped his armrest as if his life depended on it. After another few hundred jostling, friction-inducing feet of what may or may not have once been a road, the SUV finally broke through the trees and into a clearing.

A clearing populated by a motel that was clearly a remnant of mid-twentieth-century, pre-interstate travel culture—single story, brick and shaped like a giant L. There was a parking space in front of each room, but there wasn’t a single car present. In fact, the place looked as if it had been out of business since the mid-twentieth-century, pre-interstate travel culture. The paint on the doors was peeling, the brick was stained with mold and a rusty, mottled sign in front read The Big Cheese Motor-Inn. In a small clearing nearby were a half-dozen stucco cottages shaped like wedges of cheese. It was toward one of those that Inspector Grady steered the SUV.

“Seriously?” Renny said when he stopped the vehicle and threw it into Park. “You’re going to hide us in a cottage cheese?”

“We’ve used this place as a safe house since nineteen sixty-eight,” Grady said. “That’s when we confiscated it from the Wisconsin mob. These days, no one even remembers it exists.”

“There’s a Wisconsin mob?” Renny asked. “Like who? Silo Sal Schlitz and Vinnie the Udder?”

“There was a Wisconsin mob,” Grady corrected her. “The Peragine family. Shipping and pizzerias.”

Of course.

The marshal snapped off his seat belt, opened his door and exited, so Renny and Tate did, too. The moment she was out of the vehicle, she was swamped by heat even worse than in Chicago. Impulsively, she stripped off her jacket and rolled her shirt sleeves to her elbows. Her hair, so tidy earlier, had become a tattered mess, so she plucked out the pins, tucked them into her skirt pocket and let the mass of dark hair fall to the center of her back. Then she hastily twisted it into a pin-free topknot with the deftness of someone who had been doing it for years, drove her arms above her head and pushed herself up on tiptoe, closing her eyes to enjoy the stretch.

By the time she opened her eyes, Tate had rounded the back of the SUV and was gazing at her in a way that made her glance down to be sure she hadn’t stripped off more than just her jacket. Nope. Everything was still in place. Though maybe she shouldn’t have fiddled so much with her shirt buttons earlier, since there was a little bit of lace and silk camisole peeking out.

But come on. It was a camisole. Who thought camisoles were sexy these days?

She looked at Tate, who was eyeing her as if she were clad in feathery wings, mile-high heels and a two-sizes-too-small cubic-zirconia-encrusted bra. Oh. Okay. Evidently, there was still at least one guy in the world who found camisoles sexy. Too bad he also hated her guts.

As unobtrusively as she could, she rebuttoned the third and second buttons. Then she followed Grady to the giant cheese wedge, telling herself she only imagined the way she could feel Tate’s gaze on her ass the whole time.

“Oh, look,” she said in an effort to dispel some of the tension that had become thick enough to hack with a meat cleaver. “Isn’t that clever, how they made some of the Swiss-cheese holes into windows? That’s what I call functional design.”

Unfortunately, neither man seemed to share her interest in architectural aesthetics, because they just kept walking. Grady pulled a set of keys from his pocket as he scanned the tree line for signs of God knew what, and Tate moved past her to follow the marshal to the front door, not sparing her a glance.

Renny deliberately lagged behind, scanning the tree line herself. Though for different reasons than Grady, she was sure. In spite of the weirdness of the situation, and even with the suffocating heat and teeming sky, she couldn’t help appreciating the beauty surrounding her. The trees were huge, looking almost black against the still-darkening clouds, and there was a burring noise unlike anything she’d ever heard. She recognized the sound as cicadas—she’d heard them on occasion growing up in Connecticut—but here it was as if there were thousands of them, all singing at once.

The wind whispered past her ears, tossing tendrils of hair she hadn’t quite contained, and she closed her eyes to inhale deeply, filling her nose with the scent of evergreen and something else, something that reminded her of summers at the shore. That vague fishy smell that indicated the presence of water nearby. If they really had traveled due north, it was probably Lake Michigan. She wondered if they were close enough to go fishing. She’d loved fishing when she was a little girl. And she’d always outfished her father and brothers whenever they went.

She listened to the cicadas, reveled in the warm breeze and inhaled another big gulp of pine forest, releasing it slowly. Then she drew in another and let it go, too. Then another. And another. Bit by bit, the tension left her body, and something else took its place. Not quite serenity, but something that at least kept her panic at bay. She loved being outdoors. The farther from civilization, the better.

She felt a raindrop on her forehead, followed by a few more; then the sky opened up and the rain fell in earnest. Renny didn’t mind. Rain was hydrotherapy. The warm droplets cooled her heated skin and tap-tap-tapped on the leaves of the trees and the hood of the SUV, their gentle percussion calming her even more.

With one final breath, she opened her eyes. Tate stood inside the door of the cottage looking out at her, his expression inscrutable. He was probably wondering what kind of madwoman he was going to be stuck with for the rest of the day—maybe longer. Renny supposed that was only fair, since she was wondering a lot of things about him at the moment, too.

Like, for instance, if he enjoyed fishing.

* * *