Every Move You Make

“Uh-huh.” Jennifer reached down and tucked a blanket around the infant’s tiny body. “Mr. Denton Gawlick, of the Odessa Gawlicks. He and his wife are renewing their wedding vows in a week. Only the dress Mrs. Gawlick was hoping to wear, well, it’s been languishing somewhere in lost airline baggage hell for the past week.”

Zach rubbed his chin and grinned. “The case of the missing wedding dress?” Definitely not Mickey Spillane material. Then again, it had its possibilities.

Jennifer laughed and tilted her head to look at him closely. “You’re not licensed yet, right?”

Zach narrowed his gaze, hoping she wouldn’t use his lack of experience as a reason to change her mind. “Right. I’m not just wet behind the ears, I’m soaked.”

She opened a drawer and fingered through files before taking one out and handing it to him. “Then this should be a great case to break you in with.” He must have registered the surprise on his face because she said, “Don’t worry. It wasn’t all that long ago that I was an accountant. You have Lily’s highest recommendation, so you have my complete trust.”

Zach eyed her, still not sure how to take this new way of operating. He didn’t think he’d be half as generous if their positions were reversed. Referral or not, he’d have checked the applicant’s references, asked a ton of questions, and still would have been hesitant to trust the candidate.

Things really did work differently down here.

He swallowed. “Thank you, Mrs. Madison. I’ll make sure your trust isn’t misplaced.”

“It’s Jennifer,” she said as if by rote, then paused while going through some papers and looked at him. “Are you staying in town?”

“Actually, I haven’t checked into my hotel yet.”

“Good. Because right after meeting the client, you’ll have to head down to Houston and Clayborn Investigations. You see, I already farmed the case out to another agency to look into the dress down there since the flight the bag was scheduled to be on was bound for Hobby. But Mr. Gawlick wants someone from our agency to be hands-on, and so long as he’s paying for it…”

“We’re there.”

Her smile widened. “Yes. We’re there.”

Zach couldn’t help but grin back at her even as he mentally prepared a list of questions. What groundwork had been laid down on the case already? Was there any advice on how to handle Mr. Gawlick? How should he document his expenses? Was there some sort of ID he should use? But before he could ask a single question, the phone started ringing, the baby started crying, and the few quiet moments they had just experienced vanished into a chaotic never-never land.

“Call if you need anything,” Jennifer said as she propped the phone between chin and shoulder then reached for the wailing infant.

“Right.” Zach hesitated. He supposed he’d have to find answers to his own questions, which, when you thought about it, was what being a private investigator was all about, right? He started toward the door, nodding at Jennifer’s light wave as she adeptly handled both the caller and the baby. He stepped outside the office and into the warm Texas sun, then squinted at the file in his hands. His first case.

His first case.

He turned his face up to the sun and grinned.

THIS WAS THE LAST CASE she was going to take on from another agency.

“I’m sure everything will be fine,” Mariah Clayborn said into the telephone. “I look forward to meeting your associate…” What had Jennifer Madison, the P.I. from Midland, said his name was?

“Zach Letterman,” Jennifer said.

“Yes. Zach. Got it.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. She opened her mouth to end the call.

“Is everything all right?” Jennifer cut her off at the pass.

Mariah pushed back her thick dark hair then slumped in her chair. Was her emotional state so apparent that a woman she didn’t even know except via a couple phone calls could tell something was wrong?

“Everything’s fine.” Mariah forced a smile, even though Jennifer couldn’t see it. “Thanks for asking.” She cleared her throat. “I’ll give you a call once Zach and I retrieve the piece of luggage with your client’s dress in it.”

“Good. Good.”

After exchanging goodbyes, Mariah sat pole straight in her chair, her hand still on the receiver that rested in the cradle.

Oh, she supposed just a short time ago everything had been fine, just as she’d proclaimed. She’d been a woman in charge of her own life, with her own agenda, well down the road to convincing herself that she didn’t need a man after her latest breakup.

Then this morning she’d come in to find a section of the office roof had finally given way under the most recent Texas deluge—surely the saying “when it rained, it poured” originated in Texas. Of course it wouldn’t be just any section, but a stretch just above her desk, soaking piles of paperwork and the brand-new chair she’d finally given in to and splurged on a week ago.

But that wasn’t what made today so bad. No. That reason had come while she was cleaning up the mess and her phone rang. She’d snatched it up to find on the line her least favorite person from Hoffland, the small town about forty miles southwest in which she was raised—gossipy Miss Twila Seidwick.

At first she’d been more than a little irritated that the woman was calling her at work. Then she’d been afraid that something had happened to her widowed father and Twila was calling with the news.

Thankfully her father was fine. Twila had been calling to gloat over the fact that Mariah’s third ex-boyfriend in two years had just gotten engaged within a week of breaking up with her.

Merely thinking about it made her brain go numb.

Normally Mariah would have said good riddance, and maybe even called up and offered her condolences to the blushing bride-to-be. But all three? Not one, not two, but all three of her ex-boyfriends had dumped her then become engaged within a week of breaking up with her.

It was enough to give a girl a complex.

She could see her headstone now. She inspired men to want to get married. Just not to her.

She leaned back in her chair, cringing when the sound of the plastic bag under her rear end mixed with the squishy sound of the water that still soaked the pad of her chair. Her brand-new chair. The chair she’d dropped two hundred dollars on because, well, she’d liked it. And now it was ruined.

“Good morning, Mar. My, don’t you look pretty today.”

Mariah made a face at her cousin as he came in the front door. For all intents and purposes, George was a pretty good guy. He had inherited the trademark Clayborn dark hair and pleasing features, but where they looked good on him, they made her look…well, tom-boyish. She glanced at her watch. But the biggest difference between them lay in that she didn’t know when to stop working, and her slightly younger cousin didn’t know when to start. “You always tell me that,” she murmured, glancing down at her old, faded jeans and T-shirt, then pushing at her thick hair again.

“And you never believe me.”

“Yes, well, you’re two hours late. Again.”

George took the rebuke with his usual grinning charm as he made his way to the back where she’d put out the usual morning donuts and had made coffee.

Mariah sighed and returned to trying to make some sort of sense out of her ruined desktop. And if she could figure out what was going on her life at the same time, well, so much the better.

Of course, it was only par for the course that George wouldn’t even have noticed that the roof had caved in. She tried to remember a time when her cousin wasn’t so careless, but came up with a blank. It probably explained why her Uncle Bubba, George’s father, had left the P.I. agency of Clayborn Investigations to her when he finally kicked the proverbial bucket last year. Of course, the inheritance had been attached with the stipulation that George always have a job there so long as he wanted one and that he be paid a living wage, as well as be entitled to a percentage of the net income.

Not that Mariah would have fired her cousin. He was as much a fixture around the office as the coffeemaker. She only wished he was as productive as the machine. He made juggling her life between the office and the ranch a bit of a challenge. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t carry his own weight; it was that the weight he did try to carry on occasion she ended up having to take on herself. Especially now that her uncle was no longer there to help carry the load.

George leaned against his own squeaky-clean desk across from hers, took a bite of a sprinkle-covered donut, then chased it down with coffee from his Oilers mug. “Heard Justin is getting married.”

Mariah stared at him, wishing at that one moment that she could fire him. “Boy, news sure does travel fast.”

She pulled her garbage can out from under the desk and scooped into it the paperwork she couldn’t salvage.

“That’s the way it usually is with news. Bad news. Good news.” He finished off his donut. “Which category do you suppose this falls under?”