“Have you lost your mind?” Oliver said. “A late-night meeting with an informant who wants cash? You can’t be serious.”
“Got a better idea?” Irene asked. “It’s not like we have any other leads. I wanted to talk to Daisy Jennings. This is my big chance.”
She was regretting her decision to tell Oliver about Daisy’s call. She was also starting to get mad.
Oliver had pulled up in front of the Cove Inn less than ten minutes after he had hung up the phone. Eager to tell him her news, she had jumped into the front seat before he could extricate himself from behind the wheel.
He had listened closely, his mood darkening with every word, while driving to a small, secluded beach. She had not realized just how angry he was until he switched off the ignition and angled himself in the seat to confront her. She had expected him to be concerned but she did not anticipate the lecture. They were partners, after all.
“Don’t you get it?” he said. “It’s a setup. It has to be.”
“You don’t know that. What would be the purpose?”
“If you’re right, we’re dealing with a man who has murdered several women. One more probably won’t matter to him.”
“I agree, but we’re also dealing with a man who has been very, very careful to protect himself. All of the murders have been made to look like accidents.”
“Here’s a bulletin for you, Miss Reporter, the corner of Olive and Palm is a shopping street. It will be deserted at eleven thirty at night. A great place for a lethal auto accident.”
She took a breath. “All right, I admit I didn’t know the neighborhood where the phone booth was located, but believe it or not, it did occur to me that Daisy might not have been entirely truthful with me. Why do you think I called you to discuss the situation?”
“I’d like to believe it was because you had an attack of common sense, but that could be wishful thinking on my part.”
“Damn it, stop treating me like I’m an idiot. I do know there is some risk involved, but there is also the very real possibility that Daisy Jennings has solid information to sell. She told me that she needs money because she’s leaving town on the train first thing in the morning.”
“Did she say why?”
“No, but obviously it’s because she’s scared.”
“There’s nothing obvious about this situation. It’s getting murkier by the day.”
Oliver turned abruptly in the seat and opened the door. He levered himself up from behind the wheel and grabbed his cane. She watched him make his way down the short path to the beach. She knew that he was in pain. His limp was a little more pronounced. Walking on the rocky, uneven landscape likely wasn’t helping matters. It occurred to her that he had probably put some strain on his bad leg during the night when he had attempted to protect her from the photographer. Today he was paying for his act of chivalry.
He came to a halt at the water’s edge and stood silently, contemplating the crashing waves through his sunglasses. His profile was as hard as the cliffs. The breeze off the ocean tangled his hair and whipped at the edges of his linen jacket. She waited a moment. When he showed no signs of returning to the car, she opened her own door and got out.
She picked a path down to the beach and came to a halt beside Oliver.
“I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” she said.
He turned his head to look at her, his eyes unreadable through the lenses of the sunglasses. But, then, his eyes were often unreadable, she thought.
“I thought we agreed that you would stop apologizing,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“I made it clear back at the start of our partnership that I’m involved in this investigation of yours because I want to know what really happened to one of my guests.”
“Right.”
He groaned. “I’m the one who should be apologizing. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”
“I absolutely agree with you on that point.”
There was a brittle silence.
“How did Daisy Jennings find out that you want to talk to her?” Oliver asked.
Irene thought back to the phone call. “She didn’t actually say that she knew I wanted to interview her. She just said that she was with Nick Tremayne in the garden at the Paradise Club the night Gloria Maitland was found dead. She said she had information to sell.”
“How much did she want?”
“The asking price was one hundred dollars.”
He whistled softly. “That’s a lot of cash to expect a reporter to come up with on short notice.”
“I told her I didn’t have that kind of money. She immediately dropped the price to fifty and, finally, to twenty bucks. In the end she agreed to negotiate. I got the feeling she’ll take whatever I’m willing to pay. I’m sure my editor will cover the expense, provided the end result sells newspapers.”
“I’ll take care of paying our informant,” Oliver said.
“That’s not necessary.”
“I said I’ll take care of it,” he repeated evenly.
“If you insist. I can’t believe we’re arguing about who will pay Daisy Jennings.”
“Neither can I.” Oliver was silent for a beat. “Doesn’t sound like she bargained very hard.”
“I think she’s desperate. And very nervous. She knows something, Oliver. I have to talk to her.”
“I’ll come with you to the meeting tonight.”
“I had a hunch you were going to suggest that.”
“It’s not a suggestion.”
“I’ll admit, I’d like to have you with me. But Daisy was adamant that I show up alone. Like I said, she is scared.”
“Don’t worry, she won’t see me.”
Irene thought about that. Then she smiled.
“Of course not,” she said. “You’re the Amazing Oliver Ward.”
“Not so amazing, not anymore. But I can still pull off a reasonably convincing disappearing act.”
She used one hand to hold her wind-tossed hair out of her eyes and turned to look at him.
“I believe you,” she said.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea—except that in some ways you remind me of someone I knew a long time ago. If he made a promise, you knew he’d keep it or go down trying.”
“Yeah? Who was he?”
“My grandfather.”
Oliver winced. “I’m a few years older than you, Irene, but I’m not that much older.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, I didn’t mean to imply that I thought you were elderly—just . . . reliable. Dependable. Trustworthy.”
“Like a good dog?”
“Where I come from, reliable, dependable, and trustworthy are all valuable things. They are also, I have discovered, rare.”
“How the hell do you know I’m all of those things?”
“You can tell a lot about a man by the people around him. Your friend Luther Pell trusts you. I doubt that he has many friends that he does trust.”
“Pell’s business enterprises drastically limit the number of trustworthy people he meets.”
She smiled. “Which makes it even more interesting that you and he are friends.”
Oliver watched her intently. “Some would say that the fact that my closest friend in Burning Cove has underworld connections is not a particularly good character reference.”
“I work for a newspaper that specializes in celebrity scandals and sordid gossip. I’m a little short on sterling references, too. Does that worry you?”
“No,” he said. “No, it doesn’t.”
He did not say anything else but she was intensely aware of the electric tension in the atmosphere between them. She was almost certain that he was going to kiss her. She did not know if that was a very good idea or a very bad one. She only knew that she wanted to find out what it would be like to kiss Oliver Ward.
“Irene,” he said.
She touched her fingertips to his mouth.
“Probably best not to talk about it,” she said. “Just do it.”
Heat flared in his eyes. His hand tightened around the back of her neck, and then his mouth was on hers.
It was a long, slow burn of a kiss. She went into it with no particular expectations, just a compelling curiosity. That, she concluded, was probably why she was blindsided by the sheer force of the desire that swept through her.
She had never been kissed like this. Oliver crushed her mouth under his as if he had been thirsting for the taste of her for a very long time, perhaps forever. He kissed her as if nothing else in the world was more important than that moment and the embrace, as if he wanted her more than he wanted his next breath.
If it was an illusion crafted by a skilled lover, it was a completely convincing one. She did not want to know the secret behind the trick. She wanted only to savor the magic.
A thrilling excitement made her head spin. She wound her arms around his neck and returned the kiss with a sensual abandon that stunned her. If she had been asked, she would have said she wasn’t physically capable of such a response. A small voice in her head whispered that Bradley Thorpe would have concurred with that opinion. But, then, Bradley Thorpe was a lying, cheating bastard, she reminded herself, and, in hindsight, a boring lover.
The kiss made her giddy, downright euphoric. She felt as if she had accidentally opened a long-forgotten closet and discovered some bright, shiny dreams that had been locked away since she was fourteen years old.
The illusion ended with the honking of a horn. A car pulled off the road and stopped next to Oliver’s car. The vehicle overflowed with a pack of young people in their teens, male and female. Someone had borrowed his father’s car for the day, Irene thought.
The kids waved and laughed as they bailed out of the front and back seats. They opened the trunk and hauled out blankets and a large picnic basket.
The driver grinned at Oliver as the teens made their way to the beach.
“Say, you’re the magician who owns the big hotel in town, right?” he said enthusiastically. “You were in the paper this morning, sir.” The kid switched his attention to Irene. “Are you the reporter who found the body in the spa?”
“Time to go,” Oliver said.
He tucked Irene’s hand in his. Together they made their way up the short beach path. The teens followed, clustering around and pelting them with questions. The girls wanted to know more about the dead woman in the spa but the boys soon switched their attention to Oliver’s car.
“Is it true it’s the fastest car in California?”
“How fast does it go?”
“What does it have under the hood, sir?”
“Say, would you mind if I took your car for a spin, Mr. Ward?”
“Not today,” Oliver said.
One of the girls studied Oliver’s cane.
“Daddy took me to see you perform once,” she said. “I loved the part where you made the woman vanish in the mirror.”
Oliver got the passenger side door open and bundled Irene into the seat.
“Glad you enjoyed the act,” he said to the young woman.
He rounded the front of the car and got behind the wheel.
“Daddy says no one really knows what went wrong the night you nearly died onstage,” the girl continued in a voice laced with ghoulish excitement. “He says there were rumors that someone tried to murder you.”
“The rumors were wrong,” Oliver said. “Have fun with your picnic. Keep an eye on the waves. Never turn your back on the ocean. It will take you by surprise every time. There’s a strong riptide just offshore here.”
There was a polite chorus of yes, sirs.
Oliver fired up the engine and drove onto the road.
“Sorry about that,” he said after a moment.
“What, exactly, are you apologizing for?” Irene asked.
She held her breath waiting for the answer.
“The interruption. I should have found a more private location.”
She started breathing again. “Not the kiss, then.”
He gave her a quick, searching glance.
“Should I apologize for the kiss?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
He nodded once. “Good. The kids will talk, and Burning Cove is a small town. There will be more gossip.”
Irene laughed, feeling lighter and more carefree than she had in a very long time.
“Misdirection,” she said.
Oliver laughed. It was, she realized, the first time she had seen him laugh.
“Right,” he said. “Misdirection.”