Tempting Tara Read online

  “You’ll recover,” Blake predicted confidently. “You’ll go into an interview with your chin high and convince the next employer that you know what you’re doing and you don’t let anyone steer you wrong. What you did took guts and integrity, and you’ll find someone who recognizes your strength.”

  She didn’t look entirely convinced, but Blake had no doubt that he was right. Tara was too smart, too talented, too capable to stay down for long.

  “I have no doubt that you can do anything you want to do, Tara McBride. The only question you should ask yourself is what do you really want to do?”

  It had been so long since Tara had asked herself that question that she didn’t even know how to begin to figure out the answer. All her life, it seemed, she had done what everyone else wanted her to do.

  Be a good girl, Tara. Study hard, Tara. Go to Harvard, Tara. Be a lawyer, Tara.

  Go away, Ms. McBride.

  She thought of that childish letter she’d written to herself and buried in a makeshift time capsule. A letter filled with other people’s dreams, other people’s ambitions for her. And she realized she was no closer to knowing what she truly wanted now than she had been at fourteen.

  Blake seemed to understand that she needed some time to think about what he’d said. So he changed the subject back to their more immediate problem. “How many people do you suppose have tried to call you at your apartment since we left yesterday?”

  She bit her lip before answering. “Very few, if any,” she said after a moment. “My family thinks I’m out of town. My friends think I’m in Honoria. I wasn’t expecting anyone to call.”

  “I’d like to call your place again,” Blake mused, frowning at the telephone. “Just to see who answers, if anyone. But I don’t want to be traced here, the way we were in Marietta. Will your phone accept calls if I dial in anonymously?”

  She shook her head, feeling as if she should apologize. “I’ve had all anonymous calls blocked. My number’s unlisted, but I’ve still been careful.”

  “Good idea. Usually,” he added with a slight smile. “So if I disconnect the caller-ID feature on this phone, I’ll get what?”

  “A recorded message instructing you to disconnect the privacy feature and call again.”

  “That option is out, then.”

  “Don’t you have a cell phone? We couldn’t be traced through that, could we?”

  “Depends on who we’re dealing with. But I might risk it, anyway...if I hadn’t left my cell phone in the sports car in Marietta. It’s probably in a policecompound lot right now. Talk about stupid mistakes...”

  He shook his head in self-castigation, then glanced at his watch. Tara automatically did the same, noting that it was almost 2:00 p.m. Another clap of thunder rattled the windows, and the rain pounded the pavement outside the little room. Tara heard no other noises outside. She was suddenly very aware again of being alone with Blake inside this cozy motel room.

  She cleared her throat, and slid casually to the edge of her bed, planting both feet firmly on the floor. “I wish there was something we could do to make the time pass faster,” she murmured, her sudden attack of self-consciousness making her speak before thinking.

  Blake immediately got that mischievous look in his eyes that she was beginning to recognize. He moved to the end of the other bed and tested the mattress with his hand. And then he looked at her in a way that set her pulse racing. “I’m sure I can come up with an idea or two,” he murmured.

  She could probably come up with a few, herself, for that matter. But that didn’t mean she was going to follow through on them. She was already in enough trouble without tumbling into bed with Blake Whateverhis-name-was!

  She gave him a repressive look. “We could watch television.”

  “I had something a bit more interesting in mind,” he said with exaggerated regret.

  She struggled against a sudden smile. Darn it, why did he have to be so gorgeous and charming. He made it really hard for her to keep her head straight where he was concerned. “Behave yourself.”

  Looking rather pleased with himself, Blake picked up the television remote. “I’ll try,” he murmured and tuned in to a soap opera, then settled back to watch it.

  Tara wasn’t able to lose herself in the daytime drama. She had too many problems of her own to be interested in the fictional imbroglios unfolding on the tiny screen. Not the least of them, her heart-fluttering, decidedly unwise reactions to the man sitting on the other bed.

  6

  TARA DIDN’T remember falling asleep. But she woke curled in the middle of the bed, only to find herself alone in the little motel room. A quick glance at her watch told her that she must have slept for a couple of hours. She parted the curtain an inch to look outside.

  Even through the heavy sheets of rain, she could see that the black pickup truck was gone. Blake had left her here alone.

  Tara almost gave in to a moment of sharp, instinctive panic. How could Blake have left her stranded this way?

  And then her common sense slowly overcame the fear.

  Blake wouldn’t have left her. She didn’t know where he’d gone, or when he would return...but she knew he’d come back for her. He’d asked her to trust him. Against all reason, perhaps, she trusted him with her life.

  She tried to be patient until he returned. She flipped channels on the television, searching for something to catch her interest, but nothing did. She thought wistfully of the unread novel on the nightstand in her apartment. She hadn’t been able to concentrate enough to enjoy reading during the past couple of weeks, but if she had it now, she could...

  No, perhaps not. She wasn’t sure a hair-raising murder mystery would be something she should read just now.

  Her attention fell on the duffel bag sitting at the foot of one of the beds. She doubted that Blake had a book in there. But she supposed it couldn’t hurt to look. She had nothing else to do. She didn’t think he’d mind, since he’d already given her access to his things.

  She didn’t find a book. What she found, at the very bottom of the bag, was a stack of ID cards bound with a rubber band, all bearing photographs of Blake. Each card bore a different name.

  It seemed somehow inevitable that he would choose that moment to return. She still had the cards in her hand when he unlocked the door and walked into the room.

  “I was looking for something to read,” she said inanely.

  Removing his damp hat, he glanced at the ID cards, apparently unperturbed by her snooping. “Find anything interesting?”

  Mimicking his insouciant tone, she shrugged and stuffed the cards back into the bag. “Not particularly.”

  Blake tossed his hat on the dresser and ran a hand through his hair. “I’ll be glad when this rain stops,” he said. “A guy could drown out there.”

  “Where have you been?” she asked, still trying to speak casually.

  “Back to Atlanta to make some calls from a pay phone. I got the answering machine at your apartment, by the way. Either they’ve left the place, or they’re screening calls through the machine. Either way, it would still be unwise for us to go there.”

  Though it had been less than twenty-four hours since she’d left her apartment, it suddenly felt like days. Tara thought wistfully of her clothes, her things, her own bed...and then she told herself to stop wishing things were different and concentrate on helping Blake.

  “Did you have a good nap?” Blake asked, smiling. “You were sleeping so soundly when I left that I hated to disturb you.”

  “Yes, I feel much more rested, thank you. You, um, might have left me a note or something, though,” she couldn’t help reprimanding him. “When I woke up and couldn’t find you, I wondered where you’d gone.”

  He frowned, looking at her questioningly. “Surely you didn’t think I’d left you here?”

  “The thought crossed my mind for a moment. Once I stopped to think about it, though, I knew you’d be back.”

  “Thank you for trusting me,�
� he said quietly.

  She shrugged, and changed the subject. “Did you find your friend from the insurance company?”

  Blake’s eyes turned grim, letting her know that she wasn’t going to like his answer. She was struck for a moment by how quickly she was learning to read his expressions.

  “I reached him,” Blake said flatly.

  “And?”

  “He didn’t know anything about what’s happened to us. He claimed he had no idea I’d been asked to delve into the Willfort robbery. According to him, there had been no reason to believe it was anything other than what Willfort reported to the police. And he’d never heard the name of the so-called insurance-company employee who contacted me.”

  “Do you believe him? That he knew nothing about it, I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Blake answered reluctantly. “I believe him. Which means I’ve been a total idiot.”

  She immediately bristled on his behalf. “In what way?”

  “I didn’t verify,” he admitted. “I always verify an assignment This time, I just took the caller’s instructions at face value and followed them without a qualm. Not only that, I pulled you into it without knowing what I was getting into. I don’t know how to tell you how sorry I am about that.”

  “You have nothing to apologize to me for. You’ve already said you had no idea this case would turn dangerous when you asked me to join you.”

  “I just wanted an excuse to take you out,” he admitted, startling her. “I thought you could be my date at the gallery, give me a little cover for being there, and then we could go out for a nice dinner afterward. I didn’t expect to be at the gallery more than forty-five minutes or so—just long enough for me to meet my contact and let him slip me an envelope.”

  “I have to admit I was a little surprised when you showed up at my apartment,” she said, feeling suddenly a bit shy. “It wasn’t as if we knew each other well.”

  He didn’t smile when he looked at her, and something in his eyes made her pulse trip. “That was always a situation I had hoped to remedy.”

  Tara suddenly found herself having difficulty breathing normally. Blake had been interested in her before she’d left the law firm? All those times during the past couple of years when he’d stopped by her desk with a smile and a teasing remark, she’d told herself that he did so only to be polite. That she’d been no more special to him than the other associates in the firm, all of whom he never failed to greet with equal charm.

  Had he really looked at her differently?

  Blake exhaled and looked away, breaking the sudden taut silence between them. “This really isn’t the time to get into that,” he said. “First, we have to get out of this mess I’ve gotten us into.”

  Tara tried to speak normally. “What do we do next?”

  “I still think the missing art is the key,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. “If we could get a lead on what happened to it, we might be a little closer to finding out why we’re being set up for a murder charge.”

  “‘They knew,”’ Tara murmured, remembering the dying man’s last words again. “‘The paintings were...”’ She shook her head. “The paintings were what? Stolen? Everyone knew that.”

  Blake pulled absently at his lower lip, lost in thought.

  Needing something to do—anything to distract her from Blake’s admission that he’d found her attractive—Tara busied herself neatly repacking the duffel bag. The suit Blake had worn last evening. Her own dinner suit, now sadly crumpled.

  She shook out the skirt, folded it, and laid it in the bag. And then she picked up the jacket. Remembering that she’d put her pearl necklace into one of the pockets, she felt a sudden need to make sure it was still safe. Maybe because she had so few of her own possessions with her, she needed to keep track of those she had. She plunged her hand into the left pocket, unable to recall which pocket she’d put the necklace in.

  But rather than the strand of pearls, she pulled out a crumpled white envelope.

  She stared at it blankly, knowing that it hadn’t been there when she’d left for the art gallery. And suddenly she held it more gingerly, as if it might explode in her hand.

  “Tara? What’s wrong? What’s that in your hand?” she heard Blake ask from behind her.

  She turned to find him watching her closely.

  “I found this in my jacket pocket,” she said. “It wasn’t there when I put the suit on.”

  Blake frowned and looked hard at the envelope. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m positive. I don’t know where it came from.”

  “Do you mind if I see it?”

  She handed it to him. He turned it over a couple of times, studying it. As far as Tara could see, it was a sealed, legal-size envelope with no markings on the outside.

  Blake took a penknife from his pocket and carefully slit the seal. As Tara watched, he pulled out two sheets of paper and scanned them intently.

  A moment later, he muttered a curse. “Where did this come from?”

  “I told you, I don’t know. I found it in my jacket pocket just now. I have no idea who put it there, or when.”

  Blake looked up from the papers, his gaze intent on her face. “You said you knelt beside the man on the floor. Could he have put it in your pocket then?”

  Tara remembered the man groping weakly at her jacket as he lay beside her. Could he?

  She covered her mouth with her hand, suddenly remembering something else—Botkin’s lingering pat on her hip that she’d found so puzzling and offensive. But then she’d forgotten all about it when she’d found the same man lying in his own blood on the floor of the back office.

  Blake eyed her expression closely. “You remembered something?”

  She nodded. “I think Botkin put it in my pocket when we were looking at that ugly brown-and-yellow painting. I, er, I thought he was patting my butt Apparently, he was slipping this into my pocket.”

  “You thought he was...” Blake grinned fleetingly, then his face became sober. “So he put this in your pocket before the time he was supposed to meet me in that hallway. Which could mean that he suspected he was being watched.”

  Tara bit her lip, remembering the man’s dying words. They knew.

  “Tell me what that is,” she ordered Blake, nodding toward the contents of the envelope. “Tell me what it means.”

  “It means,” he answered quietly, “that you and I are going to Savannah.”

  “Savannah? The city?” she repeated blankly.

  He lifted an eyebrow. “You know another one?”

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact, but never mind that. Why are we going to Savannah?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way,” he promised. “Let’s pack up.”

  TARA WAITED until they were settled again into Blake’s pickup truck before saying, “Now tell me what was in the envelope, and why we’re going to Savannah.”

  “What would you say,” Blake asked, instead, “if I told you I have reason to believe that the paintings stolen from Jackson Willfort’s apartment in Atlanta were fakes?”

  “The paintings he was going to put on display? The ones he bought from the Pryce Gallery?”

  Blake nodded.

  Tara frowned. “I suppose the first thing I would wonder, considering what the dying man said to me, is who, exactly, knew they were fakes. And then I would ask what the chances are that the robbery was staged for the purpose of insurance fraud—especially after what Spider told us about them not showing up in the usual places where stolen goods are fenced.”

  “The legal mind,” Blake murmured admiringly. “Those are both very good questions.”

  Tara could probably have come up with several interesting scenarios, but she decided that would be a waste of time at the moment. “Do you have reason to believe the paintings were fakes?”

  “If the papers I found in that envelope are legitimate, then yes, I do.”

  “So someone in the gallery—presumably the man who was killed—knew the paintin
gs were frauds and contacted someone in the insurance company, who contacted you.”

  “And someone else found out, and killed him for it. The killer was probably searching Botkin’s pockets when you came into the room and interrupted him.”

  “Not that it would have done him any good, anyway.”

  “Right. Because Botkin had already passed the papers to you, without your knowledge.”

  Tara chewed her lower lip. “So we’re on our way to find out whether Willfort was involved.”

  “Basically,” he agreed.

  “Wouldn’t it be more logical for us to stay in Atlanta? Liz Pryce is in Atlanta. The forged paintings came from her gallery. The paintings were stolen from Willfort’s Atlanta apartment. Your informant was murdered in the gallery.”

  “Atlanta is too hot for us right now. There are too many people looking for us there, including, most likely, the police. I have a feeling we’ll find some answers in Savannah.”

  “These, er, feelings of yours. How reliable are they?”

  “Very.”

  “But they didn’t tell you something was going to go wrong at the gallery last night.”

  He grimaced. “No.”

  “So they aren’t infallible.”

  “I never said I was infallible.”

  “What are we going to do when we get to Savannah?”

  “We’ll figure that out when we get there,” he answered, not looking overly concerned about their lack of a plan.

  “Do you mind if I turn on the radio?”

  “Help yourself.”

  It was going to be a long ride to Savannah, Tara thought as she turned the knob in search of decent music. And she didn’t want to spend it daydreaming about how cozy the inside of the pickup was with the rain pounding the windshield and Blake’s arm only inches from her own.

  It would be easier to keep her emotional distance from him if she considered him nothing more than a temporary friend. They had been thrown together by circumstances, that was all. She fully intended to keep that fact in mind.

  AFTER MORE THAN an hour on the road, they stopped for a short break at a fast-food restaurant in a little town somewhere off I-16. It felt good to get out of the truck and stretch. The rain had stopped, and the skies were clearing. Tara wanted to believe that was a good sign.