“Okay, let me see if I’ve got this straight. You came down here because your roommate didn’t come back from vacation and you think something bad’s happened to her and you wanted your brother to help you find her.”

Scott was sprawled in a folding canvas deck chair, squinting hard at the woman who was sitting across the round glass-top table from him looking as wholesome and innocent as it’s possible for a woman to look with a long-necked bottle of Bud Lite in her hand.

She gazed back at him, golden eyes unblinking. “Right.”

“Uh huh. At the risk of stating the obvious, why don’t you just go to the police and report your friend missing?”

She didn’t answer right away, and in the artificial glow of the light attached to the ceiling fan circling above their heads he could see her cheeks turn pink and her throat ripple, though she hadn’t touched the beer. After a moment, she said, “I did,” and there was frustration, even anger in that clipped reply. And something else—a certain wariness, maybe. She looked toward pale dunes furred with sea grass and beyond them the glittering dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico. “They didn’t believe me. You probably won’t, either. But I’m sure I’m right about Yancy being in trouble. Don’t ask me how I know, but I do.”

Dammit, Scott thought, mentally re-writing the word ditzy—he’d already crossed it out a couple of times--on the page in his mental notebook with her name on it. Remembering, too, what Roy had said about his sister trying to write mystery novels. Roy was really going to owe him for this one.

Pressing the thumb and middle finger of one hand against his eyelids and adopting the patient, gentle tone he normally employed with semi-hysterical crime victims and eye-witnesses, he said, “Joy, if the officers you talked to didn’t believe your friend’s absence was cause for concern, they must have had a good reason. What is it you’re not telling me?”

After a repeat of the pause, swallow and blush, she closed her eyes and spilled it along with a sigh of reluctant acceptance. “Okay. Apparently Yancy checked out of her hotel herself—paid her bill, signed the credit card receipt and everything—two days early. The desk clerk on duty at the time even remembers her.” Her lips tilted into a wry smile. “Which isn’t too surprising. Yancy’s pretty memorable. Anyway, he says she was with someone—a man—and that she looked…happy.” Her voice caught a little on that last word.

She lifted the beer bottle to her lips, discovered it was empty and abruptly rose, sweeping the bottle with her and announcing, “I’m going to have another one of these,” as if defying anyone to stop her. She nodded toward the sweating can of Lipton iced tea Scott was turning in circles on the table top. “What about you?”

“No, I’m good,” he said, then moodily let his gaze follow her as she slipped through the sliding glass door into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and helped herself to another bottle of her brother’s beer. She’d changed her clothes—only a matter of exchanging the skirt for a pair of knee-length white pants and tying the shirttail ends of the yellow-with-blue-polkadots blouse at her waist and ditching her shoes—and the shape and sway of her hips was enough to make him reach for the can of tea and take a big gulp because his mouth had gone dry.

Memorable. As the word wrote itself across that notebook page in his head it occurred to Scott he’d yet to see any evidence that Joy Starr had any idea how memorable she was.

By the time she rejoined him on the deck and sank into the chair across from him with effortless grace, tucking one leg under her, he was thinking it was way past time for him to be going home. He didn’t like the way his thoughts were going, the way he kept noticing things he shouldn’t—like the fact that she’d ditched the yellow scarf, and with her hair falling in soft loose waves to her shoulders she looked about sixteen, from a time when sixteen was still sweet. Thanks a lot, Roy…

“You don’t drink?” She waved her bottle at him as she asked it, with a boldness he suspected was more the product of the beer she’d drunk than her basic nature.

He shook his head and forced himself not to stare at the shine of moisture glazing her lips. “Not in any twelve-steps sense, but…no. I figured out early in my life as a lawman that it’s way too easy for someone in my line of work to take refuge that way. Watched a couple buddies get lost, scared myself bad enough a couple times to know I didn’t want to go down that road. So, I quit. Cold. Figured in the long run it was easier that way.”

Her golden eyes seemed to flicker with the shadows of the whirling fan as she sipped, then burped softly. “I admire your self-discipline.”

“Oh, hey—” He jerked back, both surprised and discomfited by the remark. “It wasn’t that hard. I don’t need to crawl around in my own vomit to figure out when something’s no good for me. I don’t see how it takes self-discipline if it’s easy.”

“I meant that as a compliment,” she said, with exaggerated meekness. After a pause for his smile and snort of self-deprecating laughter, she added thoughtfully, “I don’t think of self-discipline as being a virtue, so much, as a factor of being a grown-up. Which—don’t take this the wrong way, I also mean it as a compliment--I believe you are.”

“Thanks,” said Scott in surprise and sincerity, and then was silent for a moment or two. In his mind he was busy scratching out that word ditzy once again, and thinking that in the short time he’d known her, his ideas and impressions about Joy Starr had been crossed out, erased, written over and amended so many times, by now her page in his mental notebook was a confused mess he couldn’t make heads or tails of. Maybe, he thought, he ought to just tear that one up and start fresh.

He cleared his throat, took a sip of tea and said casually, “Why do I get the idea the men in your life so far weren’t?”

“My ex-husbands, I assume you mean.” She smiled, and he saw just a hint of a dimple, and that through-the-lashes look that shortened his breath every time. “It’s nice of you to give me the benefit of the doubt, but…no, I don’t believe they were.” She settled back in her chair with an air of finality and a little shake of her head, and as her hair resettled into its graceful waves he was thinking whatever faint hopes he might have had for personal revelations had fizzled once again.

Then she said, “Not that I don’t have good men in my life to compare them to—I do. I don’t have any excuse at all for having such poor taste in men. I think it’s just bad karma.”

Karma. Ignoring that, he smiled and leaned toward her, chin on the heel of his hand. “Such as…who?”

“Well, my daddy, when I was growin’ up—“ and she’d slipped unconsciously into a deeper Georgia accent “—but then I lost him when I was pretty young. In fact, I wonder sometimes if that wasn’t why I—” but to Scott’s renewed disappointment, she shook that off, backed up and started again. “My brothers are great, of course. Jimmy Joe, especially, the way he took over Daddy’s trucking business after he died, and raised his boy, J.J., alone, until he met his second wife, Mirabella. Troy, my oldest brother—he was in the navy, you know. The SEALs. Retired, now, though, and married to Charly, who’s a lawyer in Atlanta. He’s a private investigator, and has a stepson and then a little girl of his own. Then there’s C.J.—my baby brother. For a long time he was considered the family black sheep, because he dropped out of high school, I guess, but I never did think he was. He was always a good kid, just got lost for a while. Now, he’s a lawyer, married, and adopting a little girl. You can’t get much more grown up than that.”

Scott laughed. “No, I guess not. So…that leaves…” He paused and she joined him in saying it, with the same little sigh: “…Roy.” And they both laughed, together. It felt surprisingly good, doing that.

“So, what about Roy? Is he your family’s black sheep, then?”

“No,” she said, dimpling again, “I think I probably have that honor. Anyway, I think it’s more like Roy’s not any kind of a sheep. You know what I mean? He pretty much goes his own way, following his own rules. Always has.”

“True…” And Scott was thinking, with a twinge in his belly, about the reason why Roy was off who-knew-where at the moment, and what it was he might be doing. Things not even Scott knew about, and didn’t care to know, and those he did know about he couldn’t tell anyone, least of all the woman sharing a moonlit deck overlooking the gulf with him right now. Not unless the worst happened, in which case it would be his unhappy duty to tell her lies.

“But about whether or not he’s a grown-up…” Joy was continuing in a musing tone, gazing at the shimmering water. “I think he is…in some ways. In others, it’s like he’s Peter Pan. Can’t bear the idea of settling down. Thinks he’s immortal—”

“I know what you mean,” Scott said with a small shudder, shifting in his chair. “The man has the self-preservation instincts of a sixteen-year-old boy. Sometimes I feel more like his father than his friend—trying to look out for him, feeling responsible for him, you know?”

“Yes, I do,” she said with soft emphasis, bringing those eyes around and hitting him full force with their effect, which he was discovering was something akin to a battering ram. “That’s exactly the way I feel about Yancy. So, I know you can understand why I simply had to come down here and find her. And why, since Roy’s not here, I have to ask you to help me.”

Scott sat back with a groan, thinking it was a little like chasing a perp through a swamp and coming around a clump of palmettos and finding the guy he’d been chasing was behind him instead of in front. In short, he’d been had.

From the book: "An Order Of Protection" By Kathleen Creighton
Silhouette Intimate Moments May 2004
Copyright 2004 by Kathleen Creighton-Fuchs

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