Marilyn Pappano - One True Thing

“Not for pictures of myself, if that’s what you’re thinking. Trust me, if I was wanted by the cops, Reese would turn me in so fast I wouldn’t know what hit me.”

“Your own cousin?”

“He’s a cop first, my cousin second.” That wasn’t entirely true. Reese would never break the law, but he would bend it a little if circumstances warranted it. Sometimes that was the only way to see justice done.

“Then what’s your interest in Wanted posters?”

He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t particularly want to admit that he’d been a cop himself. With his luck, she would probably have a lot of questions he wouldn’t want to answer. The few writers he’d met in the past, mostly reporters, were filled with them. “Curiosity,” he said with a shrug. “I watch America’s Most Wanted, too.” Once again he abruptly shifted direction. “You never told me what your alias—”

“Pen name.”

“—is.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Maybe I want to pick up a couple of your books and see what they’re like.”

“They’re very hard to find. Most of them are out of print.”

“Then you could loan me some copies.”

Her smile was quick and uneasy. “I don’t have any. Sorry.”

“Oh, come on…you don’t have a single copy of your own books?”

“Well, of course I have some, but not with me. They’re back home in my office in San Diego.”

“Lemon Grove,” he corrected.

She grimaced. “Hey, it’s all one big city.”

“And they’re in storage, with the rest of your office.”

Her face turned almost as red as the sweet tomato sauce that oozed between the layers of noodles. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Everything’s in storage.”

His back was itching again. He shifted in his chair, rubbing against the spindles. If he checked Directory Assistance for Lemon Grove, California, would he find a listing for Cassidy McRae? Instinct said no, but that wouldn’t mean anything. Most women who lived alone in big cities had unlisted numbers. But if one of his cop buddies checked the utilities and didn’t find a recent account in her name…

It would prove she’d lied about where she lived. So what? She was an author, and no doubt had fans. For some people it was a short step from fan to stalker. If some stranger was buying his book and thought he was making some sort of connection, he would want personal information such as where he lived kept private, too.

As he pushed his plate away, he slumped back in the chair and fixed his gaze on her. “You’re not married.”

She shook her head.

“Any kids?”

“No.” That was accompanied by a faint regret. It wasn’t as if it was too late. She couldn’t be more than thirty, thirty-two. She still had time to bring a dozen or more kids into the world before Mother Nature said no more.

“Family?”

Her smile was faint. “Don’t have one.”

“No parents, brothers or sisters?”

She shook her head again. “No aunts, uncles, cousins or grandparents, either. I’m an only child from a long line of only children.”

“No family. Jeez.” Then… “Want some of mine?”

She pushed her plate away, too, having cleaned it. “Your parents live outside Buffalo Plains, your cousin is the local sheriff, and your cousin four times removed sells real estate around here. Who else is there?”

“Reese’s folks live in town. My mom’s parents are about forty miles from here, and her two brothers and three sisters all live within an hour or so. There are a lot of cousins, some great-aunts and -uncles, some in-laws and out-laws. Last time the family got together, there were about seventy of us.”

“That’s nice.”

It was nicer when he lived in another state and didn’t see them that often, he was about to retort but stopped himself. There was something wrong with complaining about too much family to a woman who didn’t have any. Instead he agreed—more or less. “Yeah. It can be.”

“Are you married?”

“Nope. Never have been.”

“Ever come close?”

He thought of Amanda and the diamond ring he’d been considering for a Valentine’s Day surprise. The few people he kept in touch with in Kansas City never volunteered any news about her and he never asked. “Nope.” It wasn’t a complete lie. They hadn’t been nearly as close to a lifetime commitment as he’d thought.

“Any kids?”

“Not without being married first, or my mother would tan my hide.”

“That’s an old-fashioned outlook.”

“She’s an old-fashioned mother.” He thought about digging up another question, then stuck to the subject. “She believes parents should be married before they start having children, that honesty comes first in a relationship, and that marriage shouldn’t be entered into lightly. You don’t have to stay in a bad marriage, but you damn well have to do everything you can to keep it from going bad.”

What if he had married Amanda? What if politics hadn’t derailed his career or had done so six months after the wedding? Just how bad could that marriage have gotten? Very bad, he suspected. Bitter-divorce-and-protective-orders bad. His mother would have been incredibly disappointed in him for making such a lousy choice.

So one good thing had come out of the mess. Amanda had saved him the hassle of a divorce down the road and spared him Rozena’s disappointment.

“Your mother’s a smart woman.” Cassidy slid her chair back, then held out her hand for his dishes. Stacking them with her own, she carried them into the kitchen.

He followed with the lasagna pan. “How long does it take you to write a book?”

“It varies.” She turned on the water in the sink, waited for it to heat, then put in the stopper and squirted in dish soap.

“Give me a ballpark figure. A week? A month? A year?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes three months, sometimes six, sometimes longer. Some days I want to tell the story. Other days, I can’t force myself to get within ten feet of the computer.”

“Did you always want to be a writer?”

“Not really.”

“How long have you been doing it?”

“A few years.”

Just like her earlier answer that she’d sold a few books. He’d pinned her down to a number then, and sometime he might pin her down on this, but not now. Instead he put the last square of lasagna in the refrigerator and took out the pie and a tub of whipped cream. “Where do you get your ideas?”

She scowled at him over her shoulder before turning her attention back to the dishes. If she scrubbed that plate any harder, she was going to take the pattern right off of it, he thought, and wondered why she was so tense. “They come to me in my sleep,” she said, clearly annoyed.

Another evasion, if not an outright lie. He was beginning to think “evasion” was Cassidy McRae’s middle name.

Too bad he was no longer in the business of finding out why.

She had regrets—a lot of them. More than any ninety year old who’d squandered her life should be burdened by on her deathbed, and she was nowhere near ninety. Looking into his amazingly handsome face, with his sharp black eyes, his straight nose, his stubborn jaw and his full, sensuous, sensitive-looking mouth, and lying through her teeth to him was only the most recent in a long string of regrets.

He believed in honesty between a man and a woman—had said so in no uncertain terms, and yet she had lied to him.

And all the regrets in all the world wouldn’t stop her from doing it again.

Cassidy directed her sharpest scowl at herself. She didn’t regret lying to Jace any more than she regretted lying to anyone. There was nothing special about him, nothing that separated him from the countless people she had deceived in the past.