Diana Palmer - The Case of the Confirmed Bachelor

“You’re staring. And you haven’t answered me,” he said.

“I was just thinking what a dish you are,” she said with a grin. “You look just like Dad. No wonder women threaten to leap off buildings when you throw them over. You never talk about the time you spent with the FBI, and I never knew why. I thought maybe you missed it.”

“Sometimes I do,” he confessed. “Not often. But it’s never a good idea to open up old wounds. Sometimes they bleed.”

“Yes,” she said absently, “I suppose so.”

“All right. Have a sandwich with me and we’ll talk about what we’re going to do with the house. I’m tired of renting it out. Too much hassle. I want to talk to you about selling it.”

“Sell our legacy?” she burst out.

He sighed. “I figured you’d react that way. Come on. Let’s eat. We can fight over dessert.”

He took her to a nice seafood restaurant. She’d been expecting a hamburger, and she paused self-consciously at the door, nervous in her old black skirt and black-and-white checked blouse, her hair loose and unkempt.

“Now what’s the matter?” he asked impatiently.

“Nick, I’m not dressed for a place like this,” she said earnestly. “Can’t we go someplace less expensive?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A fast-food place,” she explained. “Plastic cartons? Paper sacks? Foam cups?”

“Nonbiodegradable litter.” He frowned. “No way. Come on.” He took her arm and forcibly led her inside. He chuckled as he seated her, very elegantly, at a table. “I hope you aren’t really that mad for pizza. They don’t serve it here.”

She smiled. “Harold and I are sort of tired of it, if you want the truth,” she confessed as he sat down across from her. The table had a burning red candle in a glass chimney. The lighting was cozy, like the atmosphere with its classical music playing unobtrusively overhead.

“I like service,” he said. “Old-fashioned service, and good food. They have both here.”

Even as he spoke, a slender blonde paused beside the table and presented them with menus. Her eyes lingered on Nick’s face while he ordered coffee, to give them time to decide on a choice of entrée.

“Thanks, Jean,” he said warmly.

The woman smiled back and with an envious glance at Helen, went on her way.

“She likes you,” she said.

“I know. I like her, too. But that’s all it is,” he added, his face very serious as he met Helen’s curious stare. “Stop trying to play matchmaker. You only complicate lives.”

He sounded incredibly bitter. “Are you trying to tell me something?” she asked quietly.

“You threw me together with Tabby at that New Year’s Eve party the last time we were home. You didn’t mention that you’d told her I flew all the way from Houston just to take her out.”

He hadn’t talked about this before. She felt guilty and apprehensive at his tone. “I didn’t think it would hurt,” she began.

He cut her off. “She had some crazy idea that my feelings had changed and I wanted a relationship with her,” he said curtly, his eyes accusing. “I wasn’t expecting it and I overreacted. She cried.” His face went harder. “In all the years we’ve known Tabby, I’ve never seen her cry. It really got to me.”

Helen knew Nick well enough to guess what happened next. “You lost your temper,” she guessed.

“I told you, I wasn’t expecting it. One minute she was telling me about some new find they were studying in the anthropology department, the next she was off on a tangent about the future.”

“The punch was spiked,” she said. “I didn’t know. I poured her two cups of it.”

“I finally figured out for myself that she was three sheets to the wind, but that sudden burst of affection knocked me off balance,” he replied. He rammed his hands into his pockets and looked uncomfortable. “I panicked. Tabby’s a sweet woman, but she’s not my type.”

“Who is?” she challenged. “You make confirmed bachelors look like old married men. You could do a lot worse than Tabby.”

“She could do a lot better than me,” he countered. “A little cottage with a picket fence isn’t what I’m saving up for. I want to sail around the world. I want to go exploring. In the meantime, I like being an investigator, even if this job is beginning to wear on me.”

“Tabby’s an investigator, did you know? She searched for the solutions to ancient mysteries. That’s what anthropologists do—they discover the cultures of ancient civilizations and how they worked.”

“No two-thousand-year-old mummy is likely to sit up in his sarcophagus and pull a gun on her, either,” he argued.

“Probably not,” she conceded. “But digging for the truth is something you both like to do.”

He ran an angry hand around the back of his neck. “I didn’t like hurting her that way,” he said abruptly. “I said some harsh things.”

“Well, that’s all in the past now,” she reminded him. “She’s dating someone and it sounds serious, so you won’t have to worry about any complications while you’re deciding what we should do about Dad’s house.”

“I suppose not,” he said, but he wasn’t looking forward to seeing Tabby again. His treatment of her wore on his nerves, and she wasn’t going to be pleased to see him. Tabby, like Nick himself, deplored losing control. Her lack of pride was going to hurt her as much as Nick’s sharp words, and she wouldn’t like being reminded of their confrontation any more than he did.

“It will be all right,” Helen said gently.

“Your favorite saying. What if it isn’t?”

“For goodness’ sake, think positively!” she chided. “Buy a plane ticket and go to Washington.”

“I guess I will. But I still have my doubts,” he said.

Two days later, with Dane Lassiter’s blessing, Nick was on his way down Oak Lane to his father’s old house in Torrington.

It looked just the same, he thought as he wheeled lazily along in the rental car. The oaks were a little older, as he was, but the street was quiet and dignified, like the mostly elderly people who lived on it.

His eyes went involuntarily over the flat front of the redbrick home where he and Helen had grown up. There were blooming shrubs all around it and the dogwood and cherry trees were green now with their blossoms gone in late spring. The weather was comfortably warm without being blazing hot, and everything looked green and restful. He hadn’t realized before just how tired he was. This vacation was probably a good idea after all, even if he had fought like a tiger to keep from taking it.

It was Friday, and not quitting time, so he didn’t expect to see Tabby at her family’s house next door. But in his mind’s eye, he saw her—long brown hair down to her waist and big dark eyes that followed him everywhere as she walked by the house on her way home from school. She was tall, very slender, with curves that weren’t noticeable at all. That hadn’t changed. Her hair was in a bun these days, not long and windblown. She wore little makeup and clothes that were stylish but not sexy. Her body was as slender as it had been in her teens, nothing to make any man particularly amorous unless he loved her. Poor Tabby. He felt sorry for her, angry at Helen because she’d engineered that meeting at New Year’s Eve and made Tabby think he cared about her.

He did, in a sort of brotherly way, mainly because that was how he’d always interpreted Tabby’s attitude toward him. She’d never seemed to want a physical relationship with him. Not until New Year’s Eve, anyway, and she had been intoxicated. Perhaps this colleague she was dating did love her, and would make her happy. He hoped so.

Life in a garret wasn’t for him. He was already thinking about applying to Interpol or as a customs inspector down in the Caribbean. A tame existence appealed to him about as much as drowning.