The Thrill of It All Page 10

  “Michael…” she whispered.

  He put his free hand up to his eye.

  Right then, someone knocked at the door. As it opened, Felicity moved by instinct. Twisting on Magee’s lap to clamber over the chair arm, her knee—intentionally—clipped his groin.

  He grunted, bending over.

  She made it to her feet, then whirled to face the newcomers moving into the room. Peter and the Wild Side’s Gwen. “He, uh, has something in his eye,” she said, motioning toward Magee.

  “Like hell,” he wheezed out. “She just kneed me in nuts.”

  Peter winced.

  Felicity shrugged, trying to appear apologetic. But he’d been so desperate a moment ago, and though she kept trying to forget about it, she’d seen him desperate before. She knew what happened next, she’d seen that before, too. And knowing him, he wouldn’t want to be caught with tears in his eyes.

  Now he had an acceptable, macho-guy reason.

  He looked up, and his eyes were glittering, all right, but they were glittering with annoyance. At her. “What do you need, Peter?”

  It was Gwen who spoke up. “As I was closing up at the Wild Side tonight, a group of three strangers came in. Wearing business suits—ties and everything. They were very polite, and they said they were looking for Ben.”

  “Did they say why?” Felicity asked.

  “They said he owes them money.”

  Seven

  Sitting at his kitchen table, Magee stared at the dregs of his coffee. After three nights of little sleep, his eyes felt as heavy and gritty as the sludge at the bottom of the mug. Last night he’d dreamed again, of climbing.

  And it had been a dream of a climb at first, everything coming together as it did on the very best days. Under a perfect sky, his body moved smoothly, a kinesthetic proof of mathematical theorems. Then he was resting on a belay ledge, and someone yelled up to him, “Catch!” A book appeared in his line of vision and he lunged for it, only to fall, a heinous fall, with the book in his hands.

  He had plenty of time to page through it as he plunged toward hell. It was the only climbing journal that his tribe was desperate to keep their names out of—the annual publication of Accidents in North American Mountaineering.

  “Magee!” The little-girl voice and the pitter-patter of Anna P.’s feet on the kitchen floor jerked him back to the present. He had a second to brace before she leaped into his lap and he instinctively grimaced, Felicity’s knee jab of the night before just an ache away.

  “Morning,” Anna P. sang out, and bussed him on the cheek.

  He inhaled the scent of baby shampoo as he kissed her in return. Ashley entered the kitchen, and the little girl wiggled away, already demanding Cheerios and toast and orange juice and pancakes and waffles.

  Ashley caught Magee’s eye and they smiled at each other. “She has her father’s appetite,” Ashley murmured.

  But with her father gone, it was up to Magee to feed her, clothe her, to give her the life, to live the life, that Simon had been planning. He knew that. Watching daughter and mother move about the kitchen, Magee imagined it. Ashley, his wife. Anna P., his, too.

  He loved them.

  He did.

  The time was right to present his plan. He’d meant to a few days before, but then he’d collided with Felicity. There was nothing to stop him now, though, only more pushing him forward, including whatever trouble Ashley’s brother Ben had gotten into.

  He abruptly stood, the loud scrape of his chair against the floor catching both Ashley’s and Anna P.’s attention. Clearing his throat, he wondered how much, exactly, to say.

  “I didn’t tell you why I went to L.A. a few days ago,” he started.

  Ashley ducked her head, studying the cereal box in her hand. “No.”

  “I took Simon’s job.”

  She froze, then looked up. “At Forrester Engineering? That desk job?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Didn’t they offer you a position a few years ago?”

  “Yeah.” The Forresters were wealthy climbing aficionados, and Simon had guided the two men up a few of North America’s higher peaks. Magee had been along once as well, and the brothers had used their persuasive powers on him as well as Simon, once they found out they both came out of the same master’s program at Cal Berkeley.

  “But when they asked you before,” Ashley pointed out, “you said no.”

  Magee shrugged. “Simon said no the first time they asked him, too. But then things were different—after you and after Anna P.—and he changed his mind. Things are different for me now.”

  Ashley slid her finger under the sealed flap of the cereal box and moved it slowly across without speaking.

  Maybe she didn’t understand what he was getting at, Magee thought. “I want you to…” He cleared his throat again. “I want you and Anna P. to move with me to L.A. We’ll find a nice neighborhood with good schools, get a house.”

  “Mommy?” Anna P. was looking from her mom to him and back again. “Mommy, I like this house.”

  Ashley looked down at her daughter. “This is Magee’s house. If he moves—”

  “You go with me,” he said.

  Anna P. looked up at her mother again. “But—”

  “Before every climb I promised I’d take care of you,” Magee said, drowning out her protests. “I promised I’d take care of you both if something happened.”

  Each time he’d made the vow without thinking about it, because he’d been so sure nothing would happen. He chose his expeditions and his teams carefully, after all. And maybe he’d begun to believe his own press, too. He was the Lucky Bastard, wasn’t he? He could face down anything, and win.

  Until that last time.

  “It’s the right thing, Ash.” The only thing that made sense of what had happened. “Simon wanted this, wanted someone for you to lean on.”

  She looked up then, and in her gentle eyes he saw she understood. Holding her gaze, he walked over to her and tipped up her chin with one finger. Her lashes floated down and he pressed his mouth to hers.

  The kiss was as soft and gentle as Ash herself. It might not be a carnal kiss, the Felicity kind that put his soldier at stiff salute, but it tasted of virtue and reparation. It fulfilled the purpose that he’d figured out.

  When he lifted his head, he exchanged another long look with Ashley, but he didn’t mention marriage.

  He didn’t have to.

  Felicity paced Aunt Vi’s living room, stepping over cats and cousins, but never slowing her pace. She’d demanded a family meeting first thing this morning. The calls had been made by her personally, to every family member—with the exception of Ashley, whom Felicity had left off the list for various reasons—but in typical Charm style it was closing on noon and only half a dozen of them had bothered to show up.

  Even those who had stirred themselves to get to the house were now draped about the furniture in various states of repose. They petted cats, sipped coffee; one turned the pages of an outdated People, while another idly flipped through the TV channels.

  Well, she didn’t have time to wait for any more of them, not if she was going to make it back to L.A. today as she’d promised herself. This time she wasn’t going to let anything stop her from getting out of Half Palm and from getting away from the Charms.

  She stomped to the front of the room and spoke over their lazy chatter. “Okay, everyone, here’s the deal. We need to call the sheriff’s department and ask them to look into Ben’s disappearance.”

  Every Charm head jerked up. A cat yowled, as if a stroking hand had tightened on soft fur. A coffee cup thudded against the old carpet. No one bothered moving to clean up the mess. Instead, they all stared at her as if she’d gone mad.

  Felicity held on to her temper and turned to her aunt. “Aunt Vi, you’ve been worried about Ben from the first. I admit, I didn’t think it was anything serious before, but now with these men looking for him…”

  Felicity still didn’t think it was seri
ous. Ben had bugged out of town until he could scrounge up the money he owed some friends. But it gave her a good excuse to pass the problem of her missing cousin on to someone else.

  Her aunt responded with the patented Charm helpless-female flutter. “But the sheriff, Felicity!”

  “Charms don’t call the sheriff,” her second cousin, Harry declared.

  He was in his late teens now, tall and lanky in a pair of expensive slacks, collared knit shirt, and natty white golfing shoes. Aunt Vi had told her the clean-cut-looking kid was “working” around the local courses, Charmspeak for hustling.

  “No,” Felicity corrected him, “it’s that Charms hope someone doesn’t call the sheriff on them.”

  Shrugging, he sent her a guileless, engaging grin, probably the very same one he used as he walked away with some CEO’s pocketful of petty cash. What would it be? she wondered. Twenty bucks a hole?

  “Well, I consulted the Tarot…” her cousin Rainbow, aka Roberta, began.

  The whole room groaned.

  “What? What?” Rainbow/Roberta flung up her many-ringed hands. “Do you want my expert opinion or not? People pay a lot for a consultation with me, I’ll have you all know.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Uncle Vin, Aunt Vi’s and Uncle Billy’s brother, spoke up. “And the rest of us are tired of hearing just how much that is. You have a good racket going, I’ll give you that, Roberta, but the worst thing you can do is start believing your own baloney.”

  Rainbow/Roberta objected to that remark, hands and scarves waving in the air to make her point. Then Uncle Vin objected back, and Harry returned to playing with the television controls, while the two oldest relatives launched into a nostalgic reminiscence of previous Charm scams.

  Sighing, Felicity picked up one of the cats, holding it against her cheek as it purred, but even the animal’s motorboat rumble couldn’t drown out that last conversation.

  She’d heard it all a million times, because the scams were the stuff of family legend, and each had a colorful moniker. There was “Fruit Loop”—when they’d opened a fruit stand selling the produce they’d stolen from someone else’s orchards. That skulduggery had been short-lived, however, since it had entailed doing the actual work of picking the produce.

  “Big Chief” was another, when an entire offshoot of the Charm family tree built a teepee in their yard to convince the Bureau of Indian Affairs they were owed a stipend because they were one-quarter Native American instead of one hundred percent lazy. The chain letter from the “Chain Gang” scam had netted next to nothing as well, as far as she knew, but the oldsters still talked about it.

  With the argument between Uncle Vin and Rainbow/Roberta showing no signs of ending, Felicity set down the cat and clapped her hands together. She had to get the family to agree. “Come on, come on, everybody. We need to wrap this up. Is there a reason, a real reason, that I shouldn’t call the sheriff?”

  The group quieted. They knew what she was asking. Were any of them currently involved in some sort of larceny that would mean real trouble if the sheriff started sniffing around. Heads moved as gazes traveled about the room. No one spoke up.

  Scenting freedom, Felicity’s heart beat faster. “Okay, then—”

  “Wait!” Harry raised the hand holding the TV remote. “We don’t know what Ben was up to.”

  Uncle Vin nodded slowly. “The boy’s right. We don’t know why these men think Ben owes them money.”

  Aunt Vi fluttered. “Maybe it’s a misunderstanding.”

  Uncle Vin appeared to consider. “Or maybe it’s a misdemeanor.”

  “Or maybe it’s a felony,” Rainbow said in ominous tones. “I—”

  “Hey, it’s Felicity!”

  Felicity’s shoulders slumped as the last remark distracted the group once again from the point in question. Misunderstandings, misdemeanors, even felonies were forgotten as they all focused on the television. Harry’s toying with the remote control had managed to start the VCR playing the GetTV videotape that Anna P. had left inside the day before.

  Felicity groaned, but that didn’t stop the Charms’ fascination with the show. Though she tried to regain their attention a few times, they shushed her as they sat through the cell phone jewelry, the lighted ice cubes, the glamorized rubber gloves, even George Bernard Shaw and the wine cellar.

  “You’re good,” Harry finally said, when the show ended. “Really good.”

  “Really good,” Rainbow echoed. “Looks like a cushy deal, too, though I bet I still make more money and work less hours than you do.”

  “Remarkable,” someone else added.

  Around the room heads nodded, and Felicity now found herself grateful for the latest interruption. Hah. The tape was perfect! It was the way to show the family how far she’d come, how far apart she was from them.

  She warmed under the murmurs of praise and didn’t try redirecting the discussion, even as she sensed someone else come in the room. She wanted every single Charm to see, to know, to realize she’d remade herself into something separate from them.

  Then she could walk away from them forever, without a backward glance.

  “Excellent,” Uncle Vin pronounced, nodding in agreement. He slapped his hands on his thighs and almost cackled. “More than excellent. Eliot? Glenn?”

  The two old men looked at each other, then looked at her, their wrinkled faces breaking into proud smiles.

  Felicity smiled back at the old darlings.

  “A credit to the family,” one said.

  The first credit, Felicity thought, the first one to break the shameful tradition of petty lying, cheating, and stealing. The newcomer in the room moved, and from the corner of her eye she saw it was Magee.

  Fine. She’d not called Ashley about the meeting because her cousin, bless her helpless heart, was part of the dithering half of the Charm family. But she didn’t mind Magee hearing this, not at all.

  “Yes, yes,” the oldest family member repeated. “Felicity, you’re a real credit to us.”

  That’s right. A real credit that they’d listen to now about calling in the sheriff.

  The co-oldster gave her a thumbs-up. “Undeniable. She’s a true Charm through and through.”

  A true Charm through and through.

  Her jaw dropped, the words rendering her speechless. Leaving her nothing to convince them with, which left no point in standing around. Without a backward glance, she escaped.

  In his car, Magee followed Felicity as she stomped on foot down the street. After a couple of blocks, when she didn’t turn back toward Vi’s, he pressed on the gas to catch up with her.

  Continuing to walk, she looked over at him. “What do you want?”

  He leaned toward the open passenger window. “Whatever it takes.” After his breakfast conversation with Ashley, he’d stopped by Vi’s to see what he could do to hurry Felicity on her way out of his life. “Do you need a ride somewhere?”

  She kept walking. “If you wanted to offer a ride, why were you following me instead?”

  “I was keeping a safe distance.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Considering what you did to me the last time we were together…”

  “Oh. Well. That.” She darted him a glance. “That was, you know, a favor.”

  “Favor, my ass.”

  “It was!” She glanced over again. “I didn’t think you would want anyone to see you with te—”

  “I had something in my eye!”

  She held up her hands. “And didn’t I say that?”

  “After you gave me a good one to the gonads, dollface.”

  She smiled, all sweetness. “Shall I kiss it and make it better?”

  He stood on the brakes and the car screeched to a stop. “Get in, dollface,” he ground out. “Before I take you up on the offer.”

  With a long-suffering sigh, she marched to the car and jumped in. Then she slid him a look. “I need to make a long-distance phone call. To L.A.”

  Be still his heart.


  Magee drove Felicity to the Bivy, unlocked the front door, then showed her into the back office. After making a quick half-pot of coffee in his personal machine, he poured a full mug, slid some paperwork under his arm, and then left her alone, standing by the phone.

  But he didn’t go far. So sue him, but he planned on eavesdropping. He had high hopes that this phone call would start the ball—no, Felicity—rolling out of his life. When she’d mentioned “long distance” and “L.A.,” he’d concluded she was calling in to work. If that blond boss of hers was as slick as he looked, he’d want Felicity within reach.

  Forcing himself to ignore an irritating itch between his shoulder blades, he pulled out a chair to settle himself at one of the small tables on the barroom floor. It was so quiet he could hear Felicity’s small sigh and then her fingers tapping the keys on the phone’s pad.

  From beneath his lashes, he watched her ask to speak with Drew Hartnett. As she waited, she used her free hand to smooth her hair, to tuck in her shirt, to work at her hair again. He’d never seen her primp like that before.

  For him, she’s fussing for him.

  He swallowed some coffee to burn away the annoying thought.

  “Drew!” Her posture stiffened, her spine going finishing-school straight. Her voice changed, too, smoothing out to lower, richer, more studied tones. “Drew, it’s so good to hear your voice.”

  Magee wondered if her pleasure sounded as fake to this Drew as it did to him.

  “I’m fine, just fine. Still here in Palm Springs. Working, yes. Like I said a couple of days ago, I needed a change of scenery to find some fresh ideas.”

  Finding fresh ideas? Magee chuckled to himself. So that was her story. He wondered what her boss would think of the fresh ideas the two of them had come up with in the back of his Jeep in a rainstorm.

  Felicity was fiddling again, smoothing her shirt into the waistband of her jeans, then reaching up to play with the buttons running down the center. Unbidden, a picture formed in his head. That rain, running down the fogged windows. Her bare breasts, her own hands running over their soft pink nipples.