It took a second to register that he wasn't pulling her away.
"Don't do this," he said through gritted teeth, his h*ps beginning to circle into the cup their locked hands had formed.
Zoe's jaw dropped as she watched him writhe. Maybe he was easy to arouse. He did seem to be having trouble controlling himself. Teresa had said he'd gone all night, and now he was pushing at her so hard her fingers were going numb. His palm was actually sweating. When he spoke again, he sounded desperate.
"You know you won't appreciate being the next notch on my bedpost. You know you're too good for that."
She looked at him, her soul gone cold. "You're saying I wouldn't be any different than the others?"
"I'm saying you couldn't be."
Failing to see the distinction, she wrenched her hand out from under his. She would have stepped away, would have salved her pride somehow, but he brushed her cheek with his fingertips. The tenderness of the gesture arrested her.
It was pathetic, really, how badly she wanted to believe he cared.
"Be my friend," he said. "Be the friend I've always hoped you'd be."
His tone was gentle, his expression genuinely fond. She didn't say she couldn't be his friend, that she cared too much in a different way. That would have been a lie. Magnus meant so much to her, she suspected she could be his friend even if her heart cracked in two.
She did, however, have too much self-respect to admit it.
She blew out her breath instead. "You're even weirder than I am."
That inspired one of his dazzling smiles. "High praise, coming from a real Fairyviller."
She should have been grateful he was still comfortable enough to tease. Unfortunately, she was too busy fighting memories. The sad truth was that Magnus wasn't the first man she'd loved who'd pulled a number like this on her.
Chapter Two
When Lizanne Pruitt entered the investigative offices of Goodbody & McCallum, first thing Wednesday morning, she didn't look like the oddest client they'd ever had. With her five-year-old son in tow, she looked like any harried suburban mom they might have run across in a Scottsdale mall.
From his seat behind their broad walnut desk—the one that told clients they were solid—Bryan McCallum watched his aptly named partner, Alexander Goodbody, usher Mrs. Pruitt in. He and Alex had run this eight-man firm for the last four years, and they'd been college roommates before that. Being so familiar with each others' strengths made responsibilities easy to divvy up, though it wasn't as simple as brains and brawn. Bryan wasn't stupid, nor Alex weak, but Alex was the more polished of the two. He did the gentlemanly niceties, pulling out Mrs. Pruitt's chair and helping her to sit.
Bryan did his bit by sizing her up.
Mrs. Pruitt had been pretty once upon a time, in a pink-cheeked, former cheerleader way. She wasn't unattractive now, just ordinary and tired and plump. Her outfit, a coordinated powder-blue dress and cardigan—one hair short of country-club chic—was nice enough to suggest she could afford their fees. Her eyes, blue like her dress, held a hunted look. Bryan would have bet this was a cheating spouse case if it weren't for the kid's presence. It still could be, he supposed. Some parents liked to get a head start in the battle for their children's sympathies.
"Coffee or tea?" Alex offered in his surprisingly raspy voice. The way he looked, it should have been as smooth as sherry. Instead, it came out as rough as a rock star's.
Mrs. Pruitt responded to the aural stimulation with a touch of flusterment. She blushed when Alex leaned down close enough to hear her faint request for tea. Bryan knew she'd probably gotten a whiff of the cologne beneath Alex's business shirt.
When you added Pour L'Homme to Alex's natural smell, you got a guaranteed wet panty.
The effect wasn't deliberate. Bryan's partner was no flirt; his manners were too reserved for that. But Alex was unnaturally good looking—a tall, lean, sun-streaked blond with eyes the color of a Caribbean cove. The sleek gray suits he favored took nothing from his sex appeal. In Bryan's experience, the women who met Alex tended to fall into two camps: those who wanted to mother him and those who wanted him in the sack. It didn't take a genius to figure out which Mrs. Pruitt was, or that she was uncomfortable with her response.
Join the club, Bryan thought, at which point her son looked up and laughed.
"Oscar," scolded his mother, though the five-year-old couldn't have meant any harm, or even known what he was laughing at. "Go sit in the corner and be quiet."
The boy obeyed her without objection, clambering into the extra chair where he sat grinning and swinging his short legs. His shoes were bright yellow high-tops with some sort of cartoon figure printed on the canvas. He was a cute kid, as lively as his mother was worn down. Something in his expression, maybe the joie de vivre in his eyes, made Bryan grin back at him.
"I'm sorry," his mother said. "I had to take him out of preschool."
"Not a problem," Alex assured her as he handed her the tea. Rather than take the chair beside Bryan, he perched his narrow runner's butt on the desk's front corner. Bryan had entertained fantasies about that butt that he couldn't repeat in public even to himself. "I can see that… Oscar is a nice young man."
Oscar seemed to think being called a nice young man was hilarious, though he didn't make a sound as he somersaulted over in the chair, ending up with his head and hands on the ground and his feet wiggling manically in the air.
"Oscar!" his mother said, her voice gone sharp. "Stop that this instant!"
"Why don't we leave Oscar to entertain himself?" Bryan suggested. "Since he seems to be good at it. And then you can tell us what this is about."
Mrs. Pruitt turned back reluctantly, clearly torn between controlling her son's high spirits and her own concerns. After a moment, her own concerns won out. "Raymond Lederer said your firm was the best in Phoenix."
Raymond Lederer was a defense lawyer for whom they did skip-trace work, tracking down potential witnesses and the like. "Raymond didn't lie," Bryan assured her. "You can count on our competence. And our discretion."
Discretion didn't seem to be the issue. Mrs. Pruitt had a death grip on the handles of her designer purse. "He said you could find anyone anywhere."
Bryan began to revise his assumption that she was worried about her husband's extracurricular activities. He resisted exchanging a glance with Alex, though he knew his partner was probably jumping to the same conclusion. "Finding people is one of our specialties. Who is it you're trying to track?"