Yes, I admit this all sounds a little over the top and (dare I say it?) crazy, too. Actually, I had good reason.
See, as if I didn’t have enough to deal with earlier in the summer when I was working on that cemetery restoration project and solving a twenty-five-year-old murder, I found out something really creepy—I had a stalker. And not just any stalker, one with bad taste in flowers, candy, and all-wrong-for-my-coloring lipstick. He’d been lying low since I’d wrapped up that last case, and always up for a good game of denial, I’d convinced myself that maybe I’d gotten lucky and he’d fallen off the face of the earth. It would have been nice to go right on believing it, too—if not for this bunch of flowers.
I scraped my suddenly damp palms against my shirtdress and poked the bouquet with one finger. Nothing happened.
Realizing just how nutsy it was to think something might, I wasn’t sure who I was angrier at—the stalker, who’d gotten to me so badly I was poking flowers to see if they’d blow up or something, or myself, for giving in to the fear. There was one thing I was sure of, though. I wasn’t going to take it anymore.
The thought burning in my brain, I grabbed the bouquet and marched out to the reception area with it.
“Jennine.” I don’t think I could have possibly surprised her since I was flaming mad and my peep-toe sandals banged against the floor, but she was scribbling a note on a message pad decorated with kittens, and she jumped a mile when I called her name. I stood in the doorway between the hallway and the reception area and waved the bouquet of flowers. “I’ve had it with this. I mean, really. I. Have. Had. It. And you’re going to help me put a stop to this horse hockey. I need to know who brought these flowers and I need to know it right now.”
In her job as receptionist, Jennine sees plenty of people, but they are not routinely five-foot-eleven redheads in full anger mode. Her eyes wide, she stared at me like I was making a scene (which I was, but since it was justified, that didn’t count). Then she simply blinked, and pointed a finger behind me.
I turned and saw what I’d been too hopped up to see when I stomped through the hallway—a man standing over on my right, his arms crossed over his chipped-from-granite chest, his shoulders resting casually against the wall.
“Quinn!” My voice was much too breathy and I cursed myself for giving in to the surprise and him for having the nerve to show up out of nowhere and pull the rug out from under me. At the same time I thanked the fashion gods for watching over me and making sure I looked as good as I did that day; I wondered if Quinn didn’t have a direct line to the same deities. He was wearing a charcoal suit and a shirt so white, it nearly blinded me. His tie was colorful in an I-am-a-detective-with-excellent-taste-and-I-don’t-need-to-prove-it-to-anyone way, a refined swirl of black, gray, and white with just enough red splashed in for good measure.
Delectability aside, this was the same man who’d walked out on me not three weeks earlier. I told myself not to forget it (as if I could), narrowed my eyes, and it was a good thing I had that bouquet of flowers. Hanging on to it prevented me from digging my nails into the palms of my hands. Quinn was taller than President James A. Garfield. I looked him in the eye. “What do you want?”
He shot Jennine a thousand-watt smile by way of excusing us, then took me by the elbow. “A little privacy would be nice,” he said.
I yanked my arm out of his reach. “Why?”
“If I wanted to stand here in the hallway and tell you, we wouldn’t need the privacy.” He knew where my office was; he led the way.
I made sure I closed my office door behind me, then crossed my arms over my chest. “Well?”
He’d already taken a seat in the chair behind my desk and he looked up at me, as unruffled at the center of personal drama as I’d seen him at the scene of a homicide. “I missed you, too. Why don’t you sit down.”
“I don’t need to be invited to sit down in my own office.” I took a couple steps closer to my desk, the better to glare at him when I asked, “What do you want?”
“I thought we should talk.”
“If you wanted to talk, you shouldn’t have walked out on me. Then we could have talked.”
“You’re angry.”
I tossed my head. “No wonder you’re a detective. You’re a real whizbang when it comes to getting to the heart of things.”
“Which is how I know you wouldn’t be angry if you still didn’t care.”
“Oh, no!” I backed off and backed away. It was better than daring to get too close and catching a whiff of the expensive aftershave he always wore. That stuff made my knees weak, and Quinn knew it. Rather than dissolve into a puddle of mush, I sat in my guest chair. “You’re not going to pull that on me.”
“What?” Quinn had a way of shrugging that emphasized his broad shoulders. His eyes were the exact color of my emerald dress and they glittered at me across my desk. “You’re being unreasonable.”
“Me?” I was out of that chair in a flash. “You haven’t seen unreasonable, buddy, not from me. I’m the one who was always up front with you, and you’re the one—”
“Who’s had three weeks to think about everything we said to each other last time we were together.” He stood, too, and came around to the other side of the desk. A stronger woman might have backed away, or at least taken a swing at him in an effort to wipe that sexy smile off his face. But I am not a strong woman, not when it comes to Quinn, and I didn’t move a muscle, not even when he settled his hands on my shoulders.
“I am about to prove just how very reasonable I am,” he said, his voice honey. “I’ve done a lot of thinking in the past three weeks, Pepper.”
I swallowed hard. I knew what he was talking about, because I’d done a lot of thinking in that time, too, and somewhere between the anger and the misery, I’d decided the only way I would ever take Quinn back was if he came crawling. He wasn’t on his knees, not yet anyway, but I could afford to curb my temper and bide my time. I felt an apology of epic proportions coming on. Oh, how I was going to enjoy hearing it!
He leaned a little nearer, and I knew that if I gave in the slightest bit and moved a fraction of an inch closer, he would have kissed me. As much as I wanted it, it was too soon to surrender. I kept my place, just like I kept my mouth shut.
He skimmed both thumbs over my collarbone and said, “I’ve decided to forgive you.”
Even I didn’t know I could move that fast. I had his hands batted away and the desk between us before Quinn knew what had happened. And believe me, I wasn’t at a loss for words, even though I was just about choking on my anger. “You? Forgive me?”
Maybe he looked a little uncertain because he’d never seen steam coming out of a woman’s ears before. “Yeah, I’ve thought about it, and I realize when you told me all those crazy things you told me—”
“About talking to dead people.”
“Well, yeah.” He scraped a hand through his inky hair.
“Me walking out on you, it was a knee-jerk reaction, and it’s not like anyone could blame me. I had every right to ask what was going on with you, and when you made up that nonsense about ghosts—”
“Get out.” The bouquet of flowers was the perfect prop, but I motioned toward the door with it a little too forcefully. A shower of rose petals rained down on my desk. “Get out of my office, and get out of my life, and if you ever think of forgiving me again, get that out of your head, too. I don’t need your forgiveness, Quinn, and I don’t need you.”
“I thought you’d be happy.”
“Oh, I’m going to be happy, all right. As soon as you’re out of here and you close the door behind you.”