Wild Child Read online

  Once he’d assured himself that the Camaro and all its occupants were gone, he glanced at Cat, a jerky, suspicious movement that revealed a gut-punch of vulnerability. It made Cat inexpressibly sad for him.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He shrugged, and finally she remembered that she had a crumbled bag of cheese puffs in her pocket. She produced the bag and held it out to him. “Ackerman’s?”

  He didn’t take any, but he looked for a minute as though he might. Encouraged, Cat took her overture a step further. “Were you trying to knock that guy on his butt?” she asked softly.

  The grimace he made must have been meant to be terrifying. His brows furrowed and his mouth screwed up. But she could see the twitch of pride in his jaw, the half-twist of a smile in his eyes. That was when she knew she could work with him. That was when she knew she had to work with him.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  The back door slammed before he could answer, and a moment later Gwen entered the room carrying a box of supplies. “Johnny?” she said, setting her load down on the table. “What are you doing here today? Is something wrong?”

  “Nah,” he said, “I been thinking about the Sinclair trial is all. I’m not so sure I want to testify.”

  By Gwen’s expression, Cat knew something was wrong.

  Gwen asked Johnny to wait for her in her office, and as soon as he’d gone, she turned at once to Cat. “Did something happen? Did he say anything to you?”

  Cat described the incident outside, and Gwen shook her head in despair. “Johnny’s the key witness in an assault case against the son of a prominent family. The pressure on him not to testify has been pretty intense.” She drew in a breath. “I want him to do it, Cat. Just once he needs to know what it feels like to be a good citizen.”

  Cat touched Gwen’s arm reassuringly. Her friend’s consternation was so apparent that it reminded Cat why she’d chosen to work with troubled children. She wanted passionately to help teenagers like Johnny avoid the pain she’d been through. And to have a chance at some of the opportunities she’d missed early on. It was one of the promises she’d made herself during her ordeal in Purdy Hall. It was more than a career goal, it was a calling.

  “Gwen, has anyone been assigned to work with Johnny yet?”

  “Not officially. I’m seeing him until one of the other counselors has an open spot in their schedule.”

  Cat’s voice was urgent. “Let me work with him. Okay, Gwen? I know I can get through to him.” Cat steeled herself for rejection. She certainly hadn’t demonstrated any ability to help anyone so far that day, including herself. But Gwen’s response was a faint smile.

  Cat reacted immediately. “So . . . what are you saying? I can?”

  “Not so fast.” Gwen cocked an eyebrow skeptically, as though to let her hasty young protégé know she had no intention of giving in too easily. “It did occur to me that you and Johnny have a lot in common,” she said. “Then again, you do have a tendency to fly off the handle. We both know that wouldn’t be appropriate role-modeling for a boy like him.”

  Cat raised her right hand. “No flying off the handle. No flying anywhere!”

  The faint smile reemerged. “I suppose it might work—if it’s all right with Johnny.”

  Cat actually had a lump in her throat. “Thank you.”

  “Do a good job,” Gwen said softly. She started for her office, hesitated, and swung around. “Wait a minute—you do know who your new client is, don’t you?”

  “Sure, Johnny . . . something.”

  Gwen’s face lost its color. “I think maybe you’d better sit down, dear. His name is Johnny Drescher, and he happens to be Blake Wheeler’s star witness.”

  “Oh, Gwen, no—” Cat pressed her fingers to her lips and turned away. There were jokes, and then there were cruel jokes.

  From behind her, Gwen’s voice was suddenly stern. “Listen to me, Cat. If you’re going to back out, then do it now, before I go tell Johnny. And if you’re not, then you’d better start rigging yourself for heavy weather, because you and your new client have an appointment with Mr. Wheeler at ten A.M. Wednesday morning.”

  On the same afternoon that Cat D’Angelo was acquiring her first client, Blake Wheeler was losing a tennis match to Sam Delahunt, the mayor of Cameron Bay. Blake knew his timing had been off throughout the last couple of games. He just wasn’t sure why. When it came to athletics, he was a man obsessed. Murder trials and grand jury hearings came and went, but nothing interfered with his tennis game. Sports were his safety valve, his escape from the pressure cooker.

  “Fifteen-thirty,” Blake called out as he tossed the ball into the air and stretched to smash it. Unleashing the coiled strength in his muscles, he willed his body to execute a perfect serve. Ace, he commanded silently as taut catgut spronged against Day-Glo orange fuzz.

  But Blake didn’t get his ace. He didn’t even get the ball in the court. Somewhere between the mental command and the physical execution, a strange and lovely vision short-circuited his concentration.

  Staring up into a pale aureole of dazzling sunshine, Blake blinked and thought he saw a woman’s hand drift in front of his eyes. Delicately boned and erotically graceful, it seemed to reach out to him and stroke the air currents. Cherry-red nails shimmered in the sunlight as the hand rolled onto its back, and the slender index finger curled in a sexy invitation. Come hither, the beckoning finger was saying.

  Blake grimaced in disbelief. The last impression he had as he arced toward the tennis ball above his head was of those tapering red fingernails. They made a man think about erotic couplings in shuttered rooms. They were the kind of nails that tangled wantonly in a man’s hair and left passionate marks on his back. Where the hell had they come from?

  When Blake came to an instant later, the tennis ball was wafting over Sam Delahunt’s head.

  “You playing baseball, son?” Sam called to him.

  Blake touched a finger to his tongue and held it up. “Wind’s at my back,” he said, straight-faced. He dropped the next serve right in the middle of the mayor’s court. As the puffing, portly man lobbed the ball back to him, Blake stepped into the easy backhand return. Unfortunately, the phantom vision chose that moment to strike again. This time Blake saw glittery dark eyes and sweet, cherry-red lips. As the lips parted slightly and breathed his name, he popped the ball over the ten-foot netting that separated the courts. It landed in a birdbath.

  “Hole in one,” Sam hooted.

  Blake barely registered Sam’s gibe. He raked a hand through his hair, perplexed. He wasn’t a believer in visions, but this one had a name: Cat D’Angelo. It was the details that confused him. She hadn’t been wearing red nail polish that morning. Or red lipstick. He would have remembered!

  “Service!” Sam shouted.

  Mercifully the match was over after the next short volley.

  “You been practicing again, son?” Sam asked, chortling as he lumbered over to shake Blake’s hand. “Sure was an interesting game of tennis.”

  “Tennis?” Blake muttered. “That was Nerf ball.”

  “Come on along.” Sam slapped him soundly across the shoulder blades. “I think you need a drink more than I do.”

  Seated in the country club’s lounge bar, the two men drank tall Scotches on the rocks while Sam expounded at length on Blake’s brilliant future. “Damn, but I wish I was your age again, boy,” he confessed, pride and envy in his voice. “You’ve got the world right smack in the palm of your hand if you want it. You know that, don’t you? You can be governor. Hell, you can be president if you want.” He lifted his glass and toasted Blake. “The right people are lining up behind us, Blake. And they’ve got big plans for you.”

  Blake acknowledged Sam with a nod. He’d heard this pep talk before, and it always brought to mind the things he disliked most about the political arena—the power games, the horse-trading, and influence peddling. Blake understood the machinery, and the kind of grease it took to ke
ep the gears meshing, but he didn’t involve himself in maintenance work any more than was absolutely necessary. He left the tune-ups and lube jobs to Sam and the professional politicians.

  Blake also knew what was coming next. Sam wasn’t merely his primary supporter, he was also his ex-father-in-law. Sam’s interest in getting Blake elected governor someday ranked only slightly higher than his interest in getting Blake and his daughter back together. Luckily, Linda Delahunt, the ex-wife in question, knew exactly how foolish that would be. Linda had a thriving career of her own in the public defender’s office, but neither she nor Blake had been able to convince Sam that they weren’t the perfect “first couple.”

  As it turned out, Sam surprised Blake. It wasn’t Linda on his mind at all. It was an assault and battery case Blake had pending.

  “I suppose you know the Sinclairs are pretty worried about that oldest boy of theirs,” he said conversationally. “What’s his name? Skip?”

  Blake bit through a melting ice cube and swallowed the cool, slippery pieces. “They should be, Sam. Skip beat up a transient. Just for kicks, apparently.”

  “I heard the old guy was a bum, Blake, a wino.”

  “Is that a reason to dislocate a sixty-year-old man’s jaw and crack three of his ribs?”

  “Skip says the man tried to rob him.”

  “There’s a witness who says there was no robbery and no attempt. He says the attack was unprovoked.”

  Sam drained his drink and held the glass up, a signal for the bartender to bring him another. “Yes, well, that’s just what I wanted to talk to you about, Blake. That young witness of yours, Johnny Drescher. I hear he’s a bad sort.”

  “What are you getting at, Sam?”

  “I think you know, son. The Sinclairs are a fine family. Why, they sit on the school board and the arts council. I don’t have to tell you it would be real hard on them if their son was convicted of assault based on evidence from an unreliable witness.”

  Blake did know what Sam was getting at, and it had less to do with the Sinclairs being a fine family than with their being major financial supporters of Sam’s last campaign. It was understood that their support would extend to any future campaign of Blake’s as well, of course. Yes, Blake knew what Sam was after. Nothing unethical, nothing illegal, just some special consideration for Skip Sinclair.

  Blake considered his longtime friend and ally. “Who said Johnny was unreliable?” Blake asked.

  Sam took a long swallow of the drink the bartender had just brought him. “Well, what else could he be, Blake? Been in and out of Purdy Hall, I hear, and on probation more often than not. A real troublemaker . . . ”

  Blake nodded as Sam continued, but he was only half listening. His thoughts had drifted back to Sam’s earlier reference to the reformatory, and in his mind he was interrogating a sixteen-year-old defendant in a pretrial hearing. Like so many kids her age, she’d armored herself with attitude, a flip manner and a smart mouth. But underneath he’d sensed fear, even terror. He’d never understood why she hadn’t cracked. Most kids her age would have surrendered to the fear and seized the opportunity to save themselves. She hadn’t.

  He fingered his glass, and through its steamy condensation, he watched the remaining ice cubes melt. Questions took shape in his mind. Who was the woman he’d encountered at the youth center that morning? A defiant and terrified child? Or the phantom who’d invaded his visual field on the tennis court: the woman with long red fingernails and a trace of sadness in her mouth.

  Sam stared down his ample nose at Blake. “You’re kinda quiet today, son. Seem restless, a little twitchy even. You got something on your mind?”

  Blake had something on his mind, all right. He was caught up in a strange awareness, a realization that certain explosive events in the past were never completed, never finished and filed away. They had an emotional half-life all their own, an unresolved energy. They lived on a continuum that looped back in on the present and became the future.

  Cat D’Angelo was just that, he realized. An explosion. She was a long red stick of dynamite that the past had conjured up and dropped right in his lap.

  Three

  BLAKE WHEELER SKIPPED up the short flight of cement steps to the youth center’s front door, Johnny Drescher’s file tucked under his arm. He knew Gwen wouldn’t be expecting him to return the file the day after he’d picked it up, but he needed a plausible excuse for dropping by. Crimson fingernails, shuttered rooms, and passion had colored his dreams last night. The visions were beginning to haunt him.

  With any luck, he thought, entering the reception area, he would flush out Cat D’Angelo without arousing any undue attention. The reception room was unusually quiet, no clients waiting, no smiling secretary at the front desk. It was early yet, he realized, checking his watch, not even nine A.M. All of the offices stood open but one. He was pondering the possibility that it might be her office when the door swung open and Cat wandered out. Bingo!

  Unaware of him, she walked to the water cooler, poured herself a cup, and then whirled as though someone had whispered in her ear that he was there. It was amazing how quickly she wiped the astonishment from her face.

  “What brings you back so soon?” she asked.

  She was suddenly bright-eyed, suddenly unfailingly polite, as though he were the UPS man or some kid selling magazine subscriptions. An act, he thought. She’s dissembling like crazy, but why the burning need to pretend with me?

  “The Drescher file,” he said. “I’m through with it.”

  “And so quickly.”

  She eyed the file. Blake waited for her to reach for it and was secretly amused when she didn’t. It was obvious she had no intention of playing his waiting game today. “We’ve got a meeting tomorrow, according to Gwen,” he explained. “I like to be prepared.”

  “A meeting—Yes, so we do.” Cat set down the water cup. She’d nearly crushed it in her surprise at seeing him, and even now, with her nerves sparking like the touch of positive and negative wires, she didn’t trust herself not to spill it.

  “Is tomorrow going to give you enough time?” Blake asked. “Gwen said you were taking over the case.”

  Cat drew in a breath, bathing her nerves in oxygen. “I don’t anticipate any problems.” Right up there with the biggest whoppers of my life, she thought. She anticipated nothing but problems. She hadn’t even met with Johnny officially yet. They had an extended session scheduled for later that morning. If she couldn’t convince the boy to testify, there wouldn’t be any meeting with Blake Wheeler. Talk about winding up with egg on her face!

  “Where are you staying?” Blake asked conversationally. “At your folk’s old place?”

  “No—” A sagging white clapboard house flashed into Cat’s mind. The place would be empty now that Mary D’Angelo, Cat’s mother, had gone back to Arkansas to nurse her own ailing mother. Empty and yet filled with memories. Cat doubted if she could even bring herself to visit her childhood home.

  “I’m staying at the Kirkpatricks’,” she said, smiling to cover her abruptness. “It’s a couple of blocks from here. Gwen arranged for me to house-sit while they’re in Mexico.”

  “Yes, I know the place.” He voiced the comment casually, letting his eyes drift over her features, hesitating on her mouth for a moment, then searching the hand she’d raised to her lapel. “You didn’t have red nail polish on yesterday, did you?”

  “Red nail polish?”

  His gaze shimmered with quicksilver. And his smile. There was something unnervingly sensual in the faint curve of his lips. Why in the world had he asked her a question like that? “I never wear nail polish,” she insisted, holding out naturally buffed nails to prove it.

  “Shame.”

  “Is there something wrong with my nails?”

  “No, they’re beautiful. They’re just not red.”

  Beautiful? That word might have thrown her if it hadn’t been for the odd inflections in his voice. He sounded amused, aroused, and faintly
disappointed. Cat stiffened. Perhaps it was old-fashioned, but she still equated red nails with wild parties and fast women. “What’s your point, Mr. Wheeler?”

  “I don’t think anybody will mind if you call me Blake.”

  She flushed slightly. What in the world is he up to? “I really think we should keep it professional, don’t you?”

  “Not necessarily.” Blake watched the sparks fly in her eyes and decided it was going to be a damn interesting meeting tomorrow, red nails or not. “But if professional works for you,” he added, “I can live with it.”

  Cat worked at the button cuff of her sleeve, tightening it around her wrist a notch. Oh, yes, this was the Blake Wheeler she remembered. Forever keeping his opponents off balance, baiting, probing for the fatal chink in the armor. Even with sixteen-year-old girls. There’s just one flaw in that approach, Mr. Wheeler, she thought, raising her head to meet his riveting gaze full on. Catherine D’Angelo isn’t sixteen anymore.

  “Tough guy, huh?”

  Johnny Drescher slouched low in his chair and kicked aimlessly at the leg of Cat’s desk. “Tough enough,” he replied.

  Cat clicked her fingernails along her desktop in a faint drum roll, unable to completely curb her frustration. She’d been trying for the best part of the morning to get Johnny to open up and tell her why he’d changed his mind about testifying. She knew he’d been frightened off by the harassment, but if she suggested that, he would probably deny it.

  It looked as though she was going to have to call Wheeler and cancel their meeting tomorrow, a task she didn’t relish. Still, her relationship with Johnny was far more important than one meeting. As she absently tapped the desk and contemplated the boy’s slumped posture, an idea struck.

  “That red-haired kid you decked yesterday afternoon,” she said, casually settling back in her chair. “Who was he?”

  Johnny shrugged without looking up. “Skip Sinclair.”