AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The statement won her Ramsey’s full attention. “No kidding.” He sounded impressed, and she flushed with warmth again. “Let’s hope this means something,” he said.
Lucy concurred.
“What did you decide on for dinner?” She had to know where they were going.
“That steak you mentioned sounded great.”
A table for two on the river, coming right up, she thought, pleased with his choice. And worried about her pleasure, too.
“We can go over the faculty list while we eat,” she said.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
Trouble was, he probably had been. While Lucy was busy wondering if there was any chance at all that the coming night might bring more carnal knowledge of him.
“H ow old was Jack Colton when he was at UC? Eighteen? Nineteen?” Lucy was driving again—toward her house, for sure this time. She’d managed to use up a couple of hours of the evening at the restaurant on the river, managed to delay her arrival at her place until after dark.
“About that. He was there twenty-seven years ago and he’s forty-six now.”
Sandy should already be out for the night with the help of the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed for her. Just for this first week.
“And already he was fixated on money,” she said. Focusing on Jack Colton at dinner had helped center her. Ramsey wasn’t going to try anything with her. He wasn’t going to kiss her.
She didn’t interest him in that way.
She should have thought of Sandy before she’d invited Ramsey to stay with her. She should have thought, period.
“Colton was an only child of older folks who gave him no financial or emotional security. I can understand why providing for himself was important to him.” Ramsey was continuing on with the dinner conversation as though they were talking on the phone, not getting ready to have a sleepover.
“Yes, I can, too,” she managed, in spite of sweaty palms. “But Jack seems to exhibit more than a normal drive for money. He worked in place of fun, but also in place of sleep— at college and, from what you said, back in Comfort Cove, too.”
Headlights came at them, illuminating Ramsey’s face as he looked at her.
“Right. Where are you going with this?”
Lucy signaled the turn onto her street, and slowed down. “Motive. What if working all the hours in a day still didn’t provide Jack with enough money for him to feel secure? Because if, as it sounds, he suffered from scarcity mentality, then no amount would have been enough. It’s not like he was saving for something in particular, right? Or supporting anyone. A single guy, living alone, could certainly have lived on what Colton was making.”
“Especially as frugal as he apparently was,” Ramsey added. “As you said, he worked all the time, but he didn’t own anything of value.”
“I’m guessing he had a nice bank account. People with scarcity mentality fear that there will never be enough. No matter how much is there.”
“He somehow makes a connection with the black-market baby business and Claire Sanderson becomes another consequence of Jack Colton’s fears.” Rams
ey went with her theory.
Was she off base here? Lucy pulled into her drive and straight into the attached garage, closing the automatic door behind her, trying to get more completely into Jack Colton’s mind-set, to let her instincts speak to her.
Her work instincts.
“What do you think?” she asked him, turning off the car. Think Jack. Talk Jack.
“It’s just the garage, but so far, it’s nice.” Ramsey smiled.
“I meant Jack’s motive.” She swallowed.
“I think you could be right.” He was all cop again as he looked at her and she wondered if she’d imagined the personal moment. Or conjured it out of an embarrassingly desperate, sudden longing for his body. “I’ve already looked for blackmarket baby connections and found nothing,” he continued, clearly unaware of where her thoughts had been heading.
“What about Gladys? Jack was in Cincinnati to go to UC. My mother heard about Gladys from an unsavory crowd hanging out by the riverfront in downtown Cinci. Maybe Jack heard of her then, too? And maybe that’s why Claire’s hair ribbon was at Gladys’s house.”
