Love by Proxy Read online

  “Andy was at home with his mother,” she said.

  “Yes, I know. I hadn’t expected him to come into the office, and he didn’t call me until last night. I didn’t have time to warn you.”

  She was still staring blankly at him. “I got arrested. They took me to jail. They booked me. I was fingerprinted. They thought I was naked. I told them I wasn’t, but they wouldn’t listen. They locked me up!” Her eyes got wilder as she went along. “My father subscribes to this paper.” She held it up. “He likes to know what’s going on in the city where his daughter lives.” She stared down at the newspaper. “What a shock this will be. I’ve never even worn shorts downtown back home.”

  He couldn’t help it. He laughed. That only made it worse. She flung the paper on the floor while the elderly butler tried diligently to keep a straight face.

  “Mr. Callahan called me this morning. He fired me. Now I’ll have to go back home. The people in the post office will see that paper, and so will the mail carrier, and the mail carrier will tell his wife, and she’ll tell the ladies at church….” Her lower lip trembled as tears threatened. “I hate you. And I made Marla get your address from Andy so that I could come here and tell you how much I hate you. I hope your Rolls Royce rusts!”

  She turned around and started out the door, just as a quavering voice asked, “Who is that, Worth?”

  The voice was of someone the butler’s age, but feminine. Through tears, Amelia saw a tiny old woman moving into the hall from the room on the other side of the house. She could hardly walk; her gnarled hands were on a padded walker. She stood just inside the hall and looked for all the world like a cuddly toy. She smiled, brightening her blue eyes and her pale, wrinkled complexion.

  “Hello,” she said softly.

  “H-hello,” Amelia said, and even managed a watery smile.

  “I couldn’t help hearing,” the older woman apologized. “Worth hardly ever guffaws like that; it woke me from my nap. Are you the young lady he was bellowing about last night? You don’t look like a belly dancer.”

  “Actually, I’m a retired ax murderer,” Amelia said with a cold glare at Wentworth Carson. “Just recently retired.”

  “Thank goodness, I’m sure I wouldn’t enjoy being murdered. Do you drink tea, my dear?”

  “Grandmother, I’m sure Miss Glenn has packing to do,” the big man said, as if the prospect of having her out of the city delighted him.

  Amelia glared at him. “I like tea.”

  “Then do come and have a cup with me,” the old woman said. “I’m Jeanette Carson. Worth is my grandson.”

  “How lovely for you,” Amelia said. She gave Worth a glance and followed the little old lady into the elegance of rosewood and silk furniture and immaculate white carpeting. “My name is Amelia Glenn.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, my dear. I adore white, as you see. Impractical, but so lovely,” Jeanette Carson said. She eased down on the sofa in front of a long, polished coffee table, and rang a bell. A young woman in uniform appeared and was told to bring tea.

  “That was Carolyn,” Jeanette said. “Worth hasn’t run her off yet, but I do believe he’s giving it his best. He prefers to have me surrounded with men here. He’s sure I can get around women, but he believes that men can handle me. Ha!” She laughed. Her wrinkled face drew up indignantly. She sighed. “Anyway, he never brings young ladies home these days. I was simply shocked when he mentioned you. I didn’t know about you, you see.”

  “Oh, Worth and I are great friends,” she said, smiling poisonously at the big man who joined them. “Aren’t we?”

  He stared at her. “You and I, friends? God forbid!”

  “Don’t you worry, we will be. You’ll get used to me, you lucky man,” she added with a cold smile.

  “You brought your troubles on yourself, Miss Glenn,” he said. He sat down, hitching up his pants. “You should take some spelling courses.”

  She glared at him. “If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have gone to the restaurant in the first place.”

  “You started it,” he reminded her. He leaned back in his chair and smiled at her challengingly.

  “I do seem to have missed something,” Jeanette broke in, glancing from one to the other.

  “Lucky you.” Amelia smiled.

  “Miss Glenn was arrested in the early hours for—” he paused for effect “—flashing, wasn’t it?”

  She glared at him. “I was arrested for wearing a belly dancing costume under a trench coat,” she told the elderly woman, “at Wentworth’s instructions.”

  Jeanette gasped as she stared at her grandson. “You sent this young woman to an elegant French restaurant in a belly dancing costume?”

  His dark eyes narrowed at Amelia. “She came waltzing into my office wearing it, sang me a birthday song and kissed me.”

  Jeanette leaned forward. “Don’t be ridiculous, Worth, it isn’t your birthday.”

  “I know that!” he burst out. “It was a practical joke one of my employees played on me. Almost,” he added darkly, “an ex-employee.”

  “Now, now, Wentworth, you wouldn’t really fire him?” Amelia taunted.

  “Worth,” he said irritably. “No one calls me Wentworth.”

  “I can think up some better names,” Amelia said sweetly. “Perhaps you’d like to hear them, at length, some other time?”

  “That isn’t likely,” he said firmly. “You’ll be out of town.”

  “Out of town?” Jeanette frowned. “Why?”

  “She lost her job,” Wentworth Carson said.

  “Then, dear, you must give her another one,” Jeanette said. “It’s the least you can do, since it’s your fault she lost it.”

  “It is not my fault,” he said. “And I don’t have a job to give her,” he added smugly, “there are no vacancies.”

  “In that case, she can work for me,” Jeanette said haughtily. “I need a social secretary. Someone to fetch and carry and help me get around town. God knows, you’re never here in the daytime.”

  Worth sat up straight, as if he didn’t believe what he was hearing. “Social secretary?”

  “Yes,” Jeanette said. She gave him a dogged glare, and the resemblance between the two of them was so noticeable that Amelia almost smiled.

  He glared at Amelia.

  “I didn’t come here looking for a job,” she said in all honesty to Jeanette. “I only came to kill your grandson.”

  “Too messy on white carpet,” Jeanette said, shrugging it off and smiling as Carolyn brought in the big silver tea service. “Work for me instead. You can even live in, if you like.”

  “Hell, no,” Worth said quietly.

  “Wentworth!” Jeanette chided.

  He got up and walked out of the room, muttering things under his breath as he slammed the door behind him.

  “Now that he’s out of the way, let’s talk business,” Jeanette said, smiling at her guest. “I’m seventy-five, I have a temper as bad as my grandson’s, I’m overbearing and pushy and I never ask when I can demand.” She sat back, tea in hand. “I’m recovering from a broken hip and it’s hard for me to get around. Worth practically keeps me in chains. And I want to break out. You can help me.”

  “You don’t know me,” Amelia began.

  Jeanette stared at her. “In my day,” she said, “I was one of the best investigative reporters in Chicago. I am a dandy judge of character even to this day. I may not know you now, but I will. And so far, you pass with flying colors. Now,” she said. She named a figure twice what Callahan had paid Amelia. “Does that suit you? And would you like to live in?”

  “I would, if only to spite your grandson, but I signed a one-year lease where I am, and I like my landlords very much,” she confessed. “Besides,” she added, “I like my privacy. There simply isn’t any when you live with other people.”

  “How old are you, dear?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Parents?”

  “Both living. They
have a print shop back home in Georgia.”

  Jeanette stared into her tea. “And is there a man in your life?”

  She sighed. “Not unless you count Henry. He runs the paper back home and would marry me on a sunny day if it weren’t too inconvenient and didn’t happen on press day.”

  Jeanette laughed softly. “We’re going to get along very well. Yes, we are.”

  Amelia thought so, too. But when she came out two hours later, Wentworth Carson was waiting outside in the yard, hands in pockets and glaring holes in her.

  “What a snit we’re in,” Amelia chided. “Talk about bad-tempered people…”

  “It is not my fault you lost your job,” he told her bluntly. “And I like my life as it is. I want no part of you here. Tell my grandmother you won’t take the job.”

  “I like your grandmother,” she said curtly. “She’s just like my mother, crusty and unflappable and impossible to fool. I’ll take care of her.”

  He stared harder. “In return for what?” he asked, narrowed eyes telling her everything he wasn’t saying.

  “How often is she taken advantage of?” she asked instead.

  “Her heart is as big as the world,” he said. “She likes strays.”

  “I am not a stray. I have owners.”

  “Go home.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’d have to marry Henry!” she burst out. “If he’d still have me after he saw a copy of this morning’s paper. My reputation will be in shreds.”

  “Why not marry Henry?” He frowned.

  “Because the most exciting thing he ever said to me was, ‘Amy, your nose has a crook in it.’”

  His eyebrows lifted. “Not a passionate man.”

  “No.”

  His dark eyes roamed over her neat suit. “Are you a passionate woman?”

  “That’s something you’ll never need to know. I am going to work for your grandmother, not get involved with you,” she told him firmly.

  One corner of his disciplined mouth turned up. “She likes you. She’ll spend her days throwing you at my head and her nights finding more ways to get us married.”

  “You’re safe,” she told him, turning toward her old Ford. “I don’t like older men.”

  “Forty is not old,” he said shortly.

  “At twenty-eight, it is old,” she returned, facing him squarely. “I want somebody to play with.”

  He started laughing, and only then did she realize how he’d interpreted what she said. Her face flamed.

  “Baseball!” she burst out. “Tennis and swimming and jogging, not…not…that!”

  He laughed harder. She didn’t say another word. She crawled into her car and managed with the greatest of difficulty to get it turned around and headed out of the yard. He was still standing there laughing when she drove away.

  Four

  Amelia showed up for work the next morning at eight-thirty sharp, wearing a sedate gray ensemble that made her pale blue eyes look slate-gray to match it. The skirt and knit blouse were worn with a trendy little short-sleeved cotton jacket, and she put her hair in a neat bun. She wasn’t giving Wentworth Carson any cause for complaint with the way she dressed.

  When she pulled up in front of the house, a short, elderly yardman motioned her to move the car down to the garage. She cranked the engine again, with difficulty. The old yellow Ford had a habit of refusing to turn on again after the engine got hot. It was one of those ghostly problems that several mechanics hadn’t been able to solve, so she lived with it. But today it did crank, eventually, and she pulled it with a clank and a clatter down to the elegant, spacious garage where Wentworth’s Rolls and a Mercedes were parked.

  It made her feel odd, parking between two such luxurious vehicles, and she was half afraid that she might accidentally scratch one of them. But it was obvious that Wentworth didn’t want her pitiful old wreck parked in front of his house. And that irritated her no end. Snob, she thought angrily.

  She’d worked herself into a fever of resentment by the time she got to the front door. Well, he needn’t think she was going to skulk up the back stairs like a servant. She was as good as he was, any day!

  The maid opened the door for her with a smile. “Come in, please. Mrs. Carson is still asleep, but Mr. Worth said you’re to have breakfast with him in the dining room. Follow me, please.”

  Breakfast with Worth, she thought, how lucky could a working girl get?

  He was sitting at the head of the table with a cup of coffee and a pile of toast at his elbow. He glanced up when she came into the room, his eyes dark and steady and expressionless.

  “What a treat,” he taunted. “Breakfast with the terror of the Egyptian tombs.”

  “I am not a mummy,” she countered. “And I don’t want breakfast.”

  “Yes, it’s patently obvious that you rarely eat,” he commented, glancing at her. “But if you work here, you’ll need to. You see,” he added, leaning back with a disgustingly confident smile on his tanned face, “my grandmother and I have an arrangement about you.”

  This sounded unpleasant. She sat down gingerly and eyed him suspiciously. “You have?”

  “Yes. I don’t have a private secretary. And since you’ll be here all day, every day—” he made it sound like a waking curse “—and since grandmother will need you for only a few hours a day, we’ve decided to share you.”

  Her skin chilled. “I don’t want to be shared.”

  “But then, it isn’t your choice,” he reminded her. “You can always go home and marry Henry,” he suggested mildly.

  She shuddered delicately. “Even working for you wouldn’t be that bad.”

  “Should I be flattered?” he murmured dryly. He lifted his head, craggy features relaxing a little as he studied her face. “It must take layers of makeup,” he said absently.

  He surprised her. “What?” she stammered.

  “Your complexion,” he explained. “It’s much too perfect to be natural.”

  “I use soap,” she said curtly. “Nothing else, not even powder. I don’t like artificial things.”

  “Neither do I,” he returned. His tanned fingers toyed with a spoon in his coffee. He was wearing a blue jacket with a white shirt and a speckled tie, and he looked every inch a business magnate. But the muscles under that jacket were formidable, and they rippled with every movement he made. His hair seemed even darker under the light, neat and clean, and there was a faint darkness where he shaved, as if he needed to shave often. His mouth fascinated her. She kept remembering how it felt on hers, how expert it had been. He was the kind of man who could have had any woman he wanted, and she was secretly glad that her powers of resistance weren’t going to be tested by him. She would have been defenseless in any kind of confrontation, and she wouldn’t have the sophistication to hold him. He could have broken her heart, and she was delighted that he wasn’t going to try.

  “She’s very fragile,” she ventured as she poured coffee from the carafe into a delicate china cup and added cream.

  “What?”

  “Your grandmother,” she returned. “How did she break her hip?”

  “Trying to learn how to break dance.”

  Amelia had just taken a mouthful of coffee and almost strangled on it. She gaped at him.

  “That’s right,” he said calmly. He sipped his own coffee. “She had videotapes of the steps, and she was trying to do a spin. She was too close to the fireplace. She went down on the stone hearth.”

  “But she’s seventy-five!” she exclaimed.

  “She likes hard rock,” he continued. “She enjoys very racy movies, she flirts outrageously with men, she can outdrink me when she likes and you’ll get an education in the art of self-expression if you’re ever in the vicinity when she loses her temper.”

  She was only just getting her breath back. “An exceptional lady,” she said.

  “Quite. But she has an unusually soft heart, and I don’t want her hurt,” he a
dded, with a level, hard gaze. “I don’t know you. But I will. And if I find out anything that doesn’t jibe with what information you’ve given me, I will toss you out on your ear.”

  She met his hard gaze levelly, eyebrows raised. “Well, I did get a parking ticket once,” she confessed.

  “Funny girl,” he taunted.

  “My mama says that laughing beats crying any day,” she returned with a vacant smile.

  “Laugh while you can,” he said pleasantly. He finished his coffee. “Are you through? I’d like to get started.”

  She blinked. “Started doing what?”

  “Working, of course. I’m going out in the field today, to inspect a potential building site. You’ll come along and take notes.”

  “But…but, Mrs. Carson…?”

  He got to his feet, towering over her. “Grandmother won’t be up for hours yet. She watched movies until four in the morning.”

  “But she said to be here at eight-thirty,” she protested.

  “I told you she’d be trying her hand at matchmaking,” he reminded her.

  She looked him up and down and tried to manage a disparaging expression. “Well, I’m really sorry, Wentworth, but you aren’t my type. I don’t like big men.”

  He pursed his lips and smiled mischievously. “No?” He reached out a big hand and tugged her gently to her feet. His hands caught her waist and lifted her on a level with his eyes. “There are advantages to being my size. I don’t get argued with much.”

  Her hands were on his big shoulders, cold and nervous. And the proximity disturbed her so much that she could feel her heart beating. His eyes were almost black, with very definite whites and black rims around the brown. They were impressive eyes. His nose was impressive, too, despite its size. It had a faintly Roman look, very straight and formidable. His forehead was broad and his mouth was firm and his chin had a dimple in it. She’d never liked dimpled chins, but this one was really sexy.

  “Were any of your people Italian?” she asked without meaning to.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” he said. “My grandfather was.”