She had dressed that morning in a white T-shirt and baggy gray knit shorts, a pair of ratty white socks on her feet. Her white-blond hair fell to her shoulders, probably looking stringy since she hadn’t bothered to style it She wore no makeup. Her entire beauty regime for the past few days had consisted of brushing her teeth.
Her telephone rang occasionally, but she allowed the answering machine to pick it up. Her family thought she was away on business. Her few friends here in Atlanta, who knew the truth about her job, thought she was still in Honoria. She doubted anyone would suspect that she’d been holed up in her apartment all this time, slowly sinking into a depression she couldn’t seem to climb out of.
She hated herself for behaving this way. Moping and sulking weren’t her style. But then, she’d never been fired before. Never in her life had she truly failed at anything...and she couldn’t seem to do anything now except sit in her apartment and ask herself what had gone wrong.
She’d tried to do the right thing—just as she’d always tried to follow the rules and make the right choices. All her life, she’d done what everyone wanted her to do—what everyone expected her to do—and she’d always been phenomenally successful. Yet, the first time she’d rebelled, the first time she’d refused to play by the rules, to go along with what was expected of her even when she honestly believed the others were wrong, she’d been summarily dismissed. Fired.
And now she didn’t know what to do. Whose expectations to fulfill. Being fired for standing her own ground had made her wonder if she’d ever in her life done anything that hadn’t been at someone else’s bidding.
Her doorbell rang, once, then again. She ignored it.
A moment later, someone pounded on her door. She frowned and huddled more deeply into the corner of her couch.
The pounding didn’t stop. It only got louder, more insistent.
Tara realized that the knocking had settled into a recognizable rhythm. “Shave and a haircut—two bits.” Over and over, until finally she jumped to her feet and stalked to the door, determined to send this annoying person on his way before he drove her nuttier than she’d already become.
Irritably, she jerked open the door without even pausing to see who was on the other side.
The man on her doorstep could have stepped out of a 1930’s musical. From the gray felt fedora on his golden head to the snazzy black-and-white-checked suspenders he wore. with a pale yellow shirt and loosely pleated charcoal slacks, he was obviously someone who followed no one’s style except his own. Belying the urgency of his rapping on her door, he lounged on the doorstep as if he hadn’t a care in the world. As if he’d had no doubt that she would get around to opening the door eventually.
“Oh, good. You’re here.” His smile was lazy, his eyes a wicked glint of bright blue beneath the shadow of his hat brim.
“Blake?” Tara felt her jaw drop. Though this man had been featured quite prominently in her fantasies during the past two years, he was the last person on earth she would have expected to find at her door this afternoon.
“Yeah. Listen, do you have any coffee? I haven’t had any caffeine all day and I’m about to grow fangs. Instant would do in a pinch, but I really prefer freshbrewed. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just as long as it’s hot and strong.”
“I—er—” She lifted a hand to her temple, thinking maybe she’d fallen asleep on the sofa and was having a really bizarre dream. Bad Chinese food, maybe?
“Black. No sugar.” Blake stepped past her as if he’d been warmly invited inside.
Tara found herself standing alone at the open door while he crossed her cluttered living room to take a seat in a wingback chair.
“Hey, General Hospital,” he said, making himself comfortable in front of the TV. “Those Quartermaines are always in trouble, aren’t they?”
“Blake, what are you—”
“If you’ve got any cookies to go with that coffee, I’d take a few. Don’t go to any trouble, though, okay?”
She looked from Blake to the open doorway, wondering rather dazedly how he’d gotten through it. She couldn’t believe he had just waltzed into her apartment and ordered coffee as if she was running a sidewalk café.
Tara had suffered from what she’d considered an embarrassingly juvenile crush on this man for almost two years, though she knew it was unlikely anything would come of it. They’d had no real connection. Blake had never been to her apartment before; there’d been no reason for him to stop by. He was only someone who had done some investigative work for the law firm where she’d been employed before she was—as always, she had to swallow hard before she finished the thought—fired.
She didn’t even know his last name.
“Blake, this really isn’t a good time for a visit,” she said, suddenly uncomfortably aware of her appearance, and the condition of her usually impeccable apartment, as well as all the other reasons why she wasn’t in the mood to entertain.
“I can see I caught you taking a lazy afternoon,” he said sympathetically. “Everyone deserves one of those occasionally. I really hate to interrupt your day off, but there’s something I need to discuss with you. We’ll talk about it over coffee, shall we?”
It didn’t look as though he was going anywhere until he told her why he’d come—and he seemed inclined to take his time about that. Tara sighed and closed the door with a fatalistic shrug.
Maybe she should have been more worried about having a strange man push his way into her house. But she wasn’t afraid of Blake, even if she was curious about why he’d come. She had never heard anything negative about him from the management team at the law firm, and she, better than anyone, knew that they demanded only the highest standards from anyone affiliated with Carpathy, Dillon and Delacroix. In fact, she’d gotten the distinct impression that her former superiors had nothing but respect for Blake and his work.
She might as well give him coffee and find out what he was doing here.
“I’ll, er, be right back,” she said, running a hand through her rather limp hair.
He seemed to be interested in the soap opera. “No hurry,” he assured her.