Abby, Get Your Groom! Page 8

  Neither of them said anything until they reached the old house’s porch.

  “I’m upstairs, China is right across the hall,” she explained.

  “Then let me go up with you to carry these,” he offered.

  She braced the food containers she was carrying against the front of her and opened the door, leading him through what the landlady called the vestibule and up the flight of carpeted stairs to the second floor.

  “Let me unlock my door and then I’ll take those containers back from you,” Abby said. “China said she wouldn’t be late but this stuff should probably go in my refrigerator, just in case. I can give her her share tomorrow.”

  “Sure,” he agreed, waiting patiently while she put the key in the lock and then pushed open her door just barely, because she didn’t want him to see the mess she’d left trying to decide what to wear.

  “Go ahead and stack them on these,” she suggested, holding out her containers to accept his.

  He stepped close to set them down but once he had he didn’t move back again. He stayed where he was, only inches from her.

  And he was looking at her intently once more, with those blue eyes full of something she couldn’t explain, but something that seemed—and felt—warm and admiring.

  “Thanks for coming tonight,” he said then, his voice deeper, quieter, as if for her ears alone.

  “Thanks for inviting us. It was fun.”

  “I hope so,” he said, still scanning her face, her eyes, her mouth...

  And suddenly she was fairly certain that she wasn’t the only one of them thinking about kissing, that he was, too.

  That he might even be leaning slightly forward.

  That he might even do it...

  And even as everything in her shouted warnings that it wasn’t something she should let happen, her chin tilted a fraction of an inch all on its own to make it easier for him.

  But after a moment he yanked his head back as if his better judgment had finally kicked in, and he stepped away.

  “We’ve narrowed down the stores where Gus Glassman might have hidden the lockbox,” he said then. “As soon as we find it I’ll let you know. If that isn’t before Wednesday then I guess I’ll just see you at the trial run for the wedding.”

  Abby nodded once more. “Okay,” she said softly.

  Then she again raised her chin, not in an invitation but with pride, to let him know she didn’t care that he hadn’t gone through with a kiss.

  Whether or not that was how he read it, he said good-night and headed back down the stairs.

  Abby slipped into her apartment and closed the door behind her, knowing even as she did that that last bit of cheekiness had been nothing but a show.

  Because, despite being convinced that no kissing should now or ever pass between them, she still cared that he might have been tempted to do it but had stopped when he’d recalled his cousin’s warning.

  The warning that had to mean Cade thought she wasn’t good enough for Dylan.

  And if he hadn’t kissed her because he thought she wasn’t good enough for him, she not only cared, she cared a lot more than she wished she did.

  Chapter Five

  “What did you say this man’s name is?” Abby asked Dylan.

  He’d called on Monday night to tell her that the lockbox had been found and that he’d also tracked down a former employee who had worked closely with her father, seemed to know him fairly well and was willing to talk with them about him.

  Abby’s last appointment on Tuesday was at three in the afternoon. Dylan had said he could get away from work at four and would pick her up shortly after that in order for them to meet with Gus’s old acquaintance. That was what they were on their way to do now. Afterward they were going to pick up the lockbox that was being held for them at the store.

  “Marty Sorensen is the guy’s name,” Dylan answered as he got on the highway in the direction of Aurora.

  “And how did he know Gus? Did he do the same kind of things for your family?”

  She was looking at Dylan in profile as he drove, so she saw the frown that gave her an answer before he said, “I’m pretty sure he did. There seems to be kind of a split between people who worked straight-up security for us and...”

  “The enforcers,” Abby supplied.

  “Yeah,” he conceded. “When I called around to other people on the security roster at the time they were...well, let’s say they didn’t want to talk about Gus Glassman. A couple of them said if I wanted to know anything about him I should talk to his crew—Marty Sorensen or some other guys whose names seemed to bring out the same attitude in people.”

  “A negative one?” Abby guessed.

  “Not a positive one, that’s for sure,” Dylan said somewhat under his breath.

  “The security personnel who weren’t the boss’s bullies didn’t want to be connected to the boss’s bullies,” she suggested, once more not thrilled to hear that her father seemed to have also been the kind of person she’d avoided in foster and group homes.

  “That’s the impression I got,” Dylan confirmed. “Of all the names I was given of other members of his group, I could only reach two of them. And the first guy said he’d worked with Gus but didn’t know him well enough to talk about him—”

  “Or he didn’t want to admit to it,” Abby muttered.

  “But Marty Sorensen actually seemed happy to tell us anything we wanted to know and invited us over to his place to do it.”

  “Did he seem...you know...like a roughneck? Are you sure we should be going to his house? Maybe it would be better to meet him in a public place,” Abby said, thinking that possibly they should practice more caution.

  Dylan took his eyes off the road long enough to cast her a smile. “When they were working together, Marty was old enough to be Gus’s father. Now the guy is in his eighties and it’s his apartment in an assisted-living facility that we’re going to. Even if he used to be a roughneck I think I can keep him in line if I need to.” He laughed as he added, “I don’t know exactly what these guys were like in their prime, but I’m reasonably sure we aren’t in any danger from Marty Sorensen this afternoon.”

  “Maybe I’m not, but he could pull out a gun and hold you for ransom,” she said as a comeback to his amusement.

  “Then you’ll have to save me,” he said.

  “Oh, you’re out of luck—I’m not taking a bullet for you,” she joked even as she drank in the sight of him.

  She’d had time to run home and change from her work clothes into a pair of black capris and a black tank top that she wore under a meant-to-be-seen-through sheer white shirt decorated with embroidered flowers.

  But he was still wearing part of what she assumed was a work suit—gray slacks with only a faint dove gray stripe to them, and a dove-gray dress shirt with the collar button open and the sleeves now rolled to mid-forearm, exposing thick wrists that—for some strange reason—she really liked the look of.

  He was cleanly shaven, though, and he smelled great so he must have done that much sprucing up at his office. And Abby wished it didn’t feel so good to be with him again and that she didn’t find it quite as easy as she did to talk to him, to joke around with him, to tease him, to be herself with him.

  The assisted-living facility was right off the highway and there was ample parking. Once they found the unit number Dylan parked directly in front of it.

  There were lawn chairs on the small porch that went with every apartment and Dylan nodded at them. “It’s a nice day, would you feel better if we got him to sit outside with us?”

  “No, I’ll try to keep you safe inside,” she said with mock resignation.

  “Thanks, that makes me feel so much better,” he countered with another laugh.

  Abby didn’t wait for him to
come around to her side of the SUV—the same SUV she’d ridden in with him to Sunday dinner.

  She met him at the curb and they walked side by side to the unit’s door. For some reason, along the way she had the oddest desire for him to reach for her hand to hold. It made no sense. She could only account for it as her wanting comfort before meeting some former thug who had known her apparently-also-thuggish father.

  But holding hands certainly wasn’t going to happen, and feeling the need to do something with hers, she put them in her pants pockets.

  Dylan knocked on the door. Just a few moments later, it opened and all of her attention went to the elderly man standing there.

  He was not quite as tall as Dylan, with a full head of snow-white hair and a congenial but craggy and vastly wrinkled face that had likely never been considered handsome. Where there once must have been muscle, he was now only skin and bones that left his clothes—khaki-green trousers and a plaid flannel shirt—hanging loosely on him. There was nothing at all intimidating about him.

  “Marty?” Dylan asked.

  “You must be Mr. Camden,” the old man responded respectfully.

  “Dylan, please,” Dylan amended, sounding respectful himself and as if he was uncomfortable with the elderly man’s deference. “And this is Abby Crane—Gus Glassman’s daughter.”

  “I knew it!” Marty Sorensen said. “You’re the spittin’ image of your momma! Same hair and those eyes—big and dark. I thought she might be Eye-talian but Gus said no, didn’t I see how fair of skin she was? Irish through and through. A beauty, though! And that’s alive in you, for sure!” The elderly man stepped out of the doorway and said, “Come on in.”

  Abby had no idea why she looked to Dylan but he was watching her and raised his eyebrows as if leaving it up to her whether she accepted the invitation or ran the other way.

  Part of her wanted to run the other way, a little afraid somehow of learning whatever it was that Dylan had uncovered for her.

  Then he gave a slight nod toward the inside of the apartment and she could have sworn he was telling her it was all right. That everything would be all right.

  And from that she found the courage to go in, with Dylan close enough behind her that she could still feel his presence—something she appreciated. And, strangely enough for someone accustomed to going through her life basically alone, something she felt a need for all of a sudden.

  After asking if he could get them something to eat or drink—and Abby and Dylan assuring the older man that they were fine—the three of them sat in the apartment’s tiny living room. Dylan and Abby took the love seat they were motioned to, and Marty Sorensen gingerly lowered himself into an old lounger that seemed held together by strips of silver duct tape.

  “I can’t believe a real live Camden is here in my house,” Marty Sorensen said then, sounding honored. “H.J. Camden’s boy—”

  “Actually, H.J. was my great-grandfather,” Dylan said.

  “Fine man, that Mr. Camden. But hard as nails,” Marty Sorensen proclaimed.

  “He was important to me. Good to me,” Dylan said without confirming or denying the type of person his great-grandfather had been.

  “And young Gus!” the elderly man said then, switching his attention to Abby. “You were the apple of that boy’s eye! You and your momma while he had her. Only met her once, a few weeks before you were born—they got married just the two of them at the courthouse without any fuss so I wasn’t invited to that and then...well. I think he was probably right to keep his sweet young wife and his work separate. But from what I heard from him, those two were happy as clams together. Young Gus said they were lucky to have each other, both of them alone in the world—”

  “Neither of them had any family?” Dylan asked.

  “Not a one. The way Gus told it,” Marty went from answering Dylan to talking to Abby again, “your momma was born to people too old to have kids—she was a change-of-life baby. They’d died someways or another before she even met Gus and she didn’t have any other family. Young Gus’s folks were killed together in some kind of boating accident when he was barely seventeen. He was on his own from then—had to quit school and get work to live. He had kind of a chip on his shoulder by the time he came to work for the Camdens—life had knocked him around pretty good. I think he was ’bout twenty-three or-four when Mr. H.J. put him with us—probably because he was a big galoot of a kid and that chip on his shoulder came in handy for the kind of jobs we were called on to do.”

  The elderly man cleared his throat, apparently stopping himself from going into detail about those jobs.

  When he went on it was in a better direction. “Young Gus got plenty happy when he met your momma, though. He’d say he felt like he’d struck gold in her. Then in you. Never saw any man who loved his wife and baby like he did. Then he lost that momma of yours. It was a shame for that poor boy.”

  “How did he...lose her?” Abby asked.

  “She was hit by a car walkin’ to church of all things. You were...oh, just a little baby—a few months old. Gus was home with you, both of you sick that Sunday, or you might all have been goners. I guess she went to early services so she could get home to take care of the both of you and some guy still drunk from a bender the night before just ran her over—”

  The elderly man caught himself and said, “Oh, maybe I should remember who I’m talkin’ to.” He was glancing at Dylan when he said that and Abby wondered if Dylan had given him some kind of signal to tone it down.

  “That boy was in bad shape after that, I’ll tell you,” Marty said then. “It was you, pretty missy, that got him by, but just barely. Me and my girl—that’s what he’d say, sobbin’ like a baby. I gotta keep goin’ even if it’s just me and my girl left. Tore me up to see it.”

  Another solemn shake of the old man’s head.

  “Maybe that’s how things went as bad as they did that day with that supervisor,” Marty muttered more to himself than to either of them.

  “The chip came back on Gus’s shoulder?” Dylan guessed, as if there were some things he wanted to know for himself.

  “It was like there was two of him then,” the elderly man said. “On the one hand he’d take out the picture of you that he always carried in his shirt pocket,” he said to Abby, “and he’d smile and touch your face like it was you right there with him—all gentle and soft-eyed.” Back to Dylan he said, “But yeah, on the job, sometimes there was maybe more temper to him than there should have been after losin’ that wife of his. Shorter fuse, you know? We just thought it helped to get the job done, but then—” More head shaking.

  “Were you with Gus when the supervisor was killed?” Dylan inquired.

  “I was. That supervisor was a hothead himself. He jumped us. Came at us from behind, surprised us before we’d even had words with him. Had a pipe. Knocked me to the ground. I was tryin’ to get my bearings again when he went for Gus. But that was when it went real bad. Nothin’ I could do, half blacked out on the floor, and the next thing I knew...well, the whole thing’d gone south.”

  Marty Sorensen spoke to Abby again then. “I said that at Gus’s trial—that the supervisor came at us first. But he was a scrawny fella, that supervisor. A lot smaller than Gus. And the two factory workers who’d seen it said Gus’d knocked the pipe out of the supervisor’s hands early on in the fight and still went on givin’ him a beat-down anyways. Till the supervisor hit his head and...well, the supervisor was pretty beat up—besides bein’ dead—so I guess the jury figured Gus’d gone too far, even though he weren’t the one to start the fight. Hated to see it. That boy didn’t deserve to go to prison.”

  “What happened after the sentencing?” Dylan said then. “I mean, you knew Gus had a little girl and no family to leave her with—”

  “Mr. H.J. sent me away from here soon as I’d testified. Sent me to London, England,”
Marty said proudly. “To look after things that were stirred up with the opening of a Camdens there—that Harrods place didn’t like it nohow. I barely got word what the jury had said ’bout poor Gus. I figured he must’ve found somebody to take that little girl of his. A friend or somebody.” Those answers had gone to Dylan. But to Abby he said, “What did he do with you?”

  Abby felt Dylan flinch beside her and he did reach for her hand then, squeezing it for only a split second before letting it go, as if offering support against the impact of the elderly man’s bluntness.

  She answered the question and the old man flinched then, too. “Oh...well...that couldn’ta been good.”

  “It wasn’t,” Dylan confirmed. “Until now she hasn’t even known who Gus Glassman was, let alone that he was her father or anything about her mother or...anything.”

  “I’m sorry,” the elderly man said. “I didn’t think past... I just went on doin’ what I was told, goin’ where I was sent. It was the job, you know? I couldn’ta done anything for you anyways, an old bachelor like me, livin’ in one room with a hot plate even before I went to London.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” Abby said kindly, certain that it was. Even if Gus had persuaded Marty to take her, he probably wouldn’t have passed muster getting approved as a foster parent. She would have ended up in the system, anyway.

  “I’ll tell you, though, that boy was crazy about you.” The elderly man reverted to assuring her of that. “The sun rose and set in your momma, and then still in you even after losin’ her. Had to have killed him inside to leave you...”

  “I’m sure it did,” Dylan contributed.

  They meant well. Abby knew that. But she was numb. Or dazed, maybe. And still what she was hearing merely seemed like more words, a story, not anything that felt real or personally connected to her.

  “That’s about all I know,” Marty said then. “It was a bad thing that happened all the way around but before that, young Gus got a little happiness with you and your momma, and I guess that’s somethin’. For him, anyways. For you—”