He knew exactly what she meant. Lance shook his head darkly. “I’m not talking about something contained within a circle of rocks you roast marshmallows over,” he said contemptuously. “I’m talking about afire mething that roasts flesh. That has no respect for who you are or how old you are, it just destroys everything in its path, getting stronger, bigger, defying you to stop it.”
The problem with growing up the way she had, the merest suggestion brought vivid images to her mind. She could see exactly what he was talking about. See it and feel it. Melanie licked her lips before answering. They’d gone completely dry.
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.” Lance kept his distance from her, because he wasn’t sure what he would do, just now, if he were close. Shake her or hold her. The latter worried him more than the former did. “I don’t enjoy my work, Ms. McCloud. What I enjoy is knowing that if I do my work right, that destructive son of a bitch called fire isn’t going to get a chance to get a toehold on the property I inspected.” His eyes held hers. “And then no one needs to die.”
Melanie blew out a shaky breath as the pain he felt became evident to her.
“How bad was it?” she whispered.
He shook himself free of the memory that haunted him, mentally cursing his lack of control. “What?”
She knew, or thought she knew. “The fire you were in. How bad was it?”
Lance stared at her. Did she profess to gaze into crystal balls, too? “Who said I was in a fire?”
Why did he bother denying it? “You did. Not in so many words, but you did.”
The sympathy in her eyes unmanned him, sending him to a place he had no desire to be. He didn’t have time to waste talking to her. He had work to do.
“Thompson can give you Kelly’s address if you’re interested in sending him something. He’s the guy looking in and staring at you.”
Then, before she could say anything else to him, he brushed past her and walked out.
Chapter Three
“Who’s the lady on your desk?”
Her question stopped him cold. This woman seemed to derive pleasure in preventing him from making it through doorways.
Lance turned slowly around. In her hand she held the small, silver-framed photograph of Bess he kept on his desk. The one touch of himself he’d added to an otherwise depersonalized office.
He glared at her. “Does the word privacy mean anything to you?”
She’d already begun to put the photograph back, moving aside the pile of folders that had taken the opportunity to spill all over the newly vacated space and obliterate it. His question had her looking at him quizzically.
With a sigh Lance strode back into the office and took the photograph from her. One sweep of the back of his hand and there was room on the desk. He planted the photograph back where it belonged, his eyes warning her to leave it alone.
Melanie looked at the woman with the soft mouth and kind eyes. There was a quiet, serene beauty there that didn’t immediately leap out at a person. She raised her eyes to Lance’s face. That couldn’t be his mother, or else he wouldn’t be so touchy about his privacy.
“Why, are you having an affair with her?”
The question stunned him. What kind of mind did this woman have? Were there only photographs of men she’d had affairs with on her desk?
“No, that’s my aunt Bess,” he snapped.
So, he had filial feelings. There was hope for him yet. Melanie grinned, thinking of her own aunt. “My aunt Elaine never married. Instead she had affairs with younger men. She used to say that was what kept her young, and going strong.”
Lance couldn’t picture Bess having an affair with any man, younger or older. From his earliest recollection, she had been entirely devoted to the memory of her husband, who’d died on a hotly contested piece of dirt half a world away, six months into their marriage. That had been thirty-three years ago. Bess had never shown the slightest inclination of wanting to go out with other men. One heart, one love, that was the way she liked to put it. From the sound of it, that wasn’t something McCloud’s aunt would understand.
“Your aunt sounds like a character.” Apparently, it was a family trait.
Striving for patience, Lance waited for Melanie to leave. She didn’t show the slightest inclination that she was going to.
The grin deepened into a smile. “I suppose she was.” Melanie saw the mute question in his eyes when she said was, though she doubted he’d ask. Not because any sense of politeness prevented him, but because he seemed unwilling to accumulate any extraneous information about people. It was almost as if he was afraid that knowing things would force him to be friendly. She told him, anyway. “Aunt Elaine died a little over two years ago. I made the shop look like her parlor.”
With all those photographs hanging on the wall? “Big movie buff?”
He’d asked without thinking. His aunt Bess loved old movies. They made her sentimental. As a boy, Lance had watched them with her. Believing in sentiment was what had set him up for the fall he’d taken, he remembered. His eyes darkened.
Melanie noticed the slight shift and wondered what brought it on.
“The world’s biggest.” A fond note crept into her voice. “That’s how she got into her line of work to begin with. She loved movie stars, loved being around them and figured she might as well be paid for it.”
Lance knew he shouldn’t ask. Like leaving food out for a stray cat, it would only encourage her to stay. But the same curiosity that made him so good at the investigations he conducted burrowed forth, obviously not knowing the difference between being curious about something trivial and something of grave importance.
“And your aunt was—”
Melanie warmed to her subject, fully aware that he was leading her out of his office.
“A wardrobe mistress, then a makeup artist for two of the major studios. She did a bit of designing, too,” she told him proudly. “Those were some of her clothes they wore in Next Year, Paris.”
Melanie doubted he was even mildly familiar with the old classic, a tragicomedy that still required at least three hankies to see the viewer through.
How was it, Lance wondered, with all the people in the world, the world could still be such a small place sometimes? He found it completely uncanny that out of almost an endless selection at her disposal, McCloud would hit upon Bess’s all-time favorite movie. Suspicions inched their way forward in his mind, but in all fairness, he had to dismiss them. There was no way the woman could have known something like that on her own. Not unless she knew Bess, and that was highly unlikely. He knew, by sight or at least by name, almost everyone his aunt was acquainted with.
Almost against his will, Lance recalled the first time Bess had made him watch the movie. He was twelve and rebelliously reluctant to sit through what he figured was just a “dumb-old girl movie,” though he would have never voiced his protest in those exact words to Bess. But she had prevailed, and he’d found himself struggling not to alternately laugh, then cry, then laugh again. Years later, he figured out she’d probably heard the gurgling noises he’d made and chose, for the sake of preserving his budding male pride, to ignore them and not comment.
Bess was one in a million.
So was the woman with him, for entirely different reasons.
Melanie cocked her head, studying his face. She’d been right. He did look better devoid of that constricting, severe, expression he wore. As a matter of fact, he was pretty nearly a heart stopper. She wondered if he knew and decided that he