Diana Palmer - The Case of the Missing Secretary

“I don’t want to come back to work for you, Mr. Deverell,” she said icily. “Here, at least, I’m not part of the office furniture. I’m a real live, breathing person with talent and ability, and if I died, Dane and Tess would miss me.”

“We’ve worked together for three years,” he reminded her.

“Three years too long,” she said, regaining her lost dignity slowly. “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble replacing me.”

“None of the temporaries can spell,” he said angrily. “They can’t file, or project a pleasant personality over the phone. Only one of them has any sense at all, and my mother hired her before I knew it. My brother hates the latest addition to the office. She actually told him to get his own coffee!”

“Your brother should have been getting his own coffee for years,” she reminded him.

“And my mother’s lost again,” he added irritably, glancing at Dane. “You’ll have to track her down. She told my brother something about a trip to Venice.”

“No problem,” Dane said. “Just give me her last known location.” He studied Kit. “I might let Kit have this assignment. She knows Tansy.”

“My mother missed you, too,” Logan told Kit with an angry frown. “That’s probably why she vanished.”

“Go ahead, blame it on me,” Kit invited with a sweep of her hand. “I cause your car not to start on cold mornings, I make your coffeepot stop working, I put dust on the windows and make the chairs in the office creak. I probably cause pond scum, too!”

“Will you stop it,” Logan muttered. He jammed his big hands into his pockets. Looking at her disturbed him. That was new, and it made him irritable. “Never mind, if you don’t want to come back. I can manage without you. Eventually the temporary agency will find me one secretary who can spell, type and answer the telephone.”

“Surely they already have?” she asked sarcastically.

“Of course. I just said so, didn’t I? The agency found me two more to go with the one that my mother hired. At least she can type. Of the two new ones, only one can spell. The tallest of the three can answer the telephone but it takes her until the fifth ring to find it.”

Kit’s eyebrows went up. “Why?”

“The desk is buried in unanswered letters and misplaced files,” he said simply. “Don’t let that concern you, Miss Morris. I did actually manage before you were first hired. And you might recall,” he added icily, “that it was not I who hired you to begin with.”

“How very true,” she agreed. “It was your mother, who has excellent taste in employees!”

“We can agree to disagree on that point,” he said stiffly.

“Should you be getting back to the office, before any more files become…misplaced?” she hinted.

His broad face hardened even more. “Cute,” he said. “Very cute. Go ahead and be a detective. That should be right up your alley, the way you mind everyone’s business but your own!”

“Somebody needs to mind yours!” she raged. “That dizzy blonde is just out for what she can get from you—”

“She gets plenty,” he interrupted hotly. “In bed and out,” he added deliberately, his eyes piercing as if he knew how she felt and wanted to sink the knife in as far as possible.

He succeeded. It went straight to the heart. But Kit had years of practice at hiding her deeper feelings from him. She just stared at him without reacting at all, except for the sudden whiteness of her face.

The stare got to him. He felt like a fool. It wasn’t a feeling he particularly enjoyed, especially with Dane and Tess standing there trying not to laugh.

“I’ll get back to my office, then,” he said. “Let me have the bill when you find my mother, Dane,” he added as he turned. He didn’t look at Kit, either.

Kit stuck her full lower lip out as she glared after his broad back. He was as big as a house, she thought irritably. All muscle and temper. If only he’d trip on his way through the door!

“If looks could kill,” Tess murmured dryly.

“You couldn’t kill him with a look,” Kit said wearily. “It would take a bomb. And even that wouldn’t hurt him if it hit him in the head!” she shouted after him.

He didn’t react at all, which only made her madder. The door closed behind him with a thump.

“In all the years you and Tess have been friends, I’ve never seen you lose your temper until Logan fired you,” Dane remarked. “I thought you worshiped your boss.”

“His feet melted,” she grumbled. “What do you want me to do this afternoon, boss?” she asked brightly, changing the subject.

“You heard what I told Logan. Find Tansy.”

She groaned. “But Mrs. Deverell disappears without a trace at least two times a month,” she protested. “She always turns up.”

“Usually in the hospital or in jail,” he reminded her, chuckling. “Logan’s mother is a dyed-in-the-wool troublemaker with a fatal philosophy of life.”

“Yes. ‘If it feels good, do it,’” Tess quoted. “The agency stays solvent because of Tansy’s wanderlust.”

“Last time she was missing, she started a riot in Newport News, Virginia, claiming to have been kidnapped by a flying saucer,” Dane recalled. “We bailed her out of a sanitarium.” He laughed. “Tansy just likes to start trouble. She’s no lunatic.”

“Most seventy-year-old women have the good sense to stay home. Tansy is a renegade. And she may not be a lunatic, but she does act like one,” Tess said. “Didn’t she go sailboarding in Miami year before last and pick up some Middle Eastern potentate who wanted her to join his harem?”

“Yes. And we had to practically kidnap her to get her away from him, to Tansy’s dismay. But as they sometimes say, all the wrong people are locked up. Tansy is a breath of fresh air. A totally uninhibited free soul.”

“Her son isn’t,” Kit said.

“Logan’s straitlaced. But Christopher Deverell isn’t,” Dane said. “Chris is as nutty as his mother, and both of them love to get Logan behind the eight ball.”

“In other words,” Tess said, reading her husband’s mind, “this could be a deliberate disappearance. If Tansy knew he’d fired you, this might be her way of getting even. She did like you.”

“Always,” Kit agreed, smiling as she recalled how well they got along. She suspected Tansy knew how she felt about Logan, too. But remembering it wasn’t going to help things, it only made her sad for what her life was like without her temperamental boss.

She missed the silliest things. She missed the way he spilled coffee on his important papers and raised the roof, yelling for her as if she was salvation itself when she came running with a roll of paper towels. She missed evenings when she accompanied him to dinners. It was usually to take notes, and strictly business, but it felt good to wear her prettiest clothes and be in the company of a man who had a mind like a steel trap and still looked devastating in a dinner jacket.

“Kit?”

Tess’s query brought her mind back to the present. “Sorry. I was thinking about where to start looking for Tansy.”

“Call Chris first,” Dane suggested. “Meanwhile, I’m taking Mrs. Lassiter to lunch.”

“Actually we’re taking lunch to the baby.” Tess chuckled. “I’m still breast-feeding. Don’t mind if we’re a little late. I hate having to leave him at all during the day, even if he is five months old.”

“I think I’d feel the same way,” Kit said.

They left and she watched them, faintly envious of the way they seemed to belong together. She’d wanted that with Logan Deverell, but he wanted his scheming lady friend. He was going to get taken to the cleaners, did he but know it, and Kit wasn’t going to be around to mop him up anymore. If he spilled coffee, or even tears, somebody else would have that chore. She wasn’t sorry, she told herself, she wasn’t sorry at all.

She went to work at once. Her first call was, as Dane had suggested, to Christopher Deverell.

“Mother’s gone again,” he said pleasantly. He was only twenty-seven, just two years older than Kit—but eight years younger than Logan. He and Kit and Tansy were like a different generation. Nobody ever told Logan that, of course.

“Yes, I know, that’s why I’m calling you,” Kit said with a smile in her tone. “I have to find her.”

“Logan’s office is a mess,” he said. “Logan screamed bloody murder for two solid days and refused to hire anybody else.”

“I know,” she said. “I was due for a change. I was stagnating in that office with the same routine day in and day out—”

“Bull,” Chris said. “You were eaten up with jealousy over the delectable Miss Corley. Everybody knows how you feel about Logan, Kit. Everybody except Logan.”

She didn’t bother to deny it. Chris knew her too well. “He’s going to marry her.”

“So he says. He’ll find her out in time, though. Logan’s no fool. Well, most of the time he’s no fool.”

“She’s very pretty.”

“So are you.”

“I’m just a walking piece of office furniture that he programmed to do his filing and typing,” Kit said solemnly. “He doesn’t miss me. He’s already found a replacement. Three of them, in fact.”

“Mother found him the best one. She’s a cousin of ours who used to live in San Antonio, and she can type. The other two… Well,” he said noncommittally. “Let’s just say that they aren’t quite what he had in mind. Melody, that’s our cousin, is the best of them all, but she can’t spell and she’s very nervous trying to answer the telephone.”

“I would be, too, with a glowering boss peering down his nose at me,” Kit muttered. “Don’t you have other relatives in San Antonio?” she asked, remembering some veiled references to people Logan didn’t ever go and visit there.

“Just Emmett. Don’t ever mention Emmett to Logan,” he added. “He has nightmares about his last visit there.”

“I won’t see Logan to mention anybody to him, thank God,” she said curtly.

“You hope. Logan isn’t coping well without you,” he said gently. “He won’t admit it, but life without you is like going around in a blindfold.”

“I hope he trips over a potted plant and goes out the window.”

“Naughty, naughty,” he chided. “Don’t you feel guilty, leaving him at the mercy of an office you’re not in?”

“No. It’s time he knew what the real world is like,” Kit said.

“From the tidbits I get from Melody, he may try to toss the new receptionist out a window one day soon.”

“Then I hope you know a good lawyer to defend him. I’ll be a character witness for the woman. Just call me.”

“Shame on you!” He laughed.

“I hate your brother. I gave him three of the best years of my life and he never even noticed I was around until I told him his new girlfriend was a miner who’d be digging for gold in his hip pocket.”

“You should have told Tansy instead. She’d have handled that.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Kit argued. “Tansy doesn’t believe in interfering. She thinks people should make their own mistakes. She’s right, too,” she muttered. “When he loses his home, his car and his business to his heartthrob, I’m going to phone him twice a day just to say, ‘I told you so!’”

“Before or after you offer to take dictation for free to help him get back on his feet?”

She sighed. Chris knew her too well. “Where do you think Tansy’s gone?”

“To Venice,” he said. “She was seen boarding a plane bound for there in Miami.”