The Case of the Missing Secretary
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“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.