Stranger in the Moonlight (Edilean 7)

Kim didn’t allow the shock of that information to show on her face. “How did you get it?”

Travis sat back down and looked at his plate.

“He bought Borman Catering,” Russell said.

Travis looked at him with murder in his eyes.

“You did what?” Kim asked in disbelief.

“He paid a hundred and seventy-five grand for the company,” Russell said. He’d finished his sandwich and was working on the second beer. “He was going to pay more, but I got Borman down to that. It’s still too much.”

“Much too much,” Kim said. “Those vans of his are worn-out and Dave’s lost commissions because he doesn’t deliver what he promises.”

?

?I thought it was too much too,” Russell said, “but we were up against a deadline.”

Travis looked at Russell in disgust for ratting on him. “Kim, I think we’re losing sight of the main issue here. Borman was going to ask you to marry him and I was afraid you’d say yes.”

“And when he proposed, he’d give me my ring back!” Kim said loudly. She threw up her hands. “Men! I’ve had all of you I can take this week. Today I had to threaten Carla with firing her because of what she’d done.”

“You should fire her,” Travis said seriously. “What she did was a prosecutable offense.”

“She was conned by a man! It’s a hazard of being female. And for your information, in Edilean we don’t discard someone for making a single mistake.”

“As I did,” Travis said softly as he looked at her with eyes begging for forgiveness.

“You have made a thousand mistakes. And stop looking at me like that! You already showed me that face, remember? You used it to get the pretty young wife of the old man to teach you how to cook—along with other things.”

Russell laughed. “She’s got you figured out.”

“Kim, I never meant—”

“I know!” she said loudly. “I’m sure that from your view you came swooping in on your white horse and rescued me. But I didn’t need rescuing. I didn’t need someone to make me look like a fool, to make me feel that I’m an idiot who can’t run my own life. What I need is—” She couldn’t take any more. “Out! Both of you get out of my house and out of my life. I never want to see either of you again.”

Both of the men got up and started for the door. When Travis passed her she said, “Did you ever think that it’s not the Maxwell name that brings out the bad in people? That it’s you?”

Travis had no answer for her.

Kim slammed the door behind them, locked it, then leaned back against it. “For your information, John Travis Maxwell, I want love too.”

Two minutes later she was calling the person she wanted to talk to about all this. He answered on the first ring and said he’d meet her right away. Twenty minutes later she was pulling into Joe Layton’s parking lot.

Twelve

Joe Layton’s solution to every problem was the same: food and work. After he’d spent thirty minutes listening to Kim’s nearly incoherent words that she uttered in between copious tears, and feeding her, he put her to work. As he had her help him put the supplies Travis had unpacked on the shelves that he’d installed, Joe couldn’t help musing on the fact that their turbulent love life was giving him a lot of free labor.

“I don’t get it,” she said as she picked up boxes of electric drills and put them on the shelves. “Why would he make so much effort to get a man away from me if all he plans to do is leave me and go back to . . . to wherever he lives?”

“New York,” Joe said. “Lives on the top floor of some big building.”

“He told you that?”

“No, but I found out.”

“That means you’ve known Travis’s last name and you looked him up on the Internet,” Kim said with a sigh. “Reede said I’d find out everything there, but he couldn’t wait to send me info. But who wants to find out about someone on the Web? But then, why does everything Travis tells me have to be a lie? Or an evasion? What’s happened in his life that makes him think even the most ordinary things have to be kept secret?”

“I don’t know,” Joe said. They were questions that were bothering him too. He’d given Lucy every opportunity to tell him about her son, but she hadn’t. Three times she’d almost said “my son” but each time she’d caught herself. Joe was trying hard not to get angry about it, but it wasn’t easy. “Are you in love with young Travis?” he blurted out.