Together Again: Book 3 in the Second Chances series (Crimson Romance) Read online

  Together Again

  Peggy Bird

  Avon, Massachusetts

  This edition published by

  Crimson Romance

  an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

  10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

  Blue Ash, Ohio 45242

  www.crimsonromance.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Margaret Bird

  ISBN 10: 1-4405-5584-2

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-5584-8

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-5585-0

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-5585-5

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art © istockphoto.com/AleksandarNakic

  This book is dedicated, first, to the women throughout my life who have mentored, inspired and befriended me. If I haven’t said it in person, let me do it now: thank you. I have no idea how I would have survived this long without my women friends.

  Second, to three very special women: Rebecca, Meg and Elizabeth. You amaze me on a regular basis with what you do and who you are.

  Third, to Philadelphia, a sometimes gracious lady where I spent some pretty good years.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Chapter 1

  Instead of the peace and coffee she’d been looking for before boarding her plane, Margo Keyes’s latte came with a side order of idiot-on-a-cell-phone. Anyone within twenty feet of the man in the blue blazer heard some of the conversation. Where she was sitting, it was in Dolby digital surround sound.

  It figured her trip would start like this. She’d been apprehensive about it from the get-go. Not that she had a fear of flying. It was the landing — or rather, what was waiting for her after she landed — that was the problem.

  Her chance for quiet acquisition of caffeine courage diminishing by the second, she glared at the man in the blue blazer, hoping he’d take the hint and shut up. Too intent on his call, he seemed to miss what was, she was quite sure, a stunning look of disapproval.

  “Are you interested or not?” he yelled. Allowing no answer to what was apparently a rhetorical question, he continued, “If you don’t want what I’ve got, I know someone who does. So, what’s it worth to you?” After he paused, presumably for the response, he said, “Good. I’ll let you know what the bid is after I talk to my other customer.” He ended the call, shoved his phone in his pocket and glared back at Margo before storming off.

  Walking down the concourse, she consoled herself that if the coffee break hadn’t worked, at least she had a business class seat reserved on the plane and a hotel suite waiting at her destination. She’d indulged in both, rationalizing if she was making this trip at least it should be comfortable. Interesting concept, that; comfortable discomfort.

  As the plane taxied out to the runway, she pulled out her BlackBerry to review her schedule for the next ten days, hoping some magic wand had been waved over it, making it all shiny and fun. However, as usual, her fairy godmother was AWOL. She put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. What the hell had she been thinking, saying yes to this? Ever since she’d moved to Portland, she’d restricted her Philadelphia visits with her mother to long weekends in the spring and fall. It got her points for being a good daughter, avoided too much time being fussed over and kept her out of the two East Coast seasons she didn’t like. This trip? Ten days in mid-June when she’d just been there two months before.

  Checking the airline schedule online, she found a flight home the day after the presentation she was to give the following week. That would cut three days off the trip. But before she could change her reservation, the flight attendant asked her to turn her phone off.

  Nothing left to do but work. She opened her stuffed-to-the-gunnels messenger bag and took out what she’d brought to help her craft her speech. It looked like she’d included everything in the courthouse except the old law library. Being tapped as the last-minute stand-in for your boss at an important conference will make you do that.

  While trying to organize it all, she lost track of her jacket. She eventually saw it too far under her seat to grab and asked the person sitting behind her to get it for her. A man threw it back. When she turned to thank him he added a dirty look — a familiar dirty look. Shit. The man in the blue blazer from the coffee stand.

  Finally settled, she began to review case files. Unfortunately, the steady stream of orders to the flight attendants from the seat behind her distracted both her and the cabin crew. When she’d read the same report three times and still didn’t know what the hell it was about, she gave up trying, put her work away and replaced it with her iPod. By plugging in the ear buds she could drown out ABB (“Asshole in Blue Blazer,” as he had now morphed into being) with Pink Martini, Colbie Caillat, Suzanne Vega and Alicia Keys.

  By the time she’d worked through most of her current favorite albums, the pilot announced their imminent arrival in Philadelphia. Winding the cord for the ear buds around the iPod before stashing it away, the thought occurred that ABB had now wrecked a second part of her day. Two strikes against her and she hadn’t even gotten to the hard part yet.

  The man jumped up as soon as the plane’s wheels hit the ground, arguing with the flight attendant when she insisted he get back in his seat. He sprang into action again as soon as they arrived at the gate, rooting around in the compartment above Margo like he was hunting for truffles. Fearful he’d dump out the contents of her messenger bag she stood, too, and removed it from the overhead.

  “Out of the way,” ABB said. “I’m in a hurry.”

  “We all are,” Margo said. “But they haven’t opened the door yet.”

  “I have to be out of here when they do. Move, bitch.”

  “Excuse me? What did you … ?”

  The man grabbed his briefcase and pin-balled his way through passengers and cabin crew to the door, which was still closed. “Asshole in Blue Blazer” moved ahead of “walking across the country pushing heavy beverage carts” on the list of reasons she was glad she hadn’t followed up on that girlhood fantasy of being a flight attendant so she could get paid for traveling.

  At baggage claim, still thinking of comebacks for ABB, some of which were anatomically impossible, most of which were too obscene to say out loud and many of which were both, she let her bag go past a couple times before she realized it had made an appearance. Off balance when she snagged it, she swung around awkwardly, smacking into someone behind her. When she started to apologize she saw, much to her consternation, she’d whacked — guess who? — talking again on the phone.

  Echoing her sentiments, ABB said, “Oh, hell, you again. Just what I need,” and elbowed past her. He grabbed the briefcase leaning up against the luggage belt in front of her, a
nd ran toward the taxi stand, leaving her apologizing to empty air. “Welcome to Philadelphia, Margo,” she muttered to no one in particular as she pulled out the handle from her suitcase.

  At the exit for the rental car shuttles, she hesitated long enough to inhale one last little bit of cool, clean air. Thus prepared, she forced herself out the automatic door into the wall of hot, wet vapor, which, laced with vehicle exhaust and the effluvium of the nearby oil refineries and storage facilities, was what passed for air during summer in her birthplace.

  Oh, yeah, welcome to Philly.

  • • •

  A short, stocky man in a business suit paced on the spongy ground, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and swatted away a bug. He hated this weather. When he delivered what he was about to get, he’d be on the next plane out of here.

  A taxi approached and he stepped back into the shadow of the trees. The car’s interior light illuminated a man in a dark blue blazer paying the driver. After the cab peeled off, the stocky man emerged from the shadows and beckoned.

  The two men walked silently into the copse of trees. When they were hidden from the road, the stocky man asked for what he’d contracted to purchase. The man in the blue blazer said he had another offer that the buyer had to meet or the deal was off. The stocky man shook his head. The man in the blue blazer pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number. He handed the phone over after the call was answered. The stocky man said a few words in a foreign language before handing the phone back to its owner.

  While Blue Blazer was focused on winding up the phone conversation, the stocky man reached under his jacket and pulled out a gun. His problem eliminated, the gunman pulled the blazer-clad body further into the trees and covered it with branches.

  Taking the phone and the briefcase, he returned to his car. When he searched the briefcase, he discovered that what he wanted wasn’t there. Nor, he found out when he went back and searched the body, was it in the fucking blue blazer. All he had was a flash drive with what he’d already seen and a pissed-off buyer waiting for what he now couldn’t deliver.

  • • •

  In her rental car and headed toward Center City on I-95, Margo went over, again, what she had ahead of her. The shoes she’d packed said it all — Manolo Blahniks for a high school reunion she’d been conned into attending, mid-heel pumps for the conference where she was to give the still-unwritten presentation and the flats she wore to please her mother who hated running shoes. No shoes were needed for the other thing niggling at the back of her mind.

  In Portland, where she was a thirty-something deputy district attorney, Margo’s colleagues thought it was great she was going for a longer-than-usual visit with her mother. She’d explained her reluctance was because she didn’t like the summer weather. But it wasn’t just the weather she didn’t want to face. There was the world of Daisy Keyes to deal with.

  “Daisy” was what her maternal grandmother, for whom she was named, had called her. It was the literal translation of Margherita, her given first name. Margo was grateful no one else had joined her abuelita in that folly. What the hell had she been thinking? Daisy? Really?

  What made it worse was she thought of herself as a wilted daisy that last year of high school, at the mercy of people and events over which she had no control. Now Margo would be spending an evening with people she largely avoided when she visited her mother, all of whom she was sure remembered only too clearly what had happened that year.

  But a suite at the Bellevue would help. No memories there. And, she noticed as she looked around the lobby while waiting to register, no guy in a blue blazer either. She crossed her fingers that she’d seen the last of him. All she had to do was unpack and freshen up and she’d be ready to face whatever was waiting on Fir Street.

  • • •

  Margo and her mother, Dolores Campbell Keyes, had grown up in the same house in South Philadelphia. The three-story row house with a marble stoop and a deep-set entry had been her mother’s dowry when she married Kenny Keyes. Nothing about it had changed since her grandmother had lived there, except the rest of the neighborhood.

  After circling the block for only five minutes, Margo found a semi-legal parking spot, made sure nothing valuable was visible and locked up the car. As she approached her mom’s house, a man called from the direction of the darkened entry immediately adjacent to it, startling her.

  “Welcome home, counselor,” he said.

  “Tony?” She stopped, her eyes searching the row of houses. “Is that you?”

  Tony Alessandro — Anthony Salvatore Alessandro to the DMV, Detective Alessandro to his employer, the Philadelphia Police Department — stepped out of the shadowy entry of the house next to the Keyes’ residence. The boy-next-door for all of Margo’s childhood, Tony had grown up into one of the best looking men she’d ever known — classically handsome features that would be at home in a Roman temple; hair so dark it was almost black; brown eyes that could make her knees buckle with one look. A mouth that made kissing a sacrament.

  He came down the steps with the easy grace of an athlete and met her at the end of the short walkway to his mother’s house. Greeting her with a hug and a lingering kiss on the cheek he said, “It’s been a long time since Mary Ellen’s wedding last fall.”

  And there it was, the last thing making her nervous about this trip. Mary Ellen’s wedding. When he’d danced with her all night before sneaking her out of the parish hall to a dark Sunday school classroom where he proceeded to kiss her senseless, making her mouth burn for his, her breasts ache for him to touch them and her whole body melt into a wet and wanting puddle. If his nephew hadn’t dragged him away, she was sure they’d have ended up naked in his bed. Or on the floor of the classroom.

  But she hadn’t heard from him since.

  She knew the blush that was the bane of her existence was now creeping up her neck but hoped the dusky light concealed it. “Yeah, you weren’t around when I was here in April.”

  “I was in DC, meeting with this task force I’m on. I hear you’re back for our class reunion.”

  “My mother’s doing, not mine. She signed me up. The half-dozen people who emailed saying how great it was I would be there made me feel guilty enough that I didn’t have the nerve to back out.”

  “Not like you to give in to social pressure.”

  “Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age.”

  “Better work on your argument, counselor. No one who’s ever met you will believe that one.” He’d kept his hand on her shoulder and was studying her face. “You look great. West Coast agrees with you, doesn’t it?”

  “It does. As much as Philly agrees with you. Every time I see you, I wonder if there’s a portrait turning wrinkled, soft and flabby in an attic somewhere. I swear to God you still look like the guy the yearbook described. Let’s see: best athlete in the class with the body to show for it. A smile that would melt glaciers. Brown eyes every girl wants to get lost in.” She glanced over his broad shoulders and trim body in jeans and a denim jacket, and up at his handsome face. “Yup, all still there.”

  He dropped his arm, laughed and made a very Italian gesture, one that even a non-Italian, at least a non-Italian from Philadelphia, would recognize. “Jesus, Margo, leave it to you to remember that shit.” He motioned toward her empty hands. “Not to change the subject but, no luggage? You’re not staying with your mom?”

  “Impressive analytic skills. No wonder you made detective on your first try. Congratulations on that, by the way. Where’re you working?”

  “Thanks. I’m working with the white-collar crime unit.”

  She looked embarrassed. “Good choice. You had a running start on the subject fifteen years ago, didn’t you?”

  “Are you evading my question about where you’re staying, Madame Prosecutor? Can’t imagine you let witnesses do something like that.”

  “No, sir, Detective Alessandro, I do not. I’m staying at the Bellevue. Between a conference in Center City next week a
nd not wanting to go to the reunion feeling like the twelve-year-old I seem to turn into when I stay here, I thought it best.”

  “Sounds like neither one of us is too anxious to go to this thing.” He looked away from her and stuck his hands in his jeans pockets.

  “Why are you worried? I thought you went to all our class reunions.”

  “This time, Nicole will be there.”

  He didn’t need to say more; she knew the story. Nicole, who’d been his off-again, on-again high school girlfriend and then fiancée, broke their engagement to elope with a much older — and definitely richer — man, banging up Tony’s pride badly. Neighborhood gossip said it could only have been the promise of life on the prestigious Main Line that had won Nicole away from Tony. But then, the neighborhood always favored the Alessandro side of any story.

  “I didn’t think she did reunions, either.”

  “Not ’til this one.”

  “I hope you have a supermodel lined up to go with you.”

  “No date. You?”

  “Surely the grapevine,” she nodded toward their mothers’ homes, “has already told you I don’t.” She pulled her gaze away from his and took a deep breath before blurting out, “Listen, not that I’m a supermodel, but I brought this fairly outrageous dress to wear with my new Manolo Blahniks. It might, I don’t know, give our classmates something to talk about other than her if you arrive with the woman no one’s seen in fifteen years, even if it is just me. And I wouldn’t mind having company when I walk into that restaurant. It’d just be, you know, old friends … ”

  He held up his hand. “Slow down. So, you’re volunteering to be my date?”

  “I just think it might be advantageous for both of us if we went together.”

  “That sounds more like an offer to carpool.”

  “Really, just old friends doing each other a favor.” She searched his face trying to anticipate his answer. “So … yes? No?”

  “Now why would I turn down the chance to walk in with the class mystery woman in an outrageous dress and expensive shoes? Pick you up … when? ”