“I doubt she told him the truth about anything.”
“Unless she decided to do a bit of shit disturbing.”
Joe’s expression suggested that from what he knew about Catherine Gale, that was entirely possible. “So you’re doing damage control?”
“If it needs doing.”
“And if he knows too much?” Brows up, Joe drew a questioning line across his throat.
“Please, we can be much subtler than that.” They weren’t always, but they could be.
She was sorting through a box of mismatched sterling silver cutlery—Fill in your set. Priced by weight.—when Graham came through the door. She’d wanted a good look at him through the clear-sight charm but not enough to be lingering by the counter so it looked as though she’d been waiting for him. She had no intention of crossing the fine line between not playing stupid games and looking way too eager.
His eyes were just as blue in the morning.
Which was quite possibly the stupidest observation she’d ever made about anyone.
He stopped by the end of the counter, once again a little too close to that damned monkey’s paw. Shoving the box of silver to one side, Allie hurried over to him, afraid he might make another grab for the paw. It might be an old, ugly, hacked-off primate hand, yet the power it held made it remarkably seductive. But then, power was always seductive.
“Eleven o’clock, you’re right on time.”
His smile was as enthralling as she remembered. “I pride myself on being punctual. Can you leave?” He turned a not particularly approving glance toward Joe. Since Joe still looked a bit rough, that was hardly surprising.
“I think I can handle the crowds,” Joe muttered, squaring up the box of yoyos with the edge of the counter.
“We’ll just be next door if anything happens,” Allie told him and waved Graham back toward the front of the store.
“What would be likely to happen?” Graham wondered as they emerged out onto the sidewalk.
“Could get a run of little old ladies who desperately need cat saucers.” Allie glanced up, saw that the pigeons were missing from the edge of the building and quickly checked the space under the newspaper box. Empty.
“Looking for something?”
She glanced over to find him watching her and liked the way his gaze lingered. “I thought I saw a kestrel the other day.”
Which was true. She’d been wrong, but it had been what she’d thought at the time.
“It’s possible,” he allowed as they walked to the coffee shop. “They seem to be taking to city life, and Calgary is a city where things are happening. We were named the best Canadian city to live in by the Canadian conference board,” he added, holding the door open for her. “And the third best in North America.”
“You know people keep telling me things are happening here…” She brushed up against him as she passed, almost accidentally, and spent a moment appreciating the feel of muscle under the same cheap suit he’d had on the night before. “… but so far all I’ve seen is the airport, the route in from the airport, the store, and this coffee shop. Oh, and the convenience store down the road.”
“We’ll have to do something about that,” he murmured, close behind her and the low, whiskey rasp of his voice lifted the hair off the back of her neck.
It took her a moment to realize that Kenny was staring at her expectantly from behind the counter. “Uh, two coffees please, for here, and…” She half turned and laid a hand on his forearm, just because he was up and in her personal space like an invitation. “… the Saskatoon berry muffins are great.”
He blinked, but since the new angle gave him a deliberate glimpse of lace and the swell of breasts inside the vee of her shirt, that was only to be expected. If he thought he could fluster a Gale girl by standing too close and smelling terrific, he didn’t know as much about the family as she feared he did. And he’d clearly never tried this on her grandmother.
She smiled at the thought. Graham looked startled for a moment, then smiled back.
“So are you having the muffins?”
When she turned back to the counter, a pair of big red mugs filled with coffee waited by two empty plates although she hadn’t heard Kenny move—not to take the mugs from the rack, not to fill them at the urns. He held a pair of tongs over the muffin baskets.
“Yes,” Graham answered for them both. “We are. Thank you.”
While he paid, Allie carried both mugs and plates over to the most isolated of the small tables by the front windows. “I waitressed in a bar while I was in university,” she explained as he joined her, brows up at the display of plate shuffling. “Right kind of place and I still get the urge to clear tables and refill coffees. Charlie says I do it deliberately to embarrass her.”
“That your cousin, the musician, in Brazil.”
“That’s her.” She could see him filing away the whole Charlie’s a her thing.
But all he said was, “You don’t seem the bar waitress type.”
“Well, Michael got the job first. He was bartending and when one of the girls quit…” She’d quit because Allie had wanted to be with Michael and had been more than willing to arrange things to get it. She was a little embarrassed about that now. Right now. Which was strange because she never had been before.
“Michael’s an old boyfriend?”
“Michael’s… it’s complicated.”
“Yeah, I have a couple of those, too. So…” Graham took a long swallow of coffee—two cream, two sugars—and pulled out a small black notebook. “Let’s talk about why your grandmother decided to open a store in Calgary so far from the rest of her family.”
Allie shrugged. “Things are happening here.”
“Seriously.”
“She told you that, that she was far from her family?”
“She did.” He wore a “trust me” face. Allie might have trusted him more if he hadn’t been so obviously wearing it over his actual expression. He was good, though; she couldn’t see beneath it. “It must have come as a huge shock to you when she died.”
“It did.”
“What happened to the body?”
Allie froze, a piece of muffin halfway to her mouth. “The what?”
“Your grandmother’s body. When there’s a death, there’s a body. I wondered what happened to it. Was she buried here or back home?”
Or eaten by dragons. Allie had to bite back an inappropriate desire to giggle. “We have a family burial plot back home.”
“That doesn’t exactly answer my question.”
“Which wasn’t exactly about the store.”
“Background information.”
“About someone who no longer has anything to do with the store.”
Graham acknowledged the point with a nod and drank a little more coffee. Allie watched muscles move in the tanned column of his throat and met his gaze with nothing more than a lifted brow when he caught her at it. He brushed his hair back off his face, although it didn’t really need brushing, and checked his notes. “So your grandmother left you the store; does she own the building?”
“She said she did.”
“But you haven’t seen the paperwork?”
Allie shrugged so he could watch the motion. Fair was fair. “I don’t even know where the paperwork is,” she admitted. “That’s remarkably blonde, isn’t it?”
“A little,” he admitted in turn. “And I don’t think ignoring the legalities is something even you can get away with.”
“Even me?” she purred, leaning forward.
A flash of something that might have been annoyance at the slip, but it was gone too fast for her to be certain. “A beautiful blonde.” He reached across the table and lifted the end of her braid out of her coffee.
He waited for her to laugh before he did. She liked that. A lot. And she was a little afraid of how much she liked his laugh, so she fumbled her phone out to hide her reaction. Some of her reaction.
“Do you mind? This’ll only take a minute, but you’re right and I should get it dealt with.” When he nodded, she called Roland and repeated Graham’s point, or possibly points, about the paperwork.