He didn't budge, instead reaching one arm around in back of him and sinking his grip into her thigh. "Tess, damn it!"
When she reached for Davey's stew bowl, her godfather rolled off his stool and peeled her off Thorne. "Take a swing at me, Tess, and I'll pop you in the chops."
Jim Haviland came around in front of the bar. "Okay, if I were Ben Cartwright, I'd fire my shotgun in the air, but I'm not. So, everyone, shut the hell up and sit down."
They complied, and he handed out brooms, dustpans, dampened bar towels and a round of beers, on his daughter.
She was unchagrined, but refused to look in An-drew's direction. He was standing behind her, breathing fire now. That was something. At least she'd penetrated that cool Yankee control.
She glared at her father. "If you'd thrown Thorne out like I said-"
"You know, Tess," Davey interrupted, still between her and Andrew, "I've always thought you were the head-over-heels type. You never were going to go quietly or slowly. I figure, you throw a table and a couple of chairs at a man, it means-"
"Suppose I throw a chair at you, Davey?"
He grinned, unrepentant.
"I'll get the mop," Tess said. "Help clean up." Her father shook his head. "No way. You've done enough damage. Go home and cool off." He handed her a cup of ice. "Pour that down your back. Get a good night's sleep. In the morning, you go back to those detectives, tell them you saw a goddamn skeleton and someone stole it out of your cellar. Make them look into it."
But she was in no mood for anyone to give her advice. "I'll do what I have to do." She was surly now, her head spinning, and she could feel Thorne's eyes boring into her. "Send me my bill."
Her father was losing patience, too. "I will, you can count on that."
"Come on," Andrew said, his tone quiet but uncompromising, "I'll give you a ride home."
Tess bristled. "I'll take the subway."
"Fine. I'll give you a ride to the subway station."
She relented, only because her father's likely next move was a call to the police, and she'd be spending the night in a holding cell. She shot him a knowing look. "We're even. I didn't tell you about the skeleton. You didn't tell me about Thorne."
"No way we're even." He grinned at her suddenly and leaned against the smooth, scarred wood of his bar. "I figure this time, for a change, you got the short end of the stick."
Eighteen
Andrew ended up with a small cut on his arm from fending off one of the construction workers and a bruise where Tess had kicked him. She didn't have a scratch on her. It was as if she'd gone through the brawl with a protective force field around her, a perk, he supposed, of being Jim Hav-iland's daughter.
She was wrung-out. He could see it in the stiff way she moved, in her eyes and the determined set of her mouth. She'd fight her fatigue. She was in the mood to fight everything.
"Your father says you're not given to seeing things," Andrew said.
But the idea that he and her father had talked behind her back obviously didn't sit well with her, and she didn't respond. She had her arms crossed on her chest and was staring out the side window. They'd passed the Museum of Science, and he'd fought his way onto Storrow Drive. It was dusk, the city lights glowing against the slowly darkening sky.
"I think your father makes a hell of a beef stew."
"That's what everyone thinks."
So, he wasn't anything special. She wasn't giving an inch. "He never remarried after your mother died?"
"No."
"Girlfriends?"
"Some." Out on the Charles River, a lone sculler dipped his oars rhythmically, Tess watching. "He gave up a lot for me."
"Maybe the right woman never came along."
"My mother was the right woman. After she died, there was no one else for him. That's the way he looked at it."
"He didn't want to be disloyal?"
She shook her head. "No. It's just that falling in love again was impossible for him. Real love is a rarity. He was lucky to have had it at all, never mind twice in one lifetime."
It sounded like an excuse to Andrew, or a fantasy on her part. "That's pessimistic."
"Practical. Realistic." She cut a glance over at him, her body still rigid. "I'm talking about real love, not lust, not friendship."
He smiled. "Lust is important."
She turned back to the window and resumed her silence.
Andrew decided this wasn't the moment to tell her that her father had waxed philosophical on his daughter and men. It wasn't that Andrew had asked. Jim Haviland, bartender supreme, had done the talking. He'd said men were few and far between in Tess's life these days, that she'd gone from being too impulsive to too picky-maybe because she had an idealized view of him and her mother, as she'd been only six when she died. He'd talked while he cleaned glasses and stirred the stew, the bar empty that early.
Moving to the back table was Davey Ahearn's idea. He'd seen Tess walking from the subway. It was a setup, pure and simple.
If she'd thrown a chair at him and kicked him, jumped on him, anywhere but her father's pub, with him and her godfather right there, Andrew didn't know what would have happened.
Well, he did, but there was no point thinking about it with her still spitting fire, even as beat as she was.
He wound his way onto Beacon Hill, downshifting on the steep hills. Tess seemed as comfortable here as she did in her father's blue-collar neighbor-hood. Andrew pulled in front of her building, brick with black shutters, brass fittings on the doors. Her apartment had its own entrance behind a wrought-iron fence next to the front stoop and down several steps.
"I notice you didn't need me to give you directions," Tess said.
"I drove by earlier." He pulled alongside the curb and turned to her. "Harl and I decided we needed to check you out. Mission accomplished. I don't blame you for being upset. Now, go home. Cool off."
She nodded at the cut on his arm. "Did I do that?"
"One of the construction workers."
"Billy. He's a hothead. He loves a good fight."
"Seems he's not the only one."
"You deserved it." She softened slightly, sighing. "But it wasn't just you. It was my father, Davey goading me. I don't know, maybe there was something in the beef stew."
"Is that an apology?"
"No." She grinned at him and slid out of the truck. "Thanks for the ride."
He drove to the end of her street, then glanced in his rearview mirror and saw her with her keys out, standing on the sidewalk. He couldn't stay. He wasn't about to leave Dolly and Harl alone on the point with a possible body snatcher in the area.
But he couldn't go off, not just yet.
He backed into a parking space, pulled on the brake, cut the engine and jumped out. He'd been feeling this way all day, a little crazed, a little off center. Unpredictable. A wonder he hadn't thrown her over his shoulder and carried her out of Jim's Place cave-man-style-an impulse the Havilands and Davey Ahearn didn't need to know about.
"We still need to talk." He walked up to her as she stood beside the wrought-iron gate. The gray skies and approaching darkness only made her hair seem blonder, her eyes clearer, but still that very light blue.
She shrugged. "About what? You came to Boston to see if I was a nut, a troublemaker, a stalker, a collaborator with Ike Grantham in some nefarious scheme-to do what, I don't know. What else? A killer. Yes, I suppose you had to be sure I wasn't responsible for a body in the carriage house cellar."
"It never occurred to me you'd killed anyone."
"But nut, troublemaker, stalker and collaborator still stand?"