The Willful Wife. Suzanne Simms

      Only the boy, of course, had become a man, a man who had been around the corral a few times himself. He’d never officially been roped, hog-tied and branded, Mathis mused, reflecting on his own marital state ... or the lack thereof.

      He had imagined himself in love once, a long time ago. He’d been nineteen. She had been eighteen, pretty, blond, wild like the wind. It had been a typical summer romance—hot and fast and furious. And then it had been over just like that.

      Mathis gazed out on what he knew was a sweltering Chicago night. “What about a lady from Boston?”

      “Worst kind of all, boss.”

      “Why?”

      He could sense Beano shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “A woman like that can make a man feel dis-com-bob-u-lat-ed.” The word was broken up into its separate syllables. “A woman like that can make a man feel like he’s meetin’ himself comin’ and goin’. She can make him forget.”

      Mathis was curious. He turned his head. “Make him forget what?”

      Beano flashed his trademark grin, the one that drew his mouth up into a bow and sent sparks flying in his dark chocolate-brown eyes. “I’ve plumb forgot.”

      Mathis laughed out loud, spilling cold beer onto his bare chest. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I?”

      “You always were easy pickin’s, boy.” It was a minute or two before Beano added another pearl of masculine wisdom. “Women,” he muttered under his breath, “can’t live with them...”

      “Yes...?”

      Beano left it at that.

      Mathis couldn’t have agreed more. Knowing that the older man wouldn’t ask, he volunteered where he had been that afternoon. “I interviewed a client today.”

      “Did you?”

      “George Huxley.”

      Beano made a sound in the back of his throat. Mathis knew he wasn’t uninformed, just unimpressed that the security agency’s latest client was a well-known American diplomat.

      “He wants me to look after his goddaughter.”

      “She the lady from Boston?”

      “Yes.”

      “Smells like trouble to me.”

      It smelled like trouble to Mathis, too.

      “I have to take the case on behalf of Hazards, Inc.,” he said, reaching up with the T-shirt in his hand and wiping it across his chest. “I don’t have any choice.”

      “S’pose not.”

      Mathis put the can of beer down and tugged the damp T-shirt on over his head. He stood there staring out at the lake—was that mist or steam rising from its surface?—and blew- out his breath expressively. “She’s a real looker.”

      “They always are.” Beano finally spoke up. “If you need any help...”

      It was the opening Mathis had been waiting for. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

      Apparently his cook-cum-self-appointed guardian angel was in his official mode. “What do want me to do, boss?”

      “Tomorrow morning I’d like you to shave extra close and put on your best bib and tucker.”

      Beano glanced down at his well-washed shirt and jeans, then lower to his well-worn everyday boots. “S’pose that means my best cowboy boots, too.”

      “And your best hat.”

      “The white Stetson?”

      “Yup.”

      “You wearing white, too?”

      He nodded.

      Beano raised one eyebrow. “Out to impress the lady.”

      Mathis watched his own reflection in the wall of glass. There was a flash of white teeth against tanned skin. “We want to make sure she recognizes right off that we’re the good guys.”

      Beano grinned from ear to ear. “We could just tell Miss—?”

      “Stratford. Desiree Stratford.”

      “We could just tell Miss Stratford that we’re the good guys;” he suggested.

      Mathis absently rubbed his hand back and forth along his nape. “She might not believe us.”

      The longtime cook made a face. “I said it once and I’ll say it again. It smells like trouble.”

      He had and it did.

      The old man’s weathered brow crinkled into a dozen distinct frown lines. “Where we goin’?”

      Where were they going? How could he explain the situation to Beano without saying too much or too little? How could he make the other man understand?

      Mathis raised the can to his mouth and finished off his beer. Hell, he wasn’t sure he understood himself.

      Then the words of an old and familiar American folk song started running through Mathis Hazard’s head.

      

      Froggy went a-courtin’, he did go.

      Froggy went a-courtin’, he did go.

      

      “We’re going a-courtin”’ was his answer.

      Two

      The siren awakened her from a dead sleep.

      Desiree Stratford rolled over onto her side, reluctantly opened her eyes and squinted at the clock on the bedside table.

      Three in the morning.

      “Ohh,” she softly groaned, turning her head and burying her face in the goose-down pillow.

      She didn’t want to be awake. In fact, she wanted desperately to be asleep.

      After a day of seemingly endless meetings with lawyers and bankers, architects and contractors, even a delegation of longtime hotel guests, after a dinner of thoroughly atrocious and utterly cold food—Desiree vowed she would fire the temperamental and incompetent chef, Andre, just as soon as she had the time to hire a replacement—after an evening spent poring over papers in her great-grandfather’s study—had the dear, sweet man kept every scrap of correspondence he had received in his life?—it had been nearly one o’clock, a mere two hours ago, that she had finally crawled, exhausted, into bed.

      Now she found herself awake again.

      She had no one to blame but herself, Desiree acknowledged. She was the one who had insisted that she move into the oldest wing of the Stratford, into what used to be her great-grandparents’ living quarters, into the very bedroom where she had stayed as a child on her thrice-yearly visits to Chicago.

      Apparently as a girl she had slept much more soundly than she did at the age of thirty. Now she heard the shrill, jarring, nerve-grating wail of every siren that passed on the street below between the hotel and the busy city hospital nearby.

      There was no sense in crying over spilled milk, as her great-grandfather used to say.

      It was too late.

      It was done.

      It was in the wee, small hours of the night and she was wide-awake.

      Desiree turned onto her back and stared up at the ceiling overhead. A faint light was coming from the row of windows on the far side of the bedroom, just enough light so that she could make out the shapes and patterns of the mural painted on the ceiling decades earlier by a starving yet talented artist.

      The images had faded somewhat with time and the inevitable layer of dust and grime that had accumulated, but they were still a magnificent rendering