Coming Undone

CHAPTER FOUR

WHEN THE ALARM WENT OFF at eight the next morning P.J. had no idea where she was for a few disoriented moments. Then the smell of cigarette smoke on her skin and in her hair registered-that all-too-familiar reek of bars and honky-tonks. The stench brought last night's events rushing back and she crawled out of bed and stumbled over to the complimentary coffeemaker to assemble a pot. The minute it started burbling she stuck her cup in the coffeepot space. When it was full she exchanged it for the glass container and knocked the drink back in one long swallow.

Finally feeling awake enough to quit stumbling over her own feet, she headed for the bathroom to take a quick shower. Then she dried off, pulled on a short cotton two-flounce lime green skirt and a white tank top and threw her toiletries into her suitcase. Bundling last night's smoke-saturated outfit into a plastic bag, she tucked it alongside her cosmetic pouch and zipped the suitcase closed.

After piling her belongings next to the door, she called down to the front desk. "This is Priscilla Morgan in room 617," she said in a tremulous voice when they picked up. "Would you send up the manager, please? Right away? And I need my bill prepared for checkout."

There was a knock on her door within five minutes. P.J. opened it the barest crack and peered out.

"Miss Morgan? I'm Jed Turner, the manager. You requested to speak to me?" She saw him stare down at the fishing line tied to her door knob, watched as his gaze tracked it along the hallway. "What is this?"

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about," she whispered. "The man next door is stalking me."

"He'swhat? "

"Shh. Please." She cast a nervous eye in the direction of room 619. "He's been following me for days, and last night he somehow discovered which room I was in and managed to get accommodations in the one next door." She let out a shuddery sigh. "He tied that line to my door. It leads to his room where it's tied to something that forms a rudimentary alarm system. I know because he told me so last night when I tried to leave." She looked up at the manager. "I'm scared, Mr. Turner. I think he's:disturbed, and I can't get out of my room without him knowing."

"Well, we'll just see about that," the manager said grimly. "Stay put. I'll be right back."

Oh, crap. She'd hoped to be out of here before he confronted Jared.

But Turner didn't go next door. He walked down the hallway in the opposite direction and, as promised, was back in less than five minutes. Producing a pocket knife, he sliced the line from the doorknob. "Will you come out here for a second and hold this?"

P.J. stepped out into the corridor and took the severed filament from his grasp.

"Keep applying tension to it," the manager instructed in a low voice.

"Where did you get this stuff?" she asked as he tapped a fine nail into the doorframe.

"From our maintenance foreman."

She gave him her best awed smile. "You are so clever!"

He stood a little taller, but merely said, "If you'll step over here to this side of me and continue holding the line taut I'll fasten it to the brad."

She watched him tie the line around the nail.

"There!" he whispered in satisfaction.

She dashed into her room and grabbed her stuff. "Thank you so much!" she said as she rolled it out. "I'll just stop at the desk and check out. Thank you!"

"Um, wait a minute, Miss Morgan. I called the sheriff's office when I went to Maintenance. You're going to need to stick around to talk to them."

Uh-oh.But P.J. hadn't spent time as a kid scamming tourists out of their spare change for nothing. She knew how to think on her feet. Giving him an earnest nod, she said, "Sure. Let me just check out and put my things in my car, then I'll come back up." She flashed him big, imploring eyes. "Please. Won't you stay here to make sure he doesn't get away? I want to put as many miles between me and this pervert as I possibly can, and I'm scared to death he'll somehow find out that the sheriff is coming. God!" Allowing a little hysteria to enter her voice, she grasped his arm. "What if he gets away? What if he lies in wait somewhere to follow meagain? "

Turner gave her a comforting pat. "No, no, that's not going to happen. I'll stay right here to be sure he doesn't go anywhere."

"You are so wonderful. Do you want me to come back up here?" She glanced nervously down the hallway. "Or:maybe I could meet with the sheriff downstairs?"

"My office would probably be the best place. Have the desk clerk direct you there and ask them to page me as soon as the sheriff arrives."

"Oh, my gosh, thank you,thank you! You've truly been my hero."

It took her only minutes to check out. She was on the road heading out of town moments after that, conveniently having failed to pass on the request to page the manager.

Envisioning Jared's face when he found himself all tangled up in red tape, she laughed as she hit the city limits and punched the pedal to the metal. Score one for the girl in the white hat.

IT TOOKJARED ALL DAYto track P.J. down. Sitting in the foliage-filled atrium of a downtown Red Lion hotel in Spokane, Washington, he ate a club sandwich while keeping an eye on both the entrance to the bank of elevators and the stairs that came down from the two interior balconies overlooking the lobby.

Much as he hated to admit it, she'd caught him off guard. He didn't know precisely how she'd conned the manager of the hotel in Pocatello, but her performance must have really been something, because the guy had been all over him the minute he'd opened the door to a peremptory knock. The damn sheriff had even been called in and he'd had to do some fancy dancing to avoid having his ass hauled down to the county clink. Luckily he had a copy of the contract that the agency had signed with Wild Wind Records.

It hadn't hurt, either, that P.J. had vanished. By the time Turner hauled him down to his office, only to discover the sheriff had been there for some time but P.J. hadn't made an appearance at all and no one had been instructed to contact him, it was obvious he'd begun to suspect he'd been played. An involuntary grin tugged at Jared's lips now.

No shit, Sherlock.

Not that he had much to chortle about, himself. He'd underestimated her. From everything he'd seen so far, he would have sworn P.J. would do just about anything to avoid turning the light of media attention on herself. She sure as hell kept dodging having to deal with all the bullshit her mother was spreading. And unless Jodeen Morgan had changed dramatically since their Denver days, he had to believe one session of straight talk from P.J. and her old lady's guns would be spiked. The fact that P.J. wasn't doing a damn thing about it had led him to believe she wouldn't make a fuss over his homemade alarm system, either.

Looked like he'd been wrong on that front.

Before he'd fallen asleep last night it had occurred to him that hooking up with her this early was probably a mistake and that maybe he ought to back off and just keep his eye on her from a distance until her tour started. Well, screw that. Her trying to get him arrested forstalking, for crissake, had made this personal.

He came to attention when P.J. suddenly came into sight, skipping blithely down the staircase just as he was killing off his sandwich. It was an hour to sunset and he hadn't known if she'd go out at all. If so, though, he would have expected her to be dressed for hitting the club circuit like she'd been last night. Instead, she wore a sports bra, an abbreviated pair of shorts and running shoes. A CamelBak hydration system was strapped to her back.

She was a runner? That wasn't something he ever would have guessed. He watched her cross the atrium.

It didn't take a detective to figure out she was going for a run-which meant that sooner or later she'd be right back where she'd started: here. No sense in leaving this beautifully air-conditioned hotel to get all hot and sweaty following her around.

Then he sighed. Because this morning's stunt was still fresh in his mind, and what if this were a ruse? She could easily have spotted him from the upstairs landing, in which case he wouldn't put it past her to have called the bell captain to load her luggage into her truck. And wouldn't he look like an ass if he sat here for the next hour and a half waiting for her to return, when for all he knew she was jogging her way to Timbuktu.

Standing up, he glanced down at his Teva sandals. Shit. He was asking Rocket for a raise. He wasn't being paid nearly enough for this crap. He watched her exit through the front entrance, then followed.

Like a breath-stealing, run-amok forest fire, a wall of heat hit him the moment he stepped outside, and he damn near trod on P.J.'s heels when he unexpectedly came up behind her where she stood stretching. With the image of blue hip-hugger boy shorts stretched taut over that amazing butt seared into his retinas, he backpedaled out of sight until she set off at an easy clip down the path that fronted the hotel. Once she disappeared around the corner, he started out behind her.

He followed her past the pool at the back of the hotel and by the umbrella tables until she reached a little bridge that crossed the river to the hundred-acre island that formed Riverfront Park. She picked up her pace and they ran at a decent clip past the forestry shelter and the pavilion with its carnival rides and IMAX theater, through greenery and meadows, down to the place where the gondolas took off overhead and past a bunch of sculptures.

Heating up, he stripped off his T-shirt as he ran. Even then, he had to stop at the hand-carved wooden carousel to catch his breath. Pressing one hand to the stitch in his side, he braced the other against a bench back and bent over, blowing hard. He looked beyond the kids leaning out to try for the brass ring to where P.J. was running by a structure that he heard a parent call the Garbage Goat. Thinking he would kill for a bottle of water, he blew out a breath and started after her again, ignoring the hot spot that his sandal was rubbing on the ball of his right foot.

They jogged past a giant interactive sculpture shaped like a Radio Flyer red wagon and farther along passed a floating stage. They turned left over another little bridge, then P.J. turned left again and they pounded past a Vietnam veterans' memorial with a soaring clock tower in the background. That brought them back near the forestry shelter and he watched a trickle of sweat roll between her shoulder blades as she ran in place while giving another connected island they hadn't covered a considering gaze. Another drop coasted down the shallow groove of her spine and disappeared into the low-cut bandless waist of her little blue shorts.

Christ, had the temperature just spiked another twenty degrees? He could see the headline now:Semper Fi Detective Strokes Out on Measly One-Mile Run. Lucky for him, he knew he could count on his sister to spend time at his bedside wiping the drool from his chin. John, on the other hand, would probably just show up to laugh at him.

To his eternal relief, P.J. turned back toward the first bridge.

Figuring he could safely assume she was headed back to the hotel, he slacked off his pace. Then his professional self demanded,And you're going to discover her room number howfrom back here?

"Crap." Blowing out a breath, he picked up his speed again.

She'd disappeared by the time he got in sight of the pool again and, swearing to himself, he put on a further burst of speed.

"Enjoy your run?"

He skidded to a halt, his head whipping around. P.J. sat at one of the umbrella tables on the rail-enclosed deck, her feet up on the chair next to her. He walked back. "You knew I was behind you the entire time?"

"Hard to miss the sound of those sandals slapping on the path." She nodded at his feet. "You run pretty good for a man in Tevas."

He swung over the railing onto the deck and took a chair across from her. "Gimme your water."

"Get your own drink."

He leaned toward her. "I sold my favorite baseball card for you. Give me the goddamn water!"

"That was fifteen years ago, and you sold it for both of us, not just me." But she shoved the CamelBak she'd removed across the table.

He swooped the backpacklike hydration system up, stuck the mouthpiece between his lips and nearly sucked the well dry. When he came up for air, he found her gazing at his naked chest.

"You might want to put your shirt on," she said dryly. "I think this is one of those no shirt, no shoes, no service places."

"Then they must not get a helluva lot of business. It's next to a damn pool."

"That's a point." A valid one, P.J. saw when she looked around and saw a few of the diners still in bathing attire. She was nevertheless relieved to see him raise his right hip and fish his navy T-shirt from his back pocket, where he'd stuffed the shirt's tail. All that bare skin stretched over all that well-defined muscle and bone made her a little nervous. So she gave him a wiseacre smirk. "Who would have guessed that you'd turn out to be so buff?"

He pulled the shirt on over his head then flexed an impressively muscular bicep at her. "You a fool for muscles?"

"Oh, yeah." She laid it on thick, batting her eyes and doing the pitty-pat thing with her hand on her heart. "They just make me weak all over."

"Uh-huh." As she'd hoped, he thought she was yanking his chain, even though the sight of his shoulders and chest and ridged abdomen did make her feel a little giddy.

Lord Almighty, girl. Get a grip.

Clearly she had to get out more. She'd determined as a kid not to get sucked into the penchant that seemed to run rampant in so many of the small-town women she'd known-that longing for a man, any man, to stand between them and the lonelies. She'd always patted herself on the back for striking a healthy balance. So okay, she'd admit that recently she'd been concentrating on her career so much that her love life was pretty much nonexistent. Still, she certainly hadn't turned her back on men altogether.

Maybe she was going a little overboard on the vocation side of the equation these days, though, if the sight of one well-muscled chest gave her palpitations like those of a fourteen-year-old exposed to her first crush. That was a little on the awkward side.

All the same, the girlish giddies had her feeling pretty cheerful.

"So, when did you start running?" Jared asked, interrupting her thoughts.

"When I was sixteen. One of the schools I attended had a track team and Mama and I actually stayed in town long enough for me to join it." Only to be told to pack up again two days after their first meet.

"You do it to maintain that great ass?"

"No. I do it for my singing."

He gave her a blank look and she explained, "The lungs are a bellows, Hamilton. Running improves my wind, which improves my ability to sustain a note." She studied him from beneath her lashes. "So you think I have a great ass?"

To her surprise, dull color climbed his neck to flush his jaw and cheeks. "Hey, I'm a red-blooded man. I've noticed your butt in a, you know, general sort of way."

"Boys will be boys," she agreed dryly. And just like that, she found herself no longer pissed at him. The not quite disguised discomfort in a man she would have sworn didn't have a self-conscious bone in his body reminded her of the boy she'd once adored.

Besides, what had started out feeling like one big slap in the face-Jared's determination to keep tabs on her and his vow to deliver her to her concerts-was actually turning into something of a godsend. This game of cat-and-mouse they played kept her from trying to rewrite her history with Mama over and over again.

Who woulda thunk it? Truth was, though, she couldn't remember the last occasion spent offstage when she'd had this good a time. He was kind of stimulating company and it amused her to keep him on his toes.

Maybe that was why, when he asked out of the blue what her mother had done to make P.J. fire her, she didn't blow him off the way she had that day in the Texas panhandle.

"She cooked the books."

He stared at her. "Sheembezzled from you?"

Raw pain swamped her and she really wished she had blown him off. But she shrugged as if it were no big deal and dipped her chin in assent.

"Thatbitch. "

She'd always hated it when he'd bad-mouthed Jodeen. It was one thing for her to do so but something else entirely for anyone else to take a shot, and her jaw automatically shot up. But she resisted getting in his face about it. Because he was right. Much as she hated to admit it, he was one hundred percent correct.

Mama was a bitch. She likely always had been, but P.J. had refused to let herself see it.

Still, she hoped like hell her sorrow over acknowledging it now didn't show. Climbing to her feet, she gathered her CamelBak. "Well, gee," she said as if she didn't have a care in the world. "This's been swell. But our little whatchamacallit-our truce thingie-"

"Detente?"

"Yeah, that. Is over. Don't go thinking this changes anything. And you really don't want to start expecting I'll make things painless for you between now and the start of my tour. Because I won't. I'm still unhappy about having a guard dog. I'm not about to roll over and make your job easier." And if she had to stifle a silly little pang of regret, that would be her secret.

He yawned. "I'll keep that in mind."

His boredom shot her moment of remorse to hell, and she almost smiled in gratitude. "Just as long as you know." She started back toward the hotel entrance. "I don't want to hear no whining that you weren't warned."