The Case of the Missing Secretary

Dear Reader,

I really can’t express how flattered I am and also how grateful I am to Harlequin Books for releasing this collection of my published works. It came as a great surprise. I never think of myself as writing books that are collectible. In fact, there are days when I forget that writing is work at all. What I do for a living is so much fun that it never seems like a job. And since I reside in a small community, and my daily life is confined to such mundane things as feeding the wild birds and looking after my herb patch in the backyard, I feel rather unconnected from what many would think of as a glamorous profession.

But when I read my email, or when I get letters from readers, or when I go on signing trips to bookstores to meet all of you, I feel truly blessed. Over the past thirty years, I have made lasting friendships with many of you. And quite frankly, most of you are like part of my family. You can’t imagine how much you enrich my life. Thank you so much.

I also need to extend thanks to my family (my husband, James, son, Blayne, daughter-in-law, Christina, and granddaughter, Selena Marie), to my best friend, Ann, to my readers, booksellers and the wonderful people at Harlequin Books—from my editor of many years, Tara, to all the other fine and talented people who make up our publishing house. Thanks to all of you for making this job and my private life so worth living.

Thank you for this tribute, Harlequin, and for putting up with me for thirty long years! Love to all of you.

Diana Palmer

DIANA PALMER

The prolific author of more than one hundred books, Diana Palmer got her start as a newspaper reporter. A multi–New York Times bestselling author and one of the top ten romance writers in America, she has a gift for telling the most sensual tales with charm and humor. Diana lives with her family in Cornelia, Georgia.

Visit her website at www.DianaPalmer.com.

The Case of the Missing Secretary
Diana Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

With love to SPC Tracy Adams 4th MMC,

13th COSCOM—please write!

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter One

Kit Morris was just barely lucid as she stormed into the Lassiter Detective Agency, her short black hair falling in wet strings around her face, her blue eyes huge and red-rimmed. Her tall, slender figure was clad in a gray suit that had been immaculate just that morning, paired with a soft white blouse and an extravagant silk blue-patterned scarf. Now the whole outfit was a dripping mess—like Kit’s nerves.

It was Tess Lassiter’s day substituting for her husband Dane’s receptionist, so she was the first person Kit saw when she dragged into the office. Kit and Tess had been best friends for years, long before Tess married Dane Lassiter, who’d been Tess’s boss at the time. Kit and Tess had a lot in common. Not that Kit had a single bald chance of ever marrying her boss. Her ex- boss, that was. At the moment, Kit would much rather stand him up against a mesquite tree and put a fountain pen through his black heart than walk down the aisle with him.

“What happened to you?” Tess exclaimed. “My goodness, Kit, you look terrible!”

“Of course I look terrible! He put me out of the car on Travis Street!”

“That’s five blocks from here,” Tess mumbled. “He who?”

“Can’t you guess?” Kit wailed. “It was him! My boss! My ex-boss,” she corrected furiously, shaking her head to get the hair out of her eyes. “He…he hijacked me from the public safety department where I was getting my driver’s license renewed!” she exclaimed.

“He hijacked you?” Tess had to smother a laugh.

“Yes! I didn’t want to go with him, but he picked me up and carried me out to the car. And in front of all those people,” she groaned. “I didn’t even get my license fee paid! I’ll have to go back again and stand in line for another hour!”

“Oh, Kit,” Tess began sympathetically.

“I resigned two weeks ago, after all! I don’t work for him anymore! He can’t talk to me like that!”

“Like what?” Tess asked soothingly, trying to calm her best friend.

Kit’s eyes blazed like blue flames. “All these years I’ve slaved for him.” She choked. “Taking his dictation, following him around the world, withstanding his disgusting temper…and he has the gall…the gall to say that I’m not worth the salary he used to pay me! As if it was a king’s ransom or something. Can you imagine?”

“Mr. Deverell said that?”

“Logan Deverell is a tyrant and a beast.” Kit fumed. “The lowest of the low. A worm! No.” She caught herself. “Pond scum! That’s what he is, only much, much lower….”

“Did you do something?” Tess probed gently.

“Not since I told him about his new conquest, right before I quit,” she muttered, trying to hide her feeling of heartbreak. Logan Deverell’s new woman was why Kit had quit her job in the first place. “He’s serious about her, you know.”

“But why did he nab you?”

Kit threw up her graceful hands. “Who knows? Anyway, he tried to coax me into coming back and I told him I wouldn’t. He practically jumped down my throat with both feet. He’s never used language like that to me, and he said that I was worthless as a secretary and he didn’t know why he was willing to hire me again.”

Tess wanted to get up and put her arms around the taller woman and coax her to cry. But Kit was stubborn, even in grief. She held her chin high, struggling to maintain her dignity. Tess couldn’t undermine her strength.

She could only imagine how her friend was hurting. Kit had been in love with Logan Deverell for years. The silly man never noticed her, except as a piece of office furniture.

“Why was he offering you your old job back?” Tess asked.

“I don’t know. We started arguing before he got around to telling me. He was raging like a madman. I didn’t even think, I just got out of the car and left.”

“He put you out in the rain?” Tess groaned. “How could he!”

“He didn’t put me out as much as I jumped out,” Kit confessed. “The stupid blind man! I love him so!” Kit choked. Her heart felt as if it were something brittle that had just been smacked with a bat. She was coming unglued. “If only I were blonde and stacked!”

“Who is this woman he’s seeing?” Tess asked.

“Betsy Corley,” she said huskily.

“I don’t know her.”

“I do. At least, I know of her. At one time I was good friends with the man in my apartment building that she took for everything he had.” Kit took a steadying breath. “Logan is determined to marry her,” she said and laughed hoarsely.

“Oh, Kit,” Tess groaned sympathetically.

“At least I have a job, thanks to you and Dane,” she said miserably. “I’ve burned all my bridges….”

“Well, in that case, it’s a good thing we’re making a detective out of you,” Dane Lassiter murmured dryly. He joined the two women, slipping an arm around his wife. He smiled at her before his dark eyes went back to Kit. “We’re glad to have you now that Helen’s gone to South America where Harold’s next job is. He’s in the construction business with his father, you remember. And Helen’s brother, Nick, is moving back to Washington so that his new wife can keep her tenure at Thorn College. He’s starting up his own agency. I’ll be two operatives short. That means I’ve still got to hire another agent. I’m glad you haven’t been tempted to go back to your old boss.”

“I’d be more tempted to step into a lion’s mouth than I would to work for Logan Deverell again,” Kit murmured dryly, hiding her pain. “I hope you know how much I appreciate your giving me a chance here.” She pushed back her hair again and brushed at the moisture on her suit. It wasn’t as wet as she’d first thought, and seemed to be drying slowly.

“We both do,” Dane told her, smiling. “But you’ve been quite a surprise, you know. If there are such things as natural born detectives, then I think you’re one of them. You’ve taken to the job like a duck takes to swimming.”

She brightened. “You really think so?”

“I do.”

Kit managed a smile. “Actually I always used to think I’d make a good detective, because I love poking my nose into things that don’t concern me.” She sighed. “You really did save my life by hiring me,” she persisted. “I didn’t have my rent payment. After I stormed out of the office the day I quit, I can’t expect Mr. Deverell to send my severance pay after me. I didn’t even work a week’s notice.”

“I hardly think Logan Deverell will do you out of your severance pay, regardless,” Dane murmured dryly. “He’s not a vindictive man.”

“If you’d seen him ten minutes ago…” Kit muttered.

Dane cocked an eyebrow as he peered past her. “On second thought,” he mused, “perhaps he is—”

Before he got the words out, the door flew open and a tall, big dark man in a gray raincoat stormed in.

“I’ve searched the whole damned city for you,” he grumbled, his deep voice like muted thunder in the office as he glared at Kit. “You little fool, you could have been killed, jumping out of a car in the middle of traffic like that! Where in hell have you been?”

“Don’t you shout at me!” Kit raged back. “You told me to get my nose out of your business, and I did,” she said with painful satisfaction at the grimace on his broad face. “You can find someone else to yell at in your office. Dane says I’m a very good detective!”

Logan Deverell lifted a bushy eyebrow and glanced at Dane. “Did you say that?”

“I’m afraid so,” Dane replied. “Under the circumstances, it might be to your advantage not to argue with Kit anymore.”

Logan glanced at Kit’s face and his lips thinned. He was inclined to agree. She looked shaken. That, and totally out of control emotionally. In all the years she’d worked for him, this was the first time he’d seen her in such a state. She was usually calm and efficient. Except for the day she’d quit, of course, when she’d set new records for abusive verbosity. When he’d followed her into her office, where she was cleaning out her desk, she’d actually thrown a book at him and accused him of mixing her up emotionally with her computer.

It had been the cutting remarks about Betsy being mercenary that had cost Logan his temper today. He still regretted some of the things he’d said. Good secretaries weren’t a dime a dozen. He hadn’t been able to replace Kit. He missed her madly, though it would be unwise to tell her that, of course. He’d hoped to talk her into coming back, and then she’d mentioned some gossip about Betsy. No way was he going to let any woman tell him what to do in his personal life!

“I won’t take back what I said,” Logan told her. “You had no business meddling in my private life. But I’ll apologize for letting you walk back in the rain.”

“There’s no need to apologize,” Kit returned. “It was my fault for ever getting into a car with you in the first place!”

He looked surprised. “I was only going to ask you to come back to work.”

“I don’t want to come back to work for you, Mr. Deverell,” she said icily. “Here, at least, I’m not part of the office furniture. I’m a real live, breathing person with talent and ability, and if I died, Dane and Tess would miss me.”

“We’ve worked together for three years,” he reminded her.

“Three years too long,” she said, regaining her lost dignity slowly. “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble replacing me.”

“None of the temporaries can spell,” he said angrily. “They can’t file, or project a pleasant personality over the phone. Only one of them has any sense at all, and my mother hired her before I knew it. My brother hates the latest addition to the office. She actually told him to get his own coffee!”

“Your brother should have been getting his own coffee for years,” she reminded him.

“And my mother’s lost again,” he added irritably, glancing at Dane. “You’ll have to track her down. She told my brother something about a trip to Venice.”

“No problem,” Dane said. “Just give me her last known location.” He studied Kit. “I might let Kit have this assignment. She knows Tansy.”

“My mother missed you, too,” Logan told Kit with an angry frown. “That’s probably why she vanished.”

“Go ahead, blame it on me,” Kit invited with a sweep of her hand. “I cause your car not to start on cold mornings, I make your coffeepot stop working, I put dust on the windows and make the chairs in the office creak. I probably cause pond scum, too!”

“Will you stop it,” Logan muttered. He jammed his big hands into his pockets. Looking at her disturbed him. That was new, and it made him irritable. “Never mind, if you don’t want to come back. I can manage without you. Eventually the temporary agency will find me one secretary who can spell, type and answer the telephone.”

“Surely they already have?” she asked sarcastically.

“Of course. I just said so, didn’t I? The agency found me two more to go with the one that my mother hired. At least she can type. Of the two new ones, only one can spell. The tallest of the three can answer the telephone but it takes her until the fifth ring to find it.”

Kit’s eyebrows went up. “Why?”

“The desk is buried in unanswered letters and misplaced files,” he said simply. “Don’t let that concern you, Miss Morris. I did actually manage before you were first hired. And you might recall,” he added icily, “that it was not I who hired you to begin with.”

“How very true,” she agreed. “It was your mother, who has excellent taste in employees!”

“We can agree to disagree on that point,” he said stiffly.

“Should you be getting back to the office, before any more files become…misplaced?” she hinted.

His broad face hardened even more. “Cute,” he said. “Very cute. Go ahead and be a detective. That should be right up your alley, the way you mind everyone’s business but your own!”

“Somebody needs to mind yours!” she raged. “That dizzy blonde is just out for what she can get from you—”

“She gets plenty,” he interrupted hotly. “In bed and out,” he added deliberately, his eyes piercing as if he knew how she felt and wanted to sink the knife in as far as possible.

He succeeded. It went straight to the heart. But Kit had years of practice at hiding her deeper feelings from him. She just stared at him without reacting at all, except for the sudden whiteness of her face.

The stare got to him. He felt like a fool. It wasn’t a feeling he particularly enjoyed, especially with Dane and Tess standing there trying not to laugh.

“I’ll get back to my office, then,” he said. “Let me have the bill when you find my mother, Dane,” he added as he turned. He didn’t look at Kit, either.

Kit stuck her full lower lip out as she glared after his broad back. He was as big as a house, she thought irritably. All muscle and temper. If only he’d trip on his way through the door!

“If looks could kill,” Tess murmured dryly.

“You couldn’t kill him with a look,” Kit said wearily. “It would take a bomb. And even that wouldn’t hurt him if it hit him in the head!” she shouted after him.

He didn’t react at all, which only made her madder. The door closed behind him with a thump.

“In all the years you and Tess have been friends, I’ve never seen you lose your temper until Logan fired you,” Dane remarked. “I thought you worshiped your boss.”

“His feet melted,” she grumbled. “What do you want me to do this afternoon, boss?” she asked brightly, changing the subject.

“You heard what I told Logan. Find Tansy.”

She groaned. “But Mrs. Deverell disappears without a trace at least two times a month,” she protested. “She always turns up.”

“Usually in the hospital or in jail,” he reminded her, chuckling. “Logan’s mother is a dyed-in-the-wool troublemaker with a fatal philosophy of life.”

“Yes. ‘If it feels good, do it,’” Tess quoted. “The agency stays solvent because of Tansy’s wanderlust.”

“Last time she was missing, she started a riot in Newport News, Virginia, claiming to have been kidnapped by a flying saucer,” Dane recalled. “We bailed her out of a sanitarium.” He laughed. “Tansy just likes to start trouble. She’s no lunatic.”

“Most seventy-year-old women have the good sense to stay home. Tansy is a renegade. And she may not be a lunatic, but she does act like one,” Tess said. “Didn’t she go sailboarding in Miami year before last and pick up some Middle Eastern potentate who wanted her to join his harem?”

“Yes. And we had to practically kidnap her to get her away from him, to Tansy’s dismay. But as they sometimes say, all the wrong people are locked up. Tansy is a breath of fresh air. A totally uninhibited free soul.”

“Her son isn’t,” Kit said.

“Logan’s straitlaced. But Christopher Deverell isn’t,” Dane said. “Chris is as nutty as his mother, and both of them love to get Logan behind the eight ball.”

“In other words,” Tess said, reading her husband’s mind, “this could be a deliberate disappearance. If Tansy knew he’d fired you, this might be her way of getting even. She did like you.”

“Always,” Kit agreed, smiling as she recalled how well they got along. She suspected Tansy knew how she felt about Logan, too. But remembering it wasn’t going to help things, it only made her sad for what her life was like without her temperamental boss.

She missed the silliest things. She missed the way he spilled coffee on his important papers and raised the roof, yelling for her as if she was salvation itself when she came running with a roll of paper towels. She missed evenings when she accompanied him to dinners. It was usually to take notes, and strictly business, but it felt good to wear her prettiest clothes and be in the company of a man who had a mind like a steel trap and still looked devastating in a dinner jacket.

“Kit?”

Tess’s query brought her mind back to the present. “Sorry. I was thinking about where to start looking for Tansy.”

“Call Chris first,” Dane suggested. “Meanwhile, I’m taking Mrs. Lassiter to lunch.”

“Actually we’re taking lunch to the baby.” Tess chuckled. “I’m still breast-feeding. Don’t mind if we’re a little late. I hate having to leave him at all during the day, even if he is five months old.”

“I think I’d feel the same way,” Kit said.

They left and she watched them, faintly envious of the way they seemed to belong together. She’d wanted that with Logan Deverell, but he wanted his scheming lady friend. He was going to get taken to the cleaners, did he but know it, and Kit wasn’t going to be around to mop him up anymore. If he spilled coffee, or even tears, somebody else would have that chore. She wasn’t sorry, she told herself, she wasn’t sorry at all.

She went to work at once. Her first call was, as Dane had suggested, to Christopher Deverell.

“Mother’s gone again,” he said pleasantly. He was only twenty-seven, just two years older than Kit—but eight years younger than Logan. He and Kit and Tansy were like a different generation. Nobody ever told Logan that, of course.

“Yes, I know, that’s why I’m calling you,” Kit said with a smile in her tone. “I have to find her.”

“Logan’s office is a mess,” he said. “Logan screamed bloody murder for two solid days and refused to hire anybody else.”

“I know,” she said. “I was due for a change. I was stagnating in that office with the same routine day in and day out—”

“Bull,” Chris said. “You were eaten up with jealousy over the delectable Miss Corley. Everybody knows how you feel about Logan, Kit. Everybody except Logan.”

She didn’t bother to deny it. Chris knew her too well. “He’s going to marry her.”

“So he says. He’ll find her out in time, though. Logan’s no fool. Well, most of the time he’s no fool.”

“She’s very pretty.”

“So are you.”

“I’m just a walking piece of office furniture that he programmed to do his filing and typing,” Kit said solemnly. “He doesn’t miss me. He’s already found a replacement. Three of them, in fact.”

“Mother found him the best one. She’s a cousin of ours who used to live in San Antonio, and she can type. The other two… Well,” he said noncommittally. “Let’s just say that they aren’t quite what he had in mind. Melody, that’s our cousin, is the best of them all, but she can’t spell and she’s very nervous trying to answer the telephone.”

“I would be, too, with a glowering boss peering down his nose at me,” Kit muttered. “Don’t you have other relatives in San Antonio?” she asked, remembering some veiled references to people Logan didn’t ever go and visit there.

“Just Emmett. Don’t ever mention Emmett to Logan,” he added. “He has nightmares about his last visit there.”

“I won’t see Logan to mention anybody to him, thank God,” she said curtly.

“You hope. Logan isn’t coping well without you,” he said gently. “He won’t admit it, but life without you is like going around in a blindfold.”

“I hope he trips over a potted plant and goes out the window.”

“Naughty, naughty,” he chided. “Don’t you feel guilty, leaving him at the mercy of an office you’re not in?”

“No. It’s time he knew what the real world is like,” Kit said.

“From the tidbits I get from Melody, he may try to toss the new receptionist out a window one day soon.”

“Then I hope you know a good lawyer to defend him. I’ll be a character witness for the woman. Just call me.”

“Shame on you!” He laughed.

“I hate your brother. I gave him three of the best years of my life and he never even noticed I was around until I told him his new girlfriend was a miner who’d be digging for gold in his hip pocket.”

“You should have told Tansy instead. She’d have handled that.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Kit argued. “Tansy doesn’t believe in interfering. She thinks people should make their own mistakes. She’s right, too,” she muttered. “When he loses his home, his car and his business to his heartthrob, I’m going to phone him twice a day just to say, ‘I told you so!’”

“Before or after you offer to take dictation for free to help him get back on his feet?”

She sighed. Chris knew her too well. “Where do you think Tansy’s gone?”

“To Venice,” he said. “She was seen boarding a plane bound for there in Miami.”

“Okay. Which airline?”

He told her, along with the flight number and time of departure. She thanked him, cutting off the conversation before he could say anything else. She turned her attention to the task at hand. She had no time to wallow in self-pity.

Minutes later, she knew that Tansy Deverell had bought a ticket to Venice. But the woman who boarded the plane wasn’t Tansy. Whoever Logan’s cunning mother had gotten to take her place had forgotten to limp as she walked down the concourse. Tansy limped just temporarily because of an accident while she was hang gliding.

Kit laughed. She had to be a natural, just as Dane had said. She was getting the hang of this in a big way. She went back to talk to the skip tracers. They were masters at the game of invention to get information, and most of them could find a needle in a haystack within five minutes.

Unfortunately Tansy was harder to find than a needle. They drew a blank.

“I’m sorry,” Doris said, shaking her head. “But she’s harder to find than a white bear in a snowstorm. If she paid someone to take her place on that flight, she did it with cash. You’ll have to find a flight attendant to ask for a description, and even then, it won’t be easy. Those flights to Venice are usually full. Individual faces are hard to remember.”

Kit could have ground her teeth. “What do I do?” she moaned. “Dane will fire me!”

“Oh, not yet,” Doris said, smiling. “He never fires anyone before Friday.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“I did get you the name of a cabdriver at the airport who remembers an elderly lady with a limp.” Doris chuckled, handing her a slip of paper.

“You angel!”

“No kissing,” Doris said, warding her off. “You’ll give Adams ideas,” she added with a covert glance at the burly Adams, who was playing with a penknife two desks in front of her.

“There’s not a thing wrong with Adams,” Kit said, smiling. “He’s a doll.”

Adams overheard her and perked up. He got up, straightening his tie, and smiled in Kit’s direction.

“He has homing instincts. You’ll be sorry,” Doris said under her breath.

“How about lunch, Kit?” Adams drawled with a hopeful smile.

“I’d love it, Adams,” she replied, “but I have to go track down a cabdriver. Rain check?”

He brightened. He blushed. No woman in the office had ever offered him a rain check. He lost ten years and his morose expression. Doris studied him with renewed interest.

“Rain check,” he agreed.

Doris toyed with her pen. “I’m not doing anything for lunch,” she said to herself.

Adams thought he might have a heart attack. Two women found him interesting in less than two minutes. Maybe his luck was finally changing. Kit was pretty, and petite Doris was adorable, even with salt-and-pepper hair and glasses. “How about a chicken burger, Doris?” he asked quickly. “I’ll buy!”

Doris beamed at him. “I’d love that!”

Kit eased out the door with relief and delight. Doris and Adams were both middle-aged loners with no family to speak of. Why hadn’t anyone ever thought of tossing them together?

That made her think of salads, and she remembered that she hadn’t had any lunch. Thanks to Logan Deverell, she’d probably starve. If she didn’t die of pneumonia from standing around in wet clothes. First, she was going home to change and eat a sandwich. Then she’d find that cabbie.