Ride a Painted Pony (Superromance) Read online

  Taylor’s mouth was too dry to pray aloud

  Letter to Reader

  Books by Carolyn McSparren

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  EPILOGUE

  Copyright

  Taylor’s mouth was too dry to pray aloud

  She watched as Nick wriggled across the carousel platform and dropped into the center well. A shot pinged against the metal door of the control booth.

  “Hell!” Nick snarled. He snatched at the door handle and dove inside. Taylor could no longer see him.

  Suddenly the organ wheezed into life with a cheerful rendition of “In the Good Ol’ Summertime.” The carousel began to turn. Lights blinked. It was like being trapped in a kaleidoscope.

  Taylor grabbed the nearest pole and felt herself jerked up. As the horse’s pole rose, so did she. As it sank, a bullet struck the pole exactly where her head had been a moment earlier.

  The music was loud above the whirring of the motor. Taylor let go and grasped the edge of a chariot and held on as the carousel picked up speed.

  She felt the centrifugal force thrusting her out toward the edge of the slippery floor. She tightened her grasp, then raised her head to look for Nick. If he’d been hit she’d ride this thing until she died or spun off onto the concrete.

  Nick must live, she thought. She couldn’t lose him now.

  Dear Reader,

  The first horse I ever rode circled majestically on the fine old carousel at our local amusement park. Years later, I realized I’d been perched on a work of art. While many of the great American carousels are long gone, the horses, lions, tigers, pigs—even ostriches and giraffes—that originally graced them have become collectors’ items.

  Because they are both beautiful and valuable, somebody somewhere is going to steal or fake them to make a dishonest buck.

  And where there is a crook, there’s a detective—in this case, an inexperienced widow with a fierce determination to solve her first big case all by herself, even if it kills her. And it may.

  Not if her new client has his way. He intends to keep his detective safe in his arms, even if he loses the carving school in which he’s invested his reputation and his savings.

  Although Rounders, Ltd., and the people who inhabit it are strictly figments of my imagination, a number of real carving schools all over the country teach even dangerous klutzes like me to carve carousel animals in the great tradition. You might like to try it yourself.

  And now, dear reader, heed the carousel barker’s cry and “Climb aboard, climb aboard.” I hope you enjoy the ride.

  Carolyn McSparren

  Books by Carolyn McSparren

  HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE

  725—THE ONLY CHILD

  772—IF WISHES WERE HORSES

  RIDE A PAINTED PONY

  Carolyn McSparren

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  For Bess Burgess, who helps me out of plot pickles.

  For those wonderful people at Horsin’ Around, a school that teaches ordinary folks to carve carousel animals, and who took the time to show me the process. Any technical errors are mine, not theirs.

  For those who cherish and seek to preserve the great carousels and carousel animals.

  For my husband, George, a left-brain type who still enjoys the ballet and the opera.

  PROLOGUE

  NICK KENDALL OPENED HIS EYES onto darkness as solid as basalt.

  His heart pounded painfully beneath his ribs. For a moment he thought he’d gone blind. As full consciousness returned, he remembered where he was. Lined drapes shut out every vestige of light from the Seattle hotel room. The air conditioner hummed; cold sweat rolled off his chest.

  He sat up and drove his fingers through his damp hair. He’d been dreaming, but not the same old nightmare. In the dream with the carousel tickets, he always woke up with a jolt of loss so terrible it filled his throat with bile. No, this dream opened another black hole in his subconscious. This was about the job, about restoring the hippocampus. But why should he be so disturbed about a simple restoration job?

  He strained to remember his dream, but it was gone. He lay back with his hands locked behind his head and thought about the work. He rolled over on his side, closed his eyes and brought the image of the hippocampus to his mind. Mentally he slid his hands over the wood, felt the sponginess along its belly, the flakes of turquoise paint on its scales. He felt the joints loosening and the seams opening where the aging glue had failed.

  A tingle of disquiet eased up the back of his neck.

  His scalp began to prickle.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and saw the tiny black-and-white picture that had run with the article—the only article he’d ever seen about that long-gone carousel, toppled by a fierce killer hurricane that buried it and all its animals under tons of New Jersey beach sand. It had been a grand old carousel with three rows of horses—outside row of standers, center row of prancers, inside row of jumpers, and two chariots.

  Horses. Only horses.

  No ostrich, no pig, no lion. No hippocampus.

  Nick sucked in his breath and sat bolt upright. He flung the covers back and padded naked to the chair where he’d dropped his dusty jeans when he’d fallen into bed. He felt around for the desk lamp and flicked it on. He blinked in the sudden light. Three in the morning. Damn.

  He pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, pushed his feet into dust-covered loafers, grabbed the keys to the rental car and left the room.

  Fog rolled in off the Puget Sound as he sped through empty streets to the warehouse. He had to know now. Dawn lay an eternity away.

  Nobody had dug that old hippocampus out of any New Jersey beach. Maybe it was genuine, but from another carousel. Maybe the provenance proving its authenticity had gotten mixed up. Nick tried to think of a reasonable explanation, while part of him stood aside whispering the possibility that he didn’t dare admit. That possibility could destroy him and his carefully constructed reputation.

  Somebody had been conned. Was it Helmut Eberhardt—the man who’d sold the animal? Pete Marley who’d bought it without checking? With full provenance, the hippocampus could be worth fifty thousand or more. Without it, the hippocampus—genuine or not—was worth half as much.

  Nick’s stomach churned.

  He slid the car to a stop in front of the warehouse and got out. He pulled a set of keys out of his pocket, opened the front door and slammed it behind him. It clanged like the door of a cell.

  The hippocampus stood under a spotlight in the center of the room. A round metal pole lanced through its midsection, securing it to a heavy wooden stand. Its fine-boned horse head still lifted towards the sea breeze. Its nostrils seemed to scent the odor of long-abandoned ocean depths. Its teeth fought the bit in its mouth. Front hooves pawed the air as though in a desperate battle against captivity.

  Then just behind the w
ithers, the finely carved horse pelt changed to scales as its body morphed from horse to fish. The carving—a mer-horse ready to carry a mermaid princess through gray-green ocean depths—was a perfect blending of horse and fish. It balanced on the lashing split-tail flukes of a whale.

  Nick had already stripped the flaking paint from most of the head and neck. He closed his eyes and ran his hands over the raw wood, remembering the eye sockets, the pointed ears, the heavy flat planes of the cheeks. His hands moved down to the fish’s body and finally slid beneath the double flukes of the tail.

  Yes. Oh, yes. He knew this creature, all right. He should have known it instantly. It wasn’t an antique. It was his creation.

  He’d carved it twenty years ago. And right now it should be locked up in his storeroom at Rounders—three thousand miles away.

  CHAPTER ONE

  UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN WILL BE SOLD AS ELVES.

  Taylor Hunt grimaced at the ornate sign at the head of the stairs. “Cute.” She squared her shoulders, took a deep breath to calm the butterflies in her stomach, opened the door to the right, and walked into a blinding pool of sunlight... and a six-foot wooden rabbit.

  She grabbed at it as it toppled towards her. “Whoa, there, Peter.”

  From behind the carving a gravelly female voice said, “Actually, I call him Harvey. Sorry, but every time I slice into him he scoots out from under me.”

  Small hands encircled the rabbit’s waist and hauled him back. A triangular face appeared between his ears. Definitely elfin, but no child. Taylor judged the woman to be in her fifties; there were lines at the corners of her bright blue eyes. “For the life of me, I can’t get the roses right.”

  The woman stepped from behind the rabbit. She was perhaps five feet tall and probably weighed less than the wooden figure. She wore jeans and a dusty sweatshirt with Band Organs Do It with Pipes written across the chest. “Can I help you, dear?” she asked.

  “Can you tell me where I can find Mr. Kendall?”

  The woman gestured vaguely to her left. “Back there, getting Rico’s stander on its feet.”

  “Uh-huh.” Taylor had no idea what getting a stander on its feet entailed, nor, for that matter, what a “stander” was. She fought a moment of panic. She had had precious little time to do her homework. She’d just. have to fake it. She had no intention of running back to Mel Borman with her investigative tail between her legs. She smiled at the blue-eyed rabbit lady, who began to dig at the rabbit’s shoulder with a wicked steel gouge, three inches wide.

  Oh Lord, Taylor thought, I’d kill myself with that thing.

  Without looking up, the woman said, “Just plunge right on back. Never stand on ceremony at Rounders.”

  Taylor plunged.

  Rounders Unlimited occupied the second floor of a building so old it probably belonged on the National Historic Register. The crumbling warehouse district down by the Mississippi riverfront in Memphis had begun to attract developers eager to turn the old warehouses into chic lofts, but the yuppification process hadn’t reached this area. Maybe one look at this long-defunct machine shop and warehouse had sent the developers hunting for easier targets.

  From the grimy wooden floorboards and crumbling brick walls, Taylor guessed that only minimum upkeep had been done since the original machinery had disappeared into scrap heaps and antique shops.

  She threaded her way among sawhorse tables covered with the disembodied heads, trunks, legs and haunches of horses. Directly in front or her, a giraffe’s head sat on its long neck, its black glass eyes level with her own. A pig and a frog shared another table, and in this Alice in Wonderland world, the frog was twice as big as the pig. The scent of fresh sawdust and wood shavings tickled Taylor’s nose. Dust—like Mississippi river silt, too fine to see, impossible to dislodge—hung in the air. She could feel it sifting down into her hair, clothes, mouth and nose. She sneezed.

  She edged past a room separated from the space by filthy glass panes nailed along the top of a four-foot wall. The loft stretched back past the reach of the skylights towards a pair of heavy steel doors. In the shadows stood more wooden animals, but no human beings.

  “Mr. Kendall?” she called.

  “Yeah?”

  Nick Kendall had apparently been kneeling on the floor behind a large wooden horse painted to look like an Indian pony. He stood, wiped his hands down jeans even older than hers, and came towards her out of the gloom. He was well over six feet tall. A giant of a man with broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist.

  “Damn,” Taylor whispered.

  She’d assumed a man who taught amateurs to carve carousel animals would look like Santa Claus. This guy belonged on a dock somewhere unloading crates one-handed.

  The minute he smiled, she knew that he was bad. Any female—from six to a hundred and six—would feel the impact of that grin right in the gut. She’d bet the lady carving the rabbit brought him brownies. The man was obviously a charmer. After the years she’d spent married to Paul—who’d showed the same easy charm as this guy Kendall, and had played it for all it was worth—she knew she should be immune. But a flare of heat in her belly warned her that she was still susceptible.

  She shifted the strap of her leather satchel to a more comfortable position on her shoulder and extended her hand. She prayed her smile looked competent and professional. “Taylor Hunt, Mr. Kendall. I want to join your class.”

  He frowned, wiped his right hand down the front of his jeans again and shook hers quickly. His palm felt like badly tanned leather.

  “Oh, yeah.” He hesitated. “How about we talk in my office?” He gestured at a door to the window room. The office was small and held a scarred wooden student desk, a computer, a battered file cabinet and two mismatched kitchen chairs—one behind the desk, the other across from it.

  Even seated—and with the desk between them—Nick Kendall’s size was impressive and vaguely disquieting.

  “Mel Borman didn’t tell me you were a woman. I figured Taylor was a man,” he said.

  Kendall leaned back in his chair and looked her over. She felt like a mule being assessed for the number of rows she could plow in a day. She returned his gaze levelly and hoped her makeup was thick enough to hide the flush she felt creeping up her face.

  “So, Ms. Hunt, how long you been a detective?”

  The dreaded question. “I’ve been an associate of Mr. Borman’s for just under two years.” Technically correct. If Nick Kendall didn’t know that you had to apprentice for a year before you could even sit for the Tennessee P.I. exam, she wasn’t about to tell him. She also wasn’t going to tell him that most of the time she answered telephones, ran papers to the courthouse, and occasionally tricked workmen’s compensation cheats into showing that they could still mow the lawn and shoot pool.

  “You used to be a cop?”

  She took a deep breath. “No.” Her stomach tied itself into a dozen granny knots, but she willed it to stay quiet.

  “Isn’t being a private investigator a dangerous job for a woman?”

  “I was in more danger driving down here.” Easier ground now. “Investigators spend most of their time sitting in front of computer screens or drinking cold coffee outside shabby motel rooms.” Not strictly accurate, but close.

  “How did you meet Borman?”

  “My uncle Mark was a prosecuting attorney. He introduced me to Mel. Said he was honest and competent. After my husband’s death, I needed a job. Mel needed an investigator. It was a good fit.” No need to tell him of the weeks she’d spent bullying Mel until he agreed to take her on as an unpaid apprentice, or the sheer hell she’d endured from her family when he finally capitulated.

  The dam chair hit her right on the tailbone, though the discomfort was probably more psychological than physical. She wasn’t exactly deceiving Kendall—just omitting details. And she swore her inexperience would never make him regret hiring the Borman agency.

  Kendall’s grilling made her feel as though she were back in the four
th grade in the principal’s office, with Mr. Davidson accusing her of hiding the garter snake in Mrs. Anderson’s drawer. She’d never admitted that one either.

  “Is this your first undercover assignment?” he asked.

  “Of course not.” Just the first one without Mel sitting two bar stools away in case one of the rowdies reached for her breast or tried to stick his hand up her dress.

  “I’ve never hired a detective before.”

  She relaxed. Of course he was nervous—maybe even more so than she was. She gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “Most people haven’t unless they’re trying to find a missing child or get the goods on a cheating spouse.”

  “I’ve never been married.”

  Alarm bells went off in her head. Most of the forty-year-old men she met were either married, damaged or gay. Her hormones indicated that he wasn’t gay. That left damaged. Alcohol maybe, or drugs?

  She sat up straighter. Why should she care? Mel’s number-one rule was “Never get emotionally involved with The Client.” Until this moment, she’d never felt the slightest twinge of interest in a client—but then, she’d never met one with the sort of grin that could con Little Red Riding Hood out of her basket of goodies.

  “I’m not sure this is something a woman can handle.”

  Taylor’s jaw set so hard that her teeth clicked. So that was why he wasn’t married. With effort, she kept the smile plastered to her face. “I can do anything Mr. Borman can do. We’re talking carousel horses here, Mr. Kendall, not the drug cartels.”