I've Got You Under My Skin by Mary Higgins Clark Read Free Book Online Page A

inside the house, he realized he was seeing them now. “You said that Ms. Moran was coming, Mr. Rob,” Jane said. “I hope you don’t mind if I ask, but does that mean that the program is going to happen?”
    “I don’t mind you asking, but the answer is I don’t know,” Rob said. Even as he spoke, he realized that he did mind Jane asking, because there was a note of disapproval in her question.
    He had just enough time to change into a long-sleeved sport shirt and go back downstairs before the doorbell chimed.
    It was exactly four o’clock. He wondered if she had timed her arrival so precisely or if she had arrived a little early and waited in her car before coming up to the house.
    It was the kind of totally irrelevant speculation that Rob Powell had found himself indulging in lately. “Woolgathering” is what they used to call it, he thought. He had even gone to the trouble of looking up the word in the dictionary. The definition was “indulging in idle fancies and daydreaming; absentmindedness.”
    Rob thought to himself, Snap out of it! and got to his feet. He had asked Jane to bring Laurie Moran into the library instead of his office. Betsy had liked the English custom of four o’clock tea. After her death he had gotten away from it, but today it suddenly seemed appropriate.
    More woolgathering, he acknowledged as Jane came into the room, followed by Laurie Moran.
    He had considered Moran to be an attractive woman when she came to the house last month, but now as she hesitated for a moment and stood framed in the doorway, he realized that she was beautiful. Her hair, a soft honey shade, was loose on her shoulders, and in place of the pin-striped suit she was wearing a long-sleevedprint blouse and black-belted skirt that accentuated her small waist. Her black patent leather heels did not have the ridiculous stilts that were the fashion nowadays.
    Once again, the seventy-eight-year-old appreciated her lovely looks.
    “Come in, Ms. Moran, come in,” he said heartily. “I won’t bite you.”
    “I wasn’t afraid of that, Mr. Powell,” Laurie said, smiling as she crossed the room and sat on the couch opposite the roomy leather armchair where he was settling himself.
    “I’ve asked Jane to prepare tea,” he said. “You may serve it now, Jane, thank you.”
    “How kind of you.”
    It was kind of him, Laurie thought.
    She drew a deep breath. Now that she was here, with so much at stake, it was difficult to appear calm. The four women, the stars of the Graduation Gala, would cost this man nearly two million dollars, instead of half that amount, to appear on the program.
    Laurie marshaled her pitch to him, but before she started she waited for Jane’s somewhat forbidding figure to turn and leave the room.
    “I’m going to make this easy for you,” Robert Powell said unexpectedly. “A problem has come up. I don’t have to be particularly astute or a deep thinker to guess that it’s about money. One of the four girls—women now—doesn’t think we’re paying enough to coax them to expose themselves to public scrutiny.”
    Laurie hesitated for the length of a few seconds, then said, “That’s right.”
    Powell smiled. “Let me guess which one. It wouldn’t be Claire. She has refused to let me help her since Betsy died. When she learns I have left her a substantial amount of money in my will it will notimpress her. When the time comes, she might even give the money to charity.
    “We were very close, but Claire was very close to her mother, too. The fact that Betsy died was overwhelming for Claire. Somehow it became my fault, not that she thought I had killed her mother, mind you. Angry as she was, she knew that was impossible, but I think that in her mind, she was begrudging me the time I had alone with Betsy.” For a long moment he looked past Laurie.
    “My guess,” he added slowly, “is that Nina Craig is the one holding us up for more money. In that way she’s very much like her