Leave It to Cleavage by Wendy Wax Read Free Book Online Page A

the apple pie they seemed to think he had room for—out the door. Then he put on his coat and hat and went looking for Miranda Smith.
    He tracked her down at the Truro Country Club, where Nancy Bell, the alarmingly perky receptionist, informed him Mrs. Smith was swimming laps. He followed the signs through the tastefully decorated lobby to the soaring glass wall of windows that enclosed the indoor pool. Entering through the men’s locker room, he walked toward the pool in his winter-weight uniform and hard-soled shoes.
    Wet heat, all the steamier after the frigid air outside, assaulted him. The floor was slick with water, the room echoed with sound, and the damp, overheated air carried the scent of expensive eau de chlorine. Within seconds, his clothes were limp and perspiration was trickling down his back.
    Trying not to breathe in the heat or the chlorine, he scanned the Olympic pool for Miranda Smith.
    She swam in the last lane, her slim arms flashing in and out of the water in a practiced crawl, her breathing synched to her stroke, the flutter of her feet steady and sure. She was the lone occupant of the pool.
    At the deep end wall, she made a smooth underwater flip turn, and as she resurfaced he got a brief flash of dark hair and goggles before she resumed her stroke. He hunkered down in front of her lane and waited for her to reach him, not quite sure how he was going to play the whole thing.
    Her right hand landed on the wall first, and her other came to join it. For a brief moment he thought she meant to keep on swimming, but then she stopped and stood, removing her goggles and running a hand over the top of her head in an automatic smoothing gesture.
    The water eddied around her waist, hiding what lay beneath, but the black one-piece was molded to her body like a second skin, and droplets of water clung to her chest and arms.
    He brought his gaze up and had to bite back a smile at the raccoonlike imprint the goggles had left around her green eyes.
    “Hello, Miranda.”
    “Chief.”
    They regarded each other for a moment, neither speaking. She didn’t make a move to get out of the pool, but just stood there looking up at him, waiting for him to say something. They’d known each other since birth, though that knowledge had been tempered by the social divide between them. He’d been the son of a real estate agent who died before Floridians discovered Truro’s quaint charm, and a dissatisfied Miss Rhododendron who’d deserted her husband and eight-year-old son when her life didn’t live up to her expectations.
    Miranda Smith had been a Miss Rhododendron, too, plus a whole lot of Miss Something-or-Others he hadn’t bothered to keep track of. From what he could tell, she’d lived the life his mother had aspired to.
    “How are you?” he asked.
    “Fine.” She flashed the beauty pageant smile a fraction of a second late. “And you?”
    “Good, good.” He made a point of staring her right in the eye, despite the natural inclination to drop his gaze lower. As he studied her he realized that her individual features were not particularly beautiful, but the sum of those parts was hard to look away from. “And Tom? How’s Tom?” he asked.
    If he hadn’t been watching so closely he might have missed the hesitation. She swallowed and cocked her head in his direction. Then she pulled out her beauty contestant smile again.
    “Why, he’s fine, Chief. Thank you for asking.” She finished her Scarlett O’Hara impression with another flash of white teeth. Any minute she was going to bat her eyelashes at him.
    “I haven’t seen him around for a while,” Blake replied.
    “No?”
    “Nope.”
    She fidgeted slightly. Nothing major, just enough to tell him she was uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken.
    “That’s because he’s out of town.”
    “Oh? Where is he?”
    She didn’t look away, but he could have sworn he could feel her mind racing.
    “He’s out of the country right now. In