Just One Kiss by Carla Cassidy Page A

finish. She read Jack’s notes, then looked at him. “You really followed this woman, Beth Daniels, everywhere for four days?”
    Jack returned her gaze. “Everywhere. I sat outside the beauty shop while she got her hair done, followed her to the cleaners. I watched her eat lunch with her best friend from high school and sat behind her in the movie theater where she ate half a container of popcorn and a whole box of Milk Duds.”
    â€œAnd she never suspected she was being followed?”
    Jack grinned, the gesture making pinpoints of light dance in his eyes. “I told you I was good.”
    â€œI would know if somebody was following me,” Marissa exclaimed.
    He leaned forward. “Not if it were me,” Jack argued, a wicked gleam in his blue eyes. “I told you, I’m good.” He leaned back once again. “In that particular case, Beth Daniels’s husband hired me to find out if she was cheating on him.”
    Marissa picked up the photos that were to accompany the report. One showed an attractive blond woman standing at a motel-room door. The next showed the door being opened by a tall, dark-haired man, and the third caught the woman slipping through the door. “I guess she was.”
    â€œYeah,” Jack agreed. “The third night of surveillance while her husband was at a business dinner, Mrs. Daniels apparently had an intimate little dinner of her own.”
    Marissa set the photographs down, her frown deepening. “Why didn’t Mr. Daniels just ask his wife what was going on in her life?”
    Jack stared at Marissa in obvious disbelief. “Because women lie.”
    There was a vehemence in his voice that stunned Marissa. “Not all women lie,” she protested. “This just seems rather…”
    â€œSleazy?” Jack’s eyebrows rose and a mocking smile curved his lips. “I’m a sleazy kind of guy who does a sleazy kind of job.”
    Marissa flushed. “That wasn’t what I was going to say. I was going to say that this all seems rather sad, that it takes a third party to find out the truth between two people who are married and supposed to love each other.”
    The mocking smile remained on Jack’s lips. “In my line of work and in my vast experience, I’ve realized that love is just a fantasy people pretend to feel to fill unhealthy emotional needs.”
    â€œSurely you don’t really believe that,” she protested. There was something in the depths of his blue eyes that had nothing to do with mockery, but rather spoke of betrayal and pain. He broke eye contact and looked away, as if afraid of what she might see there.
    â€œI do believe that,” he replied. He looked at her once again, and whatever vulnerability she’d thought she’d seen in his eyes was gone. “Love is a fantasy, a concept created by poets and expanded on by the entertainment industry. The only marriages that last are built on mutual financial interests and common goals and interests.”
    Marissa stared at him in disbelief and sighed, his cynicism evoking a strange sadness inside her. What would it be like to live without the hope of finding true love? It certainly had to be a cold, barren place in which to exist.
    â€œYou are some piece of work, Jack Coffey. If I was to hazard a guess, I’d say somebody hurt you really badly.”
    He laughed. “And if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say you were seriously stunted in the reality department. You of all people should know love isn’t real. You bought into the concept of true love forever more and look where it’s gotten you. You’re now a single parent because you believed in the foolishness of love.”
    â€œThat’s not true,” Marissa exclaimed. “I’m a single parent because I made the mistake of falling in love with the wrong man, not because I believed in love. I won’t make the same mistake