Free The Wizard of Seattle by Kay Hooper

going to be fallout, she intended to deal with it herself.
    The last thing she needed right now was an I-told-you-so from Merlin.
    Besides that, she was curious about what the reporter had in mind, so she willingly accompanied him into the coffee shop. They were shown to a booth in a corner, fairly private in the less-than-crowded shop, and Kane talked desultorily about the weather (overcast, as usual), politics (screwed up, as usual), and the latest best-seller (his name wasn’t on the cover, so he hated it) until their coffee came.
    “What’s on your mind, Kane?” Serena asked after the waitress left. Ordinarily she would have let him get around to it in his own time, but she wanted to hurry home and see if Merlin had returned.
    Kane sipped his coffee for a moment, pale blue eyes fixed on her face. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, but the wear and tear of nearly twenty years of a downhill slide was stamped into his features, lending them an oddly blurred, indistinct appearance that was a bit unsettling.
    “Did you take me back to my apartment Friday night, Serena? After our dance?” he asked finally in a very casual tone.
    As she assumed an expression of surprise, her mind worked very swiftly, examining the question and recalling every one of her own actions. Of course she knew why he was asking: because he had most likely found the draft of the announcement in his pocket and, obviously remembering she’d been with him before he passed out, had concluded that she was somehow responsible. The most logical answer, naturally, was that she had accompanied or followed him home and had, for some reason, left the paper in his pocket for him to find.
    “Why would I have done something like that?” she asked in a puzzled voice.
    “Never answer a question with a question.”
    “No, I didn’t take you back to your apartment. I repeat,why would I? A dance is one thing, Kane, but we certainly don’t know each other
that
well.”
    He didn’t lose his smile. “Why
did
you ask me to dance, by the way? I’m hardly your type.”
    Gently, Serena said, “Somebody dared me to, Kane. Sorry about that, but I’ve never been able to resist a dare.”
    “And did this somebody also dare you to ask me what my address was while we danced?”
    So he remembered that, too, dammit. “Your address,” she replied, “is in the phone book. I looked it up months ago when I was chairing that committee and needed a speaker. Don’t you remember?”
    Judging by his tightened lips and narrowed eyes, it appeared he had forgotten that. So had she, as a matter of fact, until just now.
    Going on the offensive, Serena shook her head and said, “I don’t know what you’re after, Kane, but if this is the way you react after a woman asks you to dance, it’s no wonder you don’t get invited very often.”
    He ignored the latter part of her statement. “What I’m after? Answers, Serena. I’m a very curious man. I’d like to know, for instance, just who you are. You certainly weren’t born Serena
Smyth—
that much I’ve found out. I believe you took the name, legally, at sixteen. That was after you came to Seattle, of course, and moved in with Richard Merlin.”
    She allowed one of her eyebrows to climb in mild amusement. “You make a perfectly innocent and commonplace act sound criminal, Kane. So I changed my name—big deal. If you must know, after my drunken father wrapped his car around a telephone pole when I was six and made me an orphan, I was passed from relative to relative for ten years. That was when I ran away.”
    “To Merlin,” he said in a silky tone.
    Serena ignored the tone. “To Richard. I decided to change my name, since I was old enough and since I wanted nothing further to do with any of my other relatives.”
    “Other relatives? So you still claim he’s an uncle?”
    She smiled. “No, he’s actually some kind of third cousin. But calling him an uncle simplifies matters. Are you planning a story for the tabloids,