The Love Scam

by MaryJanice Davidson, Camille Anthony, Melissa Schroeder

  “Abbiamo bisogno di lui,” Sofia said quietly.

  “That’s right,” he added. “You do need me.”

  Delaney was rubbing her temples in that “Rake is giving me a migraine” way he often observed in others trapped in close quarters with him. “Aw, man. Bad idea. Really terrible. But you’re both right.” She looked right at him with her narrow gray gaze. He pretended it didn’t make his knees weak. “Okay. You can help and we’ll stick together. Let’s hope you don’t regret it. That we don’t.”

  “That’s the spirit!”

  “Yay!” From Lillith, now reemerged and clutching her toothbrush in a small fist. Then: “What are we doing, exactly? I missed that part.”

  “It will be as Rake suggested,” Sofia added, pointing to him. “I will tell the others.”

  “We’ll need supplies,” Delaney replied. “Um, furniture? Supplies? Right?”

  Sofia and Rake both laughed. “Forniture,” Sofia corrected. “How many years have we worked together? Your Italian is shit.”

  “Hey, that’s my girl you’re impugning,” Rake protested. He’d finally judged it safe to stand—nothing worse than an erection tenting your shorts to prove you’re a hound with one thing on your mind—and did so just in time to sling an arm around Delaney’s shoulders. “Sorry, woman you’re impugning. She’s doing the best she can with her shitty Italian. Don’t judge.” He held his breath; he had no idea if she’d let him keep his arm there or would drive an elbow (and then maybe a fist, followed by a foot) into his solar plexus.

  “Non avrei mai giudicare il mio amico. È molto più difficile su se stessa di quanto potessi mai.”*

  And even though Delaney raised her eyebrows in a clear question, Sofia didn’t translate, and seemed satisfied when Rake didn’t, either. Lillith, meanwhile, just watched like it was a riveting tennis match. She probably knew more about what was going on than Rake did. Scratch probably, now that he thought about it. The kiddo didn’t miss much.

  “So what are we doing? More baskets? Deliveries? Meals on Wheels?”

  “We won’t be doing any of that.” Sofia had left the room as rapidly as she’d burst into it, probably in search of a good hairdresser, with Lillith on her heels. “It’s all you, baby.” Then she blushed—again! Twice in the last ten minutes. “Rake, I mean.”

  “You can call me ‘baby,’” he said, trying not to fall all over himself with how rapidly he put that out there. You can call me anything you like. Baby, sweetie, darling, pet, yummypants, porkmeister, jackhammer, studmuffin, Stan the Rammin’ Man … sky’s the limit!

  “Oh, sure.” She found a smile—odd how her mood had shifted so radically with Sofia’s announcement. “Let’s talk tomorrow, see how you feel.”

  As it turned out, her fears were more than justified. But the church disaster wasn’t even the most interesting thing to happen that day. The most interesting thing happened before the sun had even come up.

  Twenty-nine

  It was scary, really, how quickly he adapted to the sofa bed, now on night four—five?—of trying to cripple him. He barely noticed the bar pressing across his shoulders, and was idly on his phone, updating his Amazon wish list

  (No, I already read How to Be a Super Villain Without Even Trying.* Fewer books, but more—good Lord, Amazon sells lube by the gallon? How have I not known this? †)

  when it happened again: Delaney went from deep, motionless sleep to moving-around sleep. She sat up and, like last time, went straight to the window.

  This time he was right behind her. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re safe.”

  “Really?” God, the hope in her tone! Like she wanted to believe but was afraid to.

  “Yeah. No question.”

  She pulled her gaze from the window and looked through him. “I can leave anytime?”

  “Anytime you want. And you can go anywhere you want, too,” he added firmly. “Nobody can stop you. You’re not trapped here.” With me.

  “Oh.” She smiled at him in the dark. “That’s a relief. I don’t like it when I can’t leave. Sometimes they won’t let me.”

  “Not anymore.” Don’t touch her. Don’t hug her. Don’t wake her up. All of these, he figured, would be bad. Wasn’t there an old wives’ tale about how waking someone up while they were sleepwalking makes them go crazy? Blake would know. He could use some of Blake’s healthy skepticism right about now. “You’ll never be trapped again. And—” Inspiration hit. “And neither will the kids you’re helping. Sofia’s not trapped, either. You saved her from that.” Saved yourself from that. “Okay?”

  “I can go back to bed? Nobody will … do anything?”

  Why was it so fucking dusty in here? It was a nice hotel, but the dust was making his eyes water. Time to talk to housekeeping; this was unacceptable.

  “Course not,” he soothed, steering her back to bed without actually touching her. It worked! (He had no idea how.)

  “Okay, then.” She went, docile as he’d never seen her, climbed in knees-first, like a little kid, and then flopped over on her back. He pulled the blankets up

  (don’t kiss her)

  (God I want to kiss her)

  to her chin and in the dim glow from the ambient light, he could see her blinking up at him. Her eyes were already going half-lidded as she started to slip back under.

  “There! Now you can go back to sleep. For as long as you want. This is your room. The only people in here are the ones you say can be here.”

  “Rake can stay here,” she said, startling the holy hell out of him. “He’s nice. When he wants. You know?”

  “Yeah, he’s not a total asshole one hundred percent of the time, it’s true,” he agreed. This, then, was what people meant when they talked about damning with faint praise. “Sweet dreams, Delaney. I mean that literally: only good dreams for you. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, and closed her eyes.

  He’d never wanted to crawl into bed with someone so badly in his life, and that included the night he’d watched a Jaws marathon when he was ten. Blake’s comfort

  (“For God’s sake, we live in a desert! Carcharodon carcharias would have to escape from the ocean, find an airport, fly into McCarron International, and then take a cab to our apartment before consuming you!”)

  somehow didn’t get the job done. His mom didn’t yell, or laugh, though. Just scooted over to make room, and read with the light on until he fell asleep.

  But this. This thing with Delaney. This was something else. He’d never wanted to comfort and snuggle with someone like this. He never minded when the one-night stands spent the night, but he felt no actual connection with them, and he was fine when they left, which, naturally, they all did at one point, even when the one-night stand took six months.

  You’re getting it bad, Rake.

  Yup.

  When you get your money back, you can hire a platoon of private investigators and track some of these assholes down.

  Definitely.

  Thirty

  It was hard to remember how much he wanted to sleep with Delaney when she woke him up

  (“It’s so early I don’t know what time it is.”

  “It’s four-forty-five A.M., ya big baby.”

  “I’ve only been up this early when I haven’t gone to bed yet.”

  “Shut up.”)

  and shooed him from his uncomfortable sofa bed to work at San Basso, which once was a church but was deconsecrated and turned into, respectively, (a) a haunted house, (b) a post office, and now (c) a charity. Why Sofia and Delaney thought he would find this at all interesting at any time, never mind the wee hours, was a mystery.

  And Lillith was a morning person. Ye gods.

  “So, what?” he asked, yawning. He made noises of gratitude when Elena handed him a cup of coffee, Lillith a cup of hot chocolate (at least he hoped it was), then hiked up her navy blue skirt (the hem was a prudent two inches below her knee; Elena scolded and dressed like a fifties housewife) and climbed into the van’s driver’
s seat. “Meals on Wheels? What? And the reason we couldn’t start at noon is…”

  “Colomba di Pasqua,” Delaney replied, “and lots of it.”

  “Dunno what that is.”

  “And we do not start at noon because we are not lazy Americans,” came Teresa’s pert reply.

  “Whoa! Too early for generalizing!”

  Delaney ignored that, all of it, his yelp and Teresa’s cruelty. “While you’re doing that—”

  “Doing what?”

  “—Elena and I will work on inventory and then have a meeting with the chairman.” Sofia, he had been told on the drive over, had spent the night at Teresa’s shelter and was keeping an eye on the kids, as she often did. She was the youngest of Delaney’s little group, and Rake had assumed her days on the street weren’t as far behind her as the others’ were. Teresa’s third in command had also been plucked from the streets, and helped run the place. If he’d known baby-sitting might have let him sleep in, he would have—no. Not if it meant doing charity without Delaney. And Lillith assured him between slurps of cocoa that she’d help him do whatever it was. “Okay?”

  “’Kay. Thanks for letting me finish charging my phone. When we get back tonight, I’ll try to reach out to Blake again.”

  “Great!”

  “That sounded suspiciously cheerful. So eager to get rid of me?” he teased. Please don’t say yes.

  “No. I sort of can’t wait to see what Blake sends you next,” she admitted with a guilty smile.

  “That makes one of us.” Rake drank more coffee and groaned. “He’d better be sane this time, that’s all I have to say about it. Um, Teresa, not to look a gift barista in the mouth, but why are there five tablespoons of sugar in my cappuccino?”

  “Whoa,” from Lillith, who now had a tiny chocolate mustache, which was so friggin’ adorable, he wasn’t going to tell her.

  “Aw, man.” Delaney shook her head.

  Elena turned around to scold Teresa, finishing with “You will succumb to diabetes!” which, for some reason, Teresa found hilarious.

  “Sono fiducioso di morte violenta sarà la mia fine. Diabete? Ha!”

  Rake said nothing; he had noticed that Europeans tended to (rightly) assume most tourists weren’t fluent. Even though the other women knew he could speak Italian, they kept forgetting. And so he didn’t comment when Teresa explained that she knew she’d die a violent death, something sudden, violent, and unrelated to diabetes. Given how the others (except Delaney, who was bent over her laptop, and Lillith, who didn’t comment) agreed, he assumed they all shared the same outlook.

  She drove the van right up to the former church, which, like every other building in Venice, looked like it had been built in the eleventh century, remodeled in the fifteenth, then benignly neglected ever since. It was near the St. Mark’s clock tower which, when it wasn’t so early, he appreciated as a beautiful sight. The area was mostly deserted, because Venetians were a clever and resourceful people who understood that 5:00 A.M. is still bedtime. And the tourists didn’t have a clue about anything, so they were still in bed, too. (Lucky bastards.)

  He walked past three pillars to the entrance, Delaney and the others leading the way, and then they led him straight to the depths of hell: the kitchen of San Basso.

  * * *

  Colomba di Pasqua was a terrible fruitcakesque confection people were forced to eat at Easter. Not only that: It was tradition to give them at Easter. What kind of deep loathing does someone harbor to give a loved one a dense terrible cake studded with orange peel?

  “It’s the garbage of the orange!” he cried, then had a coughing fit when he accidentally inhaled some flour. “It’s not a gift, it’s a prank! Something you do to someone you don’t like, every single year. It is not dessert!”

  He was floured from eyebrows to knees, despite the apron Delaney had insisted on tying on him. Which was fine. He was a manly man and not threatened by any apron, however frilly, and better yet oh my God Delaney’d had her arms around him while she tied it in back! Their faces had been mere inches apart! And when her pretty wide mouth opened, he wondered, Oh God what is she going to saaaay?

  “Try not to hurt yourself. There’s a lot of sharp things in here.”

  “Right,” he replied, because honest to God, it was all he could think of. “Thanks for the tip. No picking up knives with my mouth.” This made Lillith laugh so hard, she almost fell off her stool.

  “Just don’t be a dumbass,” she said, already on her way to the meeting. “You’ll be fine.”

  “Hey! I don’t wake you up in the wee hours and give you impossible tasks and then demand you change your entire personality!” he shouted after her.

  “Shut up, please,” she said in a tone he was starting to love. From Delaney, that was almost “Kiss me, you fool.”

  Man, do I wish she’d kiss this fool.

  Then she callously abandoned him—them—to their fate, and for the first time in his life, he regretted learning Italian. It meant he was reading the recipe right. He really did have to peel dozens of oranges. He really did have to scoop up cup after cup after cup of disgusting dried fruit. He really did need a buttload of almonds, the most disgusting of all nuts, and tube after tube of almond paste, the most disgusting of all pastes. He’d cracked so many eggs, his fingers were numb as well as stained orange. He was sticky and he stank and flour was fucking everywhere and he’d been at it for hours.

  “It’s been forty-five minutes.” From Lillith, who looked adorable in her giant apron, and who was as flour-splashed and orange-stained as he was.

  “Don’t you hate this? Why aren’t you sulking because you can’t stare at a screen? Any screen?”

  “I like you” was the simple reply. “And if you’re my dad, we have to get to know each other.”

  That gave him pause. “Right,” he replied carefully. “But if I’m not—”

  “Then I’m no worse off than I was before.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking—”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “—how did your mom die?”

  “Hit-and-run. And nobody figured out who did it.”

  “Oh.” But Donna had made arrangements of a sort—she must have; otherwise, Delaney wouldn’t have learned of her estranged friend’s death.

  As if reading his mind, she added, “My friend Jim’s family took care of me until Delaney came. We used to play at each other’s houses all the time, before. His mom said we were practically siblings anyway.”

  “Yeah?” He kneaded more disgusting dough, hoping that a lack of eye contact would keep her talking. “Did you mind? Being an only child?”

  “… No.”

  “Because I kind of envy you.”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “So it was just you and your mom? The whole time?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did she ever talk about me?”

  “Sure.”

  “She did?” He stopped with the dough and looked up. “Really?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Lillith was working on her own smaller pile of disgusting dough, but now she looked up and smiled. “She said meeting you changed everything.”

  He hadn’t expected to feel pleased. “Really?”

  “Sure! She said when she found out she was pregnant, she knew she couldn’t waste any more time scamming pretty boys, she had to grow up and be a responsible human being.”

  “Oh.”

  “You were responsible for her one-eighty. She always gave you credit for that.”

  “Great.”

  “Why haven’t you asked about the DNA test?”

  “Uh.” Wasn’t expecting that from the kiddo. Delaney, yes. Not Lillith. “I’m not sure that’s something we should—”

  “We’re friends, remember?”

  He nodded. “Yes, that’s right. And friends don’t lie, so I’ll tell you the truth—I haven’t asked because I’m not sure what’s going on. And I’m curious. Because I thought all I wanted was my money and my life back,
but … I just don’t want to walk out of the theater until I know how the movie ends. And…”

  “And you’re wondering why Delaney hasn’t brought it up, either.”

  “Yeah.” He surrendered, reminding himself he was in the presence of a mind quicker and less cluttered than his.

  “It’s limbo, kind of. The in-between. No one’s in a rush to get to the next stage of—of whatever this is.”

  He nodded.

  “Which is curious.” She was fixing him with that dark gaze again. “Don’t you think? I mean, I know why I’m in no rush. And you know why you are. But what’s motivating Delaney?”

  “You’re…” He tried to think of the word. Settled for a poor substitute. “Extraordinary.”

  “No. Just smart.” But she smiled down at her dough, and edged a bit closer to him.

  “Break time!”

  “Thank God,” he groaned as Delaney and Elena came back to the kitchen.

  “For the child, idiota.”

  “Oh, please, not another one of those ‘Working children fourteen hours a day is cruel’ softies.” But he was already helping Lillith clean up, handing her a damp kitchen cloth to destickify her hands. When he moved to brush the flour off her shirt she jerked back so quickly, she nearly fell. “Whoa! Careful, hon.”

  “Sorry. Ticklish.”

  “Come along, my sticky tickly sweetheart.”

  “Please don’t talk to me like I’m three.”

  “You would prefer if I talked to you like you’re forty?” Elena asked.

  As he and Delaney watched them leave, he grinned to hear Lillith’s “Come to think of it, yes.”