It was Thursday. She couldn’t be staying for more than a long weekend, right? Four, five days at most. And she was a bit wild. Not the kind of girl you brought home to Mom, but one he could enjoy spending a night or two with. The idea held more appeal than it should have. He knew better than to entertain such stupid notions, but it did his mind good to wonder for a few minutes. Helped alleviate the stress that had been building for the past five weeks.
He looked at his clock. Officially thirty minutes since the incident and he could still feel the blood pooled in his groin. He stole another glance across the street and tensed, the breath freezing in his lungs as the white curtain moved. Tyler waited, hoping, searching for one stolen glance. He slammed his knee into the top of his desk when the phone rang, startling the hell out of him.
“Lachlan,” he said into the receiver.
“Somehow I knew you’d be there.”
He grinned at the smile in Mandy’s voice. He could always count on his sister to have the worst timing in the world. Though, of course, the absolute worst would have been thirty minutes ago. Still, his gaze stayed glued to the curtain as he greeted her.
“What’s up, honey?”
The curtain opened another inch, and he thought he’d have to hang up with his sister, despite the fact that she was calling him from halfway around the world. But then the curtains closed, and he gripped the phone like a lifeline.
“I’m in trouble.”
He started looking for flights to France and wondered what Williams would say if he tried to push the case no one wanted onto someone else in the pro bono department. It certainly wouldn’t go well. He’d never make those loan payments if he lost his job. And losing the case’s biggest profile pro bono in a decade would make him jobless in less than a heartbeat. He couldn’t afford to be jobless. But if she needed him, he’d be there. Case be damned.
Chapter Three
Layla woke with a start, staring around the dark hotel room. She couldn’t believe she’d fallen asleep instead of lying for hours staring at her ceiling. The boom of another roll of thunder sounded outside, and she shuddered. She’d always hated lightning, especially while up so high. She wanted to run to the window and throw open the curtains, just to assure herself that the giant bolts of electricity were not striking Times Square or the hotel itself. But the thought of the man across the street gave her pause.
She glanced at the bedside clock. Four p.m. Her alarm would have gone off just an hour later, and she couldn’t sleep with the sound of rain slamming against the windows. Another crack of thunder made her jump. Give her earthquakes any day of the week. She threw the covers back and shivered as the cold air dried her sweaty skin, and the dream she’d had rushed back. She’d been thirteen, sitting at Casa Del Sol with Aunt Margaret, listening to a storm much like the one now raging outside.
“Shush, dear. It’s going to be just fine. You’ll see.”
Dear. Why did the old woman always have to call her dear? She wasn’t anybody’s dear. Layla pulled her knees closer to her chest, refusing to touch her great-aunt. The woman was ancient. Like sixty or something. Ugh. And now Layla was stranded for the summer in California while her parents went on a business trip to Europe. Business—yeah, right. They hadn’t been able to get rid of her quick enough. Pathetic how much that hurt her, but she certainly wasn’t going to sit here crying about it to old Aunt Margaret.
She looked up and screamed as she watched her aunt’s face turn from kind and wrinkled to sunken and gray, then overly pink in the open casket. Marge lifted an accusatory finger toward Layla, and her aunt’s eyes opened wide.
Layla snapped back into the present with another crash of noise. This one came from out in the hall. She scrambled to her feet, wiping the rest of the horrible nightmare from her mind. She grabbed her silk robe and covered her nakedness as she walked to the door. She opened it to find her favorite bellhop falling over suitcases in the hallway. Graceful he was not.
“Eduardo, what’s going on?”
He looked up and spared one of his blue-star bright smiles. He straightened himself and snagged the rolling luggage cart a moment before it slammed into three kids. Ah-hah. She couldn’t help but smirk back at him as he turned to the guests. The mother couldn’t be bothered to care that her children were overrunning the cart and the bellhop as she no doubt sent a very urgent e-mail from her smartphone, probably for work. Layla wanted to vomit. If the woman didn’t want to parent, she shouldn’t have had kids. Or she should have a nanny in tow to help her. Stepping into the hallway, Layla cleared her throat loud enough for it to hurt. The woman didn’t notice.
“Uh, excuse me? Ma’am. Do you think you guys could keep it down, please?” She tried to keep the disdain from her voice, she really did, but she didn’t think it worked. The woman looked directly at her, then back at her phone, clearly dismissing Layla’s attempts at polite. She had no tolerance for parents who were more concerned with whatever was going on in the office than with their children.
This time she raised her voice and got nasty. “Yeah, you, blondie. This is a hotel, not a day-care center, so unless you’ve got a nanny stashed away somewhere in that luggage your children insist on playing football with, maybe you could pull your nose out of your electronic device and actually parent for a few moments. If that’s not too terribly inconvenient for you, career mom. Some people have to get up to go to work in an hour.”
The look of indignation on the woman’s face thrilled her to no end. The blonde looked to Eddie, as if she were about to open her mouth and complain, but Layla fixed her with a haughty stare any aristocrat would envy. Layla knew what she looked like; she’d seen the same expression on her mother’s pale face dozens of times. She waited for the other woman to shush her children into the hotel room before she went back inside and closed her own door.
No doubt Eddie would have a few things to say to her when he finished next door. She almost smiled at that, but her thoughts quickly soured when she realized she’d have to tell him about Mr. Times Square. At least then he could help her figure out what to do.
* * * *
Tyler sat in his office, still holding the phone. He wanted to call Mandy back, tell her he was on his way. But he couldn’t risk screwing up this case or his place on the pro bono team. Nor could he keep coming to his baby sister’s rescue, much as he wanted to. She would call him back if she needed him; he knew that. Logically, at least. He put the phone down, picked it back up. He’d been doing the same thing for hours now, in between reading notes on the Paulson case. What if she didn’t call?
Pregnant. His baby sister was going to have a baby with a kid eight years younger than her. He couldn’t believe it. God, he hoped the guy she was with wouldn’t run away. Twenty-year-olds could be very irresponsible.
A knock sounded at the door, forcing his thoughts back to the present and his office. He put the phone down and looked up to see Williams standing in the doorway. Tyler stood, waiting for the scumbag associate to come in. He shook the man’s hand.
“What’s new?”
Williams pursed his lips. That was never a good sign. “Lachlan, we got problems.”
Yeah, the biggest one is you. He didn’t say that one aloud. Tyler sat behind his desk as Williams sat in one of the two leather chairs facing it. The fake smirk that usually covered Williams’s face was gone. He was the kind of lawyer who gave the rest of them a bad rep. Tyler half listened to what Williams had to say about the case. He knew the obstacles involved; he didn’t need the other man to spell them out for him. Didn’t need Williams to tell him that if it went bad, it would reflect poorly on his whole department. Not to mention a man would go to prison for a crime he hadn’t committed. But that didn’t concern Williams.
Tyler thought back to his first meeting with Paulson a few weeks before when the firm had taken on the case. The man was shaky, his eyes unfocused, his attention divided. Tyler had tried to reserve judgment, to not see what everyone else saw when they looked at Paulson�
��a homeless man with a mental quirk that made him act very strangely. Everyone was convinced the man was a murderer, but Tyler had to figure it out for himself. He couldn’t have stayed on the case he’d volunteered for if he found out Paulson was guilty. Because job or not, he couldn’t defend a guilty man. As head of the pro bono department, Williams had a say in whether Tyler could refuse the case. Tyler would have simply asked Williams to be removed.
So he’d gotten Paulson to start talking about what happened. As he’d sat and listened to the stuttering explanation of how the man had awoken and left his tent, only to fall over Jeannie Rose’s body, he’d taken so many notes his hand cramped. Then Paulson had stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, focused on something behind Tyler.
“Spider…” his client whispered.
Tyler turned to find a daddy longlegs crawling up the wall of the small interrogation room. He stood, moving toward the spider. Paulson’s gaze was fixated, and he’d stopped shaking, maybe even stopped breathing.
“Would you like me to kill it?” Tyler asked.
“No!”
“You look like you’re afraid of it, Mr. Paulson. Please, let me get rid of it for you.”
He shook his head. “No. Spiders are just misunderstood. I don’t like them…but you shouldn’t kill it just because I don’t like them. Please remove it, though, if you can do so without harming it. I don’t like them,” he repeated.
Spiders are misunderstood. Dad used to tell him that. He watched Paulson watching the spider.
“Misunderstood. Misunderstood.” The man was terrified, kept saying the word like a mantra, as if to convince himself they were misunderstood and not out to eat him alive.
Tyler shooed the spider onto a manila folder and gave it to the guard outside the door to take outside. He heard Paulson’s sigh of relief as soon as the door closed.
“Th-thank you. Most people would have…would have killed him. Killed the poor thing. How could anyone kill the poor little thing?”
It was then Tyler realized this man could never be a murderer, and Tyler would do whatever was necessary to make sure he proved it. Because this man, who could do advanced calculus and physics in his head, but who couldn’t kill something he was terrified of, would never survive in jail.
He blinked the present back into focus and pretended to be interested in what Williams said by leaning forward in his chair and staring right at him. Except he was only staring at the window across the street.
He pictured the beautiful, wanton woman bent on seducing him. He wanted to get closer to her, to see what her skin felt like, ask her what the hell she thought she’d been doing this morning. Didn’t she know how many sick perverts there were in this city? Like the man sitting across his desk. The thought of what might have happened if he’d been the one to see her this morning instead of Tyler made him shudder. Williams would have run across the street and weaseled his way upstairs on his good-ol’-boy charm. Anyone who said people from the Midwest were sweeter or more innocent than coldhearted New Yorkers had never met Edgar Williams.
That tourist across the street had no idea what she was getting into. Good thing no one else had been there at six a.m. He wasn’t sure what all the other floors in the building housed, though. Anyone else looking out that way could have seen her. The sudden flash of jealousy and protectiveness that filled his gut shocked him. Honestly he did not have a right to feel that way about her.
He could tell by Williams’s voice that the man was winding down his speech. His supervisor nodded once. “Too bad we couldn’t get him declared unfit to stand trial.”
Tyler shrugged. “He’s a genius whose brain works a little differently; he’s not mentally ill, and he doesn’t suffer from mental retardation. He’s of sound mind.”
“Yeah, well. It just would have been easier.”
God, Williams was such a prick. He thought Paulson was guilty and didn’t give a damn. He would still want the firm to be associated with a gain. While the firm didn’t usually deal in criminal cases like murder and rape, something told Tyler that Williams would have no problem helping to set the guilty free, as long as he got paid. After this case, Tyler needed to figure out how many months he had to stay here with these scumbags to make enough of a dent in his student loans. He didn’t know how much longer he could take working for Williams.
“You know that I’ll do everything necessary to win this case.”
“Yeah, you will, if you know what’s good for you. If I’d known what we’d get into by taking on a simple bum case, I would have picked a different fucking charity. Animal rights or some shit. Zoning laws for the tree huggers. Whatever. But this…” Williams shook his head in disgust.
They’re called homeless people, you insensitive ass, not bums. Tyler clenched the wooden armrests of his chair to stop himself from launching across the desk and throttling the man. Defense attorneys who murdered their colleagues definitely got their names in the paper. For all the wrong reasons. He’d have to start living like a pauper and make bigger payments. Anything to get out of here sooner. But the thought of leaving his apartment made him ache. His mom and Mandy had pushed him so hard to say yes to buying it. If he gave it up now, they’d be so disappointed.
Williams stood, blocking his view of the window for a second until Tyler got to his feet. They shook hands again, and the curtain across the street moved. He ushered Williams out of his office as quickly as he could and was frozen in place at what he saw through the panes of glass at the hotel. A man dressed in black stood before the window, holding the curtains open wide. His mystery seductress was gone.
Chapter Four
“No,” Layla screamed as Eddie pulled the living area curtains open. He looked at her, raising an eyebrow.
She should have known that would be the first thing he did when he got in the room. She didn’t close them often, but when she did, he would fling them back open. Most of the time, she still slept when he did it. Often it made her regret the day she’d given him an open invitation to come see her whenever he visited her floor.
“Close those damned things and get over here.”
“But I love that view.” His familiar Latino accent comforted her. It reminded her of one of the reasons she survived in this city when she came back to it.
“You’re gonna love it even more after I tell you this.”
He must have heard the seriousness in her voice, because he closed the curtains. The sound of the rings bumping across the rod made her cringe. She’d tried not to look past him in the brief second the view had been there, but she hadn’t been able to help herself. She’d felt a compulsion to see what the guy with the dark skin and light suit was doing. Another man had been leaving his office, and she hadn’t seen much of his face as he looked across before Eddie shut him out again.
Eduardo pulled up a chair next to hers. “Girl, what is going on?”
He emphasized every syllable. She didn’t mind, but imagining his reaction to this made her pause. He was going to have an absolute field day. Layla covered her face with her hands. Keeping something like this from Eddie would be impossible. After ten years of working in her part-time home, he knew her too well. She was surprised he hadn’t picked up something in the hallway when she’d come out to yell at that idiot mother. She lowered her hands and looked at him. If she couldn’t tell him what happened, he wouldn’t be able to help her. And she desperately needed some help.
“So…um, you know how I don’t usually close my curtains?”
“Yeah.” His dark gaze held interest. And a touch of concern. His oval face had filled out some in the past few months, and a few laugh lines creased the corners of his eyes.
“Well, this morning when I got home, I was hot. So I started stripping, and the curtains were open, and then I came over and sat in this very chair, in full view of the windows, and I decided it was a fabulous idea to…let off some steam, shall we say.”
“Oh, my.” His fake shock would have made her laugh on any oth
er day. He knew what she was talking about. He often encouraged her to go let off steam with other people, though she’d assured him time and again how shitty she was at relationships and how they always blew up in her face.
“And then I opened my eyes, and across the square there’s some bureaucrat sitting at his desk, watching me.” Heat crept up the back of her neck, warming her face. She still couldn’t believe what she’d done next. She couldn’t even think about it without getting flushed, though she didn’t know if it was the heat of embarrassment or desire.
His eyes widened. “Oh, shit, chica. What did you do?”
She shook her head. She couldn’t tell him the rest. Saying it out loud made her feel like too much of a slut. She pulled her legs up onto the chair and wrapped her arms around her shins. Aunt Marge’s face came to mind. Her nice, sweet face telling Layla not to worry so much what other people thought of her and focus on what she thought of herself instead. Besides, Eddie would love her even if she told him she’d killed the man across Times Square.
So she opened her mouth again. “And so I looked at him looking at me, and I made damned sure I kept his attention for round two. Then I sauntered my ‘saucy little ass’ over to the window, blew him a kiss, and closed the curtains. And I haven’t been able to open them since.” She purposely used a term Eddie had employed to describe her butt in the past to let him know he was rubbing off on her, and she didn’t appreciate it.
The glimmer in Eddie’s eyes tormented her. He was enjoying her tale.
An Affair Across Times Square Page 2