By Hook or By Crook

by Linda Morris

  “Ah, Daddy bought you your very own Beamer, did he?”

  Actually, he’d bought her a Mercedes, but that did nothing to alleviate her annoyance. “I won’t make excuses for my father’s money,” she told him. “Some people happen to be born into wealthy families, and some aren’t. I can’t control who my father is, or how much money he has.”

  “True, but you could have, say, gotten a job when you became an adult.”

  “I’m pursuing my education. That will prepare me for my career.”

  “Still? You must be what, thirty? When are you going to graduate already?”

  “I’m twenty-eight,” she corrected, stung by his implication that she had lingered in school too long. She had attained a master’s degree before pursuing her PhD. “I’ve finished my PhD coursework, and I’m researching my dissertation now.” Let him find a way to cast her as an idle-rich spoiled brat now.

  His mouth curved down, as if he was impressed in spite of himself. “I see. What is your dissertation about?”

  Too late, she regretted her boast. Her obscure topic of study meant a lot to her, but she knew how it would sound to somebody like Joe Dunham. Somebody who lived in the so-called real world. “Art history,” she murmured, her bravado gone. “My dissertation is on women in the work of Albrecht Dürer.”

  “Who?”

  “Albrecht Dürer, a German engraver and artist in medieval times. Very influential.” She could only imagine how ludicrous she sounded to him. He made his living doing dangerous and difficult things. Her studies must seem ridiculous to him.

  “Uh-huh. An engraver. He did, like, what, bracelets and stuff?”

  She fought a smile but wasn’t completely successful. “No, engraving was a style of printmaking at the time, used for making printed pictures. He would engrave a design into a copper plate and then ink it and use the plate to print the design on paper. The diversity of his talent amazes me. He illustrated many books and painted, as well.” Her love for the subject took over, and she forgot her embarrassment.

  She pulled up an image of Dürer’s work and turned her laptop to face him. “This is ‘St. Jerome in his Study,’” she explained. “It’s one of his most famous works.” The image had always intrigued her. St. Jerome, engrossed in scholarship, sat at a table flooded with light from a nearby stained-glass window. In the foreground, incongruously, an enormous lion lay asleep next to a sleeping dog.

  She expected him to shrug off her explanation, out of boredom, but instead he came to sit next to her to take a closer look at the image. He studied the picture intently, intelligence alive in his green eyes.

  She found herself observing him rather than looking at the image. What was his ancestry? Irish, maybe? His dark hair, in need of a trim, seemed to be in perpetual disarray, yet it suited him. His face combined intelligent eyes the color of woodland moss, a sensual mouth, and lean cheekbones with a hawkish nose that looked as if it had been broken at least once. His face spoke of smarts and toughness at the same time. His teeth flashed white every time he grinned, which was often. He particularly seemed to laugh at her a lot.

  He gestured to the screen. “Uh, why does St. Jerome keep a lion in his study?”

  The prosaic question startled a laugh out of her. “It’s part of the iconography of St. Jerome,” she explained. “All of the saints had stories and legends about them, and medieval painters or engravers often pictured them with symbols from those stories as a way of identifying them. St. Jerome supposedly removed a thorn from a lion’s paw, so he’s always depicted with a lion.” She pointed to a large hat hanging on the wall behind St. Jerome. “This indicates that he was a cardinal.”

  “And the skull? Kind of a weird thing for a saint to have lying around, don’t you think?”

  She smiled, surprised and flattered by his curiosity. “If you’ll notice, St. Jerome’s head appears to be at one end of a line that passes through a cross to the human skull. Many scholars think this is how Dürer contrasted death and the resurrection.”

  “You know a lot about this stuff.” He glanced up at her.

  She suddenly became aware of his proximity, in a not-altogether comfortable way. He leaned against her seat, his denim-clad hip nearly touching her shoulder. She could see the worn threads of his inseam running down to his high-top sneakers. She could reach out and touch the seam if she wanted...but of course she didn’t. Want to.

  She cleared her throat as a pretext for swallowing the saliva that had suddenly pooled in her mouth. She’d never really met a man like Joe Dunham—so rough around the edges, yet still smart. He had a certain kind of appeal she couldn’t explain.

  “I should know something about it,” she said. “I’ve spent years studying it.”

  “You a professor or something?”

  “No.” The single word answer didn’t seem to suffice. “My father has been kind enough to provide both my sister and myself with an allowance,” she said stiffly. How had she let herself be maneuvered into this discussion? “It’s allowed me to focus full-time on my studies without the distractions of having to teach or write.”

  One of his dark brow’s lifted. “Your father is supporting you while you get your degree, huh? He must approve.” His comment had an edge to it, and she felt her defenses rise again. Their civil conversation had lulled her into a false sense of security, obviously.

  “I didn’t take my father’s opinion into consideration when I chose to study Dürer’s work,” she said, lifting her chin.

  “Maybe not, but I’ll bet you would have thought twice if, say, your life’s dream had been to elope with a martial arts fighter.”

  She closed the laptop with a snap, a bit more firmly than she’d intended. “And what is that supposed to mean? I would never be interested in someone like Pock.”

  “Maybe not, but I bet somewhere, at sometime, you wanted to do something daddy didn’t approve of.”

  “And who is to say I didn’t do it?”

  “I’d say that the fact that you’re willing to fly across the country to help bend your sister to your father’s will is a pretty good indicator that you haven’t exactly been the rebellious one.”

  Her head snapped back. How dare he judge her? “I’m not ‘bending my sister’ to anyone’s will,” she snapped. “If you knew Daisy, you would realize that’s impossible. I’m simply trying to get her out of a jam she’s found herself in.”

  “A jam she wants to be in.”

  Ivy fumbled for a response as the steward came back into the cabin to ask them to take their seats for landing. Joe complied, and their conversation ended, for now, at least. Ivy fumed over his words in silence as the plane sank into Las Vegas airspace.

  Anger simmered in her as she stared out at the desert. She wished she could have thought up some clever remark to put him in his place, but nothing had come to mind. Why could she always think of stinging rebukes hours later, as she lay in bed, but never in the moment, when they might actually do her some good? She wanted to deny what he said, but his words had more than a grain of truth in them. He had implied that she was somehow lacking, compared to her sister.

  All her life she’d been the responsible, smart one, cleaning up Daisy’s messes. She’d always thought of herself as a bit of a martyr to her younger sister’s wildness, but Joe Dunham clearly admired Daisy, not her.

  She shook off the thought. Why did she care what Joe Dunham thought? She didn’t. How could he imply that she was overly subservient to her father? He took money from her father too, as a consultant on a short leash. She reminded herself of that more than once as the plane landed and taxied to the gate.

  ****

  “You been to Vegas before?” Joe asked, looking surprisingly at home sprawled out in the back of the limo. So much for his “man of the people” status, Ivy thought with a bitter twist of satisfaction.

  “Once before. For a bachelorette party.”

  “Really?” The confession made Joe’s head swivel away from the sights of the Strip t
o stare at Ivy. “Sorry, but I hadn’t pegged you as the ‘wild weekend in Vegas’ type.”

  “You had me pegged right,” she said. “The bride’s father was one of my father’s most important business associates. I don’t think she particularly wanted to invite me, and I know I didn’t want to go. My father and her father insisted. They thought it would help cement a deal they were working on.”

  “Still, you could have made the best of it,” he offered. “A weekend in Vegas is still a weekend in Vegas.”

  “I did make the best of it,” she lied. His quickness to judge annoyed her. He didn’t understand what it was like to be wanted only for your money and connections.

  The weekend had been miserable. Treated with cool politeness by the otherwise bubbly bachelorettes, she’d been an overdressed wallflower at the chic nightclubs they’d gone to. The other girls partied in skimpy sundresses and revealing halter tops, making her look ridiculous in her blouse and sedate slacks.

  The casinos were even worse. Gambling bored her after half an hour. Getting hit on by drunken tourists lost its luster far sooner. The sight of the Strip rolling by through the limo’s tinted windows, with its brilliant lights, stately palms, and huge casinos, brought back all the awkward memories.

  After a quick check-in at the Bellisimo, Ivy and Joe went to the concierge’s office to find out more about the MMA fight. Sure enough, they found a martial arts event on the schedule for eight that night.

  “Beat-down at the Bellisimo,” the friendly concierge explained, with a flirty smile in Joe’s direction. Nothing about the girl looked real—not her beaming white smile or her crimson fingernails or her gravity-defying breasts—but Ivy doubted Joe Dunham cared very much about authenticity in a woman.

  Instantly she felt annoyed with herself for the waspish thought. What did she care what kind of woman Joe wanted to go to bed with?

  “The fight is in the Grand Ballroom. It’s very elegant,” the girl cooed, her artificial lashes batting rapidly in Joe’s direction. Ivy suppressed a snort, glancing around her at the gilt-and-glass-festooned lobby. She realized she hadn’t been entirely successful at keeping a tactful silence when Joe shot her a sidelong glance.

  “I can arrange for tickets for you, if you like. For the two of you, that is,” she said belatedly with a doubtful look in Ivy’s direction.

  “Thanks so much,” he said to the girl, handing over his credit card.

  Ivy refrained from rolling her eyes with great difficulty. He gave the girl one last intimate grin of shared understanding and signed for the tickets. The concierge rewarded him with a high-wattage smile. Ivy would have bet anything the girl’s eyes lingered on him long after they walked away. Why it riled her so, she couldn’t say. He certainly wasn’t her type, although she could admit to herself his rear view was worth looking at. She never chose partners on such superficial grounds, so she could concede his appeal without being in any danger of succumbing to it, of course.

  Joe pocketed the tickets and skewered Ivy with a look. “You might have tried being a little nicer to her.”

  “You were being nice enough for the both of us.”

  The words came out catty, and she wished she hadn’t spoken. She could normally keep her cool in any situation. Joe Dunham had a way of riling her without seeming to try. She couldn’t quite explain even to herself why she found the girl’s obvious attraction to Joe so grating.

  His head tilted as he studied her. Why did his green eyes see through her so easily?

  “Why should you care if I’m nice to an attractive woman?”

  “I don’t care in the least. I simply find it very predictable that the only part of her you seemed to find interesting were the two bags of silicone implanted in her chest.”

  That brought him up short, but only for a moment. “Really? You think they were fake?”

  Ivy snorted. “Of course they were fake! Real breasts don’t point due north, you know.”

  “Interesting. Still, breasts are breasts. I like ’em all, even if they are of dubious origin. Why should that bother you?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  She certainly didn’t have any interest in the man, if that’s what he thought. She liked educated introverts like herself, preferably well-heeled ones, so that she knew they weren’t after her money. Mouthy security consultants who worked for her father ranked low on her list of desirable partners.

  “So what do we do next?” she asked.

  “We wait for the fight and try to intercept them then. Pock is likely to be one of the early fights, since he’s not a headliner. The main event will be last.”

  “Shouldn’t we be out trying to find them? She said a shaman would be performing the ceremony. Surely that narrows it down.”

  Joe’s brows rose at that particular detail, but he simply shook his head. “It would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Something tells me there’s more than one shaman in Vegas who performs weddings. I think we’re better off intercepting them at the fight.”

  “But they could be getting married right now!” Ivy protested, falling into a double-time step to keep up with his pace.

  “Lucky we’re in Vegas, then. They have quickie divorces to go with their quickie weddings.”

  “Very funny. It’s not your sister’s future we’re talking about here.”

  He stopped so abruptly she stumbled, trying to stop quickly too. “If this were my sister, we wouldn’t be here, trying to stop her from doing what she wants to do with her own life.”

  His heated tone caused heads to turn throughout the lobby. Ivy flushed. She hated being the center of attention. “Shhh! Keep your voice down!” All she needed was to be recognized by some gossip columnist. “I don’t want to see this scene written up in some blog or sleazy tabloid, if it’s okay with you.”

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “Besides, I care about my family,” she said quietly. “If you don’t care about yours, that’s your own problem.” He didn’t even know her. His judgments about her were getting old.

  She stalked away, determined to spend the next few hours holed up in her room, avoiding Joe Dunham. After a moment, he fell into stride beside her.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he began, looking almost repentant. “Let’s not fight. We’ve got a couple of hours to kill until the show. Want to do some gambling?”

  The out-of-the-blue offer caught her off guard. A night on the town in Vegas with one of the cool guys, the kind who’d never paid her much attention in high school? She hesitated a moment, tempted.

  “No. I have work to do.”

  She didn’t have time to waste on Joe Dunham. Her dissertation called. She needed to do something constructive to take her mind off this crazy situation. For the last twenty-four hours, when she hadn’t been worrying about her sister’s catastrophic wedding plans, she’d been smarting under Joe’s disapproval. Not that Joe needed to know, but she also wanted to check in with her dad to let him know they’d arrived. He clearly thought she needed to cut the apron strings, and she didn’t want to hear another lecture about how a woman of her age shouldn’t be so beholden to her father.

  She got on the elevator without a backward glance and pretended absorption with the satin-upholstered walls and crystal chandelier until the mirrored doors closed—with Joe on the other side.

  Chapter 3

  Shortly before eight, Joe rapped on Ivy’s door. He’d left her alone before the fight, at her request, and he’d made some money on the casino floor. At the blackjack tables, he’d also collected the room number of a delightful brunette named Miranda. If they could wrap up this little assignment this evening, he hoped he would be extending his lucky streak in her hotel room soon.

  He’d had a hell of a good time, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand why Ivy would rather be holed up in a hotel room with her laptop, staring at pictures of old engravings, even if they were kind of cool. This was Vegas, for God’s sake, and the lights on the Strip called to anyone with a pul
se. She could look at old pictures any time.

  After a moment, he heard footsteps and muffled sounds from Ivy’s room. Finally, the door opened to a somewhat chastened-looking Ivy, beckoning him inside.

  He stepped into her room—check that, her suite. He had settled for a standard, two-double-bed room, not wanting to push his luck even with Smithson picking up the tab, but she had gone with the upgrade, booking a large suite with a kitchen, living area, and separate bedroom. She lived in luxury as a matter of routine, he supposed. It seemed like a waste, considering they’d probably be leaving soon, but hey, it wasn’t coming out of his per diem.

  “I’m sorry, I’m running a bit late. I got caught up in work and didn’t realize the time. I was changing clothes, but I had trouble with the closure in back. I forgot how much trouble this dress is to get into,” she explained in an apologetic tone.

  He was about to point out that a martial arts bout wasn’t exactly a formal event, but then he took a good look at the dress, a sleeveless grayish-silver thing. It somehow started off light at the top, and then darkened in a subtle gradient toward the bottom. Simple, lovely, just like her. It suited her to a tee. Although it wasn’t particularly revealing, something about the way it draped over her slim figure, especially when contrasted with the severe tailored clothing she’d worn up to now, captured his eye and wouldn’t let go.

  “I can help. Turn around.”

  She seemed to hesitate, unsure of herself. He didn’t understand the slightly embarrassed expression on her face until she turned around. She had managed to fasten the closure at the top of her neck, but the remaining fasteners gaped open all the way down her back, revealing the clasp of a sexy pink lace bra. It bisected smooth, creamy skin. Below, he could see the slope of her lower back, just above where the slit in her dress ended. His mouth went dry at the sight of that curve. What would she do if he touched her there?

  “Can you figure out the fasteners?”

  Her voice made him realize he’d been staring, but he wasn’t able to answer immediately. He cleared his throat and nodded, stupidly, before realizing that she couldn’t see the non-verbal gesture. “Sure.” His voice seemed to have grown rusty.