Too Hot to Touch and Exposed

by LETO, JULIE

  “How long has he worked for you?”

  Ariana shook her head, attempting to push beyond her anger long enough to answer Max’s question. She knew she had to act rationally, think about this and work through the hows and whys. But, dammit, right now all she wanted to do was kick that scrawny son of a bitch in his cocky little ass.

  “I hired him, I don’t know, six months ago.”

  “He’s a good employee?”

  She shrugged. He wasn’t the best on her staff. He tended to flirt too much with the young female tourists, bucking for bigger tips. Hell, he’d flirted with her one time too many until she’d finally set him straight.

  “Was he working Friday night?” Max asked. The struggle on his face, his intense focus on putting this puzzle together into a logical explanation snapped her back to reality. Until they understood, they couldn’t protect themselves, couldn’t strike back with accuracy. Her anger would have to wait, just until she told Max what he needed to know.

  “Yeah. He was tending bar when I got there.”

  “So he could have slipped that drug in my beer.”

  Ariana nodded. And if Ty Wong knew Leo Glass from raves—the late-night, techno-music parties where drugs usually flowed more readily than even alcohol—he had access to whatever had been put into Max’s drink.

  “Easily. But why? What does he have against you?”

  Max shook his head. “You’re his boss. What does he have against you?”

  The question stunned them both to silence. Leo Glass was somehow connected to both of them, though even from Ty’s description, Max could barely remember what he looked like. Now that he knew the punk worked for Ariana, he did vaguely remember the carrottop kid. When Max frequented Athens by the Bay, he usually sat on the outside terrace. In the early mornings, Ray, the manager, usually waited tables. In the evenings, an older waiter named Johnny and his wife—the crusty, but lovable Aida—covered the outdoor crowd. If he’d somehow managed to piss off this Leo fellow, he couldn’t imagine how or when. The punk had to have taken the photographs for money—money from someone trying to sabotage Max’s life. That he was a regular in Ari’s restaurant made him an easy target of Leo’s watchful eye. But why would he put Ari in the middle? Why embarrass her? She’d been identified in this caption, along with the restaurant’s name and location. Unless she had simply been at the wrong place—with him—at the wrong time.

  “Maybe you should get dressed,” Max suggested, attempting to pull the address book and phone out of her hand. “We need to sort this out. Figure out this kid’s motive. His connection to both of us.”

  Her nod was nearly imperceptible, but she released the book and phone and disappeared into her bedroom without another word. Max was scanning the open page for the kid’s listing when the phone trilled in his hand.

  He answered immediately. “Karas residence.”

  “Max, you gotta get down here!” ever-relaxed, ever-laid-back Charlie barked into the phone.

  “I can’t…I have—”

  “Max, trust me. Whatever is going on there is nothing compared to the crap happening here.”

  14

  AFTER HAILING A CAB to his house to change clothes, Max drove to the office, parked and walked through a gauntlet of screaming reporters who had staked out his reserved spot. Shouting “No comment” as he strode to the bank of elevators to the twenty-fourth floor, he ducked out of the light of the cameras and wondered if these vultures had found Ariana.

  Reluctantly, he’d left without her, but she’d out and out told him that she needed time to deal with this alone—to find Leo so he could be dealt with. Max highly suspected that a plan of retribution was forming in that incredibly sharp brain of hers, but he didn’t ask for details. He’d asked her to wait for his return before she did anything and had elicited a tentative agreement. He forced his focus to quelling the catastrophe Charlie had screamed about on the phone.

  The reception area of Forrester Properties was eerily quiet. The young girl who took care of the phones and greeted clients was suspiciously absent from her post. Max fought a growl as he made his way through the maze of cubicles and offices his agents used. Those on the phone were talking in hushed whispers. The rest gathered in groups of two and three, talking frantically until they saw him. Then silence thundered in his ears. Charlie, waiting for him in his office, effectively undid the quiet with his instantaneous, frenetic shouting.

  “Randolph and his core investors have been calling all morning.” Charlie slammed the door behind him. “Aunt Barbara showed up, bawling her eyes out, wondering where the hell her daughter is, wondering how she’ll deal with the humiliation of having her daughter dumped by a philandering cheat. What am I supposed to tell them?”

  Max took a deep breath and poured a cup of coffee from the carafe behind his desk. He nodded, trying to remain cool, trying to center on something simple—like how impressed he was that his secretary filled the thermos when he was supposed to be on vacation. He took a sip, slightly disappointed that she hadn’t laced the drink with something stronger than cream and sugar.

  “Don’t tell them anything,” Max answered once the heat of the coffee dissolved the baseball-size pit in his stomach. “I’ll handle this.”

  “You’re back in the game? For good?”

  Max shook his head. Now that Ariana had been pulled into his mess, or he into hers—he wasn’t sure which since they both had been targeted by the same jerk with a camera—he had no intention of leaving her to deal with the backlash alone. “I’m here now for damage control. But I’m out of here by tonight. Ariana and I have a photographer to find.”

  “Where is she now?”

  Max shrugged and fell into his leather wingback chair. “She said she was going to find her uncle.”

  “You don’t believe her?”

  “Ariana has a mind and a will of her own. I called my brother and asked him to keep her company, but she was already gone by the time he arrived at her apartment.”

  For now, he’d give her the space she needed and handle things from his end.

  “First order of business,” Max directed, snatching a pen from a leather-trimmed cup and jotting notes as he spoke. “Find Madelyn for Barbara. Your aunt doesn’t deserve to be worried. I assume you told her that Madelyn is fine, that she chose to run away on her own?”

  Charlie nodded. “I told her. I also put a call in to Maddie’s cell phone. She’ll check in when she gets the message. She never intended her quest for independence to hurt anyone, least of all her parents. She lied about the elopement to save face for them, not for herself. She thought a week of downtime would lessen the blow.”

  “Maddie didn’t know The Bay Insider was going to get involved. What about the Darlington Group?”

  Charlie tugged a chair closer to Max’s desk and fell into the stiff cushions. “Ambrose wants us to meet as soon as possible. He doesn’t give a shit what you do with your private life, but his brother isn’t so liberal or forgiving.”

  As if Max needed anyone’s forgiveness for finding the woman of his dreams. But he put aside his comments, just as he’d put aside his emotions, for the time being. Max had become adept at suppressing his feelings to focus on business. He’d always considered that a talent until Ariana pulled it on him this morning. Urging him to the office had been an effective means of keeping her heart safe for another day. But the sooner he handled this crisis, the sooner he could find her.

  “Bottom line?” Max asked.

  Charlie leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “They don’t want any more controversy associated with this project. They came to San Francisco to live, Max. They want to be perceived as part of the community, not ‘heartless interlopers who shanghaied a historical landmark for commercial rape.’”

  Charlie quoted a line from The Bay Insider’s latest editorial with clear disdain. He and Max both knew that the paper’s opinion was crap. Pure bleeding-heart, antidevelopment crap. Worst part was, through the course of this deal
Max hadn’t had a clear enemy on whom to blame the propaganda. Not one neighborhood or civic group had formed to fight the development. Not one individual had come out as a leader in the opposition. He’d been fighting the phantom “general public” as reported in the news—until now.

  He dug into his briefcase and extracted the offending newspaper, turning to the masthead to read the name of the editor. Donalise Parker. Never heard of her. The reporters who’d covered the deal in the past and who’d interviewed him for the slanted stories they’d printed had each been different. All young, all hungry and not one with the savvy or experience to orchestrate the level of hostility he’d been contending with.

  But printing a photograph of Ariana rated as an act of war, especially when the caption left no question as to her identity. They’d not only printed her name and the location of her business, they’d implied that she was the reason for Saturday’s canceled Forrester-Burrows wedding. Though written tongue-in-cheek, the commentary thanked Ariana for breaking up not only a marriage but also one of the “most offensive real estate transactions the city has ever faced.”

  He swallowed his rage with another sip of coffee, forcing himself to tear the editor’s name out of the paper without ripping the newsprint to shreds. He handed the jagged scrap to Charlie. “Call the Darlingtons and your uncle Randolph and set up a meeting for three o’clock. Then call this Donalise Parker and tell her I’d like to speak with her. Right away.”

  Charlie scanned the clipping. “You’re going to talk to the newspaper editor? Why not the owner?”

  Max grabbed his phone to dial his lawyer again. He wasn’t going to march into the offices of The Bay Insider with a full patrol from Gonzalez, Oehler and Powell, Attorneys-at-Law, in tow. He’d handle this himself. However, he wasn’t foolish enough to confront the press without a strong dose of legal advice.

  “Because the owner is some European conglomerate just making the move into media.” A few phone calls on the way over had netted him that knowledge. “They dole out the cash, but they don’t mess with the content. I’ve got to find out where this opposition is coming from…why they’re stooping to personal assassination in order to stop us dead. The Pier was a rotting pile of smelly, barnacle-encrusted wood that no one cared about until we came in with a plan not only to make some money, but bring more people to that area of the Wharf. Until today, I thought The Bay Insider was just stirring up trouble for the sake of stirring up trouble, like the media often does. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “You think they have another agenda?”

  Max flashed him the picture of Ariana, briefly, before folding the newsprint into a tight rectangle, photo-side down.

  “Go make those phone calls. I want to check in with Ari.”

  Charlie rose and walked toward the door, his shoulders slumped and his gait sluggish. He turned before he grabbed the doorknob, wincing as if he finally realized the price this mess was costing Max’s lover. “How is she holding up? She’s gotta be humiliated.”

  With Charlie well across the room, Max felt safe to turn the newspaper over and run his hand over the offending picture—even though his friend and a majority of San Francisco had already seen and dissected the photo The Bay Insider chose to print. Though snapped in profile, Max could easily superimpose the other side of her face from memory. Her eyes had been closed. Her mouth open, lips shaped in a delicate O. The breeze fluttered her hair, tangling the dark strands with the ruby curtains, creating an image he suddenly realized was incredibly aesthetic. Her beauty—exotic, wild—belonged in a gallery…to be admired, not disdained.

  She didn’t deserve this. And he wondered if he deserved her.

  “She’s angry. Furious. The guy who took this picture works for her.”

  Charlie stalked back to Max’s desk, his whisper echoing his shock. “At the restaurant?”

  Staring, Max conveyed the implications of this too-coincidental-to-be-a-coincidence turn. He wasn’t a big fan of conspiracy theories, but he couldn’t ignore the facts. He and Ariana had become an item, he thought, purely by chance. Leo Glass was either a brilliant mastermind or the luckiest son of a bitch in San Francisco.

  “Yeah, and right now, he’s M-I-A. As soon as I’ve taken care of the Darlingtons and the investors, we’re going to look for him and find out who he’s really working for.”

  Charlie’s face skewed with skepticism. “You sure Ariana isn’t already looking without you?”

  Max shook his head, denying himself the frightening images that scenario presented. “No, I’m not sure. I’m not sure of a lot of things. But I intend to be—very soon.”

  ARIANA STRETCHED HER NECK from side to side, then in one full rotation winced as kinks and cricks popped from her vertebrae. It had been a long morning. A long, fruitless morning. Leo Glass had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth. She had a good idea where he’d surface next, delaying her retribution until late tonight. Waiting, doing nothing, wasn’t an option she preferred. Doing nothing meant she had to think, and her thoughts ultimately drifted to Max.

  “Here, drink this.”

  Her uncle poured a shot glass of crisp, clear ouzo and slid it toward her. His lined face and tanned, stubbled jowls bore none of his usual good humor this morning. Even before Ariana sneaked in through the restaurant’s back door, eluding the reporter who’d staked out the front entrance, he’d seen the photo that had the Wharf in an uproar. She could only imagine what comments and crudities his cronies had tortured him with. By the time she’d arrived, he’d dismissed the crew that had been dismantling and storing equipment in preparation of the upcoming construction.

  It was just the two of them. And though Ariana normally didn’t imbibe alcohol before the evening hours, she did as he ordered and swallowed the liqueur in one quick gulp.

  He let her regain her breath before he posed his first question.

  “Do you love this man?” Stefano asked.

  That wasn’t the question she expected.

  She tipped the empty glass over her lips again, hoping a dash more ouzo would help. “I’ve only known him—really known him—for a few days.”

  Stefano’s expression portrayed his disbelief. “Ari, time doesn’t matter. You married your first husband after knowing him less than that.”

  She nodded. “And we know how that turned out.”

  His expression was incredulous. “Rick may not have deserved your love, but that didn’t change how you felt about him. I’m not asking you if this affair with Max Forrester is going to last beyond next week. I’m asking if you love him.”

  Ariana toyed with the empty shot glass, twirling her finger around the smooth lip, recalling with crystal clarity how she’d done the same to the glass she’d served Max’s Flaming Eros in just before she touched him for the first time.

  “I can’t fall in love with him. Look around us!” She gestured to the near-empty room that had once been a cluttered, vibrant bar. The mirrored shelves behind her uncle were almost completely bare. The tables and chairs and bar stools, save one or two, had been dragged away and stacked in a moving trailer parked around back. “We’re about to dive into some serious debt here. I can’t—we can’t—afford to be distracted now.”

  He nodded as he cleared away her glass, but she could tell he wasn’t buying her argument. He came out from behind the bar and dragged a battered stool beside hers, taking her hand in his as he sat. “Love is the ultimate distraction, isn’t it? But you know I loved your aunt with all my heart. From the instant I set eyes on her, I didn’t want anything else but to make love to her…all the time. That was 1955,” he clarified with a pointed finger on the bar.

  “Is that why you married her so quickly?”

  He chuckled, flipping off his battered captain’s hat, then setting it back down at an angle that looked rakish and dashing, even though he was long beyond seventy and had put on a good sixty pounds of extra weight. But until the day she died, Sonia Karas had watched her husband with adoring eyes. Ariana h
ad seen their love for herself. She imagined that her aunt Sonia hadn’t stood a chance of escaping this man’s charm.

  “Three days we knew each other.” He rolled his eyes heavenward as he recalled the tempest of their whirlwind romance. “Her father would have hung me from his largest fish hook if I hadn’t produced that marriage license.”

  Ariana laughed with him. They both knew the stories, knew the history of the forty-five year marriage during which Stefano and Sonia had worked together side by side, all day, every day. They’d had their arguments—loud ones, passionate ones—but they’d never tired of each other, never lost that spark of respect and desire that even strangers could see. They’d never even spent a night apart—not since their wedding on the run from Sonia’s father and half-dozen brothers.

  For a while, Ariana had hoped she’d find something similar with Rick—something exciting and forbidden and wild. They’d had the desire but never the respect.

  And with Max? Even in the face of horrible humiliation, Ariana still considered him a remarkable man. Full of integrity, honor. His instinct to protect and avenge her was strong, and yet he managed—only at her request—to rein in his natural inclination to find Leo himself and beat the living daylights out of him. By simply trusting her to find Leo herself, respecting her need to retain some semblance of control, he’d shown her once again that he was more than worthy of her love.

  “So? Do you love him?”

  She laid her palm over her uncle’s hands, relishing the warmth of his weathered experience. No sense running from the truth any longer, at least not with her uncle. He’d been her only family since she’d come to San Francisco. And after all the grief she’d caused him over the photo, she at least owed him some honesty.

  “Yeah, I do. Something fierce. Isn’t it awful?”

  “Awful? Ari, that’s wonderful!”

  “How is it wonderful?”

  Stefano shook his head. “He’s a smart man who worked hard and made good. Don’t think I didn’t check him out a long time ago, when I first noticed him making goo-goo eyes at you.”