“I’m a first-rate target?” In some more logical part of my brain, I knew this wasn’t something to be proud of, but I couldn’t help the little bubble of pride swelling in my chest.
“You’d have to be, as many people as you have following you.”
The bubble quickly burst, leaking acid into my throat. “How do you know that?”
He only smiled.
My guess: his was one of the three groups Shepard had seen tailing me.
“Look, Archie. I’ll be brief. I think the reason someone put a hit out on me has something to do with what you allege my mother was blackmailing you about. Whatever she knows, someone else must assume I know it too, and if I’m going to get killed for something, I’d really prefer it be for something I actually know. You dig?”
Valentine leaned back in his chair, his form graceful even in its laziness. His shoe slid between mine beneath the table. “I’m a businessman, Jane Avery. You want something from me? Make me an offer.”
“An offer of what exactly? You don’t need my money.”
“You’re right.” His eyebrow arched as he glanced at my cleavage. “I don’t.”
“I’m not going to let you do lines from my ass, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Miss Avery. I wouldn’t do lines from any part of your body. Not for payment. Not for pleasure.”
“Why not?” The words were out before I could stop them. First Shepard not wanting me at my apartment. Now Valentine not wanting to inhale illegal drugs from my general person. This rejection was really starting to get me down.
“You’re not my type.”
“Paid by the hour, you mean?”
“Out of practice.” Warm, smoky breath tickled my ear as he leaned in to whisper. “Two years in dry dock is a long time.”
What. The. Shit?
How did everyone know this?
Just when I thought I’d reached my maximum density for humiliation in one day, I was proved wrong.
Again.
Valentine’s hand had found my knee under the table. Carefully skirting around the abrasions, two fingers walked Yellow Pages–logo style up my thigh. “Shall we check if your cherry has grown back?”
This was the part where, in a movie, I would have stood up and thrown a drink in his face. But since I didn’t have one, I did the next best thing. I picked up a piece of bread and chucked it at him.
So this was what it looked like to shock Archard Everett Valentine.
“Did you just . . . throw bread at me?”
“What’s the matter? Is your vision as impaired as your morals?”
“In fact not.” He gave me his shark grin. “In order for morals to be impaired, you must first have them.”
“So what, if not sex, does a man without morals want in exchange for information?”
He ran a finger over the gleaming blade of his butter knife and adjusted it so it was perfectly parallel with its neighbor. “Your panties.”
Shock leapfrogged from his face to mine. “Excuse me?”
“Give me your panties,” he repeated. “Then I’ll answer your question.”
“You don’t want to sleep with me, but you want my panties? What kind of perv are you, exactly?”
“If you really want the answer to that, we’ll have to discuss additional terms.”
“What? Like my socks?”
“You’re not wearing any.” He brought the cut-crystal glass to his lips and took a long swallow. I imagined I could see the smoky burn as it warmed its way down his neck and into his belly.
He set the glass down. “So what will it be?”
“I’d really rather not,” I said. “Isn’t there anything else I could do for you?”
“Like what?”
I thought about this for a moment.
A very long moment.
Turns out, aside from acing classes, pissing off faculty, and engaging in healthy bouts of misanthropy, I didn’t really do much of anything.
“You win. Just let me go to the bathroom, and I’ll—”
“No,” he said. “Here.”
“Here? But there are all these people. What if—”
“What if, what if, what if.” Valentine’s refrain was singsongy with booze. “What if everyone in this restaurant was only here to glut themselves on liquor and food and didn’t give a shit what we were doing anyway? What if my date just texted me to tell me she was in the elevator on her way up?”
“Date?”
“She’ll be here any minute. In or out, Miss Avery?”
Well, shit.
This was happening.
I took a deep breath, laid the edge of the white linen tablecloth over my lap, and scooted to the edge of my chair. Ever conscious of Valentine’s eyes on mine, the subtle roughness of his pants leg brushing my calf. I slipped my hands under the tablecloth and up my skirt, hooked my thumbs through the band of my panties, and drew them down inch by inch.
Awareness I didn’t know my body to be capable of sizzled in every cell. I could feel everything. The chair’s velvety fabric beneath the edge of my buttocks. Cool air kissing damp skin between my legs. My own knuckles grazing my thighs.
Of course, our server chose that precise moment to bustle over to our table.
I sat there, thumbs in panties, staring at Valentine across the table and mentally calling him every creative swear word I knew and inventing a few new ones besides.
“Are you two ready to order, or do you need a little more time?”
“I think we’re ready,” Valentine announced. “The filet of beef for two. Medium rare. Sautéed greens with mine and truffled fries with the other.”
“And how would you like your filet?” she asked, turning toward me.
“It’s not for her,” Valentine interrupted. “She’ll be departing momentarily. Make them both medium rare.”
“Very good. Can I take your menu?” And of course, she held out her goddamn hand.
“Yes, you may.” I hoped she’d detect the serious note of censure in my grammatical correction.
Valentine finally came to my rescue, lifting both menus and handing them over.
“You exquisite bastard,” I said when our server had departed.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Continue.”
Hearing a rise of laughter from the next table, I glanced over, only to be snapped back when Valentine slapped his palm on the table.
“No.” His knuckles were pale on the hand gripping his drink. “Look at me while you’re doing it.”
And so I did.
I looked at him while the scrap of fabric cleared my knees, while it brushed past my calves. I looked at him when he pulled his foot from between mine so I could drag the panties over my sandals. I looked at him while his hand met mine under the table, warm and strong, prying my fingers apart to get at his prize.
I looked at him while all this happened to the knowledge of no one but us.
He sat up straight and glanced down. I knew he had my panties in his lap purely by the expression on his face. An amused, yet genuine, smile. “Wonder Woman?”
My ears burned like atomic torches.
“They’re my lucky panties.”
“Then let’s hope they work for me better than they’ve worked for you.” Valentine tucked them in his front suit pocket, adjusting them so a precise little triangle of red and blue poked out like a handkerchief.
“A deal’s a deal, Archie.”
“So it is. Your mother told me that someone had hired her to dig up incriminating evidence about a mistress of mine. She wouldn’t tell me who, or when. Just that she had enough information now to put me in a very dark hole for a very long time. Savvy businesswoman that she is, your mother offered to suppress the information. If I paid her more than they were offering.”
I tried to imagine my pretty mother sitting across the desk from Valentine in the cheery blue dress with tiny red polka dots she had purchased specifically for my graduation, saying these
things. Doing these things.
I couldn’t.
“What did you do?” I asked.
Denver was full of rumors about Valentine’s ability to shrivel the gonads of any underling with one flash of his unnatural green eyes. I had personally overheard Dean Koontz’s secretary kibitz with a colleague over the copier about how her husband’s cousin—a contractor on one of Valentine’s high-rise buildings—had once earned such a look and found out he had colon cancer the following day.
I had thought it the idle talk of simple minds.
Right up until he skewered me with the full force of that gaze and every muscle south of my belly button and north of my knees clenched. My body’s natural reaction against Valentine’s peculiar power, perhaps?
“I paid her,” he said.
“How much?”
“Three hundred thousand dollars. Cash.”
It was a good thing Valentine hadn’t ordered a drink for me. I would have choked on it.
“Half the amount she was asking for. She’d get the other half when she handed over the information.”
“And when was she supposed to do that?”
“An hour ago. That chair you’re sitting in? She was supposed to be sitting there. She never showed.” Valentine’s mouth twisted in an ironic smile. “After you dropped in this afternoon and told me she was missing, I thought maybe she just needed to get free of you for a while so she could meet me here without your relentless interference. But no.” A small, bitter laugh. “She did the same goddamn thing every woman in my life does once they get what they want. She disappeared.” He raised his glass to me, half salute, half “up yours,” before tipping the remaining contents down his throat.
He clunked the glass hard on the table, a sound that summoned our ever-eager server.
“Another?” she asked. I detected a note of worry creeping into her tone.
Valentine rotated a finger in the air.
My head was a hurricane of thoughts. My mother. Blackmailing Valentine. Disappearing with three hundred thousand dollars of his cash. She couldn’t have left town. Wouldn’t have left town. Not without giving me some kind of clue that she was okay.
This wasn’t like her. Any of it. I didn’t care what Valentine said. She couldn’t have done this on purpose. She couldn’t have been planning to skip town this whole time. Pretending to make plans with me for a sushi dinner and a weekend away, knowing she’d never be doing any of it.
She wasn’t that good of a liar.
The thought that arrived next dragged with it a blanket of silence that killed every sound in the restaurant.
Then who taught you?
The memory was back. Oozing up the pipes, dragging words with it. Images. Sounds. Smells.
Red and blue flashing in the windows.
Banging at the front door.
My nimble mother sliding out the back window.
Hide, Janey. They can’t come in without a warrant. I’ll be right back.
But she hadn’t been.
Not that night and not the next.
Two days.
Two days of keeping the blinds closed.
Two days of foraging for food in the fridge and cupboards.
Two nights of sleeping with my face pressed tight to my mother’s pillow, holding her in my lungs the way I couldn’t hold her in my arms.
She returned like spring. Pale and beautiful, full of apologies if not explanations. Staying away had been the best way to keep me safe.
My loneliness quickly forgotten. Quickly forgiven.
She was everything. She was the whole world.
Valentine cleared his throat, my twelve-year-old and twenty-eight-year-old selves colliding in the present.
I knew by the tectonic shift in his facial features that his date had arrived. Any semblance of sincerity the scotch had lent him was quickly chased away by the sly playboy grin he favored in public appearances.
I quickly stood, not wanting to have to be introduced to whatever small-brained, big-titted slut Valentine was entertaining himself with for the evening. But when I turned to leave the table, I ran straight into Melanie. Fucking. Beidermeyer.
Hadn’t Valentine said they’d had lunch earlier? Now dinner too? What next, an engagement party?
I told myself it wasn’t jealousy, this fiery poison burning through my veins. Dislike? Sure. Resentment? You bet. Loathing? Hell to the yes.
But jealousy?
Who the hell would’ve been jealous of Melanie Beidermeyer? Really, I felt sorry for her. With her glossy blonde hair piled into that idiotic doughnut atop her head. And that ridiculous black silk gown clinging to her bony mannequin body. And her glittery evening bag crammed with Daddy’s credit cards. And her stupid face with its annoyingly delicate features. And that bizarrely long, smooth neck that had probably never, ever had a knife held to it.
I didn’t even understand where she got the guts to come out into public, a mutant like her.
“Why, Jane!” She grabbed me by the elbows and made a smoochy noise toward both sides of my face. “Whatever are you doing here?”
“Just warming this up for you.” I patted the seat of the chair where my bare ass had been moments earlier. “And giving my panties to your date,” I said under my breath.
Melanie batted her dark eyelashes. “Pardon me?”
“She was just leaving,” Valentine said, rising. “You look absolutely lovely, Melanie.”
Her head dipped demurely, a gesture I would not have been able to master given a thousand years and an endless supply of Disney princesses for tutors. “Thank you, Rhett.”
“Rhett?” I snorted. “Does that make you Scarlett?”
“Rhett is short for Everett,” Melanie explained in tones usually reserved for idiot children and small animals.
“You go by your middle name?” I asked Valentine.
“For southern belles, I certainly do.”
Melanie’s cheeks stained a perfect pink. Which led me to wonder what color they’d turn if I slapped her good and hard.
“Well, I’ll leave you lovebirds to your din-din.”
“Lovebirds?” Melanie executed a perfectly self-effacing giggle. (Side note: Who the hell even knew giggles could do that shit?) “Goodness, no, sugar. Rhett is just giving me a few pointers. He was telling me over the valedictory lunch today how Gary Dawes is one of his oldest friends.” Melanie winked. “How lucky is that?”
Right, I thought. Just like it’s lucky that Dean Koontz and your daddy are old golf chums.
“Oh so lucky!” I said with the forced zeal of a cheerleader on meth. “You two have a good evening. And be sure to use protection,” I stage-whispered to Melanie. “You don’t know where he’s been.”
“Miss Avery,” Valentine called after me. “I wonder when we’ll see each other next.” He patted his coat pocket for effect.
Bastard.
“Oh, you know me, Archie.” I shot Valentine a smile as disingenuous and predatory as his own. “You never know where I’ll pop up.”
“That would be wonderful, Miss Avery. Enjoy your walk home. I don’t know about you, but there’s nothing I like better on a night like this than the feel of cool air against my bare skin.”
“Thanks for the tip, Archie.”
“And Miss Avery? Make sure you follow the sidewalks. Wouldn’t want you to get hit, now, would we?”
This last sounded as much like a threat as I had heard in a long time.
Biologically incapable of allowing anyone else to have the last word, I felt compelled to lob a parting salvo over the fence.
“And just so you know, this ass”—here, I gave my own rear end a solid whack—“earned a four-point-oh despite Dean Koontz doing his best to bury me at every turn. This ass worked three jobs to put itself through law school. This is a tenacious ass. A victorious ass. You would be lucky to snort coke from this ass.”
By the end of my impassioned speech, all diners within a three-table radius had frozen with forks halfway to
their mouths, demi-glace and hollandaise slowly dripping like lazy tears.
Then Valentine said something more shocking than anything he’d come up with yet that evening.
“I know.”
Chapter Ten
If my life had had a theme, it would have been choosing the wrong shoes.
The flat-soled sandals I had thought would enable me to run should the need arise had already given me five separate blisters, and I could feel every one of them by the end of the second block.
I’d been known to say that the only time I ran was if I were being chased, and even then, only if I were being chased by a Tyrannosaurus rex. Or by zombies. Or by a zombie riding a Tyrannosaurus rex.
Recent events had warranted an amendment to that short list.
Tyrannosaurus rex, zombies, or Shepard.
When I exited the restaurant minus a helping of dignity and one pair of skivvies, I saw the man I’d left safely fastened to the shower door barreling down the sidewalk toward me like an enraged bull.
It helped not at all that I now knew Shepard was similarly endowed.
The small lead I had on him wasn’t likely to last me long if I didn’t get creative in a hurry.
I cut across an open courtyard and darted into the nearest building, one of those vague office/apartment jobs with a secure lobby and decent foot traffic. Putting the large indoor fountain between us, I watched Shepard through the scrim of artificial rain dripping from a bronzed umbrella held aloft by one of the figures at its center.
The proverbial mulberry bush between the monkey—me, definitely—and the weasel, Shepard. Totally Shepard.
He stalked me from side to side, watching my every twitch and hesitation. Employing counter measures seamlessly and without effort.
This was not at all going to plan.
The way I had imagined it, I was going to simply melt into the crowd. Maybe even swipe a hat or scarf to disguise myself and scuttle away with Shepard scratching his head in my nonexistent wake.
The problem with borrowing escape inspiration from Scooby-Doo was that the dull-witted monster was always some guy in a suit, and the guy in a suit was more often than not Old Mr. Smithers or something like that. Not six feet and then some of tattooed, pissed-off ex-army dude trained to change tank tires with nothing but a socket wrench and the spinal columns of his enemies.
Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1) Page 9