“Hugging you.” She squeezed for emphasis, releasing a series of pops down the length of my spine. Melanie might drink like a lady, but she hugged like a goddamn bear. “You may act all unpleasant and insist that you don’t need anyone, but beneath that tough, unpleasant exterior—”
“Is an even tougher and more unpleasant interior, believe me.” I peeled her arms away by their slender wrists and fastened them at her sides. “Get your shit together, will you, woman? Just because we have one nonantagonistic conversation doesn’t mean we’re friends. I hate you. You hate me. Remember how this works?”
“But I don’t,” she insisted. “I never did. It’s just that I find your presence unbearable for the most part.”
“And this is different than hating me how?”
“Because it’s not so much how I feel about you. It’s how you make me feel about me.”
“How is that exactly?” I asked, maybe hoping just the tiniest bit that words like insanely jealous or completely consumed by envy might be mentioned.
“Ridiculous, for the most part.”
Bummer.
“Ridiculous? What the fuck are you talking about? You’re annoyingly, maddeningly, orphan-kickingly perfect.”
“I know!” she wailed. “That’s the problem. I’m too perfect to be taken seriously. Here I am all beautiful and rich and brilliant, and you roll into class all disheveled and surly and still make me look like an idiot with one well-placed comment. I wish I could be like you and just not care what people thought of me.”
“You know, I was with you right up until the surly and disheveled bit.”
Melanie didn’t seem to hear me. She’d built up a head of steam now and was ranting and pacing like the world’s prettiest bag lady. “You show up late to class wearing torn jeans and wrinkled T-shirts. And those shoes—”
“What’s wrong with my shoes?” I glanced downward at my trusty Chuck Taylors, well worn and well loved and maybe spattered with the blood of assorted bad guys.
I probably ought to do something about that.
“What I’m trying to say is that no one accuses you of having got by on your looks. They take one look at you and they know that anything you have, you earned.”
“It’s like you want me to beat you like a drum and stuff you into one of these lockers.”
“And that’s another thing. You’re always making these creative threats of violence, and people actually believe you. If I tried that, they’d laugh me right out of town.”
“That’s because you know jack shit about physical combat.”
“But that’s not true at all. Father always made sure I had the best self-defense teachers growing up. I can drop a man in two seconds flat.”
“Oh, yeah?” In two quick moves I had her arm pinned behind her back and her face smooshed up against a locker door.
And Sam thought I was a terrible liar.
“You want people to start taking you seriously? Well, here’s a start. Stop calling your parents Mother and Father. It’s just damn creepy.” I released her as quickly as I had nabbed her.
She sniffed and regained her pageant posture, haughty as freshly fallen cat. “It’s a southern thing.”
“Look, Melanie, it’s not like I don’t appreciate your giving me a ride and getting me a visitor’s pass, but could we possibly unpack the various elements of our mutual dislike another time? I have work to do.”
“What kind of work?” She brightened, going all keen like a terrier. “Maybe I could help.”
“You can’t.” I elbowed her out of the way and started toward the door.
“How do you know if you don’t tell me what you’re trying to do?” Melanie quickly insinuated herself between me and the exit.
“Because I know.” I had brushed past her a second time when she froze me in my tracks with the most sincere sentence I had ever heard her speak.
“Teach me to be like you.”
For a moment, I thought I might have strayed into one of those alternate universes you see on reruns of The Twilight Zone where up is down and hot is cold and Melanie Beidermeyer wasn’t a first-class twunt. (It’s a contraction. Draw your own conclusions.)
“Excuse me?”
“I want to learn how to be like you,” she said. “To wear what I want. To hang up on people when I want. To get jobs by myself instead of having my father buy them for me.”
I sighed, mysteriously unable to come up with a crushing verbal blow to send her sobbing to a bathroom stall. “Okay. But another time, all right? I’ve got some shit to sort out just now.”
“You mean you’ll do it?” She looked at me with her hands clasped to her chest, her big blue eyes all enthusiasm and hope.
“If you promise to leave me the hell alone for the next hour, then yes. I’ll think about it.”
She clapped her hands and jumped and did some sort of cheerleader shuffle.
“Lesson one,” I said. “Whatever that was? Never do it again.”
“But we’re finally bonding!” She grabbed both my hands and squeezed. “After all these years of secretly sabotaging each other and wishing each other dead, we’re finally getting along.”
“We’re not getting along, and if you dare imply that to the general populace, I will sneak into your family estate and personally break the heels from each and every one of your Jimmy Choos.”
She mimed zipping her lips, a gesture both guileless and endearing. I reminded myself that it was probably an expensive zipper made by sweatshop orphans who had gone blind from years of hand carving the teeth from blood diamonds.
“See you at work tomorrow?” she asked.
“Most likely.”
She was almost out the door when a question that had been buzzing around my brain like an addled bee finally found its way to my lips.
“There’s something I want to ask you before you go.”
Melanie turned on her heel and looked at me, her head cocked at a quizzical angle. “What’s that, sugar?”
“Kristin Flickner mentioned that you’d had the Koontzes’ medical malpractice case reassigned to her. Why?”
Her expression was equal parts pleased and rueful. “Same reason I do everything. My parents told me to.”
I stood there in the spa’s antechamber after she left, trying and failing to think. I thought it must have had something to do with the brain-blunting effect of the luxury surrounding me. Top-of-the-line hair dryers. Creams and lotions imported from jolly old Paris. Gold-plated tampons for the wealthy cooze. All telling me there was no reason to think too hard. To try too hard.
But that wasn’t how I’d been raised.
Needing a moment to collect myself before I faced down Valentine, I took a deep breath and sat on a padded leather bench.
Names floated in my head like pieces of a puzzle that refused to assemble themselves into an image.
The Beidermeyers. Dean David Koontz. Valentine. Carla Malfi. Kristin Flickner. If I squinted my mind’s eye, I could almost see the tenuous and tangled threads of spider silk connecting them. I could feel the danger in them.
And then, I knew.
My mother knew.
My mother had found out exactly how they were connected, and that’s why she was gone.
I felt it in my bones.
I felt her in my bones.
Together we stood and walked out to find Valentine.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Finding Valentine turned out to be even easier than I had thought.
After just a couple of minutes of wandering around the spacious country club atrium trying to look like I knew what the hell I was doing and where the hell I was going, I caved. I gave in to the temptation of asking my question of one of the small army of uniformed employees approaching me at ten-second intervals to offer their assistance.
“I’m here to meet with Archard Everett Valentine. Would you happen to know where I might find him?”
“Ahh,” my would-be assistant said with a knowing look. “You ca
n probably find him in the bar. He usually likes the table overlooking the golf course.”
“Thank you,” I said, wondering if this was the sort of thing you tipped for at a country club.
Mere minutes later, I stood behind yet another tall plant by yet another maître d’ station, acknowledging to myself that, when you thought about it, life really was all about patterns.
Stalking Valentine in bars. Handcuffing ex-army security types to household fixtures. Trying to wheedle an answer or two before some security guard or other tossed you out into the street with a pocketful of steak fries and regret.
I took a deep breath and plunged once again into the void.
Only, the Japanese screen partitioning off the back of the restaurant had obscured one very important detail.
Valentine wasn’t alone.
Sitting across the table from him, close-cropped head flamed by a corona of sun expensively dying behind the ninth hole, was none other than my self-appointed bodyguard.
Shepard.
Shock can stretch time like taffy or burn up whole huge portions of it in an instant. It can relieve you of muscle memory or deliver ownership of your body to some strange and mysterious source. It can make you sob with joy or laugh with grief.
And sometimes it does all of those things at once.
I don’t remember sprinting toward them at a gallop. Nor do I recall launching myself across the table. What I do remember is how the world went muffled then. I remember how the rushing of my own pulse superseded all else. I remember the skin of my face coming alive with the prickling of a thousand needles.
I remember snapping back to consciousness with about five sets of hands on my body and a steady stream of creative profanity spewing from my lips in between hysterical giggles.
A note about the creative profanity, should you find yourself in a similar situation. Just combine an animal you don’t like with a sexual act you do. For example: snake-licking, toad-sucking, shark-wanking, chicken fucker.
What? Don’t tell me I’m the only one creeped out by chickens. With their scratchy little talons and their dead eyes and their pecky little beaks.
But I digress. Point being, any and all of the aforementioned invectives could have been included in the torrent of verbal filth issuing from my gullet.
So there I was, arms outstretched like Superman, table linens sliding beneath me like a luxurious conveyer belt, assorted water glasses and wine goblets making crystalline explosions as they hit the polished parquet floor, when an impeccably outfitted detail of Valentine’s own security abruptly arrested my progress and planted me back on the floor.
Several members of the restaurant staff poked their heads past the screen. “Would you like us to call—” One of the staff paused midsentence, seeing the full complement of goons flanking me. “Anyone?”
Valentine took a thorough accounting of me with his slow, cold, green-eyed gaze. “That won’t be necessary. I believe my own employees are more than equipped to handle the situation.”
The server took one look at the beefcake squad restraining me and nodded. “Of course, sir.”
When they were gone, Valentine nodded to the empty chair at the table. “Please help Miss Avery to her seat.”
And help they did. Roughly acquainting my ass with the padded chair in a most unceremonious fashion.
“So,” I said, turning to Shepard. “Want to tell me what the actual fuck you’re doing here?”
“Does he need to?” Valentine lifted a tumbler of amber liquid to his lips and sipped. “Or have you figured it out?”
“I want to hear him say it.”
Lie.
I didn’t want to hear him say it. I would have much preferred never to have to give ear to the words I knew were coming. The truth was, I needed to hear him say it. I needed it to justify the sick churning in my gut. To give causal form to my body’s visceral reaction.
Those damnably beautiful forearms with their network of veins and tattoos rested on the white linen tablecloth, his broad palms flat against the table, long fingers splayed. I remembered what they felt like on my neck in the closet’s close darkness.
“I work for Valentine.” He stated this sentence with no more affectation than he might announce the current weather. A simple fact.
My reaction was somewhat less tranquil.
I hadn’t exactly planned on picking up the fork and trying stab the eye out of the tiger twisting up Shepard’s forearm, but it happened nonetheless. I didn’t succeed, of course. Shepard caught hold of my wrist and pinned my arm to the table before the tines could find their target.
Which was a mistake.
Anger had been the impetus for our closet collision. It flared back to life now, threatening to incinerate the table and everyone at it. Everyone that wasn’t him. Wasn’t me. Wasn’t us.
The animal I’d met in the dark sprang to the surface. The feral hunger waking behind his eyes. Desire mixed with fury. A tangle of wants.
“Don’t tell me you’ve fucked her.” Valentine’s face had gone cold despite the alcohol warming the blood in his body. His smile wasn’t a smile but a dark, sarcastic slash. The measured tightness of it belied the careless slouch of his long, lean body. “This tendency of yours to become involved with our targets is becoming a real liability, Shepard.”
Valentine had said this for my benefit. To make sure I knew I wasn’t the first. Wouldn’t be the last.
I marshaled every ounce of the betrayal I felt, turning it into the acid words I spit directly into Shepard’s face. “So you didn’t run back and tell Daddy what happened in the closet?”
Shepard released my wrist as if it had burned him.
“What closet? What is she talking about, Shepard?” Whoever had originally labeled envy “the green-eyed monster” must have channeled Valentine’s face at this precise moment.
Shepard said nothing, his eyes warning me to do the same.
A warning I had no intention of heeding.
“Oh,” I said with exaggerated wonder. “You mean dragging me into a closet and putting your hands on me wasn’t part of your orders?”
“Jane.” Times like this, I really wished my mother hadn’t saddled me with a name one could pronounce so perfectly through gritted teeth.
“Still. I have to give you credit,” I said. “You almost had me believing that you gave a shit about what happened to me. And the way you carried me to your car afterward? Fucking clever.”
Shepard’s fist came down on the table with enough force to make the plates jump.
“Enough!”
In the strained silence following the outburst, Valentine reached out and coolly took a sip of his drink. Even in his rumpled dress shirt, sleeves cuffed to the elbows, it was easy to see the manner that had made him famous in boardrooms and bedrooms alike. Unquestionable command. Unarguable power.
“We have much to discuss, and I would prefer we conducted this conversation like civilized adults. Do you think that’s possible?”
“Well, I can,” I said. “I can’t speak for the honorless spoodge-sack of deception to my left.”
Shepard didn’t take the bait as he might have had Valentine not been in spitting distance. Not that I’d spat at him yet, but I wasn’t ruling it out.
“Fine,” Shepard said. “But only if she drops the fork.”
Until that moment, I hadn’t realized it was still gripped in my clenched fist. I set it aside, and one of the minions took it from me and set it next to Valentine. Which didn’t seem fair in the least as he already had all the good weapons. What with the steak knife and the brass napkin ring and everything.
“How long have you been working for Valentine?” I asked.
Shepard’s eyes had gone flat. Distant. Like the man I thought I knew had wandered somewhere else inside the complicated channels of his head. “Since always.”
Memories slammed into each other, backing up in my head like a massive pileup. The clues I’d seen, ignored, or flat out missed. How he�
��d seen me kidnap Valentine that first day. How he’d known where to find me each and every time since then when I’d tracked Valentine down.
“And Paul?”
Shepard turned his dead eyes to Valentine, who nodded. “Paul too.”
With my aim and Shepard’s reflexes, the floral centerpiece ended up hitting the Japanese screen and shattering on the floor in a wash of broken glass and petals. I was about as shocked as they were, as I’d never been much of a thing thrower before this particular evening.
This amused Valentine as much as it failed to amuse Shepard. “Perhaps we should remove all potential projectiles from Miss Avery’s immediate vicinity.”
His minions shuffled to obey, stripping the area around me of everything but the tablecloth. Which I might have already been considering whipping out from beneath the flatware like Houdini and using as a garrote.
“So Paul and my mother. Were they ever in a relationship, or was that a big fat lie as well?”
It was Valentine, not Shepard, who answered.
“That particular story was his idea. I only asked him to go by your mother’s house. When you turned up there, I expect he thought an existing relationship might make his presence there seem less problematic.”
Right about now, I was wishing they hadn’t moved all the throwables out of my reach. “But it isn’t even my mother’s house, is it?”
Surprise stole about ten years from Valentine’s face, and for a brief second, I could see what he must have looked like as a boy. All large gray-green eyes and tousled dark hair. No lines etching his forehead or bracketing his mouth. He didn’t like being surprised, judging by how quickly he evicted this expression in favor of his usual bored stoicism.
Valentine motioned to the waiter, who flew over as if pulled on a drawstring. “Bring Miss Avery a drink. I suspect we’ll be here a while.”
The waiter angled his horsey face to me in a manner far too solicitous for what he’d seen unfold that evening. “What will you have, miss?”
“Just the water.” However tempting oblivion might be, however lovely it looked when Valentine courted it, I needed my head clear for this conversation.
Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1) Page 20