Confidence Tricks

by Tamara Morgan

  Poppy wouldn’t know—Gunner had eaten every last bite of hers.

  “I thought the plan was to make contact with Cindy,” he added. “Not to sic your dog on her.”

  “Maybe you should have chosen a more personable pet, then,” Poppy replied. She tugged on the leash as they rose and began walking a few blocks to the parking lot where they’d left the car. No motorcycle this time—just Graff’s sensibly overpriced Lexus. “And relax. I grabbed Cindy’s wallet out of her purse. I’ll stop by her apartment to return it when you guys are ready to launch the next phase. We’ll be BFFs in no time.”

  Asprey stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, studying her. “That’s so simple it’s almost genius.”

  She kept walking. “It’s not genius, Asprey. It’s one of the oldest cons in the book. A returned wallet—with all the money intact—builds instant trust. It’s way more effective than a series of lunch dates and chance meetings walking the dog in the park like you guys had planned, believe me.”

  He let out a low whistle and shook his head. “I think maybe bringing you onto our team was the smartest thing I’ve ever done.”

  Poppy laughed, absurdly pleased by the misdirected compliment. “You won’t get an argument from me on that one. But let’s not forget—I’m not on your team if I don’t know all the facts. Including why.” Why did their company insure forgeries? And why, unless it was part of their perverse sibling rivalry against Winston, would they try to ruin their own company?

  He shoved his hands deep in his pockets and cast her a sidelong look. “It’s my turn to ask questions. Remember?”

  “Thin-crust pizza with pineapples and green peppers,” she announced, resigned. “Chocolate-covered strawberries. Virgo. Yesterday I was a cat person, but Gunner might have changed my mind for good on that one. I can’t swim, but I love the ocean. You’ve seen me around an opossum. What am I missing?”

  “I think you know.”

  She halted. Damn him. “The jail situation was complicated, Asprey, and it’s not just my story to tell. If it were only me…”

  “Then don’t tell me.” He shrugged and kept walking. “We can go to the ocean instead. And not swim.”

  But the second she started walking again, she knew it was already too late. Every day spent in this man’s company pushed her guard down a few more inches, made her feel a little bit more like an abandoned airport was close to home. She was breaking all the rules. Worse—even knowing that trust was the one thing she couldn’t afford, she continued to slip further and further under his warm, magnetic, impossibly delicious spell.

  Never get involved on the job.

  One of these days, she’d be smart enough to take her own advice.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Holy shit, Poppy—are you dating an actor?”

  “What? No.” Poppy watched Asprey, who crouched on the ground jiggling a stuffed bunny to make it look alive, and frowned. Jenny was eating it up, her giggles muffling the conversation she and Bea shared across the room. “Why would you think that?”

  “That’s the guy, the one you were looking at online a few weeks ago.”

  Damn. She’d forgotten about that. “Yeah, um, I might have been lying about that.”

  “Poppy…”

  “I know, I know.” She raised her hands and shot her friend a beseeching look. “I promised you I wouldn’t lie and that we would take some time, just the two of us. But I wasn’t ready to talk about him yet. I wasn’t ready to talk about jail yet.”

  One of Bea’s brows rose. “And now all of a sudden you are? Because of him?”

  Poppy took a deep breath and examined the man in question. He glanced through a fallen piece of hair and smiled at her, and her breath caught before she could finish. Squatting on the dinged apartment floor in part one of a three-piece suit, the glinting watch on his wrist worth more than Poppy’s car and all of Bea’s worldly possessions combined. On any other man, she’d have called it overdone and ridiculous—but on Asprey? It was just who he was. Money and ease and charm and high-class heists that revolved around painters whose names she could barely pronounce. Why him? Why now?

  “I’m not sure I have a choice.” She softened. She’d already come this far—there was another Grandma Jean maxim for the records. No use doing something half-assed. Ain’t no one attractive with half an ass. “I know I haven’t been a very good friend since I got out of jail, but I’m going to try better, I swear.”

  “I know why you’re afraid to be around here all the time.”

  Poppy forgot that she’d fallen into the habit of denying Bea’s accusations and gave in to the impulse to ask, “You do?”

  “Of course. You aren’t the only one who had two years of nothing but time to think, Poppy. I know I’ll never be able to understand what you went through in there, but it was just as hard for me on the outside, knowing what you‘d sacrificed. Even with Jenny to take the edge off.”

  “I’m so sorry, Bea,” Poppy said, her nose feeling tingly and sharp. “I never thought about it that way.”

  “Don’t apologize to me,” Bea said sternly. “You have every right to your feelings, and I’m not about to tell you that you have to forgive me or even that you should be able to be my friend again the way we used to be. But you have to confront your loss sometime. If you can’t do it with me, then I hope you can find someone who makes it easier.” She looked pointedly at Asprey. “That one looks like he might do the trick—a face like his? Good for you.”

  Poppy laughed softly. Bea always did have a thing for the pretty ones. “He wants to know why I went to jail—and he has this persistence I can’t seem to shake off. But I don’t want to say anything that will put you and Jenny in danger.”

  “You trust this guy? He looks like someone we would have used as a punching bag back in high school.”

  Poppy glanced over again. Asprey lay on his back, his legs in the air, thrashing as Jenny pretended to tickle his stomach. He would be good with kids on top of everything else. “I dislocated his arm the day we met.”

  Bea laughed, a low rumble that Poppy hadn’t heard in so long she’d forgotten such a sound existed. “Only you could do that to a guy and turn it into a date, Poppy. Only you.”

  “Bea used to work the cons with me,” Poppy explained, settling at the square dining room table with a mug of tea in her hand. Asprey had one too, but he was a lot less interested in refreshments than he was in hearing what she had to say.

  The woman named Bea—the roommate—and her daughter had gone for a walk with Gunner in tow, even when Asprey pressed them to stay. He couldn’t imagine anyone walking a kid around in this neighborhood.

  But Poppy had just laughed at him. “Bea used to train with me at the Pit, Asprey. We don’t intend to set up shop here forever, but for now, she can walk in the broad light of day—especially with Gunner standing guard. I promise.”

  He took in Bea’s attire, which was like Poppy’s if she opted for more hardware and leather, and nodded. Women who could hold their own in a street fight were an anomaly where he grew up, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t growing to like them. A lot.

  “She’s tough,” he offered.

  “She has to be,” Poppy replied in a steely, defensive tone. “Where we’re from, girls have two options in life: learn some street smarts or get knocked up by the first jackass with a compliment dangling from his lips. Forgive us for choosing the former.”

  “I wasn’t judging. I was observing.”

  She didn’t appear convinced, but she wrapped her hands around her mug and continued, her gaze pinpointed somewhere a few feet above Asprey’s head.

  “It happened about two and a half years ago.” Her voice took on a lyrical quality, and Asprey fell into the sound of it. He tried not to appear overeager, but he had never been more curious. Poppy’s truth. Her deep, dark secret. “The job was easy enough—we’d recently come across a half dozen baseballs signed by Mickey Mantle. Fakes, of course, but pretty decent ones. I played the
girlfriend of a cheating scumbag, selling all my ex-boyfriend’s stuff to the first buyer I could find, as is only due a woman crossed.”

  “Noted,” Asprey said with a smile. “Not only can you demolish a guy, but you’ll sell all his stuff when he’s down.”

  Her lips lifted at the corner. “He was supposed to be a cheating scumbag. Did you miss that part? Anyway, we had a whole box of convincing stuff. Men’s shirts, some Blu-Ray Schwarzenegger movies, cuff links, baseball paraphernalia. I’d run into my target on the street, the box’s contents spilling all over the street in the process.”

  “Of course,” Asprey murmured, following along. “At which point your target just happened to notice the signed baseball.”

  Poppy nodded. “A good, clean con—one of our best. You wouldn’t believe how nice the guys got once they realized I was looking to dump the stuff at the first pawn shop I could find. They listened to me rant and cry and rave for as long as I wanted.”

  This plan was even better than pickpocketing Cindy to build trust—Poppy had a natural eye for this sort of thing. “And immediately offered to buy the whole lot from you for a generous sum, right?”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Not one of them thought to give you fair market value or suggest you consult someone first?”

  “Of course not. The best cons work because they take advantage of natural greed. Guilty men never press charges. They know they can’t.”

  His criminal knowledge was expanding every minute. “Like Todd and his gambling addiction.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  She frowned. “We were off on one of the marks. We did a little research first, found guys who carried a lot of cash and were always on the lookout for a bargain, and who knew baseball but weren’t fanatic about it. But we got one of them wrong—he wasn’t a bad guy, just down on his luck. It turned out the five hundred he offered for the box was a last-ditch effort to turn a quick profit and get his rent covered for the month.”

  “Sounds like a lesson well learned to me.”

  “It would have been, if he didn’t have a kid.”

  Oh. “Oh.”

  “Tell me about it.” Poppy released a long sigh and finally looked him head-on. Her eyes had lost most of their sparkle, and there was a firm set to her mouth he hadn’t ever seen before. “It was lazy researching on our part, but we were having such easy luck with the con we got careless. Taking that guy’s money went against our code.”

  He raised a brow.

  “Give it back if it turns out they need it more than you.” She took a deep breath. “It’s not much of a code, but it’s ours. Once we figured out that the money had to go back, I called the guy up and asked him to meet me. I pretended to want his advice about the breakup, but it was really an attempt to keep him away from home long enough for Bea to break in and trade the baseball for the money he’d paid us. We didn’t want to leave a trail.”

  “It didn’t work?”

  “Not entirely. The ex-wife had a key to the apartment, and she came in as Bea was going out the window. She caught a glimpse of the license plate as Bea drove away and called the police.”

  “So Bea was looking at third-degree felony breaking and entering.” A minimum two-year sentence.

  “Yep.”

  “Yet you took the fall.”

  “Yep.”

  He was about to ask why, but that was when realization struck. It was an uncomfortable sensation, one that made him feel equal parts in awe of her and ashamed of himself. While she was in jail for a five hundred dollar act of kindness, he’d been spending five hundred dollars a day on gasoline for his private plane. “How old is Bea’s little girl?”

  “Twenty-two months.”

  He did the math in his head. Two years of jail time plus five months since her release. Subtract nine months of gestation.

  “She was two months pregnant when I turned myself in,” Poppy said quietly, saving him the trouble.

  For what had to be the first time in his life, Asprey was at a loss for words. There were a hundred things he could say, things he might offer any other woman on the face of the planet—the soft, fluffy ones who were Virgos and loved pink but who hadn’t spent two years paying for a crime that wasn’t, in his eyes, much of a crime at all.

  “So there you have it.” She threw the words at him with something approaching triumph. “We made a mistake, and we both paid for it ten times over.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said simply.

  “And that’s not the worst part.”

  He didn’t move. There was something worse than two years in jail?

  She pushed back from the table. “Give me a minute.”

  Asprey wasn’t sure what he expected when she returned from the back of the apartment—if maybe an orange jumpsuit or leg shackles or a mug shot would have been less surprising than the small plywood box she placed unceremoniously on the table. When she didn’t say anything or move to sit down, he assumed he was supposed to lift the lid.

  “I wouldn’t,” she warned. “It’s my grandma.”

  He pulled his hand away as if burned. “You keep your grandma in a box?”

  She smiled tightly. “Until I have the money to make alternate arrangements, yes. We don’t all get limos and black hearses and front-page obituaries, you know. A wooden box—this wooden box—is the only option when your last living relative is in jail and you’ve invested every penny you have with a scam artist who preys on the elderly. Grandma Jean was lucky to get this.”

  Todd Kennick.

  She sat, leaving the box there, glancing at it with a mixture of loathing and sadness. “This is life and death, Asprey, the way it exists down here in the real world. But you wouldn’t have any idea about that, would you?”

  She might as well have launched herself across the room and pulled his shoulder out of its socket again. He almost wished she had—that pain, the searing, physical kind with a beginning and an end—was something he knew how to handle, had experience handling with regard to this woman in particular.

  “I never thought I’d see you without a smart-ass comment, Asprey,” she added, a cold smile playing on her lips. “I guess I’ve finally shocked you with my sordid past. I was beginning to think that wasn’t possible.”

  “No.” He let the word sit there a moment.

  Her smile faltered. “No?”

  “No,” he repeated firmly. “You haven’t shocked me.”

  “If you could see your face right now, you might be willing to rephrase that statement.”

  “This isn’t shock, Poppy.” Was she being this obtuse on purpose? “I’m sorry that your grandmother died. I’m even more sorry that Todd took advantage of her—and that you have to go to such lengths to get her money back.”

  If anything, the knowledge only served to make her more appealing. She’d once said this whole thing was a mission of justice, and all he could think now was good for you. It would take a lot more than a few years in jail to stop this woman from doing what she felt was right.

  “Thank you,” she replied.

  “I’m not done yet.” Asprey leaned over the table and didn’t speak until her eyes met his. “I will do everything in my power to help you vindicate your grandmother, and I’ll do it with a smile. But if you think having a limo and black hearses and front-page obituaries make death any less painful, you’re not only being stupid, you’re being mean.”

  She shot up from the table, her hands gripping the edge of the yellow Formica. “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what you were trying to say here, wasn’t it?” He gestured at the box. “That I can’t possibly know what that sort of loss feels like because I have money? That the regular human emotions driving you to act don’t apply to my kind? You know what that makes you, right?”

  “Don’t you dare say it.”

  He dared. “A snob, Poppy. You’re a snob. The moment we met, you took one look at my clothes and my lifestyle and
decided you know exactly who I am. A piece of society fluff. An easygoing rich boy who’s only up for a good time.” He laughed bitterly. It was all coming out now. “Of all the people in my life, I thought you would understand.”

  A man like him couldn’t possibly know what it was like to struggle. Silver spoons and Cessna planes rendered him useless for any function but decoration. It was the same story he’d heard his whole life, but this time, the storyteller had the potential to crush him. And she didn’t seem to care.

  “Oh, I understand, all right.” Poppy crossed her arms. “You talk big, but your vision of the world is filtered through the huge, rose-colored bubble where you live—where you’ve always lived. As soon as this job ends, I’m going to bury my grandmother and go back to being an ex-felon with no prospects, and you’re going to…what? Stay in the hangar with Graff forever? Take over Winston’s house and drink espresso all day long? Roll around on your bed with millions of dollars and a bevy of well-bred socialites? I’m a criminal, Asprey. I’ve always been one and, despite promises to Bea and my parole officer, I’ll most likely stay one. And you…”

  “I’m just a playboy millionaire who will never amount to anything?” he offered, finishing her statement. “Is that it?”

  “If the shoe fits,” she replied. Her lips curved in a humorless smile. “I’m glad I finally gave in and told you about Grandma Jean. I thought it would make things clearer between us, and it has. It’s high time we both see this thing for what it really is.”

  His chest grew tight. “And what is it?”

  “A business relationship. A means to an end. Nothing more.” She nodded toward the door. “And I think it’s best that we treat it that way from here on out. See you at the hangar tomorrow, Asprey. It’s been fun.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything left to say.

  Asprey grabbed his keys and moved to the door, but there were about eight locks and he couldn’t figure out the pattern to get the damn thing open. Wordlessly, Poppy came up behind him, expertly flipping each one. She lingered so close he could feel the warmth of her breath on his neck.