Skin

by Karin Tabke

  He sputtered and spit fibers from his mouth. “I was worried about you.”

  “So worried you had to hide in the closet?”

  “I heard voices, and yours wasn’t one of them.”

  She untied his hands, then his feet. He rubbed his wrists first, then his ankles, while he studied the three men who had turned away from him like he was no more threatening than a fly. “Don’t even think about it, Jimmy,” she warned, her voice low.

  “Those guys ain’t models.”

  Frankie thought the same thing. It was her biz to know who was hot and who was not. She’d know about Jase if he was legit. First chance she got, she was going to have Unk run Mr. Skin.

  Reese turned his attention to Jimmy. “Rick’s a promoter. The next time you’re in Europe you’ll see Jase’s face plastered on every billboard from Spain to Russia.”

  Jimmy slowly stood. “Gimme my piece back.”

  Ricco shook his head. “No can do, Jimbo.”

  Jimmy was smart enough not to push it.

  “I’ll leave it here for Frankie to give you when we’re gone,” Reese said.

  “You telling me to take a hike?”

  Jase smiled tolerantly. “That’s exactly what he’s saying.”

  Jimmy glanced at Frankie. She shrugged.

  The situation was uncomfortable enough without him. “Go on, Jimmy. I’ll bring your gun to the office.”

  Once Jimmy exited the condo, Frankie turned to the three men, her feet apart, her hands on her hips. The men had bodies and faces any woman would drool over, but Jimmy was right, something about them…their characters were as hard as their bodies. “Who the hell are you guys?”

  Reese walked past her and grabbed a beer from the fridge. “Would you like one?”

  “I want answers, not alcohol.”

  “Ricco and Jase told you who they are and what they do. What else do you want?”

  “The truth.”

  Jase chuckled. “Okay, Frankie, we’ll level with you. I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body and Ricky here is my lover.”

  “Jase, tell her the real truth,” Reese said, his tone ominous.

  Jase’s features lost their humor. “Are you serious?”

  Reese nodded, his face mirroring Jase’s. Ricco stepped forward and put a hand on Frankie’s shoulder. “You’d better sit down for this.”

  Finally. Answers. Frankie sat on the sofa.

  His face solemn, Jase sat down next to Frankie and took her hands into his. “You have to promise not to repeat a word of what I tell you. If you do?” He looked at Ricco and Reese, then back to her. “I’ll have to kill you.”

  Frankie saw the hardness in his face. The guy wasn’t kidding. She swallowed hard and nodded. “I promise.”

  “Ricco, Reese and I are foster brothers who were captured when we were five by members of the planet Hogarth. They’ve just recently released us back to earth.”

  Frankie yanked her hands from his and stood. “Screw all three of you.” All three men raised their brows and Jase and Reese grinned. And it looked like Ricco was fighting one and losing.

  She strode down the hallway to the bathroom. When she came back into the living room, all three men were sitting at the kitchen table, beer in hand, laughing and making merry at her expense. Assholes.

  She grabbed a napkin from the counter and scribbled her address on it. She threw it at Reese. “There’s my address. Be there in an hour or you’re fired.”

  She stalked past them to the front door and slammed it shut behind her. Hiking her bag over her shoulder, Frankie winced. She’d ignored the dull throb of it all day. Continuing to do so, she headed for the front gate. Halfway there, she pulled her cell phone out and called a cab. Then called her uncle. She frowned when she got his voice mail. He rarely had his cell phone turned on. He wasn’t big on electronic leashes. “I grew up without a remote or a computer, cara, I don’t need a phone ringing in my pocket all day.”

  “It’s me, Unk. I’d like you to ask around about a Reese Barrett. I can get you his particulars later. Also, I had a little chat with my brother today. He said there was money missing from Skin and accused me of stealing it. I’m not sure what he’s up to, but I wanted to let you know before you heard his accusations as a rumor. Ciao.”

  The door had barely slammed shut when Reese pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number.

  “Yeah,” a voice answered.

  “The fox has bolted, put a tail on her.”

  “Done.”

  He flipped the phone shut and the three men looked at one another seriously, then cracked up in laughter.

  Reese smacked Jase on the back. “That was good. I think Frankie bolted the quickest.”

  Ricco smiled. “They fall for it every time. But she’s a smart one. You have your hands full.”

  “She has more than a handful,” Jase quipped.

  Reese’s eyes narrowed. “Mine.”

  Jase threw his hands up and backed away. “I think the lady has a different idea, but I’ll give you your shot. Then” — Jase cracked his knuckles and flexed his biceps — “the master will take over.”

  “When this case is over she’s fair game.”

  Ricco quirked a brow. “You mean there will be leftover Frankie?”

  Reese drained the rest of his beer. “I misspoke. I’ll be off on my next UC. If Jase wants to pursue once this case is closed, I won’t stand in his way.”

  Jase looked hard at Reese. “She doesn’t do anything for you?”

  Reese shrugged. She did something for him, all right. He was a constant walking hard-on. There was more to what she did to him than the physical, but that tidbit he kept to himself. “She’s female, I’m male, on that level, yes.”

  Jase nodded. “She seems to be more than just female.”

  “She’s got a temper.”

  “What else?”

  Reese scowled. “Nothing else. I’m in it for the case. She’s a means to an end. Stop trying to read something else into it.”

  “Sure, buddy, you always look at every female with lust in your eyes.”

  Reese shrugged the accusation off. Of the three, he was the reticent one.

  “This is really a stretch for you, Reese, acting like Mr. Outgoing.”

  Jase laughed and grabbed another beer from the fridge. “Yeah, I’ll hand over my Mr. Congeniality crown to you.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  Jase glanced up at his buddy, a cryptic look crossing his face. “You falling for her act?”

  “What act is that?”

  “Miss Innocent.”

  “Hardly. Last night, she was either in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the right place and the shooter has bad aim. This afternoon she was walking across Post with her brother and they were both targeted for a hit-and-run. Again, either she’s in the wrong place at the wrong time or the driver didn’t move fast enough. I think it’s too coincidental. I think she’s the target.”

  Jase nodded and looked at Ricco before he looked at Reese. “We’ll explore that, but I still say she’s tit-deep in this.”

  Reese’s cell phone beeped and he put it to his ear. “Yeah.”

  “The fox is being hunted.”

  “Got it.” He clicked off the phone and looked hard at his cohorts. “Time for action. Frankie has an unfriendly tailing her.”

  Reese headed back to the spare room that served as an office and pulled his piece out from his desk’s false bottom.

  Chapter Fifteen

  As she walked through the door of her town house Frankie stopped dead in her tracks. Shock registered. Fear flashed. Anger erupted. Sonofabitch!

  Her brand-new sofa lay on its back, the fabric slashed to ribbons, the stuffing strewn all around. Her nona Fazzio’s stained-glass Tiffany lamp lay broken and scattered across the shredded carpet. Paintings that had been in her family for years hung askew or were tossed on the floor along with the other carnage. Her hands shook. A deadly silence permeated her home.

/>   Who did this? Who the hell broke into her house and violated everything she held sacred? Frankie dug her can of pepper spray out of her purse, wishing she had a gun instead.

  Slowly she walked through the living room, glass and broken pottery crunching underfoot, to the equally destroyed dining room and then into the kitchen. Her china and crystal were shattered into millions of shards on the floor, the drawers pulled and dumped. The pantry door hung agape, the contents strewn everywhere.

  Fury infused every cell of her body. Then Reese’s words resonated in her mind. “It’s you they want.”

  Even as the evidence lay before her, she still could not fathom why anyone, including Anthony, wanted her dead. For a long minute she stood silent, her gaze touching on the destruction, her eyes missing nothing. Every crevice, every corner, every layer was disturbed. Like someone was looking for something. What? Did someone think she had her father’s will?

  She stepped over the ruin in the kitchen and made her way down the hallway to her home studio. Her anger swelled. Her equipment was broken and thrown, her computer in pieces on the floor. Putting the pepper spray back in her purse, she set it and the camera bag down next to the splintered wood that was once her copy table. She bent down to pick up her old Nikon, surprised it was still intact. The treasured camera was one of the few things her father had given her. Sadness rushed through her and she wished she’d had a much different relationship with the man responsible for her birth.

  She had gingerly set the camera on the window ledge and pulled her cell phone from her purse to call Unk when she heard the soft crunch of glass underfoot in the kitchen. She froze, terrified. Friend or foe? Her eyes darted around the room, already knowing what her brain knew. No way out and no escape route without being seen. She was trapped. No place to hide. The door to the closet hung awkwardly from one hinge. Impulsively, she darted through the doorway and upstairs to her bedroom and the cavernous walk-in closet.

  She made the sign of the cross as she breathed a quick breath of relief. The door was secure, though open. She slipped inside and pulled the door almost all the way shut, keeping it cracked just enough to peek through and see the person who was going to pay with his life for destroying everything she’d worked so hard for.

  Her heart beat like a kettledrum in her ears as she listened to the footsteps methodically go from room to room, stopping and starting. Realizing she left her purse downstairs in the office, she choked.

  “Please, don’t find it.”

  The footsteps halted at the bottom of the stairway.

  “Breathe,” she whispered to herself when she realized she was holding her breath, and then remembered the softball bat in the far corner of the closet. Slowly she backed up, feeling with her hand along the wall. She almost stumbled over a heap of clothes the shit disturber threw when he wrecked her closet. Squatting, she felt underneath the mounds of clothing. Just when she was about to cry in frustration, she touched the hard aluminum grip. Carefully she pulled it out from under the heavy mound of clothes. Her eyes adjusted in the darkness and she made out a blanket tangled around a pile of shoes. Setting the bat aside, she pulled the blanket up and draped it over the long hanger rung. Slipping behind it would offer small cover, but at least no one would open the closet door and see her standing there, a panicked mess.

  Bat in one hand, Frankie tiptoed to the cracked door. Her gut lurched and she felt like she was going to throw up. The footsteps were entering her room. For a long minute there was no sound. She couldn’t make out the person standing in her doorway; only a long shadow gave him away as he viewed the ripped sheets and guts of her mattress strewn over the room like snow in Tahoe.

  Gripping the bat with her right hand, she slapped her left hand over her mouth to keep from crying out. The footsteps moved closer to the closet door. Did he hear the loud beat of her heart? Did he smell her fear? The shadow fell across the floor in front of her. Oh, Virgin Mother Mary, please don’t let me die. I promise to go to confession every Saturday. Who was she kidding? Once a month.

  The door opened, and light flooded the closet. Frankie screamed and swung the bat, pushing her way toward the hulk of a man in front of her. A dull grunt of pain as the bat hit solid flesh spurned her on.

  She pulled back for another wallop; instead, the intruder tackled her low around the waist and pushed hard. Frankie screamed. In a flaying tangle of arms and legs, they landed on the guts of her mattress as she continued to whack him with the bat. Her hair caught around her face, obscuring her view, but her senses opened. Even blinded, she knew the strong woodsy scent of the man on top of her.

  The bat halted midair. “Reese! You scared the hell out of me! Why didn’t you call out?”

  “Because, Miss Know-it-all, I didn’t know one, if you were here, and two, if you were, whether someone had you at gunpoint. Now put that bat down.”

  Immediately she opened her fingers and the bat rolled out of her hand. Reese didn’t seem in any hurry to remove his body from hers. Instead he leaned into her, smiled crookedly, and glanced around the room before settling those dark blue eyes of his back on her. “So, what is it you have hidden here?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I was as shocked as you when I walked in here.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say I was shocked. Surprised, maybe. It looks like whoever is after you has changed tactics.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s obvious the person or persons who did this were looking for something. It wasn’t a random scare tactic but a seek-and-destroy mission.”

  “Who are you?”

  “The guy who’s stuck with you and not liking it very much.”

  She pushed his chest but he remained sprawled on her. “I thought you said you’d leave me alone.”

  He pressed his hips against her. “Feel that?”

  “I don’t feel anything except your hips.”

  “Exactly. I. Don’t. Do. Mafia. Princesses.”

  His hand slid up her bare thigh and pulled down her short skirt. Her skin warmed in its wake. “Even when they throw themselves at me.”

  “You’re arrogant.”

  “You’re stubborn.”

  Deep voices from the living room interrupted them. Frankie’s body went rigid in renewed fear. Whoever ruined her house must be back. Reese put his finger to her lips and stood, hauling her up with him. He pushed Frankie toward the closet, then grabbed the bat from the floor.

  “I hung a blanket,” she whispered as Reese entered behind her and closed the door, leaving it open just a crack. The voices drew nearer.

  In the darkness she felt his body heat. Gently he pushed her further back into the closet while he faced the door. She tripped over a mound of shoes and stifled a scream as he caught her, pulling her against him. She grabbed his arm for support and slid her other arm around his waist as he pulled her from the pile. The hard butt of a gun at his back surprised her more than his presence. A model with a gun? Who the hell was this guy?

  The voices came closer, and she barely made out the words.

  “Looks like someone had the same idea,” a low, gruff voice said.

  “Lightweights,” an equally nasty voice responded.

  “Whadya mean?” the first voice asked.

  “You see a body?”

  “Nah.”

  “Exactly. They screwed up. Lightweights.”

  “I didn’t see no car out front. She ain’t here. Looks like we won’t be bagging one ourselves.”

  Reese slid his gun from his waist. Despite his quiet confidence and his gun pointed at the door, Frankie’s heart hummed like a buzz saw against her chest. She was sure they could hear it. She pressed against Reese’s back and wondered for the briefest of seconds if he felt it too.

  She held her breath, straining hard to recognize at least one of the voices, but they were unfamiliar. Behind the blanket she could barely breathe, the closet was so warm. Frankie slipped her arms around Reese’s waist and pressed her body against his, to draw o
n his strength and still her jittery nerves. Her knees wobbled and she felt the resurgence of nausea. She smiled when he ran a comforting hand across hers before disengaging her hands from him.

  Holding his gun with one hand, he wrapped his fingers around the back of her head and whispered against her lips, “Don’t make a sound.” She nodded and he released her.

  “Wanna give it a once-over before we go?” the first thug asked.

  “Nah. It’s the girl we wanted and she ain’t here. Let’s go.”

  The sound of heavy footsteps retreating from her room was the sweetest sound Frankie had ever heard.

  “Let’s head over to that magazine she runs.”

  “But the boss said —” the second voice interrupted.

  “I want this —” the first one started to explain, and the voices faded down the stairway.

  Still silent, she listened as the men made their way downstairs, their muffled voices giving way to murmurs as space separated them.

  “What do we do now?” Frankie whispered.

  Reese pushed her back toward the wall. “We wait for them to leave.”

  “Wait?” she hissed. “They’re going to my offices.”

  “Yes, wait. And since you aren’t there, no one will get hurt.”

  “You have a gun. Let’s follow them.”

  Reese slid his weapon between his belt and back, then pulled her hard against his chest and kissed her. This time Frankie struggled. She pulled away from him. “I’m not going to stand in here while those thugs get away. Give me your gun.”

  “Keep quiet.”

  She moved past him and he grabbed her, spinning her around. She stumbled and he pushed her face first against the far corner of the closet. He was careful not to hurt her, but his patience had worn thin. He had a hankering to see the next sunrise. “As much as I’d like to go out there and play the Lone Ranger, there are two of them, one of you, and one of me. I happen to value my skin, and yours. So we wait.”

  “Let go of me,” she said against the wall, the drywall muffling the percussion of it.