I finally picked up the pace and put together a respectable start on a wardrobe. We bought a set of luggage down the street at Louis Vuitton. I went pale looking at those price tags.
“Don’t you think that travelling with this kind of luggage just screams ‘rob me, please’?” Or ‘lose my luggage Mr. Baggage handler. You can sell it and pay off your mortgage.’”
“Maybe so, but if theft was that common how come these folks still sell so many products? Word would surely get around it wasn’t worth the risk.”
After a few hours of blowing money non-stop, we went for some lunch. After that, Dylan put me in a cab with all our purchases and told me to relax at the St. Regis spa for the afternoon.”
“I’ve got some shopping to do myself and I also want to look up a friend from school who might be able to point me to a good law firm. I’m going to need more than Spencer’s advice and I want a second opinion on that will sooner rather than later.”
“I think I can manage an afternoon at the spa. I’ll have a massage. I’ve never had one before.”
“You’re in for a real treat. Have fun. Spoil yourself rotten.” When I looked doubtful he said, “get used to it.”
The bellhop had to use a huge brass cart to schlep all our new stuff to the room. I planned to change into one of my new outfits so that when I went to the spa, I at least looked like I belonged there. My cheap sundress looked a lot more charming on a rustic island than it did in a luxury hotel.
Dylan’s e-notebook was still on the desk where we’d left it and I idly jiggled the mouse and refreshed his email. Sure enough, Mr. Spencer had already responded. I scrolled down through Dylan’s inbox to see what other kinds of email he got. It was pretty mundane stuff; not that I had expected any big surprises. I would have been shocked as hell to find out he was corresponding with some other woman. He just didn’t seem the type.
Nope, for the most part it looked like he got a whole lot of junk. There were a couple of fishing related subject lines but they really didn’t interest me.
I went back up to Spencer’s email. The temptation to open it was very strong. Not that I would understand much of the legal speak Jackson Cruz’s will contained; I was simply curious. It would be easy enough to cover my tracks by marking the email as unread after I took a look. I knew how to delete the download afterwards. Sure there was an off chance that Dylan would go poking around his history, but I seriously doubted he’d find any reason to do that.
My nosiness got the better of me. I felt guilty, but not very. The note from the lawyer was very short. He thanked Dylan for his confidence and assured him that he would be available to render any assistance—blah, blah, blah.
I opened the attached PDF of the will. I was right, there wasn’t much in there that I could make sense of. I certainly didn’t have any opinion about it, but one thing did stick out. Dawn’s name. My previous internet research had turned up the usual overload of irrelevant information and I hadn’t taken it much further than the one night’s quickie poke around. Without middle names, it was pretty tough to sort out the results.
Even Dylan Cruz was also the name of a pro skateboarder and several women! Armed with the fact that his name was Dylan Jackson Cruz might net me a lot more information on my sweetie when I got around to looking him up again.
Now I knew that his sister was Dawn Penelope Cruz I could dig deeper. I got my own tablet. No sense in leaving more history for Dylan to accidently discover. “Dawn Penelope Cruz” I typed in quotes. No results.
“Dawn Penelope” netted lots of results with all kinds of last names: Davenport, Hulke, Smythe and so on. Most were in England so I dug a little deeper. Since Jackson Cruz had been living in London, there was a connection. No dice. All of the English Dawn’s were far too old.
On a wild hunch I typed in “Dawn Penelope Jackson”. Bingo. A picture of graduating seniors at Sacred Heart University in Stamford, Connecticut included a young woman in the nursing program there. I made the picture as big as I could get it on the little screen and found the face that belonged to Dawn Penelope Jackson. She was a pretty girl, taller than most of her classmates and she looked a whole lot like the man whose bed I’d been sharing.
But she graduated in the spring. She’d had an entire summer to move away from Connecticut and take a job. Nurses could go just about anywhere and find work. The chances of her still being in Stamford were slim.
I did a Facebook search. “Dawn Jackson”. Nope. “Dawn Penelope Jackson”. Yes, I was on a roll. One result was all I needed or wanted. She was there. Her privacy settings were high, but the profile picture said it all. There was no doubt in my mind that I had located Dylan’s sister. Her ‘about’ section listed her location as still being Stamford and her ‘works at’ still listed Sacred Heart University. So she either hadn’t updated or she was still there. She had a respectable amount of friends, so she obviously didn’t live a reclusive life. Dylan didn’t even have a Facebook page. He thought the whole social media thing was a ridiculous waste of time.
My investigation had netted me what I wanted to know. The question now was what was I going to do with the information? I was excited as hell and my first instinct was to tell Dylan what I’d learned as soon as he came back to the hotel.
It’s a good thing I had several hours to think about it. First instincts can be so wrong in so many ways. Dylan had back-pedaled after his initial endorsement of my offer to be a go-between and he’d given me grief about being the ‘inspector’ and looking everything up. The way he said it made me feel he wasn’t quite as comfortable with accessing all the public knowledge there was about just about anyone as I was. I’d always figured if there was something I could learn on the internet, it was fair game.
In my opinion, if you wanted to keep your private life private, don’t go on line, don’t get your picture taken and don’t get mentioned in the paper. Dylan had done pretty well hiding the details of his life. I’d only seen some stuff about the tournaments he’d won with Stephen. He appeared at no charity galas with any of his sometimes famous dates. There might be more to find now that I knew his middle name, but I kind of doubted it.
I couldn’t get Dawn off my mind in spite of the delicious massage that should have melted all my thoughts into a vanilla scented puddle under the padded table. Instead, the hour long indulgence gave me that much more time to focus on her. The more the soft music tried to relax all thoughts out of my head, the more I drilled down on my curiosity.
Maybe I was nosey and maybe I was prying where I didn’t belong. But Dylan was eaten up with the problem of what to do about his sister and I wanted to help. Maybe if I found her, I could sort of observe her from a distance and report back to him. If he knew she was thriving, had a profession to follow and looked ‘normal’ maybe he wouldn’t fret about waiting three years to make contact.
It seemed perfectly obvious to me that Jackson had to have been providing for her after death just as he was providing for Dylan. Spencer must have contacted her and given her the same carte blanch as her brother. So, she wouldn’t be suffering financially.
Not that she ever had. Sacred Heart wasn’t cheap. Daddy had to have been footing the bill for her $20K plus bill just like he had supported Dylan and the El Loco. And Spencer, who obviously knew where she was, continued Daddy’s largesse.
“Honey, I’m home!” Dylan announced seconds after I heard the click of the keycard in the slot. I was on line looking for the best way to get up to Stamford and hoping I’d be able to steal some time to go. I quickly closed the screen and turned my face up to receive his hello kiss. I could never tire of that delicious mouth on mine. Even a few hours apart kindled a longing to be with him that amazed me.
I’d always cherished my time away from both Nathan and Jake, for different reasons. Nathan could be a real pain to be around and his temper kept me on edge. When we were apart, I got a rare chance to relax. With poor Jake, it was just the opposite. I used my time away from him to socialize with more stim
ulating company. I knew that eventually the first blush of my fascination with Dylan would fade and I would probably want ‘alone time’. That was natural and healthy. But that hadn’t happened yet and I just couldn’t seem to get enough of the man.
He had ditched the outfit I’d gotten him and was dressed in a button down Oxford cloth shirt, a pair of gray dress slacks and black suede loafers that looked like they cost a mint. I hadn’t seen him in anything so formal since his meeting with Jackson in London. He wore expensive, elegant clothes very well. The pale blue shirt made his deep cobalt eyes look brighter. The pants hung on his long legs perfectly and the shoes were elegant and understated.
I got up and wrapped my arms around his neck and he hoisted me up to kiss me with his two strong hands. I kissed him again, deeply, winding my tongue around his and lacing my fingers through the dark curls that grazed his collar. His hair was slightly long for the ultra conservative duds and that just made him look that much sexier.
“Nice outfit, Handsome. You look all grown up,” I told him.
“I couldn’t exactly go lawyer-hunting looking like a refugee.”
“Did you have any luck?”
“Well,” he said as he put me softly on the edge of the bed, “my friend was able to hook me up with a top-notch firm and I think they’ll be a good match. One of their main areas of expertise is estate planning.”
I glanced over at the pile of packages he’d dumped by the door. “Looks like you also got some serious shopping in, too.”
“Yeah, well I’m kind of starting from scratch. Real shoes feel weird. Even Gucci’s.” He sat down beside me and slipped off his shoes. “I figured I couldn’t go wrong with a classic. I think my grandfather may have had a pair of these. I know my old man did.”
“They look very classy. What else did you buy?”
He walked over to gather up his packages and I had to admire how nicely he wore those trousers. I couldn’t get over how masculine—how utterly manly—the classic clothes made him look.
“I basically just got the same pair of pants in different colors. Same with the shirts. I guess I’m not real creative when it comes to dressing up,” he said as he pulled garment after garment from the shopping bags. He lifted up a suit bag. “Blue blazer. Also not very original. If clothes make the man, I’m one boring dude.”
I laughed out loud at that one. “You are many things, Dylan Cruz, but boring is not one of them. In your case, the man makes the clothes.”
He produced a laptop case from another bag. “I had to have something I could actually use. We can leave those foul little e-notebooks as tips for the maids or something.”
“I kind of like mine. It’s light.”
“Suit yourself, sweetheart.” He put his new machine on the desk and fired it up. “The guy in the store set it up already for me. I hope Spencer got the will sent. I’ll need it for my meeting tomorrow.”
A little twang of guilt pinched me as I watched him connect to his email.
“Yep. He’s on the ball. It’s here.” He opened the attachment and took a few minutes to scan the document. “I haven’t got a clue as to what half of this means. Why do lawyers take twenty words to say something that could be said in five?”
“It’s what they do, I guess.” I was being as nonchalant as possible.
He put a stick into the USB and copied the file. “All set. I can let the experts take over tomorrow.”
“What time is your meeting?”
“Eleven.” He rummaged in the bag from the computer store and brought out a couple of Galaxies. “One for me and one for you. We can charge them up and stay in touch tomorrow. I don’t know about you but I’ve felt a little naked without my phone.”
“Thanks,” I said as I took the white phone he held out to me. “Glad you got two different colors.”
“I think of everything, don’t I?”
“Yes you do, my love.” I kissed his cheek. “You’re wonderful.”
“Speaking of wonderful . . . How was the massage?”
“Fantastic. I am officially spoiled rotten.”
“And I intend to keep you that way.”
“Dylan, about tomorrow. Would it be okay with you if I got up early and went to the MoMA? You didn’t seem particularly enthused about it and I’d rather see it without feeling, you know, rushed.”
It was the beginning of a string of lies that would tangle my life in a choking knot.
Chapter 24—Dylan
Truth be told, I was kind of relieved to be excused from modern art duty. It wasn’t my favorite. I found a lot of it to be something I could easily copy. That was something I couldn’t say about Renoir, Van Gogh or Degas. I’d gotten in arguments in college with people who tried to impress on me that it was the originality of someone like Jackson Pollack that gave his work value. Thanks, but dribbling paint on a gigantic canvas was still dribbling paint. Any child could do it.
“That’s perfect,” I told Rene. “I’ll be much better able to focus on the meeting if I know you’re somewhere having a good time.”
Rene insisted on changing her clothes before we went to dinner. The simple polished outfit she’d worn to the spa didn’t strike her as ‘fancy’ enough for dinner at Esca.
“I’m not going to show up at Mario Batali’s dressed down for dinner,” she told me after I had explained that it was one of the orange-clogged chef’s best joints in New York.
“Darling, Mario himself isn’t likely to be there. He’s got an empire to run.”
“You don’t quite know when I’m making a joke yet, do you?”
I really didn’t. She’d sounded serious to me. “I have a lot left to learn about you.” Rene turned her back so I could zip the little confection of a dress she had chosen. I ran my finger against her spine before I closed it. “And, I am going to spend a lot of time learning everything there is to know.”
She’d chosen a dark cream colored dress that had just the right amount of plunge in the front to show off her assets. Rene’s figure was petite and generous at the same time. Her necklace hung perfectly in the V of the garment and it showcased the jewels nicely against her skin. She’d chosen some strappy rose-gold sandals that had heels so high I wondered how she was going to walk in them. She saw the concern on my face as I watched her fasten the delicate straps around her ankles.
“I know what you’re thinking. I’m going to have to hang on to you for dear life or risk a broken leg.”
“You are welcome to hang on me all you want.”
“They’ll take some getting used to.” She twirled around on her toes. “But aren’t they perfect? The whole outfit looks like it was made for my necklace.”
“We did very well at Bloomies. I’ll have to get you more jewelry. I can’t have you matching everything to that one piece.”
She kissed me sweetly and softly enough so that she didn’t smear her lipstick. “Look how much taller I am. It’s much easier to reach your mouth.”
She’d taken extra care getting ready and the result was fabulous. I was so used to seeing her in the most casual clothes sans make-up that the little touches she applied were quite dazzling. Her beautiful eyes were even more intense with the lashes darkened by mascara. Her lips seemed just a little bit more luscious slicked with a subtle blush of rose pink.
“I don’t want you to think that you ever have to wear make-up,” I told her. “But you do look positively stunning tonight, love.”
“I feel so ‘girly’. It’s kind of fun.” She giggled and rolled her shoulders.
“I’ve never seen your hair like that either.” I think it was Stephen who told me that chicks love to hear that you like their hair. That’s not why I said it, but I remembered his advice when I told her the style was very pretty. It was braided down one shoulder in an unusual way.
“It’s called a fish-tail. I thought it might appeal to my champion angler.”
“I don’t know how much of a champion I am going to be from here on out. It may be a while bef
ore I want to get behind a rod and reel.”
“You’re my champion. That’s what counts. Anyhow, you’ll get back on the horse—or behind the fish. You’re a real fighter, Dylan. I can’t believe how well you’ve come through your whole ordeal. The accident, your father’s death, the wreck. Any one of those events would be catastrophic to most men.”
“Most men haven’t lived through a childhood of catastrophe. It toughens the spirit.” I grabbed my new blazer and steered her toward the door. That was as far as I wanted to take that thought on our first night out on the town.
Esca was crowded and I was glad I had thought to have the concierge at the hotel call ahead and arrange a tasting menu for us. I wanted the evening to be memorable. In a way, I felt like this was truly our beginning.
Mario didn’t disappoint us. We began with crudo. Turns out Rene was as big a fan of raw fish, too. The Italian sushi was served with a fine prosecco.
“I love the way the bubbles tickle.” Rene smiled across the simply laid table and sipped her wine. She looked serene bathed in the soft and mellow light in the dining room. The wall of wine bottles behind her caught the flicker of the candles much like her subtle diamonds.
“I’ll be tickling you even better later,” I promised her. She reached under the tablecloth and ran her hand suggestively up my leg. Even her lightest touch was enough to set me on fire.
“Ooooh! Look what we have here.” She made the remark when the waiter set down the plate of buratta. It was a deliberate tease. I couldn’t tell if she was exclaiming over the grilled escarole or my growing reaction to her below.
I took her hand and put it back up on the table. “My sweet, you won’t make it through our two-hour meal if you don’t leave the Major alone.”
She pretend pouted and told me she was just looking for a nice sausage to compliment all the seafood on our menu. “You,” I told her, “are positively shameless.”
Tempest Tossed: A Love Unexpected Novel Page 31