Hustled To The Altar

by Dani Collins

  Sergio had Felix star-fished across the hood of his hatchback. Felix’s expression was like a still photo, white and horrified, as Tyrone flung the contents of the briefcase into the air. Bundles of newspaper that Con had cut with Perry’s help in the concierge office flew and broke, exploding like feathers from a pillow.

  As they drove by, Murphy said, “Mickey Rooney was right. ‘You always pass failure on the way to success.’”

  “Yeah,” Con agreed. “Renny’s going to love this.”

  9:11 p.m.

  Renny called Laila, then turned off the lamps and opened the drapes, wanting to see the lights and the stars and the silhouette of the mountain ridges with their glowing veins of snow.

  She needed a drink, she decided. She slid past the corner of the desk on the way to the bar and kicked over a briefcase.

  Someone knocked.

  Renny kept her eye on the case, as if it would pop open like a jack-in-the-box, while she let Laila in.

  “Did you run the whole way?” Renny asked.

  “Why is it dark in here?”

  Renny turned on a lamp and continued staring at the briefcase. It was tan with gold clasps.

  “How’d it go?” Laila asked, moving toward the camera.

  “Not well. The cops didn’t show and I had to leave.”

  “So there’s nothing on here?” Laila’s voice was heavy with disappointment as she bent to the camera and adjusted the angle, pointing it at Renny. “What happened?”

  Renny shook her head. “I can’t tell you on the record. It has to do with Jacob and he has nothing to do with this.”

  “At least tell me what happened with Felix.”

  “He was spooked and left with his money. He didn’t take Con’s, but that’s no consolation because he didn’t leave any evidence either, and the police weren’t here to arrest him.”

  “Where is Jacob now?”

  “In the shower. Washing off the feel of prison.” She pressed her lips flat with contrition as she looked directly into the camera. “Can you turn that off, please?”

  “Where’s Con?” Laila asked.

  “He followed Felix.” Renny felt drawn back to the case she had kicked over. Crouching beside it, she said, “We cleaned all the cases out of this room before Felix got here, right?”

  “Uh, huh.” Laila adjusted the angle of the camera again. “What’s that?”

  “Well, I remember taking four of them into the bedroom. Tan, brown, black and burgundy. I don’t remember seeing price tags on them.” Renny ran the string through her fingers and fought a funny breathlessness.

  Lifting it onto the cushion of the sofa, she clicked open the clasps. The briefcase was filled with bundles of cash.

  “Felix’s money,” she said, looking up at Laila and the blank eye of the camera.

  “Ohmygawd,” Laila whispered.

  “How did he do it? Felix walked out with a briefcase like this. Bait and switch,” she answered herself. “It must have been a decoy.” She pressed her hand to her forehead. “That’s why Con bought all the luggage. And the son of a bitch knew what case Felix was using. How?”

  She thought for a minute, then figured it out. “Perry called him and told him what kind of case Felix was holding while I was standing with him in the lobby. Con was planning this the whole time. That’s why he didn’t want to buy into Felix’s game. That’s why he called off the cops. That’s why he had Jacob arrested! He knew Felix would leave here with nothing. That conniving jerk was ahead of me the entire time.”

  “Are you surprised?” Laila asked with a been-there kind of bitterness.

  “No. Yes. Dammit, yes, I am. I thought we were a team, but he used me like a frigging game piece. He didn’t trust me, didn’t even need me. So why the hell did he bring me here and put me through all this?” Her voice rose to a thin, painful pitch as she stood. Her throat hurt and her eyes stung.

  Male laughter approached outside the door. Con burst into the room, trailed by Murphy, Spencer and Perry.

  Renny swiped beneath her eyes and pulled herself together to face the men.

  “I wish I had had a camera on that,” Murphy said. “Felix got stung bad.”

  “Tell me about it,” Laila said from behind the camera.

  Perry and Murphy described the hair-raising ride in the van, punctuated by Con’s exaggerated remarks, making it sound like a blistering good time.

  Renny’s chest tightened. She felt excluded. Ill-used.

  “We didn’t stick around to see what the big guy did to him, but you can bet he won’t be so pretty after,” Perry said. “Oh, man, it was sweet.”

  “How’d we do here?” Con asked, flopping onto the sofa beside the cash and fingering the bundles. “All good?”

  Renny snapped out of her self-pity. She had left the drawstring bag of jewelry on the corner of the desk. She picked it up and then moved behind the sofa, leaning down to Con. She slid the bag down one side of his chest while dipping her other hand into his shirt pocket on the other side.

  He ran his hands up her arms, tried to catch her around the neck and would have kissed her if she hadn’t already been pulling away. She left the bag of jewelry in his lap and straightened away.

  “What’s up?” he twisted to ask.

  “We’re trading.” She showed him Jacob’s ring, closing her fist around it when he tried to grab it back.

  “Wait,” he commanded.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to switch the cases?”

  “I didn’t know if it would work. Why are you upset?”

  “I’m not upset.”

  “Upset and lying about it.”

  “Renny,” Laila said, camera lowered. “Murphy will set up in the other suite to do interviews. Can you come over in about fifteen minutes to finish this?”

  “Sure. I’ll go pretty up.” She moved toward the bedroom.

  “Renny—” Con started to rise.

  “Tell everyone how you switched the cases, since you’re the only one who knows.” She swung the broken bedroom door shut, making it skew off its hinges.

  Leaning against it, she let pain wash over her, accepting it so she could move past it. If she took nothing else away from today, she wanted to stop conning herself. She was hurting and wouldn’t deny it.

  She had had big hopes for today, some she hadn’t even admitted to herself. Deep down, she had believed putting Felix in prison would raise herself to Con’s level, but Con always had to be one step ahead, one better. She and Con would never find common ground. He would never see her as his equal. Their game was definitely over.

  She knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Occupied,” Jacob said.

  “It’s me. Can we talk? Oh, wait. Phone.” She crossed the room to pick up the receiver on the bedside table. “Hello?”

  “Ms. O’Laughlin? We have an elderly woman down here looking for you.”

  Mona? Well, she should have expected this. She should have phoned hours ago to halt the wedding plans.

  “I’ll be right down.” Glad for the excuse to get away from the conviviality, Renny slipped past the group again, avoiding Con’s questioning frown.

  In the lobby, the woman at the front desk directed her outside.

  Worried that Mona was standing in the chill air waiting for her, Renny rushed outside, gaze searching the shadows. A footstep scuffed behind her and something hard nudged against the small of her back.

  “Now we finish our business,” Felix said.

  9:30 p.m.

  For a few minutes after Renny had called her to Con’s suite, Laila had been convinced her story, tentatively titled Daughter of Deception, had been lost. It had recovered with the discovery of the second briefcase, however, and she was pulling her exposé together the way only a reporter under deadline could do.

  She was sweating the deadline big time though. There was a redeye from Billings to Salt Lake, but she’d have to leave within the hour to make it. The ambitious bitch in her snapped out que
stions, gave directions, sent Perry with the camera she was holding to Murphy for editing, and worked out the progression of the story. All the while, something in her screamed in frustration at the way things were between her and Spencer. She owed him an apology and didn’t have time to make a decent one.

  “Where did Renny go?” Con asked, making the door screech as he set it aside and came out from the bedroom.

  “I asked her to meet me in the other suite for an interview,” Laila told him. “She’s probably waiting for me there.”

  He nodded distractedly and left.

  Laila stayed. The bitch inside her tapped her wrist and said, “No time,” but Laila ignored her.

  Spencer lifted the cover off the plate of cold noodles, replaced it, kept his back to her and spent a while studying the pastries.

  What to say? What to say?

  No time, no time.

  “I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “You caught me off guard when you asked about a date. I wanted to say ‘yes,’ and it scared me because I can’t let anything interfere with my getting ahead. It’s the way I’ve been thinking so long that I don’t know how to think differently. Ambition is the only thing that has ever brought me anything good, Spencer. It’s how I got to go to your farm. Did you know that? I wrote the best story about why I’ve always wanted to ride a horse.”

  His wide, calf-roping shoulders relaxed and he nodded, but he didn’t turn.

  “And the first time I saw you, you were on a horse, and I didn’t want to learn to ride my own horse. I wanted you to be Prince Charming and pick me up and let me ride with you.”

  He turned, leaned on the table and folded his arms, a smirk tickling his lips.

  “I hate it when you laugh at me!” She looked away.

  “I love it when you tell me what’s really going on inside you.”

  “Heart palpitations. Panic. I’ve gotta finish this story and get on the road, and I won’t be able to do that if I think you’re still mad at me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “If I get this job, I’m going to be busy bringing myself up to speed. Dating long-distance—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. I want . . . God, I still don’t feel old enough to deal with this thing between us, but there’s something, right?” Her throat was getting tight and her lungs felt compressed and she didn’t understand why.

  He nodded, hesitant but sincere.

  And she felt shaky and happy and scared. “Ask me again?”

  His beautiful mouth began to shape some words and her tummy fluttered and she thought about running across the room and kissing him—

  The door behind her opened. Con and the bellman entered.

  Some of her optimism must have still been on her face, because Con glanced at her and snarled, “Don’t look so hopeful. I’m not looking for an interview. I’m looking for Renny.”

  Pissed that he was being an ass and had interrupted a seriously awesome moment, she snapped, “Who asked for one?”

  “One what?”

  “An interview.”

  “Certainly not you.”

  “Is that supposed to be a dig? About the way I handled Alicia Mills? Well, big shot, as a matter of fact I did ask for an interview. You declined.” She realized she was well into hag mode, took a breath and found a calmer, more sincere tone. “But I understand you were under a lot of stress at the time. I’d like to apologize. I handled the Prince of Play story poorly and I deeply regret the pain I caused you and your grandmother.”

  He stared at her.

  “I mean it,” she assured him, feeling naked.

  “Right,” he muttered, hands on his hips, face pulled into a scowl. He looked toward the bedroom, dismissing her.

  “Hey!” She was aware of Spencer coming to stand by her, protective knight that he was, but she didn’t need him. She had had it with the Prince of Pretentious and wasn’t afraid to tell him so. “You don’t get to throw my apology back in my face. I don’t expect you to be my best friend, but you can quit acting like I’m the only person on this earth more concerned about how they appear than about who they hurt or what they do.”

  “That’s a dig, right?” He turned the full force of his aggravation on her, clearly spoiling for a fight.

  For a moment, she doubted her ability to put him in his place, but she’d had enough of paying for her mistake. Besides, she liked Renny. What he’d done to her had been really lousy.

  “You better believe it’s a dig, sport. You didn’t need Renny here. She figured that out as soon as she saw Felix’s money. She wanted to put him in jail, but you had to look like Bobby Fischer. Do you feel like a genius? Because all that your sneaky strategy accomplished was humiliating her. So how ’bout you quit pretending you’re better than me? ’Cause you’re not worth my heartfelt apology.”

  Con opened his mouth to shred little Miss Laila into strips of breakfast bacon, but then he thought about how Renny had looked when she had taken back Jake’s ring, dumping all his own jewelry in his lap.

  The bottle of perfume was shattered at the bottom of the stairs again, except he wasn’t an innocent kid who didn’t know any better. He’d tricked Renny, knowing it would upset her but not calculating how much.

  “I couldn’t risk her life.” If he kept telling himself that, maybe he’d believe it was his only motivation. Except the truth was, he had been showing off, indulging his need to compete, because as long as he was an uncontested winner, he wasn’t one of life’s losers. If he could find her, he would apologize. “Where is she?”

  Laila and Spencer both shrugged. Perry, eating an éclair with one hand, holding the tray in the other, also shrugged.

  “With Jacob? He was in the shower,” Laila said.

  She probably said it knowing it would gut him. It did. Con had been battling the fear of losing Renny from the moment she had taken back Jacob’s ring. Before that. When she had been refusing to speak to him because he had rejected her proposal. He had told himself all he had to do was complete the sale of Performance and escape the demands on him and he’d feel better. In reality, he’d been dying a slow death because Renny had walked out on him.

  Well, by God, if she was playing slippery seals with Jacob, he’d break a lot more than a door this time.

  Con went to the bathroom door and knocked hard.

  Jacob opened the door wearing a robe. A humid, floral scent rolled out from behind him. “I feel one hundred percent better. How do you say this? Ya-lang, Ya-lang?” He held up a tiny bottle of oil.

  “Ee-lang, ee-lang,” Perry corrected from the broken doorway to the bedroom. “Con, do you mind if I take these to the other suite? Murph and I have the munchies.”

  “Is Renny in there with you?” Con asked Jacob, balling his fist as he spoke.

  “No. She knocked a while ago, mentioned something about a phone call.”

  “Perry, see if you can find out who called.” Con backed away from the bathroom door.

  Jacob tucked his hands into the pockets of the robe and frowned. “Where would she go?”

  “Hopefully Perry can tell us,” Con said.

  Perry hung up a moment later and said, “A guy came to the front desk and said there was an old lady waiting outside to talk to Renny. They saw her go outside but didn’t notice if she came back in.”

  Con’s insides turned to water.

  Letting Felix go had been an error in judgment. The real mistake, however, had been cheating Tyrone. Con’s superlative imagination exploded with scenarios, none of them comforting.

  9:58 p.m.

  Renny sat with her chin on her knees, scrunched in the backseat of Felix’s icky little car. The passenger window looked to be made of sandwich wrap and duct tape, otherwise she might have asked Sergio to open it. Anything to dispel the musty smells clinging to Felix’s possessions.

  Felix was driving fast, making abrupt stops and impulsive turns. She was pretty sure this was the third time he had come to a halt at the same four-w
ay stop sign.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Shut up. Don’t distract me.”

  “Are you lost?” Sergio asked.

  Felix looked at him with annoyance. “There are nine streets in this town. How could I be lost?”

  Renny had been scared until she had realized Felix hadn’t used a real gun. She couldn’t believe she had fallen for a plastic tube in the small of her back, but here she was, folded into the back seat of his blue-smoke-spewing car, staring at the stars through the sunroof. Since she wasn’t worried about getting shot, and talking was likely her only way out of this, she ignored his order and addressed Sergio.

  “Are you in charge?”

  He struggled to turn his bulk in the seat and face her. “I’m just making sure he doesn’t split without repaying Ty.”

  “Who is Ty?”

  “My brother-in-law. I’m married to his sister.”

  “Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” Felix said, then asked, “How did you do it?”

  “Met her outside a club. This guy was getting rough with her and I hate seeing a man knock around a woman, so—”

  “I wasn’t asking you! I was asking her. How’d you switch those cases, Renny?”

  She cleared her throat, wondering whether she should reveal her background and that Con had outsmarted her as well as Felix. No. That might lead to how she and Con had cooked this up as revenge for Mona’s sake. At the rate Felix was going, it was best to keep Mona as far removed from this situation as possible. For now, she’d play dumb. It seemed like the safe choice, especially now that she knew Sergio wouldn’t lean on her.

  “What cases? You know, Felix, I’m used to dealing with Con’s eccentricities, but kidnapping a client is beyond even him. If you wanted to finish our business, you could have come up to the suite. I meant to ask you to stay, but you took off too quickly.”

  “No, you be straight with me now. I’m going to compliment you on it, so you might as well tell me how you flipped my briefcase full of cash for one full of newspaper.”