Twenty Times Tempted: A Sexy Contemporary Romance Collection

by Petrova, Em

Where was I when she’d gotten up close and personal with a perfect stranger?

  Oh wait… Michael, Michael insert foul language O’Brien. The only thing not distracting me from living my life like a normal human being, not consumed by fantasies of first degree murder and forays onto the sniper rifle websites for helpful hints on how to off someone from a distance without being caught, was obsessing over my best friend’s baby brother.

  The one who didn’t come on Wednesday.

  For him, I’d reserved a very special place in hell.

  Though, the truth was, I’d be heading there way before either man simply because I wasn’t clever enough not to get caught.

  “A penny for your thoughts, Tay.”

  I gave her ten bucks worth.

  “I’ve been called stupid and naïve and a cheat. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. But I trusted him, Cordie.” My heart had already splintered, so that left my voice to break under the pressure, chucking out the damning words, “I was in love.”

  Cordie wrinkled her nose in that ‘it’s an excuse, not a reason’ way she had of cutting to the core of the truth. She sucked on the end of the fried mystery bit and frowned, then set it down.

  Curious I picked up a length and held it up. It smelled good, but like looks, that could be deceiving. Taking a chance, I bit off the end and examined the interior: greenish with a cheesy, saucy take on collard greens without the bitter aftertaste when they weren’t done up properly. Popping the rest in my mouth, I sighed with pleasure and said, “Not bad.”

  Cordie moved the dish in my direction just as Colin-the-barkeep set two iced mugs of dark ale frothing with a thick head of foamy goodness in front of us.

  “Have you ladies…” licking his lips and staring down Cordie’s cleavage, “…decided on…?”

  Shrugging, I let her choose. The alien strips of fat-riddled relations to cabbage hit the spot so there wasn’t much need to intercede on what I might prefer as the next course.

  Cordie said, “Shepherd’s Pie,” and Colin went into raptures over her discerning taste, leaving us with one of those ‘as you wish’ gestures.

  Michael was Boston Irish, twice removed from the old country and wearing a veneer of aristocracy. I doubt he’d ever had Shepherd’s Pie and said as much.

  “It’s good, you’ll like it.”

  We chatted around and about my little problem, coming to no conclusion other than I was probably screwed without having just cause to haul O’Brien’s ass to an Italian court, let alone finding out where the fink was hiding in Europe.

  Colin set white oval dishes with side handles in front of us, adjusted the place settings, tut-tutted at the level of ale—clearly we weren’t keeping pace with his expectations—and toodled away to wipe down the bar and await our pleasure.

  The first forkful, after punching through a crust of browned whipped potatoes, dribbled with a teasing display of veggies and ground beef, nearly causing me to swoon with the aroma and sensuous collection of comfort ingredients.

  Around a mouthful of ‘God, this is good, what’s in it, and how did you ever find this place?’ Cordie explained the classic prep techniques.

  “It’s simple foods, that’s the secret.” She shuffled her fork around the middle of the bowl and extracted a representative sample. “Ground beef, lean, that’s important. Then the vegetables might vary but usually you’ll have onions and peas, carrots too.”

  She motioned Colin over—he had to be hovering or he’d leapt over the bar and I’d missed the vault of the century—and inquired about something. Since I was chewing and appreciating, I missed that part of the conversation.

  Cordie continued, “Ah, a cup of Guinness and a half cup of red wine.”

  “Um,” or perhaps a ‘yum’ was all the encouragement she needed.

  “The seasoning shouldn’t be heavy. Salt, pepper, some thyme,” and she looked to Colin for confirmation. I followed her eyes to find the man looking aggrieved when she’d mouthed ‘fresh’ and they both shrugged. Dried thyme it was. She finished with, “And garlic of course.”

  Colin interjected with the coup d’grace, “Don’t forget the tomato paste to bind it.”

  Apparently binding was critical as they both nodded in some arcane rhythm, like bobble-headed doll chefs, the cute versions of Anthony Bourdain on a culinary high.

  There was braising, tasting, adjusting, layering and baking until the potato topping bubbled and browned.

  If there was a culinary heaven, we’d just hit the lottery and the one-way ticket to satisfaction. Cordie left a bit in her bowl which I dutifully cleaned up, stopping short of licking both bowls. The ale went down smooth as silk and Colin replaced it before the empty glass hit the table.

  If someone hinted I was smitten with Colin, well… They wouldn’t be wrong.

  Sipping the ale and digesting consumed virtually all of my motor and higher level functions, and it wasn’t until we’d waddled out into the twilight and the top end of the dinner crowd that something Cordie said finally registered.

  We’ll have to have Robbie make this for us when he returns.

  Returns?

  Um, yes, dear, he’s doing research somewhere in Michigan, I think.

  Research.

  Um-hmm, his editor sent him out. Some kind of crisis with a story.

  Crisis.

  “Didn’t he call you?”

  No, no he didn’t.

  “Does he have your number, dearest?” I shook my head ‘no’, hard enough to make the cornrows pop and squeal in annoyance. “Do you want his?”

  Robert van Horn, the sports journalist out-of-town on a crisis for his newspaper, that Robert van Horn? Did I want his number?

  Well, did I?

  Was I that needy that I’d call him when he was on assignment, fishing for excuses and reasons to forgive? Hadn’t I done enough groveling to last a lifetime?

  If he’d wanted to let me know, he’d have found a way…

  “He’ll get in touch when he returns. There’s no point in distracting him when he’s busy.”

  No point at all.

  Cordie looked like she didn’t believe me. Why should she when I didn’t believe me?

  We walked arm-in-arm to the Port Authority Terminal where Cordie would catch a bus over to Newark Liberty International and her flight back to Pittsburgh.

  “Give David a kiss for me.”

  “Call me when you decide how you want to proceed, promise?”

  I promised I’d go over everything the lawyer discussed and waved goodbye and spent the rest of the night fretting…

  Why hadn’t I asked for his number?

  Why?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rob

  Jackson had me in a sweat and by the short and curlies. There’s nothing quite like watching your research and first draft come under the scrutiny of a man who’d made his mark with a well-deserved award for sports journalism from Northeastern, back when he pounded the pavement instead of pounding his recalcitrant staff into line.

  “Is this…?” got interrupted by me shoving a folder to the near edge of his desk, making room for the chart, “…hmm, okay, yes…”

  “It shows a pattern.”

  “Circumstantial.”

  “Still.”

  “We need a smoking gun, Rob, not fanciful pie charts and…” pausing to look at the newsclips I’d had a nice grad student translate for me, he continued, “…who’s this? She looks familiar.”

  Who’s this, indeed? That was the question that had my gut in a knot.

  “Stop pacing and sit, boy. Don’t try pulling your shit with me.”

  Flopping on the uncomfortable metal chair, arms crossed in a belligerent pose sure to get me knocked back a peg in my jet-lagged, sleep-deprived state, I stared at the spot between the rock and the hard place. It glared back.

  There was no away around the maze of coincidences that had built slowly over the last two weeks into a pretty solid trail of questionable behaviors and associations. A lot of it
wasn’t new but when viewed as a whole, it made for pretty compelling reading. It was the little surprise at the end of last Wednesday, after the grad student had presented me with the translations of what had transpired in Italy so many years ago, that serendipity struck and I had that aha! moment we all dream about.

  Jackson saved me from going into too much detail on the side-trail that threatened to derail me by asking, “What else do you need?”

  “I need help with the financials.” My check book balanced but that was the extent of my expertise in higher level math.

  “You’ll want Wallace, then.”

  Yes, Peggy was an excellent choice, older than me by a century or two and tough as nails when it came to ferreting out what the bad boys down in the canyons were up to with public funds. She was also retired and working as an independent contractor so her mission, should she decide to accept it, wouldn’t come cheap. I said as much.

  “You let me worry about that.”

  That was a load off my mind. To make the allegations stick, I needed balance sheets that added up on the grease side of the ledger. Peg was the best man for that job. I pushed a bulging folder closer to my boss’ tapping fingers and said, “This has copies of everything she’ll need to get started.”

  Jackson grunted in reply and reached for his jacket hanging on the back of the chair. He motioned me to follow, echoing what I’d yet to say, “I need a drink.”

  On the elevator ride down, we watched the numbers tick off and joined the throng disgorging into the lobby. Jackson swung right onto the jammed sidewalk and we made our way at a good clip along Sixth, ignoring the lights and dodging cabbies in a rush to pick up the trolls dumping out of the high rises. At 45th he elbowed me toward one of our less frequented watering holes.

  The pub was busy but not insane so we found a round table near the bricked wall and ordered a couple pints: Guinness for me, Innis and Gunn for him.

  We hadn’t been here for a while. They’d gone upscale with fancy inlaid table tops perched on old oak barrels. The stools were fashioned out of metal beer barrels with a vinyl seat and a chair back, comfortable enough if you weren’t staying long. Those of us with long legs were challenged by the lack of foot rests.

  The furnishings weren’t the only thing upscale now. Gagging at the menu prices, I wondered who was treating who but my editor eased my worries with, “It’s on me, seeing’s how your still on suspension.”

  “Yeah, about that.”

  He lifted an eyebrow, ignoring the question. I’d lived like a student, on the cheap, destroying my taste buds with pizza and greasy burgers, squirreling away the cash advance as best I could. But still, two weeks was two weeks. The rent on my apartment, utilities, all that crap didn’t stop just because I was buried up to my earlobes in the stacks at the main library near Spartan stadium.

  A cute young thing approached and asked, “Can I get you boys anything?”

  That was a dangerous question but we managed to dodge it with a request for crab cakes and the pub’s very excellent Irish onion soup. They used an obscene amount of onion, carmelized and then simmered in a roasted chicken broth laced with stout. I knew this because I’d dated one of the hostesses not so long ago. Dated briefly, if memory served.

  At some point, my brain had shut down from the vacuous pandering for attention, leaving me with celibacy as a fallback position.

  Then I’d met Taylor Richardson O’Brien, a game changer for my libido and the cause for my nightly bouts of acid reflux ever since. My physical discomfort aside, the accidental meet with Taylor, and her mysterious past, had guaranteed a ringside seat at Rob’s moral high ground versus throwing an innocent to the wolves for the sake of a story. And not just any story.

  This one had Pulitzer written all over it: cover-ups, bribery, dirty deals, corruption of youth, behavior unbecoming—from the halls of academia to the back rooms in Vegas and all the way across the Pond into the international arena.

  Jackson wiped his mouth with a napkin and finished off his ale, motioning for another round, settling in to ask the questions he couldn’t back in the newsroom where the walls sometimes had ears.

  “Alright, van Horn. Spill.”

  Chewing on my lower lip, there was that final moment of indecision, the tipping point where my feelings and the public’s right-to-know had the final mash-up. It wasn’t a matter of ‘choose wisely’; that was a done deal. My problem came with the consequences of what I might set in motion and how much of that was going to dig a hole from which I might never crawl out of.

  The hole in my heart. And that didn’t even come close to what I put at risk between me and my sisters and nieces and cousins, because when you hurt one of them, you hurt all of them.

  I wasn’t just taking Taylor to the cleaners, I was leading a goddamn parade.

  My sister and Taylor and the Fink’s relations in Boston needed a smoking gun to set Taylor free of her husband’s clutches. I’d found that. The problem was, nobody was going to like what I discovered.

  Turning to Jackson, I said, “Peg will get what you need to close all the loopholes in the case. She’ll follow the money and it will lead exactly where it needs to.”

  But?” There was always a but.

  “In the big scheme of things, what we have is pocket change, same old, same old. It’s all in the who gives a flying fu—” Ducking my head, I muttered, “Sorry,” at the bartender when she replenished our stock and cleared the plates.

  My boss asked a logical question. “If you get what you need from Peg, is there anything else that will make this pop, something that will headline on Section C?”

  “I can do better than that, Dave. Way effing better.”

  Nodding, he settled against the back of the chair and encouraged me to continue. When I’d finished, he was tapping his teeth and staring off at the ceiling, a flush of near ecstasy spreading joy in his editor’s jeans.

  “You’re sure about this.” It wasn’t a question. I had all the evidence I needed to point the finger at someone that the Italian authorities might be very interested in speaking with: Michael O’Brien, late of Milan, Italy and now residing somewhere in the Big Apple environs and going under a variety of alias, one of which Jackson and I—and likely any number of vice cops—knew as Michael Malone.

  Malone had been long suspected of having ties with one or more of the mob families engaging in offshore internet betting irregularities. There were also rumors that the man had been one of the prime movers in developing an illegal sports betting software program that netted the distributors over twenty million bucks in licensing fees.

  Jackson said, “Let me guess where those license fees came from.”

  “That’s too easy.” I drained my glass and shook my head no at a refill. “Estimates put the mob’s take at well over a billion in illegal gambling proceeds,” and smirked at Jackson’s whistle of appreciation, “but here’s where it gets interesting. Last year, the software designers got hauled in on a single count each of felony to promote gambling.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Until you look where those licenses went … Costa Rica, Canada and the Carribbean. All bookmaking ops where betting is legal. Apparently this Malone’s been island hopping for quite some time, facilitating the mob’s move into the digital universe and the twenty first century.”

  “Sheee-it.” He got that faraway look, trying to recall particulars. Finally, after drawing a blank, he asked, “Who broke that story?”

  “Boss, I’m afraid we did. I mean, not us, but the boys downstairs. Did you know the Five Families have a website devoted to… cripes, everything. Leadership charts, famous quotes, it’s … bizarre.”

  Jackson paid for the meal and stalked out of the bar, with me once more bringing up the rear and feeling flush with self-righteousness. At the corner he glared at me, but this was his good kind of glare. He put on his game face and asked, “You doing anything tonight?”

  I’d come right from th
e airport to the newsroom. I needed a shower and a change of clothes. Definitely a nap and more antacids. None of which my boss was going to give a rat’s ass about so I said, “Uh, no sir.”

  “Good. We’re going through that pile with a fine tooth comb. You’re gonna need help and resources.”

  “Does that mean I’m back on the payroll?”

  His lip did that uptick that told me he’d kept something from me.

  “Sir?” It never hurt to sir him now and then.

  “You were never off, van Horn.” At my dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks expression he informed me, “You work better under pressure, son.”

  Right. The checking account and 401k appreciated his consideration. My liver and budding peptic ulcer might have different ideas on that.

  There wasn’t much going on pushing midnight on a Thursday, the newsroom relatively quiet with the usual white noise permeating the cubbies and a blue sheen cast by monitors and overhead flat screens giving the space the illusion of a cocoon.

  I’d dragged a folding table into Jackson’s office and we’d organized the folders into sure things, need more research and so far out there it was worth a look. It was the last one that gnawed at my gizzards.

  “Rob, you look like I feel. Go home. Get some sleep. We can hit this again tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir, thank you sir.”

  I was so beat I wasn’t sure I wanted to hit my empty apartment, the one that’d been closed up for two weeks without anyone checking on stuff, not that I had tropical fish or pets or plants to look after. The sad fact was, I had very little that needed a personal touch. What should have been my nest, my home, my refuge, was nothing more than a hostel waiting for its next tenant.

  How sad was that?

  Before I walked out the door I asked, “When do you want me back,” desperately hoping for afternoon but knowing that wasn’t happening, not with Jackson chomping at the bit.

  “I’ll meet with Mac and Parvi first thing, then we’ll sort how best to allocate their time. And we need to co-ordinate with the team that ran the investigation into that software thing. No sense in reinventing the wheel. They can give us a jumping off point.”