Breath of Scandal

by Sandra Brown

  “She comes from a small town in Nebraska, has a freckled nose, a cute ass, and an infectious giggle.”

  “And you like her a lot.”

  He probed Jade’s eyes, as though looking for something. “Yeah. What’s even more amazing, she likes me.”

  “I don’t find that at all amazing. Do you have good sex?”

  He gave a lazy grin. “Apparently they shuck more than corn in Nebraska.”

  “I’m glad, Hank,” Jade said, pressing his hands between her own. “Very glad.”

  “I’m thinking of marrying her.” He gave her a hesitant glance, then looked meaningfully into her eyes. “What do you think, Jade? Should I?”

  He hadn’t been asking advice. He had been asking if he should give up his hopes for her and make plans with someone else. “Marry her, Hank,” she said huskily. “That would make me very happy.”

  Before leaving for this business trip to L.A., Jade had dropped in on Hank and Deidre to see their twin daughters. They had just turned six weeks old. Hank was still her best friend. She had hired him as the designer for the offices at the TexTile plant in Palmetto.

  Jade blinked the present into focus and realized that she had reached her destination. She experienced the rush of adrenaline that accompanies any professional undertaking, especially a surprise attack. David Seffrin had arranged for her to meet the contractor under consideration, but, at her request, he had kept the exact day and time of the appointment open.

  “I’ll see what my schedule is and contact him myself once I get to L.A.,” she had told the developer.

  She wanted to see things as they actually were, not as the prospective builder for TexTile would have them appear.

  Boldly, she entered the trailer without knocking. Inside were two desks. At one, a secretary was typing on a computer keyboard. A man was speaking into a telephone at the other desk. He had his back to Jade.

  The secretary lifted her magenta fingernails off the keys. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m here to see Mr. Matthias.”

  The secretary directed a glance to the opposite end of the trailer. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, but Mr. Seffrin has spoken to Mr. Matthias on my behalf. If you’ll please tell him that Ms. Sperry from GSS in New York is here to see—”

  “Ms. Sperry?”

  The casters on his chair squealed as he spun it around. Jade turned slowly, keeping her expression cool. “Mr. Matthias? I’m Jade Sperry. How do you do?”

  Flustered, he kept his eyes on Jade as he spoke briefly into the telephone before hanging up. Standing, he buttoned his suit jacket and moved down the length of the trailer, his hand extended. “I didn’t know we had an appointment today.” He shot his secretary an impatient look.

  “We don’t. I wasn’t sure what my schedule would be while I was here in L.A. As it turns out, I’m free today. On the outside chance that you had no plans for lunch, I thought I’d stop by.”

  “Lunch? Today? Well, say, sure.”

  “What about Mr. Hemphill?” the secretary asked.

  “Cancel,” her boss snapped discourteously. “Say, when would you like to go?” he asked Jade.

  “Now.”

  “Oh. I, uh, thought you might want to look around first.”

  “I’ve already looked around, Mr. Matthias.”

  “Okay, well, that’s good. Say, do you have transportation? If not, we can take my car.” He rushed forward and held the trailer door open for her.

  Once they were settled in the leather interior of his Jaguar and had agreed on a restaurant, she asked, “Have you read the information Mr. Seffrin sent you?”

  “Sure have. Cover to cover. I’m your man for that project in South Carolina, all right.”

  “What makes you think so, Mr. Matthias?”

  Jade listened while he, after a token display of modesty, enumerated his outstanding qualifications. One could count on a good business lunch lasting at least two hours. Even fighting L.A. traffic, Jade and Mr. Matthias returned to the trailer well under that amount of time.

  She declined his invitation to continue their discussion inside. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Matthias.”

  She turned to go. He stepped around her, blocking her path on the sidewalk. “Say, wait. When will I hear from you?”

  “Mr. Seffrin and I have several other contractors to interview,” she lied.

  Throughout lunch, she had tried to keep an open mind, but every word out of his mouth confirmed her negative first impression. She thought that he must have written his own press releases and recommendations because he certainly seemed to have an elevated opinion of himself.

  The more he boasted, the less impressed Jade became. As badly as she wanted to commence work on the project, she faced the dismal fact that this trip had been pointless and she was still without a general contractor.

  “It could be weeks or even months before we make a final decision,” she told Matthias evasively.

  “Say, listen, you aren’t steamed because of what happened back there at the restaurant, are you?”

  “You mean when you invited me to go to your apartment for dessert?” she asked coldly, dropping all vestiges of professionalism. “No, Mr. Matthias, I’m not steamed. I’m repulsed.”

  “Say, you’re a classy-looking lady. It was worth a try,” he quipped, flashing her a stupid grin. “You can’t blame a guy for making a pass at you.”

  “Oh yes I can, Mr. Matthias.”

  “Then you’re one of those women’s libbers with penis envy. Ball busters, I call you. I believe you had your mind made up about me before we ever left for lunch.”

  “You’re right, I did.” Since he hadn’t spared any words, she saw no reason to keep her impressions to herself. “Your office is a mess. I’m not talking about the clutter that hard work generates, I’m talking about overflowing ashtrays, empty soda cans, and a muddy floor.

  “Secondly, I arrived without an appointment just to see how you would handle the situation. Your previous luncheon engagement deserved a personal call from you to explain the postponement. Furthermore, I couldn’t spend months working with an individual who begins almost every sentence with ‘say.’ And finally, I knew you weren’t right for this job the moment I saw your hands.”

  “What’s wrong with my hands?”

  “They’re soft, and your nails are manicured.”

  “Say, lady, where do you get off—?”

  The siren of an approaching LAPD squad car silenced Matthias. The car rolled to a stop just yards from where Jade and he were standing.

  “What the hell is going on?” Forgetting Jade, Matthias marched forward and grabbed one of the policemen by the sleeve. “What are you doing here?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Wayne Matthias. I’m the boss here.”

  “We got a complaint call. Apparently one of your workers went berserk and attacked another one. Somewhere up there,” the policeman added, tilting his head back and scanning the top stories of the unfinished building.

  “Shit. This is all I need,” Matthias muttered, loosening the knot of his necktie. A crowd of pedestrians was collecting, curious to know what was going on. “You’d better keep these people back. I don’t want a lawsuit on my hands if somebody gets hurt.”

  Jade was herded back along with the other onlookers, but she felt compelled to stay and see what difficulty had warranted a call to the police. She and the others stood in expectant silence as they watched the service elevator slowly descend. When it reached the ground, the clanging metal door was slid open and a man was thrust forward into the arresting arms of the uniformed policeman.

  “You!” Matthias sneered with disgust. “I might have known it would be you.”

  It was the man Jade had been watching through the binoculars.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The policeman elbowed Matthias aside and confronted the man, whose hands had been secured behind him with someone’s leather belt. Two other workers stepp
ed off the elevator behind him, through they kept their distance.

  He hadn’t given up without a struggle, Jade noticed. He was bleeding from a cut above his brow, but the other men’s faces had sustained worse damage. He regarded those standing around him with contempt, especially Matthias.

  One of the policemen asked, “Okay, what happened up there?”

  “He could have killed us all,” a worker blurted out. “Nearly did before we wrestled him down and got his hands tied.”

  The policeman nodded to his partner. “Get that belt off and put him in cuffs.” He asked the speaker, “Who are you?”

  “I’m the foreman. We were up there working on the air ducts, and he started bitching about the lousy quality of the materials. I told him the materials were none of his goddamn business and to get back to work. He refused and demanded to see Mr. Matthias here. I told him that the boss didn’t give a rat’s ass about his opinion of things and to get back to work or I’d fire his ass. That’s when he threw a punch at me.” He touched a swelling bruise on his chin.

  “Is that right?” The cop turned to a Latino worker who had come down in the elevator with them.

  “Sí. He start hitting everybody.”

  “He was yelling and calling Mr. Matthias here dirty names.”

  “Me?” Matthias asked, stepping forward. “What’d I do? I wasn’t even up there.”

  “You ordered that shit.” The low, vibrating voice of the accused man, speaking for the first time, stunned everyone else into silence. “Your building will burn like paper if it ever gets so much as a strong fart in those air ducts.”

  Matthias cursed beneath his breath. “He’s fucked in the head. I’ve thought so ever since I hired him, but I felt sorry for him, you know,” he said, speaking in a wheedling tone to the policeman. “He’s been a pain in the ass ever since he got here, but so long as he put in a full day’s—” His breath whooshed out of his body when the man’s flying fist slammed into his gut, bending him double.

  The policeman had barely taken the belt from around the worker’s hands before he launched his attack on Matthias. The astonished officer tried to subdue him again but was angrily shoved aside. The worker grabbed Matthias by his collar and threw him against the chain-link fence. The two policemen converged on them and wrestled the man away from the gasping Matthias. It took both of them to get handcuffs on him. He was read his rights as he was led to the patrol car and stuffed into the backseat.

  “I’ll nail your ass for this,” Matthias screamed, shaking his pale, soft fist at the man. “I’ll have you charged with assault, you son of a bitch.”

  “Better than being a murderer,” the man shouted through the backseat window of the patrol car.

  “You’ll have to come down to the station to file the complaint,” the policeman told Matthias. “You, too,” he said to the workers. “We’ll have to get statements from all of you.”

  They shook their heads and muttered among themselves as the patrolman joined his partner in the car and drove away.

  The crowd dispersed, but Jade hung around, unseen, for almost two hours before Matthias roared away in his Jaguar. The secretary was still at the computer terminal typing when Jade entered the trailer unannounced for the second time that day. “What do you want?” the secretary asked ungraciously.

  “Some information, please.”

  “Mr. Matthias has left for the day.”

  “I’m sure you can help me.”

  “With what?”

  “I want to know about the man who was arrested this afternoon.”

  Her face lost some of its hostility. “You think he’s cute, too, huh?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “He’s a hunk. Don’t you think so?”

  “Can you help me or not?” Jade asked pleasantly.

  The secretary shrugged, then turned her swivel chair back to the computer terminal and called up a file. “I positively creamed the day he came in here asking to fill out an application.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Dillon Burke. Beards have always been a real turn-on for me. I’ve got this girl friend—she calls beards womb sweepers. Isn’t that terrible?” She giggled. “They make a man so mysterious, you know?”

  “Actually, I’m more interested in his background.”

  The secretary scanned the data on the screen. “He started working for Matthias on April twenty-eighth last year.”

  “Before that?”

  “Doesn’t say. See for yourself. That’s all we’ve got on him. Not even a mailing address.”

  She turned the screen toward Jade, who checked the scanty information, then ripped a sheet of paper off a note pad and jotted down the man’s name and social security number. “Exactly what does he do?”

  “Everything. To look at him you’d never guess it, but he’s smart and knows what he’s doing. Matthias asks Mr. Burke’s advice all the time, but he’d never admit it.”

  Jade assimilated that. “So his allegations were true?”

  “Allegations? Oh, you mean what he said about Matthias using crappy materials?”

  “Is it true?”

  “Look, I don’t see that that’s any of your business. I’ve already told you more—”

  “He flirted with me.” Jade had a hunch, and she played on it. “While we were at lunch, Matthias slid his hand under my skirt and asked me to join him in his apartment for the rest of the afternoon.”

  The secretary’s eyes narrowed to slits. The purplish fingernails curled toward her palms like claws. “Why, that two-timing, slimy, horny little shit!”

  * * *

  Jade watched Dillon Burke as he was escorted through a door and led to a desk where he signed a receipt for his belongings. As he strapped on his wristwatch, the desk sergeant said something to him that brought his head around. He looked at Jade with that disturbing intensity she had first noticed through the binoculars.

  Beneath dense brows, his hazel eyes regarded her suspiciously. They moved from the top of her head to the toes of her black eel pumps and back up again. It took all her willpower not to squirm.

  “Are you sure?” she heard him ask the police sergeant when he turned back around.

  “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, buddy. Go on, get out of here before we change our minds.”

  Jade stood up, surprised to discover that her knees were unsteady. She didn’t like police stations. They were too reminiscent of the night she had spent in the interrogation room at the Palmetto County courthouse. She hadn’t been surprised to read that Hutch now occupied the office once held by his father.

  “Mr. Burke?” she said as she approached him. “Will you come with me, please?”

  When he quizzically tilted his head to one side, his long hair brushed his shoulder. “What for? Who the hell are you?”

  “My name is Jade Sperry. Please?” She gestured toward the door. Her blue eyes didn’t flinch from his hard stare, though it was disconcerting. “As the sergeant said, they might change their minds and decide to keep you overnight. This way.”

  She moved toward the entrance, giving the false impression that she was confident he would follow her. For all she knew, as soon as they cleared the door, he would bolt and she would never see him again. To her relief, he fell into step beside her.

  She led him to the limousine parked at the curb. The chauffeur hastened to open the back door for them. She offered to let Burke precede her. He hesitated only a few seconds before getting into the plush backseat. The limo was an extravagance, she knew. But she wanted him flabbergasted and humbled by the good fortune that had miraculously befallen him. She wanted him to say yes to her proposition.

  Jade reached for the electric button that raised the glass partition between the chauffeur and the backseat. Saying nothing, Burke followed her motions with watchful eyes.

  The limo pulled into traffic and glided through it as soundlessly as a silver snake. Jade crossed her legs, then wished she hadn’t. Her stockings made a
silky-scratchy sound in the silence. Burke looked down at her legs, then raised an inquisitive gaze to her face.

  To cover her nervousness, Jade opened her purse and took out a pack of cigarettes and a new lighter. “Cigarette?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Oh.” She laughed with self-derision as she set the cigarettes and lighter on the small built-in bar of the limo. “I’ve seen too many movies, I guess.”

  “Movies?”

  “Whenever a prisoner is brought out, the first thing he’s offered is a cigarette. I bought some, thinking… this is the first time I’ve gotten anybody out of jail.”

  With a cynical eye, he gazed around the lush interior of the limo. “This is a first for me, too.”

  “You’ve never been in jail before?”

  He turned to her abruptly, startling her with the unexpected movement. “Have you?”

  He seemed very large and very close, and suddenly she doubted the wisdom of her impulsiveness. She recalled how quickly he had attacked Matthias when the belt was removed from his hands. His sheer physicality frightened her, but she didn’t recoil, for she supposed that’s what he wanted her to do. He was trying to intimidate her, probably because he felt intimidated himself.

  “I’ve never been incarcerated, no,” she answered evenly.

  He subjected her to another slow, thorough once-over. “Somehow I didn’t think so.”

  “Does the cut over your eye hurt?” It was no longer bleeding, but the wound still looked fresh.

  “I’ll live.” He slouched in the seat, setting his eyes forward again toward the tinted pane of glass that separated them from the driver. “Where are we going?”

  “I thought you might be hungry. Will you join me for dinner?”

  “Dinner?” he asked with a mirthless smile. He looked down at his workclothes and boots. “I’m not exactly dressed for any place fancy.”

  “Will that bother you?”

  “Hell no. Will it bother you?”

  “Not in the least.”

  They rode in silence for several minutes before his curiosity got the best of him again. “When are you going to tell me what the hell is going on? If Matthias sent you as a bribe or something, then—”