Stacked Deck

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Stacked Deck Page 11

by Tracy Watkins


  “Go ahead. I’ll pack.”

  He stared at her for a moment. Then, shaking his head and frowning, he slid off the sofa and walked to the French doors leading out to her secluded pool.

  He had his back to her when he dropped the towel. He stood there naked, staring out across the rooftops below. Then he slowly turned, and dove into the pool.

  She sat on her chair staring at him, her mind in a kind of daze. The image of him standing there had not yet faded.

  She fetched two towels from the hall closet and walked out as he was doing laps. Putting the towels down, she intended to quickly leave.

  She didn’t. And she blamed her lingering, voyeuristic interest on her sleep deprivation.

  “I brought you…towels. I’m going to pack.”

  “Great pool,” he said while treading water in the middle of the pool.

  She tried to focus on his face. For some reason she decided to sit down at the edge of the pool and put her feet in the water. He swam over. “How’s that foot?”

  “Sore. I need to soak it in Epsom salts.”

  He took her foot and began to massage it with a soft, firm gentleness that tingled up through her legs. “That feels good,” she purred.

  She was finding it impossible not to look at him because, well, he was right there at the shallow end. The water came up to his stomach and for some reason she felt a little light-headed….

  “You have great feet,” he said.

  “That’s not a fetish, is it?”

  “Never was before, but it’s working on me.”

  She laughed.

  Somewhere in her mind this was a silly game, or maybe it was a serious move to ensure his loyalty, or maybe she wasn’t exactly sure what this was.

  He was staring at her now as he massaged her foot and her leg—and whatever else he could get his hands on. She was staring into his eyes and she was pretty sure now that her intention to not let this go anywhere had died as soon as she walked out there with the towels. Did it really matter? If JD was going to play her amour, then there should be enough reality to make the illusion work.

  She was way into sleep deficit territory and he was doing something to her legs that was getting her excited way beyond her control.

  I should get the hell up and go pack, she thought. Even as his hands moved up her leg, even as he started something she knew she should stop. But his hands were so delicious on her body that stopping him was just not going to happen. She became fascinated by the way he could massage her calf, the way he could play around with the underside of her knee and make it tingle like that.

  Then she was simply out of control.

  Those magic hands were up her thighs, kneading, and when they were up under her shorts, and he was then pulling those shorts off, she could barely raise her hips to assist him.

  In that blissful moment, she knew she had lost to whatever this bad boy racecar driver was going to do because she was already having orgasmic spasms before he even finished the massage.

  Apparently, somewhere in his life, John David Hawke had run into a copy of the Kama Sutra, and he had mastered all the right moves.

  Chapter 15

  I n front of his shop, Giambi, flanked by bodyguards, glanced over at the wrecked Bugatti twenty feet away. The totaled car was still on the car hauler, surrounded by police with notebooks, two French detectives and Giambi’s personal security team. He was sickened at the sight of his prized possession.

  Staring at the shoes that had been found in the dirt, he said, to no one in particular, “What the hell happened here?”

  He held the shoes in his hand like they were precious Fabergé eggs. He knew shoes. These were top of the line.

  “Expensive?” Vincenzio asked, walking over from where he’d been talking to an officer. The suit jacket he wore was cheap and not hanging properly on his thick torso.

  “What?”

  “The shoes?”

  “Hell, yes, they’re expensive.”

  “They hers?”

  The question hung in the air for a moment. Giambi watched a cop put a small marker down on the ground where another bullet casing was found.

  Giambi turned the shoes over, and looked at the workmanship. Excellent. His father would have greatly appreciated the craftsmanship. What Giambi had appreciated, along with the shoes, was Anne Hurley’s saucy strut in them as she came toward him as if she was on a runway. Most men might watch the movement of her breasts, or the flash of leg, her expression and attitude, but for Giambi his first glance went straight down to her feet, to the pumps. The son of Calzolaio, an Italian shoemaker who was also the son of a shoemaker. The love of shoes was in his bloodline. Had he not had an early falling out with his father, he had no doubt what business he would be in today.

  “Would have been a lot easier,” he said out loud.

  “What?” Vincenzio asked.

  “Nothing. You don’t leave a pair of shoes like these behind unless there’s a damn good reason.”

  Vincenzio nodded as if heavy, solemn thoughts were churning around in that brain of his. “Unless you’re running and somebody is shooting at you.”

  Yes. That’s what JD had told him. They’d run from the shooters. But something looked wrong with the whole scene. Giambi just stood there, staring down at the ground. Taking it all in.

  “Her shoes are here, in the shop. The bullet casings are all around. There are bullet impact marks on the building. Shooting was going on here and way the hell over there.” He pointed to where the casings had been found some distance away. “Makes no sense. Okay, so she’s running. But from where to where?”

  “The detective thinks there might have been a scuffle.”

  “JD didn’t mention that.”

  Giambi tried to envision how a pretty lady and JD got in to this knock-down-drag-out battle and somehow got away and then crashed a car nobody could catch.

  And they survived.

  No, he thought. Something’s wrong.

  A dozen scenarios rambled around in Giambi’s agitated mind and none of them were very good.

  The last twelve hours had brought Beth closer to this stranger than to any man she’d ever been involved with. It was unnerving. JD was no longer just a means to an end.

  On the way to the Sapphire Star, he talked openly and freely about his past, his family and how he became a Formula One driver. If she was going to depend on him, work with him, sleep with him, she needed to know things no dossier, however thorough, could provide. And now that they were on his own turf, he seemed more relaxed and ready to admit to almost anything she threw his way. “I was the guy who wanted to do things differently. We were a contentious family. Racing families in the South aren’t running ’shine on

  Thunder Road

  like back in my grand-pappy’s day, but the personalities are still pretty much the same. Mountain people like to settle things with their fists and sometimes their shotguns.”

  The more he talked the more she saw common denominators between them. They both grew up in rough circumstances and learned early how to deal with a hardscrabble existence. They both had big dreams and ambitions kick in about the same age. Both had ambitious fathers who hadn’t fulfilled their own dreams.

  Then it was her turn. They sat on tan cushy sofas looking at a view of the entire hillside, sipping iced tea with plenty of lemon. Just the way Beth liked it. The doors and windows were open, letting in the cool breeze off the azure sea. He wanted to know something personal about her. Something real, he said. Something that had nothing to do with the operation.

  And because he’d shared so much without really knowing who she was, she found herself telling him the second reason she was in Monaco. “My father was a professional gambler, but he ended up working for a cheating crew. It started in Vegas and eventually got around to other cities, like Atlantic City. But as the poker craze took hold, he wanted to go legit. Become nothing but a straight player. A family man. But this crew he worked for didn’t buy in to that.
He couldn’t leave. He knew too much. He quit and a week later he was dead. Dumped in the garbage like trash.”

  She told him about the day the police came to the shabby hotel where’d they’d been living. How they took her to the morgue with this lady from social services to ID her father.

  “I didn’t think they let twelve-year-old kids do that,” JD said.

  “Nobody else to do it, I guess.”

  “I have to admit something,” JD offered. “What you’ve been telling me just now is probably the first thing I’ve really believed about you.”

  She smiled. “I was an orphan for a long time, but never a rich widow. I’ve been a card player since probably before I could walk. I’m often employed by people who’ve been cheated. Or by casinos who want to bust cheating crews.”

  “What about this other thing you’re involved in. The blackmailer.”

  “That I can’t tell you anything about and it’s much better, for your sake as well as mine, that we keep it that way. Ignorance is bliss when you’re dealing with this sort of thing.”

  “You mean, when somebody hangs me off a fifty-story building by my feet and wants to know something, I’ll have nothing to tell them?”

  “They’d drop you either way.”

  They laughed easily with each other.

  Beneath the talk about their pasts their eyes were having another conversation. In the afterglow of the kind of all-out intimacy they’d shared poolside, she was taking a step back to check out the nature of the thing that was her new relationship. Was it good or bad? Temporary passion, or did it have the potential to be something more?

  She couldn’t answer that question.

  She was good at quick character assessments. At least insofar as superficial traits. But JD was on another level. She always believed if you get involved you need to look for all the pitfalls or you’ll fall into one of them. She was sure it was as true for him. He wasn’t callow. He had substance. And she liked him. Maybe too much. What that meant was the big unknown. Romance on the job was both inconvenient and dangerous.

  She’d told him they had to cool the passion for a while, but after this was over, maybe they could take up where they left off. Take a little vacation together. Have some fun. He was up for that.

  She thought she’d read him. Then she’d discovered there was a lot more to him than she’d anticipated. He was complicated. He raced cars, had a checkered past, came out of the whiskey-running stock of the mountains of Tennessee and made love in ways that should be illegal.

  She had needed his lovemaking in a bigger way than she’d realized. So if you’re gonna slut around, she told herself with bemused self-tolerance, do it with somebody worth the price of a candle. This guy was well worth a whole warehouse full.

  Giambi was arguing with a detective about who had jurisdiction over his car, when his cell phone rang. It was his butler, Jason, telling him that JD and Anne Hurley had returned to the hotel, and she had moved in.

  “Moved in. Moved in where?”

  “Into JD’s suite. I asked if they needed anything, and JD said they wanted me to go down to the market and get a few things. I was holding off until you returned, sir, but it’s been a couple hours, and Miss Hurley just phoned to see if I had returned with their things.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll be coming back soon and I may need you.”

  After Giambi hung up he was more confused and incensed than ever, so he took out his handkerchief, sat down on a wooden stool inside his now empty garage and began cleaning Anne’s shoes.

  The leather was as smooth and fine as any he’d ever seen. The quality of the overlay and gluing, perfection. Women understood jewelry, fine clothes and shoes. Most men were barbarians. They didn’t care about the finer things in life.

  Vincenzio broke Giambi’s trance. “The police want to take your car.”

  “No,” he said, concentrating on his shoes.

  “They say they’re gonna take it. It’s a piece of a crime scene.”

  Giambi moved the shoes close to his mouth and blew gently to remove fine particles of lint still attached to the leather, then slowly dragged his handkerchief across the top to remove what the eye couldn’t see. When he had finished, he tucked his handkerchief in his back pocket and stood.

  “Let’s get out of here. I need to have a little talk with my racing hero and his new roommate,” Giambi said. “To hell with my car.”

  Chapter 16

  B eth unpacked in the guest bedroom with its heavily mirrored, Roman motif, and wondered how many girls JD had entertained in his plush digs.

  With the butler gone, and Giambi still at the shop, it was time to make her first foray into Giambi’s inner sanctum.

  It had taken a while, after the episode at the pool, for her to find her brain again. She was eager to get back to work.

  She walked out of her bedroom to find JD asleep on the sofa.

  It was a shame to wake him, but she couldn’t afford to overlook this opportunity to get into Giambi’s office.

  Gently, she stroked his thick hair and kissed his cheek. He opened his eyes, and smiled up at her. He looked just like a sweet little boy. She kissed him again.

  “That’s nice,” he sighed. “Are you ready to go, or can we just stay here?” He pulled her closer.

  “Love to, but—”

  “I know. I know. You’re on a mission.”

  “Yeah,” she said, standing.

  “How’s the room?” he asked, sitting up, then slipping on his sandals.

  “Fine. A bit much with all those mirrors, but it’s very convenient.”

  “My room’s much better. Sauna. King-size bed. You are more than welcome.”

  “It’s all business right now.”

  “What happens if your reader deal won’t work? He changes his badges frequently.”

  “There are other ways. No silent alarms?”

  “I’m pretty sure there aren’t. He doesn’t trust his own security enough to want them to know anything about his private quarters. He’s very tight about that.”

  “It’s what you don’t know that worries me.”

  She was happy they’d been able to get rid of Giambi’s butler. He would have been a big problem. When they’d first gotten up to Giambi’s suite they’d encountered him right away, the second they’d gotten out of the private elevator. Like he was waiting for them. She didn’t like him right off.

  Jason was a piece of work, dressed formally, he had all the stiffness of a true butler, but the eyes of an assassin. He called JD sir, and she was madame. It took her about two seconds to see he was as big an impostor as she was.

  Jason had surveyed her luggage before taking it and said, “Will madame be staying?”

  “Yes. In my room,” JD had said.

  Jason had raised his eyebrows.

  “And we need you to go to the market and get a few things, if you would be so kind,” Beth had asked and handed him a long list of items, hoping it would keep him busy for quite some time. Jason hadn’t liked the idea, but acquiesced. Trained but not indoctrinated fully to his new calling.

  Keep an eye on this boy, Beth told herself. He’s too heavy in the shoulders and hard in the eyes to be a true butler. More of the bodyguard type.

  Beth felt much more comfortable now that she had JD firmly in her pocket.

  “You’re sure there are no hidden security cameras to worry about? Ones maybe recording just for his use or for his security team?”

  “The office is off his bedroom in his private suite. With Jason, his private elevator and security allowing no one access to this floor, I don’t think so. If he feels secure anywhere, it’s here.”

  “He doesn’t trust his own security?”

  “He trusts them the least because they can hurt him the most. He’s a careful man. And a private one. Once he’s in his room, he can come and go as he pleases and nobody really knows about it. Except Jason, of course.”

  “What about this butler? He looks like he’s more than
just somebody serving drinks and getting clothes pressed.”

  “Yeah. Eagle eyes and elephant ears. He’s definitely one to watch out for. He’s very loyal. I think because Sal takes care of Jason’s family back in Italy or something, but I’m not sure.”

  “Giambi have a desktop computer or laptop?”

  “Both.”

  “I need to get into his office. Now.”

  Breaking in to Giambi’s private suite was easier than Beth had anticipated. He hadn’t changed his code after all.

  She and JD made their way across the Vegas-style suite. It was one as plush as any she’d ever seen, from the piano and four or five sitting areas, to space for a band, a grotto pool that was a duplicate of the one in Hugh Hefner’s place, the paintings and frescos and Greek and Roman motifs.

  JD showed her where Giambi could enter and leave if he wanted to use the side door to the emergency exit stairs, without his staff knowing.

  “What’s with the caves in the pool?”

  “Well, Giambi always liked the Hugh Hefner lifestyle. Silk robes, fine cigars, healthy appetite for pretty girls. He was at Hef’s mansion a couple times. Liked the grotto pool. Little love caves, that sort of thing. His office is behind it. There’s a way we can go into the love caves, exit from the other side and into the office without Jason knowing about it. He pretty much stays in the kitchen area. His apartment is behind the kitchen. Watch this,” JD said. He went over to a power box. The lights around the pool suddenly vanished, replaced by a moon and stars and mood lighting.

  “Nice.”

  He led her down to a door in the back. “Maids are supervised by Jason. They only come in here when Giambi isn’t around.”

  Unlike the rest of his sumptuous suite, the office was small and sparse.

  “It’s his panic room,” JD said. “You could hole up in here and survive just about anything. Fireproof, bullet-and bombproof. This is both office and vault. You throw the bolts on the door and nobody gets in. You have communications with the world. And that—” he pointed to a ladder that led to a roof hatch “—leads to the chopper in case you want to get the hell out fast.”

 

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