Criminal Deception

by Marilyn Pappano

  Or he would be, if she hadn’t been Josh’s first.

  If he knew for absolute certain that she wasn’t still Josh’s.

  He parked his bike out of the dog’s range before asking what she wanted.

  “My pockets are empty except for keys. Buy me a diet cherry limeade, and it’ll be my treat next time.”

  He went to the window, where one of his after-school regulars greeted him with a smile too warm and friendly for a girl half his age. “Hey, Joe. You want your usual?”

  “Yeah, plus a large diet cherry limeade.”

  The girl-he remembered she ordered a tall caramel-drizzle frappucino every time but couldn’t recall her name-looked past him to the table, and her glossy pink mouth settled into a pout. “I’ve never seen her before. Who is she?”

  “Her name is Liz. She’s…” His brother’s ex-girlfriend? Maybe current? The woman he would have gladly gotten hot and dirty with if she hadn’t said the magic words-Remember Josh. How the hell could he forget him? “She’s new in town.”

  Caramel-drizzle-Carmie, that was her name-tossed her blond ponytail over her shoulder. “I hadn’t heard you were seeing anyone.”

  “I hadn’t either.”

  “So are you guys, what? Like, friends?”

  He glanced over his shoulder at Liz, sitting now, with Elizabeth bracing her paws on her thigh. She was scratching the dog behind the ears, and the pup was quivering from the tip of her nose all the way down to her tail.

  Joe imagined he might do the same if Liz got physical with him.

  Tapping nails drew his attention back to Carmie, who was still pouting. “Yeah,” he replied. Friends was as good a description as any.

  With a disgruntled sound, Carmie turned away to fix their drinks, then set the cups in front of him and made change. “The food will be out in a minute.”

  He stifled the urge to offer to wait and returned to the table. Elizabeth immediately tried to climb into his lap, stopping only when Liz gave her a stern No.

  “Teach me to do that,” he said. “She’s lived with me forty-eight hours and so far ‘dinner’ is the only word she’s acknowledged.”

  “It’s all a matter of attitude.”

  “Yeah. She’s got it and I don’t.” He settled into the plastic chair, crossed one ankle over the other knee and gazed into the distance. If he’d shown up at Ellie’s, Tia Maria’s or Chantal’s with Liz, the gossip would have spread across town by the time they got home. But none of these kids besides Carmie even noticed them, and she would have forgotten by the time she got home.

  That was good. If people were going to gossip about him, he’d rather have them wondering if he was gay than what was between him and Liz.

  Besides, of course, Josh.

  “You never answered me.” With one elegantly slender hand, Liz gestured toward Charlie’s. “On the way here, you called leaving Chicago ‘running away.’ Is that how you see it? How you see yourself? As a coward?”

  He had hoped she would forget the question or at least give him the courtesy of pretending to forget. He’d never talked about this with anyone-not that he had many people to talk to. It wasn’t exactly a topic he could bring up with his parents. Even the slightest reminder, and his dad teared up and his mom’s behavior bordered on frantic: cleaning, blathering, even spontaneous bursts of prayer.

  His muscles were so tense that it felt as if shrugging might make them crackle. “Thousands of people are victimized every year, and they don’t pack up and run off to find someplace safer to live. They don’t break with their past and start all over someplace new. They don’t hide.”

  She took a long suck on her drink before giving her own more convincing shrug. “You didn’t change your name or your appearance. You haven’t isolated yourself in the back of beyond. You don’t carry a gun or view everyone with suspicion. You have a business. You have friends and neighbors, and you’ve taken on new obligations. You go out at night. You talk to strangers. You’re not in hiding.”

  “I’m not in Chicago either.”

  Another delicate wave of those fingers, this time dismissing his argument. “Staying in Chicago wouldn’t have made you any stronger or braver. People there wanted your brother dead. Since you happen to look exactly like him, getting out was the smart thing to do, at least until those people are put in jail.”

  “Josh isn’t going to make any effort to help with that, is he?” The bitterness was heavier in his voice than he’d intended. God knew, he felt a lot of resentment toward Josh, but he owed him at least a little fairness. If leaving town and staying away was the smart thing for Joe, then wasn’t it doubly smart for Josh since he’d been the Mulroneys’ target in the first place?

  Carmie delivered his burger and fries, along with a handful of napkins and a long look for Liz, and the dog immediately returned to his side, greedily eyeing the food.

  “Maybe he’ll surprise everyone,” Liz said as he handed a pinched-off piece of hamburger bun to the puppy. “Maybe his conscience will force him to appear for the trial.”

  Joe laughed, and the tension between his shoulders eased. “You’ve mistaken Josh for someone else. He doesn’t have a conscience.”

  “He has one. He just doesn’t listen to it very often.” She pried the top off her cup, then fished out the cherry. “Do you intend to go back to Chicago once the trial is over?”

  It was an easy answer, something he’d thought about and decided right after he’d moved to Copper Lake. But as he watched her dangle the cherry by its stem, raise it into the air, tilt her head back and open her mouth, all conscious thought left him. His mind went blank, his lungs burned for air, his skin heated and arousal rushed in his ears and through his body.

  She closed her teeth around the cherry, pulled the stem loose, then chewed, making a soft mmm sound. Dots of sweat popped out on his forehead, and his hand was unsteady as he reached for his root beer, gulping half of it in one swallow.

  “Is that a hard question?”

  Question? Oh, yeah, Chicago. “No. I decided when I bought the shop that if I liked it here, I would stay.”

  “And you like it.”

  “I do.” And I’m liking it more every day. “It’s a different life.”

  “Quieter,” she said with a nod.

  “And slower.”

  “You work long hours.”

  “But I worked eighty-hour weeks in Chicago. I’m my own boss now. I get to make the decisions.” He chewed a bite of burger and swallowed slowly before continuing. “At the investment firm, I didn’t remember the names of most of the people I worked with. I talked to my parents every couple days, but I hardly ever saw them. I scheduled time for dates and sex. My focus was on my career above everything else.”

  Like Josh’s focus had been on himself.

  Maybe they’d had more in common than just shared genes.

  “And here your focus is on living a fuller life. Quality versus quantity. You don’t have to schedule dating and sex anymore.” She paused only long enough to grab a handful of Elizabeth ’s leash as the puppy stiffened when kids climbed out of a nearby car. “So why aren’t you doing it?”

  His throat required another gulp of root beer before he could speak, and then his voice was hoarse. “Having sex?”

  “Actually, I meant dating,” she said drily, “but the other’s interesting, too. Are you doing it?”

  If he’d been wearing a tie, as he had every day for years, he would have been choking on it. “None of your business.”

  “Mrs. Wyndham thinks you might be seeing a girlfriend when you borrow her car for out-of-town trips.”

  “I thought she wondered if I was gay.”

  Liz shook her head, her curls rippling. “The possibility occurred to her, and she was probably prepared to be very PC and accepting of it if it were true, but she’d prefer to think you’ve got a sweetheart somewhere. Do you?”

  He polished off the last bit of his burger and crumpled the cold fries in the greasy wrapper. “I�
��ll make you a deal, Liz. I’ll tell you all about my sex life right after you tell me why you’re looking for Josh.”

  For an instant, he thought, she looked tempted, as if one bit of information might be worth trading for the other. Then she shook her head, a wry smile curving her lips. “See, that’s the problem,” she said, parroting his words from earlier that day. “I don’t care about your sex life.”

  For two years, neither had he. This was a hell of a time for things to change.

  And a hell of a person to cause the change.

  Chapter 5

  Friday started out bright and sunny, but by mid-morning, the sky had turned dark. The wind picked up, bringing rain in a gentle fall, exactly what Mrs. Wyndham’s newly planted flowers needed. Liz would have preferred a deluge. She would have kicked off her shoes, gone out into the grass and let it drench her, washing away the edginess and the attraction that was too damn close to becoming something more.

  Important.

  Real.

  Something she didn’t need, didn’t want, wouldn’t have.

  Her windows were open, and she was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, the wicker creaking each time she moved. It was a comforting sound, already growing familiar after so short a time. With her laptop balanced on her knees, she checked her e-mail, let her mother know that she’d be home for a visit at the first opportunity, then signed off to face the photograph of Josh that served as wallpaper.

  He and Joe were identical, right down to the gleam in their blue eyes and the tilt to their smiles, but she’d never had a problem telling them apart, though it hadn’t been the obvious things like personal style. Josh had been cocky, sure of his appeal, comfortable in denim and leather, while Joe had been the poster boy for career success.

  The difference for her had been simpler: Joe attracted her; Josh didn’t.

  Josh had been a job. Joe had been…

  Off-limits, she reminded herself. And nothing had changed.

  Her cell phone trilled, and she glanced at the screen before answering. “Hey, Mika.”

  “Are you enjoying the rain?”

  Liz rolled her eyes. “Do you have the weather report for Copper Lake called up on your computer?”

  “Yes, I do. It’s one of the first things I see when I boot up. Seventy-four degrees and raining. Expected to clear by midnight, with sunshine tomorrow.”

  Another of the first things she saw on the computer, Liz suspected, was the same photograph of Josh that she herself was looking at. Mika’s attention, first and foremost, was the case.

  While Liz kept having trouble remembering it.

  She closed the laptop screen, then set it on the coffee table. “You have anything new for me?”

  “Not really. Thomas Smith arrived in Copper Lake yesterday. He made contact with Joe Saldana, who insisted he doesn’t know his brother’s whereabouts.”

  Liz had met Smith a few times before her team had removed Josh from Chicago. He appeared more organized crime than prosecutor, a seriously tough-looking guy…who’d attended Milton Academy and Yale before graduating from Harvard Law. He was single, a little too smug for her tastes, and had informed her after one meeting that he would have asked her out if he didn’t have a policy against dating feds. Mika, who’d been at the meeting, too, had given him the look that turned most men to stone, but he’d seemed not to notice. Unusual, because men always noticed Mika.

  “He’s staying in Atlanta a few days. One of our people in that office is going to pay Joe a visit. We think it will solidify your story if you’re there at the time, so he’ll coordinate with you first.”

  Oh, good. She so liked playing the role of clingy ex-girlfriend who didn’t know when to leave well enough alone.

  “Have you been inside his house?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “Gee, I don’t know. An invitation?” Rising from the sofa, Liz stretched, then padded to the open door. “Why don’t you get a warrant?”

  “We can do that, but since you’re living fifty feet away…”

  Stepping outside onto the porch, Liz gauged the distance between her cottage and Joe’s. Probably no more than a few inches from fifty feet. Did Mika have a satellite photo of the cottages called up on her computer, too?

  “Do you think he would just leave evidence lying around?”

  “No,” Mika conceded. “But law-abiding citizens tend to be clumsy in their attempts to protect their loved ones.”

  Liz wouldn’t exactly describe Josh as Joe’s loved one. He carried a lot of rancor toward his brother. But blood was thicker than water, family first, blah, blah, blah.

  “I’ll see how he feels about company this evening.” It was the action Mika wanted, but it disturbed Liz because she wanted it, too. She would like to see how Joe lived. Was his cottage as bare as her own, or had he truly settled in? Was he messy, neat, in between? Did the lavender house bear any resemblance to the chilly condo where he’d lived in Chicago, furnished by an interior designer and hardly looking lived in?

  She would be happier about it if she didn’t have to worry. So far, their time together had been pretty public, but she’d still had erotic dreams last night. Alone? In his house? Good cause for concern.

  “Let me know,” Mika said. “And don’t get too distracted.”

  “Distracted?” Liz echoed as she sat on the porch floor, the siding at her back.

  “I know you had mixed feelings about going to Copper Lake.” Mika hesitated. “I know you had mixed feelings about Joe.”

  Which was more astonishing? That Mika was actually getting personal? Or that she’d seen what Liz had been sure she’d kept very well hidden from everyone except Joe? “I don’t know-”

  “I was there when you visited him in the hospital.”

  Liz squeezed her eyes shut. Josh hadn’t seen anything. His parents had been too grief-stricken to notice. Tom Smith hadn’t said anything, and she was pretty sure he would have. Like Mika, his case came first.

  “I’ll stay focused,” she said flatly.

  “I’m sure you will. Call me.”

  “I’m sure I will,” Liz mimicked after she pressed the End button. She flipped the phone shut with a defiant snap, then heaved a sigh. There were easier cases out there. If she could trade this one…

  She wouldn’t. She’d given too much time to it. She’d wound up handcuffed to her bed because of it. She would do her best to find Josh and persuade him to testify, and then she would return to life as normal. The Mulroneys would go to prison, Josh would be in trouble again before she made it home and Joe would know the truth. Would know she’d lied. He would want only to forget, and she would always remember. And wonder.

  The day passed slowly, the rain falling ceaselessly. At five, she changed into a short cotton skirt and a scoop-necked tank. She pinned back her curls and put on makeup, earrings and clunky clogs. Her minimal belongings didn’t include an umbrella or a slicker, so after making a phone call, she tucked her cell into her bag, locked up and did the fifty-foot dash to Joe’s porch.

  There she shook her hair, thinking with a grin that Elizabeth and Bear, both barking now inside the house, would likely have the same reaction to the rain, then she kicked off her shoes. By the time Joe came around the corner at five-thirty, she was sitting in one of his rockers, legs stretched out, feet propped on the porch railing, damp clothes clinging to her skin.

  He didn’t notice her until he was halfway up the steps, bike gripped in both hands. He stopped abruptly and stared at her until something-maybe the weight of the bike or the rain in his face-made him move the last few feet to shelter.

  “Hey.” He set down the bike, then removed his helmet. His hair was dry, but it was likely the only part of him that was. His baby-blue T-shirt and jeans hugged him like a second skin, and water sluiced off to puddle at his feet.

  The temperature had dropped enough to make wet clothing chilly, but he didn’t look cold. She didn’t feel it. Struggling t
o sound unaffected, she said, “If you had a car, you wouldn’t have gotten so wet coming home.”

  “If I had a car, I’d be part of the problem, not the solution. Do you know how much pollution they put into the atmosphere?”

  “Sometimes, though, a bicycle isn’t a reasonable option.”

  “Sometimes. Some places. Copper Lake isn’t one of those places.”

  He toed off each shoe, kicked them against the wall, then stripped off his socks and stood there, barefooted like her. There was something incredibly appealing about the sight. Apparently unaware that she’d discovered an all-new fascination with bare feet, he said, “Make yourself comfortable.”

  “I am.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Probably because you need to get out of those clothes.” The instant the last word was out, she swallowed hard. Wrong thing to say, very wrong thing to think about. Joe out of his clothes would be too tempting, and she was already feeling weak.

  “Yeah, I guess I do,” he said, but he didn’t move toward the door.

  “I hope you don’t mind me inviting myself over, but I thought I’d repay you for the cherry limeade last night. I ordered two medium pizzas to be delivered in-” Rocking forward, she slid her fingers around his left hand and lifted it so she could see the face of his watch.

  His skin was warm, not as soft as her own but not particularly callused either. His fingers tensed for just a moment, then went lax in her grip, and his pulse throbbed just the slightest bit harder. There was a small scar on the back of his hand, right where the blood vein was most prominent, reminding her of the time in the hospital when an IV had been taped there. When he’d looked so pale, so vulnerable and still so damn handsome.

  “Delivered when?” His voice was husky, sliding over her skin, bringing back the sharp edginess that had plagued her earlier.

  It took a few heartbeats to remember her reason for taking his hand. “Twenty minutes.” Hers was husky, too. Edgy.

  “What kind?”

  “One vegetarian, one supreme.”