She was sitting up slowly. “What?”
“Do you come or do you not want me to even try?”
She shook her head. “I did come,” she said softly, but he didn’t know whether that was her standard line or whether he’d been so wrapped up in his own ferocious orgasm he hadn’t noticed.
“Well, I’ll pay more attention next time. I promise.” He grinned, so relaxed and feeling good he couldn’t help himself. “Don’t worry. I like to make a woman come. You’ll enjoy it next time.”
She reached for her dress and stepped into it. “I enjoyed it this time,” she said, with a shaky smile.
When she tried to retrieve her panties, he snatched them away. “I’ll keep these, if you don’t mind.”
He pulled his chinos on and stuffed the panties into one pocket, grabbing the condoms as well. Come to think of it, they might even have to stop for more at a drugstore on the way back to the hotel.
They walked down the staircase, hand in hand, until she suddenly pulled hers away. When he glanced over at her she was blushing. She was awfully sensitive or shy or something, especially for a working girl.
“Hey, Evan.” He turned his head to his oldest brother Michael’s voice.
“Hi, Michael. I didn’t know you were here already.”
“Yes. I’m staying over.” He turned to Evan’s date, who seemed to have composed herself. “Hello, Miss Prentiss. Do you have those papers for me?”
“Yes, Mr. Reynolds. I was just looking for you. They’re here in my purse.” She pulled out a folded set of papers and handed them to Michael along with a pen. He spread them out on a small hallway table and started to sign.
Without looking up, Michael said, “Did you meet my assistant, Evan? I don’t think you’ve ever been to the office, have you?”
What the…?
He finished signing and handed the papers back to her.
“I emailed you the file you requested as well, concerning the gentleman on the rig. It’s in your inbox.”
“Good. That’ll be all, Miss Prentiss. Thank you for coming all the way out here.”
She smiled. “My pleasure, Mr. Reynolds.” But she was looking straight at Evan.
Shit. Now he was the one who was blushing.
As he watched Miss Prentiss go out the front door of the mansion and Michael wandered away, someone tapped him on the shoulder.
“Evan?”
“Yeah.”
He turned to see a mass of dark-brown curls spilling over a plunging shocking-pink neckline, a glittery chain disappearing into the pushed-together cleavage.
“I thought that was you. They give us a picture.” The girl in front of him slipped a card into his hand and he glanced down to see the name of the escort service he called.
Right. That was what he was supposed to look for. She was supposed to give him a card. He remembered now.
Fuck!
“I’m Annie.”
Her lip gloss was as pink as her dress. She was pretty, in a flashy way he usually didn’t mind, since it was what a girl looked like naked that counted to him these days, but somehow, after Miss Prentiss he wasn’t in the mood anymore.
Not for Annie anyway.
“Thanks, honey. But I’m all set. I’ll pay for the night, but consider it a vacation.”
“Really? Is it me? They can send some other girl.”
“Not the one I want,” he muttered.
* * * * *
“I like your new girlfriend. And I’m using the word deliberately.”
Michael gave his sister Samantha a quick hug and peck on the cheek. “Oh you met her? Good. And thanks. I like her too.”
What he really wanted to do was find Vanny. He’d already taken the time to answer the questions his father had fired at him, about business at least, which had eaten up more time than he’d expected. And then he ran into Miss Prentiss and signed the papers on the way to look for Vanny. And now here was Samantha, who he really couldn’t ignore since the party was in her honor after all.
“Why doesn’t she work on the oil drilling rig anymore?”
“Vanny? I fired her.”
“Wow, I didn’t think you were that hard up for a date, Michael.”
He laughed and grabbed a glass of champagne from a passing waiter, handing it to his little sister. “How about you, Samantha? How’s married life treating you?”
“So far so good.”
“Has Vik stopped this spy thing?”
“We just got back from our honeymoon. Give the man time. Even Interpol probably needs two weeks’ notice. Besides,” she added, as she sipped her champagne, “I’m not too sure he wants to quit.”
“That’s a dangerous job, Sam.”
“He could go into strategizing, taking on isolated assignments, not the deep undercover stuff. It’s what his mentor did to ease off.”
“That’s the old man I met at the wedding? The one who looked like James Bond?”
“That was him. Crenshaw. I’m not sure if that’s his first or last name, but he’s really very sweet.”
“You moving into the family castle now you’re back?” In addition to being a spy, Samantha’s new husband, bizarrely enough, turned out to be an earl as well.
“We would if Vik’s grandmother had anything to say about it, but he wants to take it slower.”
“No countess for you yet, eh?”
“No, but you may genuflect if the mood seizes you.”
He kissed her hand instead. “I have to find Vanny. Father tied me up longer than I wanted.”
“Go ahead.” Samantha waved him on. “Find your girl.”
Unfortunately, on his way to do so, he ran into Tiffany. Or rather she ran into him. Right into him. Tiffany was never one for subtlety, but even he was surprised at the way she plastered herself right up next to him.
“Hey,” he said, pushing her back as gently as he could under the circumstances. The last thing he wanted was for Tiffany to cause a scene with Vanny here. Who the hell had invited her anyway? Samantha hated Tiffany.
“Michael, I have to talk to you. In private!”
He shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Tiffany. I’m on my way to find someone.”
“That little hick bitch you brought with you can wait.”
“That’s enough.”
“If I’d known that was what you liked, I’d have popped into J.C. Penney for some overalls and print dresses.”
He looked around quickly to see if he could spot Jeff. Maybe he could calm his ex-wife down.
She tugged at his arm, succeeding in pulling him into one of the sitting rooms off the main ballroom. After a minute of hesitation, he let her close the door behind them. If she was going to launch into one of her tirades, better if the door was closed.
“What is it?” he snapped.
“You have to help me.”
“Do what?”
“Get away from him. Please!” For an uncomfortable moment, he thought she was talking about Jeff.
“Look, he told me you divorced him.”
“Who?” She looked blank for a second. “Oh, Jeff.”
“Yes and that you were cheating on him, not that that surprises me one bit.”
“Huh!” She looked around distractedly, muttering, “He was behind all my affairs anyway.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
She made an uncharacteristically scrunched-up face. Oddly, the naturalness of it made her more attractive rather than less. “For such an experienced man, Michael, you’re so naïve in some ways. He picked the men for me. He watched me with them. Not in person. He was afraid to go that far. He always made me record it. And then he’d watch it again and again.”
Naïve or not, Michael guessed he wasn’t all that surprised by the information. Jeff always seemed a little too interested in other people’s fucking. “So what? Some guys get turned-on by that kind of thing. Not me,” he hastily added. Actually the thought of Vanny having sex with another man kind of made him want to kill.
“Other than the fact that you were probably breaking a hell of a lot of privacy laws, it doesn’t matter to me if Jeff gets off on that.”
“Oh he gets off on it, but unfortunately he’s ridiculously guilt-ridden about it. Anyway, you were the one I really wanted to sleep with. He wouldn’t have minded that either. In fact, he may have wanted it more than I did.”
“Stop right there, you lying bitch.”
“I tried to engineer it a hundred times. And when I finally realized you wouldn’t ‘betray’ him by sleeping with his wife, I divorced him to make it happen.”
“I’ve heard enough of your twisted logic. Jeff’s better off without you.”
“He is,” she said earnestly, surprising him. “He really is. And especially now. I wish I could get that through his thick skull.”
“I’m sure you’re doing your best,” he noted wryly.
She shook her head quickly. “But none of that matters anymore. I’ve got a bigger problem. I’ve got…” her voice faltered. “Oh God, he’s…he seems to be obsessed with you.”
“Funny. That’s the same thing he says about you.”
“Not Jeff,” she said swiftly.
“What are you talking about, Tiffany?”
“I’m pregnant.”
Michael raised an eyebrow.
“It’s not yours. I’m just a few weeks along. But I want this baby. And one asshole’s insane delusions are not going to hurt it.”
“Whose baby are you supposedly carrying?”
“Jeff’s.”
“It’s possible, I guess. But if he asks me, I’m going to advise he get a paternity test before he forks out a penny of child support on top of the already exorbitant alimony he pays you.”
“Oh God!”
Tiffany looked so distraught—her mascara even running—that he almost believed her.
“Why won’t you listen to me? You’ve got to do something to stop him!”
“Who? Jeff?”
“Not Jeff!” Her head popped up at a sudden sound. “I have to go. I have to—”
The door opened and somebody ducked his head in. Michael didn’t recognize him.
“Oh I’m sorry. I thought this room was empty.”
Tiffany’s face was completely drained of color, the tint of her foundation not enough to compensate for it. “I have to go.”
“I saw this right outside the door and heard voices so I thought it might be yours.” He held out a black evening bag. “Miss?”
Tiffany took the purse and then pushed past him and shot out the door past the man.
The guy, sort of a professor type, said, “I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t disturb anything.”
“Not at all,” Michael said politely and went back out to find Vanny.
Chapter Eight
Vik Pillay eyed the blonde in the skintight black dress, her boobs practically hanging out. The detachment he felt at the display was almost amusing to him now. What a trained dog he was after two weeks of marriage and only a few months before that of courtship.
There was only one woman for him. Now and forever.
But this one was interesting. In a purely professional sense. He watched her as she fiddled with the palms of one of the potted trees old man Reynolds had all around the greenhouse, and then slipped something from her compact black evening clutch into the dirt.
She was acting so oddly that he had followed her here to the greenhouse, taking care to stay out of sight. Old habits died hard and Vik had been a spy for over a decade. When something was wrong, he could just feel it. Probably why he’d made it out alive after all this time. And something about the slutty gorgeous blonde was all wrong. For one thing, she was too nervous. For another, this type never wandered away from the crowd—unless she was meeting someone to fuck. Half thinking that may be all there was to it, he trailed her at a proper distance and hid when she turned down the long hallway to the greenhouse, following a second or two later at a safe distance.
With a slight twist of his body, he disappeared into the background when she hurried out. After a minute or two, he went into the greenhouse and searched the dirt of the plant, finding the little device easily. She hadn’t hidden it very well.
“If you snuck out of the party to make out with Tiffany Fischer, who I just happened to notice leaving here, I’m afraid we’re going to have a murder-suicide situation on our hands. I’m going to murder that blonde bitch and make you so sorry you cheated on me you’ll want to kill yourself.”
Vik straightened from the plant, device in hand. Too concerned to laugh at his wife’s little joke, he held it out to Samantha. “That’s who that woman was? Tiffany Fischer, you said?”
She took it and turned it around in her palm. “Yeah. One of Michael’s rejects. She used to be married to his best friend too. A real and total bitch.”
“And a little bit more,” he said grimly.
“Why? What’s this?”
He took it back from her. “This, my lovely little wife, is a very compact but very deadly bomb. Extremely sophisticated. And planted by Mrs. Fischer there.”
“Wow. Hell hath no fury and all that.”
“I doubt that’s what’s behind this. I don’t even know where somebody like that could get a hold of something like this. You need very deep, very dangerous contacts to get something this compact and deadly.”
“Well, shouldn’t we call 9-1-1 or something? I mean, is it going to go off any minute? Not that I’m being a wimp here or anything.”
He grinned at that. This woman was the furthest thing from a wimp he’d ever come across. He kissed her swiftly. “No need.”
“Why not?” She had that dazed look on her face that she always had after they kissed. The one that made him find it very hard to stop at just a kiss. The one that ensured that, although they’d honeymooned in one of the most gorgeous sites in Tahiti, they had barely made it out of bed to the beach.
Unfortunately, dazed look or no dazed look, making love to his wife would have to wait. The Reynolds family, and that included the Pillay family now, had a mystery to solve.
“She forgot to arm it. See this little green switch here? She was supposed to flick it on.”
“Tiffany never was very bright.”
“Thank God for that. How about we go find out who is?”
* * * * *
What did they say about dumb blondes again? This incompetence was simply too much. It was amazing the woman had ever gotten away with murdering her pimp in the first place so many years ago. Dumb luck undoubtedly.
At least she’d pulled over to the side of the road in that little orange Jag of hers when he overtook her on the deserted road. She knew it was him, having seen him at the party. He put on a pair of driving gloves and got out of the respectable Bentley, which he parked behind her, turning off the headlights.
“I put it exactly where you said to,” she whined right off as he slid in beside her.
“Really? How come we haven’t heard a big kaboom behind us on the road?” He glanced at his Cartier illuminated watch. “It’s been about enough time. Five minutes or so I said, right?”
She looked back at the dark behind them. “Was it really supposed to, just like, blow the place up?”
“A nice little chunk of it anyway. Enough to see from here.”
“But, I mean, isn’t that kind of excessive? I’m not criticizing you or anything, but if you want to kill Michael Reynolds, why don’t you just kill him? Don’t they have snipers or something for that sort of thing? Not that I’m saying you should kill him or anything.”
“Is that why you didn’t arm the bomb? You didn’t want to kill Michael Reynolds?”
“No! It’s not my fault if it didn’t go off! Maybe there’s a time delay or something.”
“It couldn’t have had anything to do with the fact that you failed to move the little green switch to the on position, could it?”
“I did! I swear I did! Somebody must have found it and switched it off. That’s not my faul
t, is it?”
“Remember what I told you, Cissy?” She visibly cringed at the name. “Once it’s switched to on, it’s extremely difficult to switch off.”
“Well, they must have. Or maybe that bomb thingy was, I don’t know, some kind of a dud.”
He sighed heavily. He was always going to have to kill her, wasn’t he? She’d seen his face, unlike his minion on the rig. And now, thanks to her, Michael Reynolds had seen him with her at the party as well. He had to interrupt their conversation rather than surreptitiously give her the package as they’d agreed. It was clear Cissy was about to spill the beans.
But he hadn’t thought he would have to kill her so soon. He thought that perhaps she could have been of further use to him. Or at the very least, he could have done it slowly, for maximum enjoyment, taking her lovely body apart piece by piece. No time for that now.
When he realized that the new Reynolds family member was following Tiffany, he followed as well, long enough to see the man find the device and determine this nitwit had failed to arm it. They would all be suspicious of Tiffany now of course, or at least the old man would be suspicious even if his son was too pussy-besotted with his new girlfriend to give a shit apparently. And eventually Cissy-Lou here would crack. So he’d employed almost-forgotten skills from a childhood of stealing cars and slipped out of the party to borrow this Bentley and come after her. It was quite a risk, but he had no other choice.
In fact, he hadn’t wanted the bomb to kill Reynolds, which is why he’d instructed Cissy to plant it in the greenhouse away from the main building. He had something else in mind entirely. But it didn’t matter what she thought one way or another. Never had. And certainly didn’t now.
“You really should be grateful, my dear.” He removed the gun from his inside coat pocket and raised it right to her forehead. She didn’t even flinch away, though she was shaking. “It could have been much more painful.”
She started to say something, to plead no doubt, and not wanting to hear it, not to mention not having the time to, he pulled the trigger. Just once. Her head fell back, almost gently, against the seat, the red streaming down her cheeks.
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