Players: Bad Boy Romance

by Amy Faye

  Maybe there would come a time when she'd be able to think of him in that way again, but only a day after coming back into his life wasn't soon enough. She needed time to be able to build up to that part of their relationship again.

  She needed time to be able to get everything figured out for herself. She needed to be able to think clearly, and that wasn't going to happen in the house right now. Mitch seemed to recognize that, and he's let her have her space.

  She should thank him. But sometimes it's inappropriate to thank people for things. Particularly, Anna thinks, when they're doing the politeness of letting you keep your private thoughts private.

  As much as he was a stickler for good manners when it came to doing the right things at the right times, he insisted just as much on making sure that you didn't do the wrong things at the wrong times.

  In fact, he may have been more committed to that, on the whole. It was always better to stay silent, to stay in repose, than to do something that would upset Mitch. He could play off inaction as whatever he liked. He was very smart, and he was very capable of staying on his toes.

  On the other hand, Anna wasn't smart at all. She was always messing things up. Always getting confused. She should have been with a smart guy like Mitch the whole time, to make sure that she stayed in line.

  Josh was nice. He was comforting. There was a lot to like about him. But he didn't know her like Mitch did. He didn't know that she needed to be kept in check. He didn't know that she was too dumb for her own good, that she needed to be taught with a firm hand.

  He didn't know that she was too dumb to be left to her own devices. He thought she was better than that. For a while, Linda almost had Anna believing it, too.

  But he was wrong. They were all wrong. And now she remembered it.

  A pin bites into the sensitive flesh in Anna's side. She does her best not to pull away. It only makes it hurt worse, if you pull away. It's better to just keep your arms up and take it for an instant.

  "Ow," she says. She allows herself that much. The pin pulls back. It still stings even when they straighten it and it comes out the fabric on the other side.

  "Are you okay, sweetie?" A woman who Anna's never seen before looks concerned. It's a strange expression to see on a stranger's face. A very strange one, in fact.

  It's understandable, though. She's one of Anna's bridesmaids, and if she's a bridesmaid then she should be concerned. It's only proper.

  Anna swallows her worries and her fears. There's nothing to be worried about, not any more. She's got everything under control.

  Because now the only thing she has to have under control are her actions. It doesn't matter if she's nervous, not really. Mitch will take care of it.

  It doesn't matter if she doesn't know what to do. She doesn't have much choice in the matter; Mitch will take care of it.

  It doesn't matter, because as much as she thought she did, she doesn't matter. She should have learned that lesson by now, but she won't make that mistake again.

  She's been reminded and she's in her place again and regardless of what she thought she wanted, it doesn't much matter any more. Mitch will make sure that she gets where she needs to be.

  If he doesn't, then this woman—Anna thinks her name is Sarah—will. She looks awfully concerned, and awfully pretty. It'd be a shame to disappoint either of them.

  Anna wonders idly whether or not Mitch has fucked her. It occurred to Anna before that he might have cheated on her. It had seemed perfectly natural at the time. Of course he would want to be with other women. Women who weren't fuck-ups like she was.

  Now it almost threatens to light a fire of anger in her chest. She catches it before that becomes a serious risk. It might have consequences if she were to let herself think too much about it.

  She's prepared to deal with consequences, if she has to. She's done things that she knew were wrong before, when it seemed important.

  The truth is, this isn't important. She's not with Mitchell because she loves him. Part of her knows that the feeling is mutual. Mitch doesn't care a whole lot about anything or anyone.

  But he cares a lot about appearances. Anna knows she's not good at many things. She's dumb, she can't remember anything. She never learns. She's too flighty, too emotional.

  Mitch hasn't let her get far from knowing her flaws. It's one of her better strengths, that she knows so well how flawed she is.

  But her best strength is being able to keep up appearances when she has to. Because that's the one that's always been the most important out of all of them.

  She can keep herself looking like she's completely fine, even when she wants to break down and cry. Even when all she wants is just to go back to her little one-bedroom apartment and wake up to a dark-eyed man cooking her eggs and bacon.

  She can even smile a little. She looks in the mirror. She looks like she's handling everything. It's all moving so fast, they might be able to see a little of the stress, but everyone will just write that off.

  Of course she's stressed. Who wouldn't be? All the trouble that relationship's been having… haven't you heard? She can practically hear the gossip in her head now. It's nothing like, 'the poor dear, she looks like she's getting ready to cry.'

  Just 'look at her, she looks like she's had a whole wedding to prepare for in only a couple of weeks.'

  She's always been good at faking her appearance. It's one of her greatest talents, and now she's doing just as well as she ever has.

  Which is good, in the long run. She's not sure that she's ready to try to figure anything else out right now. Because if she does, then she knows what she'll figure out. She'll figure out that the only thing keeping her away from that kitchen, with that dark-eyed man, is Mitch Queen.

  And no matter how much she knows that he's the one responsible, it doesn't matter, because there's never going to be anything that she can do about it.

  So it's better not to think about it. Just like she always did.

  It's just better that way.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Josh Meadows sets the phone back down on the coffee table. Face up, so he can see when the call comes through even before the ringer picks up. Because he's waiting for a call, and it'll be coming through any minute now.

  It's not illegal to poke through someone's private records, not exactly. See, there's private records and then there's private records.

  Detectives do this kind of thing all the time. Private detectives, not police detectives. Not usually, anyways. With only one name, it's not easy to say which members of Al Queen's estate staff are ex-cons and which aren't.

  Because of the one that Josh Meadows knows, exactly one is. If you extrapolate outwards, of the thirty or forty people who Josh saw, they're all convicts. Including himself, very possibly, because someone might look at him and see his relatively shabby clothes and mistake him for a servant when he wasn't.

  No, you need a list to go through. Because wildly guessing gets you nowhere. A list isn't impossible to compile, but it is pretty difficult. It's doubly difficult if you're on suspension, with or without pay.

  It's triply difficult when the person who you're poking around is Al Queen, who was mayor of this damn city for going on eight years, and now who's running for congress.

  No, that's not the kind of person that someone on suspension generally pokes into the affairs of. Particularly not if that someone was suspended for punching Al Queen's kid so hard that he almost certainly had to get dental work done.

  That wasn't the kind of digging that got done on its own. It wasn't even the kind of digging that got done if you knew which wheels to grease. It was the kind of digging that got done if you were particularly committed to digging and you didn't mind how dirty you had to get for it.

  In this case, he got off fairly light, all told. He owed a few favors, but since when was that surprising? He always owed favors. And people always owed him favors. It was practically a reciprocal economy, at times.

  That's how it goe
s. You ask someone to look into things for you, get some information, and you ask them not to tell the Captain, and the Captain definitely doesn't call you on your cell phone, knowing full well that you're suspended and you should be damn well happy that a suspension was all you got.

  Which is why Josh took a second in answering the phone, even though he'd been waiting for a call while trying to scribble out a sixth draft of his apology speech. Because the Captain was definitely not supposed to call him.

  He answers the phone anyways, though. Not answering wasn't ever an option. "Captain?"

  "What the fuck are these stories I'm hearing about you, Meadows?"

  Josh almost smiles. "Stories, sir?"

  The voice on the other side of the line is angry. She's cute when she's angry, he has to admit. Not to her face, of course. Or to any of his coworkers. Or ever think about it. Because that's not the sort of thing that you ever bring up. Not ever.

  "Don't you play dumb with me, you son of a bitch. You know exactly what I'm talking about, so don't you dare try to play any games with me."

  "Games, sir?"

  She hates that. It's better that way. Better for everyone, probably. But what's he supposed to do, just come right out and say what he's thinking? No way. She'd shoot it right down.

  So Josh is going to keep playing dumb as long as he can manage it, in spite of the fact that the Captain will very likely blow a gasket if he keeps the act up much longer.

  "I told you to go home, didn't I? I told you to keep whatever the fuck this personal vendetta was at home, too, didn't I? I told you to leave the Queen boy be. Didn't I?"

  "You did, sir."

  "And what did you do? Exactly what, precisely, did you do not three days later? Enlighten me."

  "I followed up a lead, sir."

  Josh can hear her breathing through the other end of the line. She's breathing like she's going to pop a blood vessel. "I'm going to let you have three minutes, and this had better be god damned good. You cannot possibly imagine the world of shit that you will be in if you don't impress the ever loving hell out of me."

  Josh thinks that he probably can, actually.

  "I've been digging a little."

  "Yeah, I know," she says.

  "Well, what got me started was, the description of the kidnappers, what description we got from Miss Witt, sounded a little familiar. Jeffries asked me, a while ago, to take a look at that robbery case that he's working on."

  She doesn't say anything.

  "So I was thinking, there's a good chance that it's one of the guys he's looking at. No problems there. But the similarity in the disguises, it struck me as odd. Both wearing dark, heavy clothes. Both wear ski masks, both cover their eyes so you can't even see the color of their damn skin under the mask."

  "That's pretty circumstantial, Meadows."

  "Well, I figure, it's a long shot. I've got a weird feeling about Queen, though. The younger one. He didn't seem that surprised when we told him about his daughter going missing, you know."

  "I don't think being an asshole is enough to justify the sort of insinuations you're making, Meadows."

  "If it turns out to be nothing, I don't make any insinuations at all. I just keep it all to myself, don't say anything, unless my darling Captain calls me up and asks me to explain the whole thing."

  "Fine. We'll indulge your fantasy for a minute. Speaking of which, you've got ninety seconds by my watch."

  "Okay. So let's say, just for the sake of argument, that he knew in advance. How likely you think it is that someone goes to the victim and warns them about what's coming? Not likely.

  "So the information can't have gone in that direction. It could only have happened the other way around. Queen knows what's going to happen because he told someone else what was going to go down before it happened. In other words, he orders it.

  "I know. Long shot. You don't need to tell me that. So, if we assume that—"

  "Forty-five seconds."

  "You'd want pros doing this kind of thing. Only, no real good leads for any of it. Anyone in the game doesn't want to admit it, not even to C.I.s, so either they know exactly how hot the information is—not unlikely—or they're not involved.

  "We assume they're not involved, for the sake of discussion. But you still want pros, right? So you would want to go to someone you trust, and someone who knows their way around a job." Josh barely has time to breathe between the words, they're coming out so fast. But as the deadline ticks closer, he's getting to the point.

  "Would you like to know how many of the grounds staff at Al Queen's mansion are ex-felons? What percentage?"

  "Fine. What percentage? Five, four…"

  "Eighty-five. Of the fifty-odd people working there, forty-two of them are felons. The rest are convicts, but non-violent stuff. Petty thefts, fraud, shit like that. Pretty much all walks of life. And who do you think they're loyal to? Al Queen, and by extension, his son—Mitchell Ellery Queen."

  The Captain is quiet for a minute.

  "So you've got a lot of circumstance, I'll grant you that. That's not remotely going to be enough to make those kinds of accusations in public, Detective. You know that."

  "Which is why I'm poking around."

  She's quiet another minute.

  "This conversation never happened," she says. And then she hangs up, and, as if by magic, the conversation never happened.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Anna frowns and looks at the table in front of her. Is she supposed to make choices about the wedding, or is this some kind of trick?

  She'd go with the green. That part's easy. Green looks more muted. It looks better. No problem. It's only an off-white green, after all. 'Mint,' she thinks.

  But there's no reason to assume that is what she's here for. She's never been asked to choose anything for Mitch before, and the odds that he would start asking her to do things like that, completely out of the blue…

  Mitch was capable of surprises. He was capable of almost anything he set his mind to, and if he wanted to let her choose, then he would let her choose. That wasn't going to happen, though. Not in this lifetime.

  So why had they brought it to her as if it were a choice somehow? They must know how he is, too. There's no way that someone could spend any great deal of time with Mitch Queen and not come away with the impression that he's a man who makes his own decisions, not sending away for others' decisions.

  What this really feels like is a test, and it's a test that she can't pass. Not really.

  If she chooses green, she won't be fitting into his plan. Her natural reaction is always the wrong one. That's the first thing she learned. Mitch likes earth tones, so green wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility, but the brown…

  He'd have gone for the brown in a heartbeat. Faster than she'd go for the green, and she'd liked that green from the moment she saw it.

  The problem was, she couldn't choose the brown, either. Because then he'd get her alone at some point, and he'd tell her how he just wanted her input on the colored trim for the cake because he'd wanted to have someone on the outside making decisions.

  To have her input. And if she chose what she thought he would choose, then it defeated the whole exercise. She'd be stuck on the defensive, insisting that, no, she really liked the brown.

  When, of course, she'd liked the green. She'd have picked the green if it didn't mean a hissy-fit from Mitch about how she was ruining their beautiful wedding.

  Anna takes a deep breath and tries to decide which lecture she wants to hear more. The baby fusses in the other room, a reminder of what her real priorities are supposed to be. Ava's hungry, and it's past time to feed her.

  "Um. The green."

  The ladies who are supposed to be her bridesmaids smile like they're hosts of a T.V. game show and they're about to tell her what's behind Door #2. They close up the book.

  "Excellent choice. We'll get back to it."

  "Yeah. I hear Ava calling, so I'd better—"

&nbs
p; "Go on," they say.

  It doesn't feel like an act of rebellion, choosing the color she likes over what Mitchell would like. Maybe it should have. Maybe it should have represented something to her, the rejection of his tastes over her own, or something like that.

  Maybe she should have seen it all as some sort of big battle to carve out a space for herself. But she doesn't.

  There's no carving space with Mitch. He's less like marble and more like hard iron. You might be able to beat it into shape—his father had, in the few places that mattered to the elder Queen—but you couldn't just push a chisel through.

  She didn't see it as any of those things. She'd picked because she was in a hurry, and because the lecture she was going to get later didn't matter as much as her daughter. Nothing did.

  Not the lecture, not how she'd feel about it. She'd have to learn how to ignore them. That was just how it would have to be. Ignore Mitchell altogether, and just focus on the baby.

  Anna was sure that eventually, he would come to her with more information on these so-called bridesmaids, and he'd tell her all about what he'd done. What he intended to keep right on doing. They'd reach some sort of understanding.

  It would be, for all intents and purposes, completely painless for both of them. Because the truth was that the marriage didn't matter, either. The only thing that mattered was Ava.

  The only thing that mattered was Ava, and nothing else—not 'the right thing,' not 'love,' not 'justice'—none of it was going to get in the way of raising her daughter.

  Anna slips a little quilt out of the chest in the corner. It's almost hard to notice it. It was a wonderful idea to put them around the house. They provide an excellent opportunity for her to feed Ava without embarrassing Mitch and having to endure another nagging lecture.

  She slips the blanket over her shoulder and unbuttons her blouse a little way, enough to free a breast, and a moment later Ava's drinking her fill.

  Anna lays back against the sofa, keeping Ava cradled against her as she feeds. A voice comes in from somewhere in the house. The entire ventilation system is connected, and the walls vary wildly in thickness.