Unleashed

by Lois Greiman

  “Do you know that guy?” he asked finally.

  “What?”

  “The man who’s staring at us like he might eat you,” Tony said. “Do you know him?”

  “Oh…” A couple dozen likely lies rushed through my brain, but at the last moment I reminded myself there was no reason for fabrications. “Yes.” I cleared my throat and loosened my fingers around the stem of my wine glass. “We, um…we dated a few times.” The memory of the other things we had done a few times made my hormones fire up like the flames of Mount Doom.

  “Is he the guy who made you so nervous about men?”

  I tore my mind from the libidinous memories. “What?”

  “Did he hurt you?” he asked. His voice was low and level now, his attention entirely focused on my face, and in that moment I thought I could really like him.

  “No,” I said, and managed to heave a fairly normal exhalation. “No. We just weren’t…we just weren’t right for one another.”

  He nodded but kept his gaze riveted on me, as if he could read my thoughts. As if he cared enough to try. “He’s still watching you.”

  “Oh?” My heart did a quick little jig in my chest, but I stifled the sophomoric thrill and shuffled my gaze to Rivera’s. Something snapped between us, almost yanking me to my feet, but I kept my lustful Manolos firmly planted on the floor, my plum sheath wrapped demurely around my thighs, and in a moment I managed to wrangle my gaze back to my date’s. “He’s, umm…” I did my best to keep from wriggling, though my bra felt too tight, my dress too long, my lungs too full. “He’s a cop. A…” I gazed intently at my plate. I had devoured every morsel of fish and the accompanying sauce but left the frilly edge of a kale leaf. I’m not an idiot. “A police officer. He’s probably just scouting for evildoers.”

  “Evildoers?”

  The muscles in my quads were starting to jump a little. “He’s very intense,” I said. “Very involved with his work.”

  “Is that why you broke up with him?”

  I could feel Rivera’s gaze burning into my solar plexus, but I ignored him as best I could. It was like trying to disregard a tsunami. “Let’s not worry about him,” I said. “I want to hear more about you.”

  Tony pulled his gaze from Rivera with as much effort as I had exerted. “What would you like to know?”

  “Is he still there?”

  “What?”

  I almost closed my eyes to my own neurotic obsessions. “Your um…your chef. At…” Holy fuck, was Rivera still there? Was he watching me? Was he remembering the night at his house, or in the office supply store, or on my kitchen table? “At the Florence…what was his name?”

  “Paulie?” He sounded dubious at best.

  “Yes. Paulie, is he working right now?” I had no idea what I was talking about.

  “He’s got the night off.”

  “Oh, well…” Was he on a date? Was she someone I knew? Was it that skank I had caught him with, who he swore was nothing more than a cover, when I knew—

  “Are you okay?” Tony asked.

  “What?” The strain of keeping my gaze front and center was starting to make my eyeballs quiver. “Of course. Yes, I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be? Why wouldn’t I be fine?”

  “He’s pretty good-looking.”

  “You think so?” I kept my attention glued to Tony’s face and wondered dismally if that was weird. Under normal circumstances, which I couldn’t even imagine, would I glance at Rivera now? Would I skim his lean jaw, his take-me eyes, his hotter-than-hell body? Would I give a little shrug and move on? Was that even a possibility?

  “Don’t you?” he asked.

  My hair, recently colored a becoming cocoa cinnamon, was beginning to sweat. “Don’t I what?”

  “Don’t you think he’s attractive?”

  “Oh. He’s, um…he’s all right,” I said, and almost winced. Sister Celeste, one of Holy Name’s more terrifying nuns, had often alluded to the fact that God could strike you dead for lying. Since He or She had not yet seen fit to knock me flat with a divine lightning bolt, I rather doubted the validity of the statement, but perhaps the sheer size of the lie was the determining factor. I braced myself for impact.

  “She’s pretty, too.”

  “She?” My eyeballs jerked toward the lobby. Rivera had his head bent to listen to his date, but his gaze was still locked on me like a heat-seeking missile. It took me several seconds to drag mine to the woman who stood beside him.

  “But that makes sense,” Tony said.

  She was facing away from me, but I could see enough. She was small and curvaceous, with glossy black tresses that tumbled halfway down her shapely back. I could have spanned her waist (or her throat) with my fingers. She wore a red print dress and a pair of kick-ass stilettos. I felt the hair rise at the back of my neck. Felt a growl roll up my throat.

  “…family,” Tony said, but I had no time to decipher what he was talking about. I was rising to my feet…slowly, body unbending one stiff muscle at a time. My attention was glued on Rivera’s latest skank. My hands had curled unconsciously around the neck of the bottle of twelve-year-old grape.

  And then she turned.

  Her gaze swept the restaurant and settled on me. Rivera spoke to her again. She scowled…and recognition dawned on me. Rosita. She was gorgeous, confident and powerful. She was also the dark lieutenant’s mother. I felt my body wilt like a tired leaf of kale.

  “You still okay?” Tony asked.

  I pulled my gaze from Rosita’s and sank back into my chair. “What?” Embarrassment flooded me. “Yes. Of course. Sorry. I was just going to…” What? What exactly had I been planning to do…with the prepubescent bottle of Château d’Yquem clutched in my trembling hand? I released it with an effort, uncurling my fingers one creaking digit at a time. “What were you saying?”

  “Do you know her?”

  “Who?”

  He stared at me as if he wasn’t entirely certain I was still human. “The woman with your ex.”

  “Oh her…Yes.” I laughed a little. Ha ha ha. Good God, I was nuts. “She’s, um…she’s his mother,” I said. Reaching for the just-surrendered bottle of vino, I sloshed half a cup into my glass and polished it off in one quick quaff before glancing to the right again. Rivera’s expression was as hard as Italian granite. His mother’s dark brows were drawn low over snapping jalapeno eyes. I chiseled my gaze away. Rivera could be scary as hell. But Rosita had been married to Senator Miguel, and being the wife of a cheating politician was bound to put a little power in a girl’s punch. Add that to the fact that she adored her only son with a Spanish woman’s zealous devotion and you had a recipe for a rumble. Not that I hadn’t had very good reason for breaking up with her baby boy, but still…“What are your other chefs’ names?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “The cooks at your other restaurants…what are their names?”

  “Why?”

  “We should go there!”

  “Now?”

  “Right now.”

  He didn’t move. “Are you afraid of him?”

  I would have had to be blind not to notice the spark of protectiveness in my date’s eyes. For a moment I was almost tempted to fan that enticing little ember and watch the fireworks. But that was the old Chrissy. The new Chrissy didn’t get a feral rush when men brawled like slavering wolves for her attentions. “No,” I said. “Not of him.”

  “Of her, then?”

  “Of course not,” I said, and wondered if I could take her if it came to fisticuffs. I had the advantage of size and comparative youth, but she was Latino and, if the stories were to be believed, the A seared into her cheating ex-husband’s left buttock was not from a branding accident. Rosita, it was said, had grown up in cattle country south of the border and still retained some relics from her vaquera days. “It’s just…” I refrained from squirming, though I could still feel her hot-metal gaze on the side of my face. “It’s simply a bit…uncomfortable.”

  “I can get ri
d of them.”

  I felt my attention being dragged toward the couple by the bar again, but Tony’s words sunk into my mind like a poisoned dart. I snapped my gaze to his. “What?”

  “You won’t have to worry about them anymore.”

  “I don’t want them dead!”

  “Dead!” He looked at me as if the last marble had just dropped out of my cranium and rolled under his feet.

  “Isn’t that…?” My stomach roiled. Classy seemed light years away suddenly. In fact, it looked as if normal was well out of reach. “That’s not what you meant, is it?”

  “I thought asking them to leave might be a little aggressive.”

  “Oh. Oh. Well…” I laughed. Sweating, I glanced toward the bar again. The Riveras were gone. My heart dropped. But I’m sure it wasn’t disappointment that curdled in my gut. Rallying, I cut off a tiny piece of kale and nibbled it to death. It tasted like bedbugs. “That won’t be necessary.”

  Not much was said for a while. Funny how suggesting your date is a murderer will slow down idle conversation.

  Complimentary desserts arrived. Orange sherbet flanked by spunky-looking spearmint leaves. I felt my sphincters relax marginally and turned my attention to the last course, but honestly, sherbet doesn’t get me too riled up. The old Chrissy has been known to say that it’s not dessert if you can lift it with one hand.

  “Is she the reason you two broke up?” Tony asked.

  “I beg your pardon?” I raised my attention from my pseudo dessert.

  “Families can make outside relationships pretty tough.”

  “That’s true,” I said, and remembered the time my brother Pete had glued my thumb and index finger to my forehead while I was asleep. The accosted digits didn’t form the perfect L he had hoped for, but turns out anytime your fingers are adhered to your forehead you look like kind of a loser.

  “Didn’t his mother approve of your line of work?”

  “What?”

  “I suppose it’s just my family that doesn’t think you should choose your own career.”

  “Do they disapprove of food in general or just chicken piccata?”

  He shrugged, looking sheepish. “They assumed I would join them in the family business.”

  “Oh.” I was devilishly tempted to search the restaurant for the Riveras again, but I resisted. Maybe they had chosen a table outside. “Families are a pain in the…” I paused, finding my classy inner self with some difficulty. “Families can be problematic.”

  “Tell me about your parents,” he said.

  I sampled another miniscule bite of sherbet and called my progenitors neither Neanderthals nor cretins…classiness achieved yet again. “I think one might call them blue-collar.”

  He nodded, watching me. “What does your father do?”

  “He’s retired now,” I said.

  “But he still pressures you? Still worries that you’re about to spill trade secrets and tilt the known universe into chaos?”

  I raised my brows at him. “You have trade secrets?”

  “No. Believe me. My family are the worst business people, possibly the worst people in the world. If they had secrets no one would want them.” His tone was rife with frustration, making me wonder if his family might be even worse than mine. But then I remembered the running feud that had existed between Dad and the Carusos, who lived in the little bungalow on the corner of Thorwood Street. Their Chihuahua, Fritzy, had spent most of his surprisingly long life barking at anything that moved and most things that didn’t. Dad, who liked to relax with a beer and the Bears of a Sunday, had taken to shooting bottle rockets in Fritzy’s general direction, escalating the feud and setting a number of inanimate objects ablaze. So, unless Mr. Amato had been raised by rabid badgers, chances were good I still had him beat.

  “Generally, I don’t think Dad is aware of my existence,” I said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The greater regret is that I can’t say the same about Mom.” I took another bite of orange-flavored nothing.

  “What does she do?”

  “Pries, spies, denies.” I laughed and chanced a glance to the right. The Riveras were still out of my line of vision. I felt a muscle between my shoulder blades relax marginally.

  “And your brothers?”

  “The idiot three.” Who always managed to seem like three dozen.

  “I got you beat there.”

  “Not in psychological damage, I’m sure.”

  “I hear it’s therapeutic to talk about it.”

  “You’d have to have a comfy couch and a few hundred billable hours to clear up that mess,” I admitted.

  He smiled. It wasn’t knock-your-socks-off charming, but it could certainly cause a girl to throw a shoe every now and again. “They’ve got to be better than mine.”

  “Are you a wagering man, Mr. Amato?”

  He chuckled. “What’d they do?”

  I took a sip of wine and considered remaining discerningly reticent, but griping about my family had been a favored form of entertainment ever since the Stupids had put catnip in my diaper and sent me out to play with our neighbor’s overly aggressive Siamese. “I divide their sins into three categories: food, friends, and farm animals.”

  “Food?”

  I fiddled with the stem of my glass. “They were especially fond of placing items in my meals that were not necessarily meant for human consumption.”

  He stared at me. “Friends?”

  I squirmed a little, then drank. Memories of my brothers’ fucktard shenanigans still made me uncomfortable, which, in McMullen speak meant I often wanted to remove someone’s spleen with a spoon. “When I was in tenth grade, Gilbert Finley asked me to the prom. He was the quarterback for the Fighting Saxons. I was ecstatic. I didn’t think he even knew my name.”

  “And?”

  “And he didn’t. Turns out, all drunken Irishmen sound alike.”

  He thought for a second, then shook his head. “It was your brother? Pretending to be Finley?”

  “One of Michael’s many clever jokes,” I said, and drank again.

  “Do they still live in the Chicago area?”

  “Nowhere else will have them.”

  “Thus your move halfway across the country.” His voice was thoughtful.

  I stared at him. “Where does your family live?” I asked.

  His eyes were very steady. “Boston.”

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “Shanghai would be better.”

  “To distance…” I said, and raised my glass.

  “And pretending we were orphaned at a young age,” he added, and we drank in companionable unison.

  Chapter 4

  Confucius say, Do unto others before they fully conscious.

  —Michael McMullen, advice he took to heart with eye-jabbing regularity

  By the time we had finished off the Château d’Yquem, I liked Tony quite a lot. He was quiet and thoughtful and intelligent. True, he didn’t make my hands shake and my endocrine system fire up like roman candles, but wasn’t that just what I was looking for? A man who was attractive but not mind-boggling. A man who had a job but didn’t take it home with him. A man who was self-aware enough to realize he didn’t have all the answers.

  Distracted by this Renaissance man, I had almost forgotten about Rivera by the time I made a beeline for the ladies’ room. Maybe I straightened my spine a notch and skimmed the tables hidden behind the pillars, and perhaps I fluffed my hair a little at my reflection as I passed the windows that lined the hallway to the restroom. But anyone with a droplet of estrogen would have responded similarly when a former beau was in the vicinity. It didn’t mean a thing. And anyway, the Riveras were nowhere in sight. I might have surreptitiously checked again. And again. Still nothing. Good. Excellent, I thought. They were long gone. Angrily grateful, I turned into the posh powder room, chose a marble-sided stall, and relieved myself.

  It took me a second to wrestle my sheath back into position. One snazzy slingb
ack torqued a little as I approached the sinks, making me question the wisdom of heels. The old Chrissy preferred to be barefoot. Shoes, after all, are a pain in the ass, but so are men, and thus far they haven’t gone the way of the dodo bird. I was still mulling over that little truism as I turned on the water and soaped up my hands.

  “What’s his name?”

  I squawked at the sound of the low-timbred voice and jerked my gaze to the mirror above the sink.

  Lieutenant Jack Rivera stood not four feet behind me. He was casually resting one lean shoulder against the wall beside the wooden door. But he still looked dark, sinister, and as sexy as hell. If…you know…hell was sexy.

  “Did I…? Is this…?” I glanced to the left, suspicious of my surroundings. It wouldn’t be the first time I had stumbled into the wrong restroom after imbibing a teaspoon of alcohol. But there was nary a urinal in sight. I narrowed my eyes but managed to conjure up my classiest tone. “To what do I owe this pleasure, Mr. Riddler?” Mispronouncing his name had been a favorite hobby of the old Chrissy. Even New Chrissy enjoyed it more than can be understood by those whose fingers have not been superglued to their foreheads.

  “He’s not your usual rebound type.”

  I straightened, hands dripping. “I don’t believe I need to inform you that it’s against the law in the state of California for a man to enter a woman’s restroom.”

  “He probably graduated from high school three or four years ago already.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was referring to. Possibly the fact that I had once, after a particularly turbulent breakup, dated a gentleman who was not technically old enough to order a beer. “Los Angeles County executive order C-27-12.” I was making shit up, but the sight of him standing there cocky and know-it-all pushed all my crazy buttons. “You should leave before I call law enforcement.”

  A corner of his mouth quirked up. “You must be more desperate than I realized.”

  “Well…” I returned to my hand washing. My expression, I was thrilled to see, was calm, but my knees felt a little noodly, and I was entirely unsure what the hell I was going to do after I’d scrubbed the skin from my knuckles. “Curfew comes so early for my usual type, and there was a special on college kids.” I shrugged. “They eat a lot, but they’ve got such excellent endurance.”