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Alec was only marginally paying attention to Cleo until the color drained from her face as if she’d sprung a leak. Her eyes flickered up. She caught him looking and spun her chair away almost fast enough to mask her panic.
“Hang on a sec,” he said into the phone. He held the receiver against his chest to muffle any protests and listened hard.
Cleo’s voice dropped, but he still caught “lawyer.” It was said with the inflection people used when the word was preceded by “have they called a.”
His reporter’s intuition went off like a tsunami siren. “Listen,” he said into his phone. “I’ll have to call you back.” Before his contact had time to object, he hung up.
“Call Danny Bonner,” Cleo said as he walked around the desk. When he reached her, she spun back around to face her desk. “Call him anyway and tell him to get down there.”
Alec followed her around so he could see her from the side.
She swung her chair toward the window, lifting the cord over her head so she wouldn’t get wrapped up in it. “Tell him I told you to call.”
He walked around to see her face, but she swiveled her chair as he moved, keeping him at her back.
“Promise?” she said into the phone.
He grabbed the back of her chair and gave it an extra spin. Unprepared, she came around to face him.
“I’ve gotta go, but I’ll call you in an hour to get an update. Bye.”
Apparently, she didn’t wait for other people’s parting words any more than he did because she pushed off with her foot to continue the spin. When it came into reach, she dropped the receiver onto its base. She stopped the chair when she faced her computer screen and tapped a shortcut on the desktop. Reuters’ home page blossomed on the screen. She started drilling down into a story about the latest pollution-ending legislation, a story he was sure appealed to her refined taste but wasn’t going to fly at The Word.
He stepped back around the desk, sat in his chair, and picked up his pen. Twirling it with his fingers like it was a baton, he asked, “Who was that?”
“A friend.”
“A friend in need of a lawyer?”
She didn’t lift her eyes from the screen. “It happens.”
“Does this friend happen to be in Las Vegas?”
She looked at him over the top of her glasses. “I have friends in other places, you know.”
“I’m sure you do.” He tapped the pen on his day planner in a 3/4 rhythm. “Is this one in Vegas?”
“Don’t you have a Bigfoot story or something to write?”
He smirked. “I had my doubts, but this partnership just might work out.”
Her brow furrowed. “What partnership? You’re showing me the ropes. That’s not a partnership.”
“No?”
“No.” She turned back to the computer.
He wasn’t fooled. “You don’t see anybody else on this floor sharing an office, do you? A desk?” He hiked his eyebrows. “Looks like a partnership to me.”
“And what makes you think a partnership between us would work anyway?” She clicked her mouse twice, her eyes glued to the screen, but he wasn’t buying her disinterest.
“Because you don’t like to lie. You won’t even tell me your friend’s not in Vegas―”
Her gaze was hot on him. “You think I can’t lie? You think I got that story on border corruption by politely asking people to tell me what they knew? You think―”
He held up his hand to stop her. “I didn’t say you couldn’t lie. I suspect you’re very good at it when you want to be. What I said was you don’t like to.” He leaned back in his chair, holding the ends of the pen as if it were corn on the cob. “That can be a real handicap in this business. I, on the other hand, lie like a rug.” He leaned forward over the desk. “A very cheap rug.” And then he flashed his most charming grin at her. “You need me.”
“Puh-lease.” She stood and set her glasses on the desk. “I have to go to the ladies’ room now to throw up.”
“Take your time.” He waved goodbye. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
She muttered something that sounded like, “Lucky me.”
Nothing, he decided, would ever take precedence over watching Cleo walk away when she was annoyed. That extra swing in her hip seemed to say ignore the man behind the curtain; look here. She could deny it until they served ice cream cones in hell—and maybe it wasn’t something she did consciously—but her lips weren’t the only part of her body trying to distract him from whatever was going on.
So he’d look, but he wouldn’t forget the man behind the curtain either.
When the door closed behind her, he stared sightlessly for a minute at his day planner. Then he jotted down everything he remembered about her conversation and doodled dramatic question marks around the name Danny Bonner. Instincts a lot less honed than his could figure out she had valuable contacts in Vegas, so why was she so resistant to sharing?
Well, duh. She was still caught up in that uber-competitive mainstream media crap where you had to guard against the guy at the next desk. It wasn’t like that at The Word. Even people who disliked each other became team players when the rest of the profession ridiculed and dismissed them. Cleo was still fighting her fall from grace. Still relating to where she came from instead of where she was. She thought she had to protect her sources or risk him stealing a killer story.
She wouldn’t give up that mentality without a fight. If he wanted a crack at her connections, he’d have to glue himself to her backside.
Not that that sounded like a bad idea.
He was contemplating the backside in question when Cleo’s phone rang again. Without thinking twice, he reached across the desk and answered it. “Yup.”
Silence. Then a hesitant, high-pitched voice. “Is Cleo there?”
“She’s in the loo.” Everyone at The Word adopted Nigel’s Britishism. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
He heard a shaky breath drawn. “She told me to call Danny, but I can’t find his number.”
Hearing the name Cleo had just spoken not ten minutes earlier, he fought to keep his excitement from leaking into his voice. “Maybe I can help.” He pulled the phone onto his half of the desk, so the cord wasn’t stretched across three counties, and pulled up DexKnows on his laptop. “Would this be Danny Bonner?” he asked, checking the day planner where he’d jotted the key items from Cleo’s earlier call.
“Yes.” The voice was still pitched high, but the threat of tears seemed to have receded a bit.
“What city are we looking in?”
“Las Vegas.”
Bingo.
“I’m Alec, by the way,” he said while he filled in the search engine blanks.
“Hi, Alec.” The mystery caller’s voice was getting steadier. She sounded sweet. And young. As if she should have an adult looking after her.
He waited a few seconds then asked, “And what do I call you?”
“I’m Jada.”
“Hi, Jada. So you live in Vegas?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Jada, I just looked up Danny Bonner online. The only phone number is for a lawyer. Is that what you’re looking for?”
“Oh, yes. That’s it. There’s a pen here somewhere. Annaliese always keeps one here. She’s got this tether thingy . . .”
He caught his breath. This kept getting better and better. “So you know Annaliese too?” Jada sounded so young, but she called Annaliese by name, so she probably wasn’t Annaliese’s daughter. He’d had only one phone conversation with Annaliese, but it had been enough to make the idea of her in the role of mother kind of scary. But if Jada wasn’t her daughter . . .? He dismissed that question, relegating it far down the list of things he needed to know at that particular moment. “How’s Annaliese doing?”
“She’s in jail.”
He could hear tears threatening again. He wanted to kick himself for upsetting her, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “In jail? Why?”
In her soft, sweet voice, she said, “Because Sebastian’s dead.”
Every hair on his body rose. He’d thought Cleo might have some worthwhile Vegas contacts. He’d never imagined she might know someone in the thick of things.
“What the hell!” Cleo’s hands were balled on her hips. She glared at him so hard he expected deadly rays to shoot from her eyes.
He held out the receiver. “Your phone rang.”
Three long strides and she snatched the phone from his hand. “You son of a bitch.”
He didn’t kid himself; just because the words were softly spoken, it didn’t mean she wasn’t ready to gut him like a fish with a belly full of high-priced caviar.
He turned his laptop, so she could see Danny Bonner’s phone number. Then, keeping the desk between them as much as possible, he headed for Nigel’s office to talk about travel expenses.
~***~
Cleo let Alec take her carry-on from her hand to stow it in the overhead beside his. She was tempted to make him wrestle it away from her, but it served no purpose except to display her petulance. Once the bag was stowed, he slid into the middle seat, leaving her the one on the aisle.
As if going to Nigel behind her back and pitching the idea of a trip to Las Vegas wasn’t bad enough, now he was telling her where to sit on the plane? She should never have let him get in front of her as they were boarding. Rookie mistake.
She sat in the aisle seat to keep from creating a pile-up in the aisle. “What if I don’t want the aisle seat?”
“You should never sit in the window seat,” he said as though he was the voice of reason. He pulled the safety sheet out of the pouch in front of him.
“Why not?” Her belligerent tone contrasted sharply with his.
He looked up, a surprised expression on his face. “How often do you fly and you don’t know the safest seats on a plane?”
He wasn’t trapping her with that. “Unless you can predict what kind of accident the plane is going to have, there is no safest seat.”
“That’s true. If you’re talking about mid-air accidents. But if the plane’s on the ground and there’s, oh, say, a fire and you have to evacuate, your best bet is to be within four rows of an exit. And being on the aisle gives you an extra edge.”
Well, la-de-da. Except what he said made sense. And they were two rows from an emergency exit. So he was watching out for her. In the most obnoxious way imaginable, but still . . . She hated him for it. And it wasn’t like he was doing it because he was a gentleman. He was doing it because she had contacts he wanted to exploit.
She pulled out the book she’d stuck in her purse, so she wouldn’t have to talk to him, and pretended to read.
Las Vegas.
Home Sweet Home.
She’d never imagined when she got up that morning she’d have three hours’ notice to pack and get to the airport for a flight home. She wished she’d been able to talk to Jada again, but every time she’d tried, the call had gone to voicemail. That didn’t have to be a bad sign. And nothing had broken yet on the wire about an arrest, so she buried her anxiety about her mother under her fury at Alec. As a distraction, it worked well.
Not that she was going to thank him any time soon.
Instead, she pretended to read her book and invented imaginative ways to kill him, since shooting would be too quick and painless. Not to mention that pesky three-day waiting period to get a gun.
Who did he think he was, answering her phone and pumping people about her private life? That was just plain offensive.
Maybe she’d been a little premature, dismissing shooting him. She could always start with his extremities and work her way in. And surely she knew someone in Vegas who would loan her a gun.
Okay, so if she’d been in his shoes, suspecting a colleague of holding out on her and a similar opportunity came along, she’d probably have done the same thing.
But the way he’d answered her phone at her apartment? He’d stepped over the line there. Infringed on her personal space. Revealed his existence to her mother.
“So you grew up in Vegas,” Alec said, interrupting her train of thought.
“Yup.” Would he leave her alone if she kept her answers short?
“Do you still have much family there?”
“What makes you think I have any there?”
“Because Annaliese said you were related.”
Was nothing sacred? “Okay, yes, we’re related. But don’t let that confuse you. This isn’t a case of―” she almost said like mother, like daughter, but she wasn’t ready to go there yet. “Just because we’re related doesn’t mean we’re alike.”
He cast her a sideways look. Of course, he’d caught her near misstep. He was trained to listen for them. But it wasn’t big enough for him to latch onto. “Yeah, like that’s a big surprise,” he said dryly. “It’s too bad, though. You could stand to loosen up a little.”
The laser burn she tried to sear into his skin with her narrow-eyed glare didn’t take. “Maybe I just don’t want to ‘loosen up’ with you.”
His eyes widened in an expression of such disbelief she had to bite her lower lip to keep from laughing. What an ego.
“Any other relatives you’re hiding under the carpet?”
“Nope. Just Annaliese,” she said, then mentally kicked herself. She didn’t want him to even wonder if Annaliese was her mother. “And my mom.” There. Two separate people.
Annaliese.
And her mom.
Should she come up with a name for her fictional mother? Something normal. Blasé. Boring even.
Mary. Mary Morgan. There. She was ready if he asked. A quick rush of relief swept through her. Thank God, she’d dropped her mother’s last name when she went off to college.
It probably wouldn’t have occurred to her, but it was practically a family tradition. Ann Carpenter had left behind a family she never wanted to see again and become Annaliese Carson the second she’d arrived in Las Vegas at eighteen, so Cleo hadn’t seen a problem with doing the same. Except she hadn’t wanted to cut all ties with her mother. Only the publicly traceable ones.
So she’d simplified her middle name from Morganna—what normal person named their child after the evil witch of Arthurian legend?—to Morgan, hoping that would make it easier to break the news to her mother. She was just grateful her middle name had made the transition easy. According to Annaliese, Leia—of Star Wars fame—had been a serious contender. Hell, she was probably lucky her first name wasn’t Princess.
As it turned out, Annaliese had merely shrugged and said, “It’s not like Carson is a family name with some venerable history.”
“Did you call your mom to tell them you were coming to town?” Alec asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Good question. Why not? “Because she’s traveling.” Whew. She’d dodged that bullet. Now he couldn’t ask to meet Mary Morgan. “With her new husband. They’re on their honeymoon.” Where had that come from?
“Oh.”
She thought he was done until he asked, “Where?”
“Where what?”
“Where is she honeymooning?”
“Okinawa.” Okinawa? Maybe she should write fiction. Oh, right—she soon would be. She worked at a tabloid now.
She hoped he wouldn’t ask about Okinawa because, except that it was an island somewhere near Japan, she knew Jack Squat about it. Hm. It might even be part of Japan. She wasn’t sure.
“That should be interesting,” Alec said.
“Yes, it is. She sent me a postcard.” If he kept asking questions, she really might have to kill him.
Apaches used to stake out their enemies in the desert, deny them water, and let the sun bake them. At least, she thought they did. Maybe that was only in old westerns. Still, it wasn’t a bad idea. Drive outside Vegas in pretty much any direction and you’d find miles and miles of empty desert going to waste. Perfect for a little Apache torture reenactment.
Halfway into the flight, Alec said, “Research must be a real pain as slow as you read.”
“What?”
He pointed at the book propped in her lap. “You’ve only turned one page since we took off.”
She glared at him.
He held up his hands, his palms toward her. “Just an observation.”
Cleo pointedly turned her attention to the book. She turned the page.
Wasn’t there something about covering his half-naked body—make that mostly naked body—with honey, so ants would come to the picnic? That might be some Hollywood notion too, but honey was easy to come by. Could she buy ants as well, or would she have to find an anthill before she staked him out?
Tough logistics.
“You know,” she said, “this whole expedition is a wild goose chase. Sebastian drowned in his bathtub. It’s a big tub. It would be easy to drink too much and just . . .” She made a swooping gesture with her hand, mimicking someone sliding underwater.
“You’ve seen his tub?”
She didn’t like his tone. It was a cross between excited teenager about to get laid for the first time and offended lover.
“I worked in housekeeping at the hotel when I was a teenager. I’ve seen all the tubs.” And scrubbed them all too. Even if it was murder—which she was sure the police would soon figure out it wasn’t—there were lots of people more likely to kill Sebastian than Annaliese was. “He was in the process of getting a divorce, you know.”
“I don’t suppose you know anything about his current wife,” Alec asked.
Now why had she brought up the divorce? “Nothing worth much. I haven’t seen Liz since high school.”
“You went to high school with her?”
Now he sounded giddy. “Don’t get excited. It was a big school, and we didn’t exactly run in the same crowd.”
“But you were aware of her,” he said as though he wouldn’t allow any other answer.
“Of course, I was aware of her. She was one of the popular girls.”
“You weren’t one of the popular girls?” He looked skeptical.
She snorted. “Not hardly.” She’d never been Liz’s social equal. She had, in fact, worked hard to stay off the popular kids’ radar because they could be mean, and with a mother like hers, she was too vulnerable to taunting. Her anonymity had nearly come to an end her junior year, however, when she and Liz had both been on the yearbook staff. Away from the pack of popular girls, Liz had seemed . . . well, human. They might even have become friends if she hadn’t invited Cleo to her birthday party.
Part of her had wanted to go, but a bigger part had been afraid of ending up as the butt of some joke. On too many occasions, she’d seen girls act nice only to become backstabbing bitches hours—sometimes minutes—later. It was a rule of the jungle: don’t come to the popular crowd’s attention. She had even coined a phrase to describe them: an ambush of mean girls.
After Cleo’s nonappearance at her party, Liz had cold-shouldered her. Maybe she’d hurt Liz’s feelings by not going. She’d felt a little guilty about that, but mostly, she’d been relieved. The punishment could have been so much worse.
“What do you remember about Liz?” Alec asked.
Yeah, like she was going to give him details. “Just what everyone knew. She was a cheerleader. Homecoming queen. And I think she was voted biggest flirt or something our senior year.”
“Would she remember you?”
She wanted to say, “How would you remember someone you didn’t know existed?” but if Alec did somehow get a chance to talk to Liz, he would certainly mention her now that he knew about their connection. The last thing she wanted was for him to start wondering if she’d told him any other lies. So she said, “Doubtful. But it won’t be worth any extra points if she does.”
The stewardess’s voice came over the intercom, informing them they’d be landing soon. As the book fell closed on her lap, the cover registered on Cleo’s consciousness.
The woman on the front clutching a sheet to her shapely form accurately pegged the book as a beach read. A sexy, sultry, lighthearted, and yes, trashy romance novel. Cleo had found it promising when she’d started it the week before, but she could all too clearly imagine Alec twisting her choice of reading material into some sleazy story idea for The Word. Legal would undoubtedly force him to camouflage her identity, but he’d probably tell everyone they worked with that she’d inspired the story.
Luck was with her, though. He was making a note to himself about something or other on his iPad and missed it entirely. She shoved the book deep into her bag, then glanced worriedly at him. Could the note have something to do with her? She wouldn’t put it past him to do something like pumping her teachers to find out if she was slutty in high school.
If that was what he planned, he’d be disappointed. Even Sin City had reactionaries. Like the group she’d hung around with who’d all taken the pledge to abstain from sex until marriage. How many of them made it?
In her case, the pledge had delayed the inevitable, but that was good enough. She’d managed to hang on to not just her virginity until she was mature enough to handle sex but to her sanity as well, both of which had been under constant assault living with Annaliese.
At least one other in their group hadn’t made it to his wedding night. Robbie Jorgenson—the one who’d initiated the idea, the one the others followed—had fallen from grace a mere three months later. But then you couldn’t expect an abstinence pledge to do the work meant for a chastity belt. Well intentioned or not, he’d had all the hormones every teenage boy had, bouncing around like free radicals.
He’d been so embarrassed when Cleo caught him coming out of her mother’s room, but he wasn’t half as embarrassed as she’d been. He had all those raging hormones for an excuse, but who had to worry her mother might seduce her study date if she was late getting home?
Cleo sighed. No one who knew Annaliese was her mother would be surprised the girl who’d taken a virginity pledge in high school would also wear a red slut suit on the first day of a new job. They’d just figure Annaliese’s lifestyle had screwed up her daughter’s thinking.
And she really didn’t want to know what Alec would make of the mess of contradictions that was her sex life.