| |
It was dark when they left El Dorado. Or as dark as it ever got on the Strip. Silence reigned as Alec drove them back to Annaliese’s condo. As much as he enjoyed needling Cleo, he was pretty sure she was out of patience, and anything he said would get his head taken off and handed to him on a silver platter. Or maybe tin. He probably didn’t rate silver.
The few words she spoke ensured he didn’t miss any turns. Mostly, she stared out the passenger window. He figured she was sulking about how he and Annaliese had double teamed her into staying in Vegas. Annaliese’s insistence that they both stay at the condo was probably a major contributor as well.
He pulled into a visitor’s slot and killed the engine, but before he could get out, Cleo turned toward him. Whatever it was, it was probably best to let her say her piece, so he waited.
After several long moments, she asked, “Why didn’t you tell Willa I work for The Word?”
He’d expected something more pertinent to their situation. Ground rules. A lecture on guest etiquette. Not a question about what he had or hadn’t said to a woman he’d all but forgotten two seconds after she’d left his sight.
“I don’t know. I wanted to. Boy, did I want to. And I was going to. You need to get over being embarrassed about it. But the way you looked . . . Like I should offer you a last cigarette and a blindfold.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t do it.”
He watched her profile. She seemed to roll his answer around in her mind. After a few seconds, her lips tightened and she nodded as though to herself.
“Just don’t think I owe you something because you didn’t rat me out.” She pushed her door open and got out.
He had a feeling what she really meant was “something like sex,” but he didn’t want to have that conversation, afraid he’d end up feeling like even more of a sex-crazed slime ball than she’d already implied he was. And somehow, this was all because he hadn’t been an ass and outted her.
~***~
Cleo grabbed her bags from the trunk and led the way to the front door. She let them in with the key Annaliese had given her. Inside, she punched a code into the security pad by the door, then hung the key on one of the three brass hooks next to it.
Alec followed her through the entry and down a short hall. The kitchen was straight ahead, but she took a left through a wide arch into the main living area before they reached it. Under high ceilings, the parquet floor gave way to plush white carpeting, defining the boundary between the dining room and the living room. The furniture was good quality and in neutral tones except for a few accent pieces in bright gem tones of turquoise, ruby, and sapphire. In the daytime, everything would be brightly illuminated by the desert sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling glass comprising half of the far wall. To the right, an open stairway led to a banistered upper floor.
The feeling that she was forgetting something nagged at her as she led the way to the guest room off the left side of the living room. Something important. She was so tired and emotionally wrung out from worrying about her mother all day, it didn’t come into focus until she set her bags at the foot of the bed and let her gaze sweep the room.
Good. Nothing appeared to have been added since she was there last. No pictures of her that might clue Alec in to things she’d rather he didn’t know. Alec hadn’t followed her. She went to the door and saw him gazing around the living room.
Goosebumps rose on her arms. Behind him on the wall was a grouping of photographs, at least three of which showed her at different stages of growing up. All he had to do was turn around and he’d see them.
“Do you mind? It’s been a long day and I’m tired.” Figuring out ways to do someone in turns out to be exhausting work. Who would have guessed? “If you really need one, I’ll arrange a guided tour in the morning.”
“This isn’t quite what I expected,” he said.
“I know. An interior decorator did this room.” She didn’t mention the decorator’s services had been a gift from Sebastian, and one that had been self-serving because the decorator was an attractive woman Sebastian had wanted to bed.
Cleo still appreciated the results. Both Annaliese and Jada were prone to the dramatic, as Alec would soon discover.
“That would explain it,” he said.
His bag in hand, he ambled toward her. Relieved to get him out of the danger zone, she stood back from the door to let him enter the guest bedroom.
This room, sadly, had not been exposed to the decorator’s taste. Black lacquer furniture dominated the room. The cover on the queen bed was black satin with furry white throw pillows. Black, faux animal pelt throw rugs lay on either side of the bed to protect bare feet from the chill of the tile floor. In front of more floor-to-ceiling windows that added a light, airy feel in the daytime sat a black plush loveseat.
Alec dropped his beat-up travel bag in front of the bureau. “This is more what I expected.”
“That’s because Annaliese and Jada did this room.” If she wasn’t so tired, she’d be embarrassed.
She should reconnoiter the living room now, but her sluggish brain couldn’t come up with an excuse that would keep him from following her.
“She’s a force of nature, isn’t she?” Alec asked.
“Annaliese?” Cleo asked. As though another possibility existed. She opened her carry-on bag on the bed and started pawing through her essentials. Maybe if she waited until he was settled in she could . . .
“Yeah.”
“She’s used to getting her way,” Cleo said.
He opened the bureau drawer and put something from his bag inside. She refused to watch too closely, afraid it was his underwear. Even more afraid of knowing if he was a boxers or briefs man.
“Don’t bother unpacking. We’re not staying that long.” She pulled out her cosmetics bag and headed for the guest bathroom.
Using the bureau as a ledge, he rested against it, his legs stretched out in front of him. His scowl made a lie of his relaxed posture.
Here it comes.
“We’re staying until I’m sure there’s no story,” he said as though he were being reasonable.
“Funny. I would have sworn you heard what Annaliese said.” She glanced into the mirror as she set her cosmetics bag in the bathroom they’d be sharing. On seeing her refection, she heard frown lines in her mother’s voice. She forced her face to relax. “You were sitting right beside me when she said it. There is no story.”
“Maybe it’s not the story we were hoping for, but Koblect’s death is still a story,” he said from the other room. “We won’t know how big a story until the coroner’s report comes back. We’re staying until then.”
“No, we’re not.”
He hadn’t figured out yet that Annaliese was her mother, but if they stayed, he would. She opened a jar of face cream, dabbed some on her fingers, and swabbed it over her face to remove her makeup.
“Do you want to explain to Nigel why he shelled out full-price airfare but we’re not staying long enough to know the likely cause of death?”
“The likely cause? That would be drowning in his tub. Did you not hear that either?”
“Maybe that’s the cause,” he said. “That’s why coroners investigate. Because without a witness, you don’t actually know. And sometimes not even then.”
He was right but it didn’t stop her from wanting to find a ten-story window to throw him out of.
“Good lord. What are you doing, woman?”
She looked up to find him leaning against the doorjamb, a look somewhere between confusion and disgust on his face.
“Moisturizing. This is a desert, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“You look slippery.”
She smoothed the moisturizer into her skin and assessed herself in the mirror. It was supposed to make her skin look like a “smooth canvas.” She’d settle for “dewy.” She wasn’t sure she’d gotten either, but at least she wouldn’t have crow’s feet at thirty.
“You do know I’m not sharing that bed with you.” She flipped the bathroom light off and returned to the bed, digging deeper into her bag, looking for her nightgown.
“Then I hope you’re comfortable on the couch.”
She glared at him. “You really are no gentleman.”
“I thought we’d settled that. Look, Annaliese is right. We’re mature enough to share a bed. Unless you’re afraid I’ll find out you snore.”
“I don’t snore.” Where in the hell is that nightgown? The garment in question was baby blue. She fixed the color in her mind’s eye and started again from the top layer. “I don’t want to share a bed with you because you men can’t share a bed without testing the boundaries, and I don’t want to spend the night fighting you off.”
“You know, if I didn’t have a healthy ego, I’d think you don’t want to have sex with me.”
She stopped digging and looked him straight in the eye. “I don’t want to have sex with you.”
Then it happened. Right before her eyes, the smarmy, childish Alec who wrote for a tabloid and thought water pistol fights were great fun was gone as if he’d disappeared in a stage magician’s cloud of smoke, and the intelligent, principled man who’d sat in her apartment explaining how they should be too mature for hurtful gossip stood there. Oh, he still looked like smarmy Alec. He was as tall and as attractive as smarmy Alec, but the demon light was gone from his eyes.
“Look”—even his voice was softer—“nothing’s going to happen in this bed you don’t want, okay? You won’t have to fight me off to keep your virtue intact. But I’m only human. If you stay on your side, I’ll stay on mine.”
This Alec she could trust. He’d keep his word. She was tempted to crawl into the bed next to him. Then she realized, with this Alec on the other side of the bed, she wasn’t sure she could trust herself.
She closed her carry-on and turned her attention to the larger bag. “What side of the bed do you sleep on?” she asked, doing a mental coin toss. If he slept on the right side, she’d take it as a sign to sleep on the couch. If he slept on the left, well . . . She wasn’t ready to commit to that alternative.
“The one near the door.”
Damn. “So the left side.”
“If that’s the one near the door.”
“So if the bed were on that wall”—she pointed—“you’d want the right side.”
“If that’s the one near the door.”
Was he serious? “No one picks their side of the bed by which side is closest to the door.”
“I do.”
“Is it so you can make a fast getaway in the morning?” She started digging again, looking for that flash of powder blue. “Or is it some macho thing? Like the way you guys never want your back to the room in a restaurant, so you can see danger coming?”
He shrugged. “I always sleep near the door. It’s more convenient.”
Did she look particularly gullible tonight? Convenience would be sleeping on the side near the bathroom. “It’s a guy thing, isn’t it? You think if someone breaks in intent on rape, pillage, and plunder, you need to be between me and the door, so you can protect me, because I’m a woman. Really, Alec, that’s ludicrous. Even if I needed protecting, what are the odds of that actually happening?”
A lot better than the odds she’d come to Vegas with a nightgown apparently.
She stared into her bag as though it would suddenly materialize. It didn’t. She’d have to borrow one. Maybe Jada had something that didn’t look like it came from Fredrick’s of Hollywood or Dominatrix R Us.
“Where are you going?”
She stopped and looked at him, having one of those moments when you walk into a room and can’t remember what you wanted there. Lord, she was tired. She started to walk back toward the bed, but the sight of her bag reminded her she hadn’t packed a nightgown. She pivoted.
“Where’re you going?” he asked again.
“I need to borrow something from Annaliese.”
“Seriously?” He looked pointedly at the bags on the bed. “There’s something you didn’t pack?”
She sighed. Why did she even try to keep secrets from him? Not that this was especially newsworthy. As long as she managed to keep him from figuring out the secrets that mattered, this was nothing. “I forgot my nightgown.”
His laughter followed her out of the room. She climbed the stairs to the room Annaliese and Jada shared.
The red and black décor of their bedroom wouldn’t have been out of place in an expensive bordello. The bed with its gauzy red canopy dominated the room and seemed to send the message that the sex you’d have there would be like nothing you’d ever have anywhere else. This was only reinforced by the two movie-poster-sized prints Annaliese had hung on the far wall.
Black-and-white studies of the female form, half in shadow, half in light, the sleek lines and gentle curves were sensual without being vulgar. Looking at them, it was no mystery why men—and some women—found female bodies seductive.
And they were the last thing she needed to see with what waited downstairs.
Forcing herself into a woman-on-a-mission mindset, she opened the walk-in closet’s mirrored doors.
She’d lived in apartments not much bigger than this closet. Annaliese’s things were on the right; Jada’s on the left. Feeling obliged to at least check her mother’s first, Cleo ruffled through her lingerie.
Jammies with feet were too much to hope for. She picked up a sheer black teddy trimmed in feathers.
Holy hell. She bet Annaliese had black heels that would complete the outfit.
If she wanted to seduce Alec, this was what she would wear. Except maybe in red.
Not that she wanted to seduce him.
Her bitchiness on this trip wasn’t entirely about her concern for Annaliese. Alec was too sexy to be nice to. Yes, she was pissed at him for taking her personal connections to Nigel and getting him to send them to Vegas together, but she’d be over that if she allowed herself to be.
Mostly her bitchiness was about staving off the sexual fantasies she’d stupidly indulged in.
It was one thing to fantasize about him in the privacy of her shower or even in the office, but if she was going to be around him nonstop for days on end, she couldn’t entertain lustful thoughts or she’d find herself jumping his bones whether he wanted her to or not.
Not that she had any reason to think he’d object. Any guy who called that many women “babe” had to be a man-whore.
No, she was the one who’d wake up with regrets. Her work life would be untenable. Of course, it already was.
That didn’t stop her from imagining the look on his face if she walked into the guest room dressed like a seductress. She could picture his eyes going dark and sultry, his tongue licking his lips.
Knock it off, she told herself as she put the teddy back and turned toward Jada’s side of the closet.
Cleo had first met Jada when she’d come home from college on Thanksgiving break. At first, she’d been stunned that her mother appeared to be switching teams, but as Cleo had gotten to know Jada, it became easy to accept them as lovers.
People might consider Jada soft in the head, but she was also soft in the heart for everything from helpless animals to homeless people. She’d give anyone who asked not just the shirt off her back but the shoes off her feet and anything in between they needed. So while Cleo felt a little presumptuous borrowing a nightgown without asking first, she knew Jada wouldn’t mind. And it was, after all, for a good cause.
The most modest gown she could find was a rose-colored, ankle-length, satin nightgown with spaghetti straps and a long slit up the side.
What she really wanted was a nice, discreet chastity belt. Fat chance she’d find one of those in this closet.
She was a restless sleeper and nightgowns tended to bunch up around her thighs, but at least she’d be able to walk through the room without giving Alec a peep show. After changing, Cleo quietly went down to the living room.
This might be her best chance to accomplish her other mission. Focus. She knew all the pictures in the room, but over the years, they’d become background clutter and failed to register anymore, so she wasn’t sure where the ones she needed to hide were.
She found two framed photos of herself in the living room and one on the dining room wall of her as a teenager with her mother. Annaliese liked grouping pictures, so Cleo rearranged the cluster to cover the hole removing the pictures created. After she stashed the pictures in a drawer under the tablecloth Annaliese never used, she peeked into the guest bedroom.
Alec wasn’t there. Her heart plummeted. Had he snooped in the living room while she was upstairs? Then the bathroom door opened and he came out, his attention focused on the iPad in his hands.
He didn’t look up until he was by the bed. That was a good thing because it kept him from noticing her jaw had dropped at the sight of him without a shirt.
Holy hell on a craps table.
Where had he been hiding those six-pack abs?
She snapped her mouth shut and looked away only to have her eyes bounce back.
A lot had happened in that moment. His hand was frozen over the iPad’s touch screen as he took her in. She didn’t have to look down to know her nipples had peaked under the smooth satin.
His gaze traveled languorously down her body, then back up again, until he found her eyes.
They held each other’s gaze for several long seconds. Cleo feared it would only take one small move from one of them to spark a fire that would take them across that forbidden line.
He blinked first, then cleared his throat and looked back down at his iPad. After a few seconds, he said, “I’m done in the bathroom if you want it.”
It felt as though she hadn’t taken a breath in too long. “Thanks.” She went to brush her teeth with shaking hands.
When she came out of the bathroom, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, taking off his socks. She marshaled her thoughts for one last pitch that he sleep on the couch as she picked her carry-on up to move it from the bed. It nearly slipped from her hands when he stood, popped the button on his jeans, slid the zipper down, and—
“What are you doing?”
His thumbs still inside the waistband, he turned his head toward her. “I’m getting undressed. Why? Does it look like I’m doing something else?”
“I’d really prefer you changed in the bathroom.”
“There’s no point to that.”
“Yes, there is. I don’t want to see you naked.”
“Because a glimpse of my tiny heinie will inflame you with lust? Or are you afraid a single glimpse at my manhood will turn you into my love slave?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, I’d just hate for your ego to be crushed by the laughter.”
His lips twitched as though he was fighting a smile.
She set her carry-on on the chair. He enjoyed baiting her too much. If she wasn’t careful, the banter back and forth would incite him to flash her. She turned back toward him, crossed her arms, and put on her sternest face. “I honestly do not want to see you naked.”
Alec’s eyebrows drew together and he almost looked sympathetic. “Then you’d better shut your eyes.”
Her eyes widened instead. He wouldn’t really strip in front of her.
Apparently, he would. With no more warning than a shrug that seemed to say your choice, he pushed his jeans down. She snapped her head away before he’d bared anything important.
If she were smart, she’d have closed her eyes like he’d told her to. Instead, she caught his reflection in the mirror on the wall opposite the bed.
She had a momentary view of him from the side before he sat, kicked off his jeans, and tossed them at the empty loveseat by the window. He stood then and turned his back toward the mirror, pulled down the covers on his side, and slid into the bed, leaving her with nothing but the memory of the soft color of melted caramel between the faint tan lines above and below his tight, well-defined ass.
The show was over too quickly, and she almost cried out in protest.
He sat up and dragged his pillow around in front of him and proceeded to plump the daylights out of it. Before she could look away, he met her eyes in the mirror.
“See anything you like?” he asked, his lips pulling into a mocking smile.
She wanted to grab his pillow and smother him with it. Given he’d struggle, she probably wasn’t strong enough. She opened the closet and reached for spare sheets and a thermal blanket.
“You don’t really want to sleep on the couch,” he said.
She really didn’t. She wanted to curl up in a real bed, snuggle down, and go to sleep without worrying about the grief Annaliese would give her in the morning for sleeping on the couch. But sharing a bed with Alec wasn’t going to happen. She turned toward him, sheets in hand. “I can’t share a bed with you naked.”
“I can’t sleep in clothes. If I do, I’ll wake up in about an hour overheated. Besides, they make me feel like I’m strangling.”
Strangling sounded good. She added it to her mental list of ways to do him in.
“And if you stay on your side of the bed, you won’t even notice.” He put his pillow back where it belonged.
She snorted her disbelief. “You won’t stay on your side.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Okay. If I don’t stay on my side of the bed, you get to name the penalty.”
“And what will it cost me if you keep to yourself?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nope. This isn’t a bet. It’s more of a money-back guarantee. If I put a toe on your side of the bed, what do you want?”
If there was anything she wanted from him, this would be the moment to go for it. It was too good an offer to pass up.
“If you don’t stay on your side, we’re on a plane out of here tomorrow. That’s the penalty.”
“Woof.” His brow furrowed as if he hadn’t expected her to name such a harsh penance. She waited, thinking this could turn into a win-win situation. All he had to do was violate her airspace; it didn’t have to go any further than that. They’d be gone before Annaliese woke up, and he’d never know he’d met her mother.
“You drive a hard bargain,” he said, “but it’s worth it to get you to stop fighting me about staying.”
Somehow, he didn’t look disappointed enough to suit her. She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t think you can play both ends of this. I’ll tell everyone in the office you’re a welcher if you do me dirty.”
He folded his arms behind his head, a slow, lazy smile stretching his lips as his eyes filled with that demon light. “Sorry, you’ll have to come to my side if you want to do the dirty.”
He was impossible. “I didn’t mean it that way and you know it.”
“Yeah, no one ever means those Freudian slips.” He extended one arm to flip the covers back on her side. With a heavy-lidded look, in a sexy, lowered voice, he said, “Come to bed, chica.”
She stared at the bed, wondering if she’d just been outmaneuvered. It was too late to worry about it. Her pride wouldn’t let her back down now.