“Life is not a fairy tale. If you lose your shoe at midnight, you’re drunk.”
From the T-shirt collection of Anna Collins
Hot pink was not a stealthy color, and stiletto heels were approximately as subtle as gunshots on the long marble hallway that led to a back staircase. I paused to slip off the shoes, for which my aching feet thanked me in ALL CAPS, and then had to wipe the smudge of my handprint off the high-gloss walls.
Who did that? Who used high-gloss paint on walls? People who didn’t clean their own walls, that’s who.
The marble floor was cold under my bare feet, and I had to hike the pink silk up over one arm so I could run down the empty hall. The sounds of the party receded when I reached the staircase, and the carpeted steps even felt quiet as I climbed them.
All the art in the public rooms was large-scale black and white photography – iconic images that were probably numbered and signed by people with names like Leibovitz, Beard, and Avedon. The walls of the back staircase were paneled in warm-toned wood and opened up to a second-floor landing that overlooked the garage. The space was a pass-through, with pretensions declared by a couple of small landscape photographs in gilt frames hung on the walls and a decorative hall table sporting a nude statue of a ballet dancer.
Yeah, right. Keep the toe shoes, lose the tutu. Like that would ever happen in real life.
I slunk down the hallway as a mental conjuring of the naked ballerina stepped off her pedestal and whirled past me in her toe shoes. I admit, I checked out her butt-to-thigh junction with a degree of envy that would’ve made my sister laugh and everyone else shake their head and look worried for my sanity.
I wasn’t worried, though. I mean, who would want to live in a world where naked statues didn’t step off pedestals and dance away? Besides, this naked dancer stopped and pirouetted in front of a built-in bookcase that fit the approximate location of the door to the panic room.
I loved secret bookcase doors. I’d had to drag a bail-jumper out from behind one once, and solving the puzzle of how to open that door had been the best thing about the whole job. That had been an old Victorian house, and even though the bones of Sterling Gray’s mansion were old, the remodel was all high-gloss and tech. I doubted this secret door puzzle would be quite so easy to solve.
I glanced at the floor first, then the ceiling. Nope, no metal tracks. The thing about bookcase doors was that they were incredibly heavy when they were full of books and generally required a track on which to slide open and closed. The fact that this one didn’t have a visible track meant that the door opened into the panic room, which placed the door pin inaccessible within the undoubtedly steel doorframe and made it infinitely easier to bar from the inside.
I’d been watching for cameras since I slipped away from the party, and so far I’d counted six, which meant there might be eight or nine between me and the ballroom. According to the wiring schematic, this panic room was the hub for all the optics cabling, and was therefore the logical place to put a control room. One of the primary reasons I’d come to Sterling Gray’s party was to find out whether that room was manned by a security guard, monitored remotely, or was just a place to record the footage for later review. There was one unscientific way to find out.
I stood in front of the bookcase and searched the book titles as if I were just a regular guest who got lost on the way to the bathroom and decided to bring some reading material in with her. Because taking a book into a stranger’s toilet was how I rolled.
I tilted a couple of the books toward me, choosing titles at random. They were leather-bound classics for the most part, with gilt edges and uniform heights. The gray leather bindings marched along the shelves in alphabetical order like Virginia Military Institute schoolboys with their brass buttons and gold trim, and names like Scott, Shakespeare, and Shaw called out with a sharp “here!” with each tug of my hand. If the latch was book-operated, a wire would be strung up through the shelf and attached to a plate inside the book, but the spines gave no indication of any differences in construction from one book to the next.
The uniformity was like an itch I couldn’t reach to scratch, and I had the sudden urge to rearrange the perfectly ordered books. First, I switched Orwell and Huxley next to each other, because a dystopian debate among the books might liven things up. Then I put Mary Shelley next to Octavia Butler so they could discuss all the things. And finally, humming I like big books and I cannot lie under my breath, I decided to group Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, and Herman Melville together. It was when I tugged on Moby Dick that the latch finally clicked open.
“No!” I whispered gleefully as the heavy bookcase slid open on soundless rails. Either Sterling Gray was the most insecure pinkie-dinkie on the planet, or his security guy was laughing his butt off at him. I knew the camera had already caught my literary mischief, so I donned a look of stunned surprise worth the year of acting lessons Colette had demanded we take when we were kids, and leaned forward to peek inside.
The room was longer than it was wide – sort of like a double-sized walk-in closet – and it was empty of anything with a heartbeat. A dim light glowed from one long wall where a large screen television displayed the various security camera views. Below the TV was a long cabinet that included an under-counter refrigerator, an espresso maker, a stocked bar, and several computer hard drives. A low sofa that probably converted to a bed was pushed up against the opposite long wall, and a plush carpet and a coffee table filled the middle of the floor. I had the impression of luxury and comfort, but my eyes lost all focus on anything other than the gilt-framed painting on the wall behind the sofa.
It was a portrait of two sisters in the style of the Chasseriau painting that hung in the Louvre Museum. The women were dark-haired and breathtakingly beautiful. They were my mother, Sophia, and her older sister, Alexandra.
Movement on the monitor caught my eye as a lone male figure climbed the back staircase. I stepped back into the hall and pulled the bookcase door closed with a quiet click, then tugged a book off the upper shelves and opened it to read.
The words on the expensive paper swam out of focus as I turned all my senses toward the sound of the man reaching the top steps. I heard his hesitation when he saw me, but I pretended to be completely engrossed in the book I’d found. Which I might have been, if the book had been intelligible.
Black dress shoes with extra-long pointy toes that looked like wardrobe for a Goth vampire stopped in front of me, and I looked up with a gasp. The fake gasp turned real at the sight of Sterling Gray’s narrowed eyes.
“Colette,” he said, as though my sister’s name were a full sentence.
“Sterling,” I replied in the same tone.
“What are you doing up here?”
“Reading…” I turned the book over, ostensibly to show him the title, and then had to bite the surprise out of my own voice, “…Beowulf.”
“In old English?” His tone sounded more stunned than suspicious.
“English major,” I shrugged. Aaaaand, my boob popped out. “Damn it!” I clutched the shawl around myself furiously and managed to smack myself in the chest with Beowulf. “Oww!”
“Is everything okay here?” an elegant voice asked from the end of the hall. Heat flushed through my body, and I turned away from both men to shove the offending nipple back inside my shockingly inadequate dress.
“It’s fine. I’m fine,” I said to the bookshelf. I took a moment to replace Beowulf on the high shelf, and then had to grab at my shawl to keep it from slipping off my shoulder. “Damn it!” I whispered fiercely. So much for avoiding anyone’s notice.
I heard a chuckle behind me, and I scowled. I had to play this cool for Colette to get her invitation back here, but I was almost certain Sterling Gray was laughing at me … her. I pasted a charming smile on my face, relaxed my death grip on the shawl, and turned to face Gray. My gaze flicked to the Disney Prince who was standing behind him, and his look of concern made some damn butterfly take flight from its perch on one of my ribs. I forced my gaze back to Sterling, and the butterfly froze in place and then dropped like a drunken frat boy.
“It’s so odd how nervous I get around you, Sterling,” I breathed. Those acting lessons were really paying off. Either that, or I’d suddenly become asthmatic. “It’s like I’m sixteen again.” I was laying it on with a trowel, and he was either an idiot or … yeah, no, he was an idiot.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Gray said with a slow smile that told me volumes about his feelings about nervous sixteen-year-old girls.
Over his shoulder I could see Darius’s eyes narrow, and for one brief moment I had the impression he might actually dislike Sterling Gray too. But then he inclined his head very slightly and took a step back. “I’ll just return downstairs.”
He turned to go, and I had to tear my eyes away from broad shoulders that filled out his tuxedo jacket as though it had been sewn directly onto him.
Gray traced a line down my bare arm with his finger. It raised goosebumps on my skin that resembled the approximate texture of a recently plucked chicken. “What were you really doing up here, Colette?”
Breaking into your panic room. I almost said it out loud, and the part of my brain that reveled in verbal diarrhea really didn’t like the metaphorical muzzle I clamped over it. I appeased it with a slightly less damning version of the truth. “I wanted to see your house, so I took myself on a tour. But books are my squirrels, so I stopped to look through yours, and here I am.”
“Books are your … squirrels?”
“You know, like I’m just going along, minding my own business, when … ‘SQUIRREL!’ and bam! My attention is all about the books.”
He was starting to get that look for the exits look so I changed tactics and kissed him.
Hi, my name is Anna Collins, and I make good choices.
Sometimes. Just not today.
It surprised him, so that was good. After a startled half-second, he slipped his tongue into my mouth and licked my teeth, and that was just gross. Who licks teeth? Granted, I wasn’t a kissing expert, or really, even kissing proficient. Actually, despite a fairly decent list of one-night stands, I hadn’t had all that much experience in really good kissing because I didn’t usually kiss the same guy twice.
I pulled back, ostensibly to breathe, but really because I needed his tongue out of my mouth. A smile curved his lips, and in that moment I realized that Sterling Gray was actually pretty handsome. He was six-foot-something, gym-fit, with green eyes, well-styled brown hair, and a chiseled jaw. I had a thing for chiseled jaws, probably because a person couldn’t have a weak chin with a chiseled jaw – it’s structurally impossible. And nature abhors a structural impossibility, so, there you go.
“You’re unbelievably sexy.” His voice was low and growly. I didn’t get called sexy. I might get ‘pretty’ on a good-hair day, or ‘cool’ when I stepped off a motorcycle in my leathers, and once I even got ‘hot’ from a guy standing below me as I scaled a rock wall. That one baffled me because those climbing harnesses did nothing for a person’s rear view. But ‘sexy’ just wasn’t in my repertoire, and if I was totally honest with myself, it kind of made his tongue a little less gross. Until he opened his mouth again.
“I wanted you the first time I saw you, Colette. I couldn’t take my eyes off you.”
Oh right. Colette was the sexy one. How could I forget?
“I have to put in an appearance at another event tonight,” I said, trying to sound like I hadn’t practiced the words, “and you’re busy being the host here. But maybe, if you don’t have other plans, I could come back for a nightcap?”
I had argued with Colette about the word ‘nightcap.’ I said it sounded like a Nick and Nora Charles movie from the 1940s, and after a look that clearly told me she thought I was a whackjob for my black-and-white movie reference, she said it was classy and sounded rich. It also indicated my wish to return the same night rather than at some later date. That was a point I could give her.
His smile didn’t change, but he studied me as if I’d surprised him. I didn’t like the scrutiny, because even though Colette and I are genetically identical, twenty-eight years of life and ten years spent mostly apart had changed a couple of things in our faces, so I turned and slid past him.
“It’s okay, I know you’re probably busy,” I said as I started toward the back stairs.
He grabbed my arm a little too tightly, which he must have realized because he let his hand slide down to take my hand. “I’d love to see you tonight, Colette. Can you come back after midnight? Say, one o’clock?”
I darted a quick look at him, just to make sure he was serious. Colette had told me to walk away if he hesitated even a moment, and I was stunned to see she was right. He was one of those guys who only wanted things if he thought they were hard to get. Probably inherited the trait from his father who had our mother’s stolen painting hanging in his panic room.
“I’ll be noticed if I stand outside your front door at one o’clock in the morning.” He might as well hang a flashing neon sign on my back that said booty call.
“Come through the kitchen door, by the garage. I’ll open it for you.”
I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice. He couldn’t have been more perfect unless he’d handed me a key and the alarm code. “Are you sure?” I asked. “I mean I wouldn’t want someone to think I was breaking in and accidentally shoot me.” I was fishing.
He kept my hand in his and escorted me down the hall to the main staircase. “I pay my security team very well to keep me safe. An unlocked door isn’t going to compromise that.”
Hmm. That comment was vague enough to make me uneasy. “You have guards?”
“I have alarms and cameras. If I’m not in the kitchen when you come in tonight, you can find me on the third floor.”
“What’s on the third floor?” I asked innocently, though I knew the answer well enough from the floorplans.
Sterling Gray turned to face me and brought my hand up to his mouth to kiss my knuckles. “The master suite.”