by Avery Flynn
He shrugged his shoulders. “Whatcha gonna do?”
It hit Sylvie the moment she walked into the bedroom. Man smell. Not locker room man smell, thank God, but warm-blooded, all-American testosterone mixed with sandalwood and soap. Closing her eyes, she took in a double lungful and her thighs actually quivered.
“You okay?”
Heat blasted her cheeks and her eyes snapped open at Tony’s voice. “Yeah, fine.”
The stubborn hardwood floor refused to open up under her feet. She had some sort of Pavlovian response to the kind of hotness Tony exuded. The whole situation sucked. Why couldn’t he be a troll who smelled like rotting funk instead of a hottie who turned her into some kind of hormonal teen with a smelling fetish?
At this point, fate was just fucking with her. A stalker with physical damage on his agenda. A burglar who left diamonds but took old laptops. A hot guy who said he didn’t want her but looked at her like she was a supermodel. It sounded like the beginning of a bad joke. But it was her life. No wonder her time-to-freak-out alert had gone haywire.
“I turned the guest room into an office. I’ll stay on the pull-out couch in there.” He swiped a pair of jeans from a leather chair and shoved a dresser drawer shut with his foot.
“I can’t kick you out of your room.” And sleep in his bed, where she’d probably spend the night sniffing his pillow.
“You’re not kicking. I’m offering some Waterberg hospitality.”
Sylvie flipped through possible excuses but couldn’t come up with a thing that didn’t sound churlish or pathetic and force her to tell the truth. No way was she going with “I’m afraid I’ll do indecent things with your pillow.”
He quirked an eyebrow at her continued silence.
Time to suck it up, princess. “Thanks, that’s really nice of you.”
“Great. Why don’t you hang out in the living room and call your dads while I get this mess cleaned up?”
Chicken that she was, she wanted to hug him for giving her an out to escape his bedroom. Instead, she skedaddled away from the temptations he offered—it took a little effort, but she did it—and strode into the front room, which was dominated by a huge TV and a well-worn couch. She whipped out her cell phone and punched in the number she knew by heart.
“How’s my favorite bulldog doing today?” Henry’s voice immediately calmed her riled nerves.
She sank down into the dark blue couch. “If I tell you the truth, do you promise to sit on Anton until he calms down?”
“You know I’d be sitting on him until Betsy Ross mop caps came back into vogue before that happened. You better just spill it.”
For a second she considered lying to protect her fathers from the mess her life had dissolved into. They’d done so much for her, and she’d spent every day since her adoption day trying not to disappoint them or be the center of any kind of drama. She owed them that much. But she had to face it, her life of staying safely out of the spotlight was over.
“Someone broke into my apartment,” she confessed.
“Oh my God, are you okay?”
“Yeah, Tony and I were at The Darling House when it happened. They only took my computer, everything else is still there.”
His voice lowered back to its normal octave. “Thank God. Please tell me you’re not calling from your apartment.”
“No way. We relocated to Tony’s in Waterberg.”
“Why not come here? You can stay in your old room. We’ll make s’mores and watch Casablanca.”
Her throat closed up and the cell slipped in her clammy hands. Hurting her fathers was the last thing she wanted to do, but she couldn’t chicken out of telling them the worst part. Tightening her grip on the phone, she braced herself.
“Whoever is behind all this wants to hurt me—not the High-Heeled Wonder, but me. They know who I am, and are probably going to lash out at everyone I love. The best way to keep you safe until we figure it out is for me to stay away. I’m so sorry. I took the High-Heeled Wonder moniker so whatever I did on the blog wouldn’t reflect badly on you. I didn’t ever want to cause trouble for you, not after all you’ve done for me and Anya.”
“Do you think I care about that? Do you think Anton does?”
Sylvie fumbled for words when the only thought in her head was yes.
“Well, we don’t, Sylvie Anne Bissette. You’re our daughter. We love you. Unconditionally.” He sighed into the phone and she knew from experience he was pinching the bridge of his generous nose. “We’re proud of you. We always have been. Go tell the world that you’re the High-Heeled Wonder. As long as you’re safe, we don’t give a damn.”
Biting her lip, Sylvie stared at the ceiling in Tony’s living room and sniffed back relieved tears. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Any time, bulldog. Now, how about coming here for those s’mores?”
“I’ll think about it, but at least for tonight I’m already settled in at Tony’s.”
Tony smoothed a hand over the fresh sheets before tossing a thick comforter on top of them. He would not think about Sylvie sleeping in his bed. Her hair spread out on the pillows. Covers twisted around her long, bare legs. The way the streetlamp filtering through the window would caress her skin.
His cock twitched. Yeah, he wasn’t thinking about it, but his dick sure was.
He tried to shake the vision out of his head, but it refused to vanish. Stubborn, just like the woman herself.
“Can I borrow your laptop?”
On instinct, he jammed a pillow in front of himself, blocking Sylvie’s view of his arousal. “My laptop?”
“Yeah, I need to change the password for my blog.”
It took a second, but his brain finally caught up. Stalker. Robbery. Missing laptop. “Sure. It’s in the office.”
“Thanks.” She spun on a toe and disappeared down the hall.
Client. Daughter of murder suspects. Woman who would hate him if she ever found out what he’d done to her. Forcibly reminding himself of the facts did little to ease the throb behind his zipper. He swore his cock was laughing at him. Refusing to think only with the small head any longer, he tossed the pillow on the bed and grabbed his phone, punching the numbers harder than necessary.
His sister answered on the third ring. “Ryder.”
“I’m putting you on three-way conference call with Cam. Hold on.”
Cam answered on the first ring, but a woman’s soft laugh echoed in the background. Tony’s first instinct was to remind his number two that he was on duty, but considering the direction of his own thoughts lately he was the last person who should tell someone to keep it in their pants.
“Someone broke into Sylvie’s apartment, stole her laptop, and left everything else. We’ve moved base to my house until further notice. Tell me you’ve got good news.”
Cam let out a soft whistle. “Why your place?”
“You kidding? I’m related to half the neighborhood. A stranger on this block is going to stick out like sushi at Nonni’s Sunday dinner. Plus, I’ve got access to more firepower here.”
“Smart plan. Carlos hacked into Sylvie’s blog and has traced several of the noninitial threats to the same IP address,” Ryder said.
“Name?”
“He’s working on it.”
“Tell him we needed that info yesterday.”
Cam asked, “How did the chat with that other blogger go?”
“Rhodes admitted she spilled Sylvie’s identity to a bunch of people, but the two at the top of the suspect list are Anders Bloom and Pippa Worthington. Based on the photos Sylvie shared, Bloom is a designer who makes some of the ugliest shit I have ever seen on a woman. Sylvie mocked him pretty hard on her blog. His sales have tanked. Worthington is a big-shot fashion editor who is in a world of shit at work, a fact that Sylvie shared with the entire Internet.”
Cam whistled. “You really think either one would go postal to this extent because of what a blogger said about them?”
Tony’s toes itched at hearing
spoken out loud the question he’d been asking himself for the past twenty-four hours. “I don’t know, but they’re the best leads we have right now.” Tony rammed his fingers through his hair. “Ryder, light a fire under Carlos. I want those computer records now. Cam, start snooping around Bloom. Sylvie said his last three collections were a bust and one more failure could mean the loss of his financial backers. Check out Worthington, too. Find out if she had opportunity or the ability to pull this off.”
“Gotcha.”
“One more thing.” Tony paused, trying to will the muscles in his shoulders to relax. “Rhodes ratted out Sylvie’s identity as the High-Heeled Wonder while doing drugs with Bloom. According to her, he’s one of the biggest sources of nose candy for models in Harbor City.”
Silence filled the line and Tony paced to the door. He glanced down the hall. No sign of Sylvie. For once he was glad.
Ryder murmured, “Do you think it’s connected to—”
The hairs on Tony’s forearms stood at attention and he interrupted his sister. “Can’t say, but it makes sense. Anders worked for Henry and Anton back when Keith was killed. It would explain why the trail always leads back to them.”
Steel filled Cam’s voice. “On it,” he said.
“Great. Let me know as soon as you hear anything. I’ll be in touch soon.”
“Hey boss?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.” Cam chuckled.
Did he never get tired of that stupid line?
“Fuck off.” Tony hung up, shoved the phone into his pocket, and marched into the office to find the woman he was failing miserably at thinking of as only a client.
Sylvie sat in a chair pulled up close to his rolltop desk, her shoulders hunched as she peered at the computer screen. Tension rolled off her as strong as the wind whipping the trees outside the window.
“Everything okay?”
She turned and directed a hard glare his way. If looks could kill, it’d be pretty much over for him.
“You tell me.” She nodded at the laptop. “Why in the hell do you have an open case file on my fathers?”
Chapter Nine
“Fashion fades, only style remains the same.”
—Coco Chanel
Anton’s decade-old mug shot broke Sylvie’s heart. Staring back at her from the screen was a version of her father she’d never met, who’d never tucked her into bed after a nightmare or soothed her worries with lemon drops. He looked like shit in his booking photo. Quarter-sized pupils. Sunken cheeks. Cracked lips. Greasy hair going in every direction. According to the police report, he’d gotten busted for trying to score cocaine from an undercover officer.
She slid her shaky fingers across the screen as if the action could erase the image. “He hid his addiction well. We never saw him like this, but I remember vividly when he went into rehab.”
Anya crying into her pillow. Henry putting on a brave face with a smile so fake it nearly cracked his teeth. And she’d spent twenty-eight days planning for history to repeat itself. But thankfully, Anton hadn’t gone down the same suicidal path that her mother had while whacked out on drugs.
He’d come home. Shaken and unsure, but he’d come home to them.
She’d be damned if she’d let anyone take him back to that hell. Even Tony.
“You haven’t answered my question. There are police reports, interview notes, and more. Why do you have all this?”
Tony shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “I can’t tell you.”
“Who is Keith Molson? What does his autopsy have to do with my fathers?”
Tony stomped to the desk and slapped the laptop closed. His strong hand stayed on the cover, nearly taking up the entire space with his wide palm and long fingers. “Stop asking questions you don’t want the answers to.”
“Of all the stupid things. If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t have asked.” She shot out of her seat and jabbed a finger into his unyielding chest. “Tell me the truth.”
“Seriously. You don’t want to know.” Tony held up his hands, palms out, and took a step back. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
She ground her teeth. She couldn’t stand the pity pooling in his brown eyes, threatening to drown her. Why did the people who kept promising they didn’t want to hurt her always inflict so much fucking damage? Her chest ached with the need for air. Keeping her jaw clamped tight, she inhaled a deep breath. It burned her nostrils but didn’t reach her lungs. It was like trying to breathe underwater using straws stuffed with newspaper. She gasped, fighting to drag in the oxygen she needed.
Panic slashed at her useless lungs. Her vision turned fuzzy. “Can’t…breathe.”
Tony straightened like a shot. “Where’s your purse?”
“Room.” Her legs folded underneath her and she thumped onto the couch.
He sprinted from the office.
She wheezed in another half breath, remembering her yoga instructor’s advice to visualize a place of serenity. She summoned an image of the ski lodge where she’d spent last Christmas with her family. The brisk wind against her cheeks. The swish of her skis as she sailed down the slopes. The nearly blinding white of the mountain peaks gleaming in the distance.
The sunlight flickered and thick gray clouds sealed out the light. Her lungs burned, the searing pain yanking her away from the darkening scene.
Tony’s face appeared over her, wavering like an oasis in the desert. He held out her puffer.
She wrapped her hand around his and brought the inhaler to her mouth. A blast of medication opened her constricted airway, followed by sweet, cool oxygen. Her muscles uncoiled and she sucked in a full, deep breath of air.
“Better?” He pushed a damp strand of hair from her forehead.
“Yes.” The single word scratched against her tender throat, but she couldn’t stop now, no matter how much it hurt, nor in how many ways. “Tell me why you have a case file on my fathers.”
He rubbed his hand across his five o’clock shadow.
“Please.” It hurt to plead, but she had to know.
Tony raised his gaze to the ceiling and fisted his hands at his sides. Then he looked back at her and his shoulders drooped. “They’re suspects in a cop’s murder.”
Her brain blanked as the idea skittered around her head like a marble on a sheet of ice. She gripped her inhaler like a lifeline. “They—” No.
“Are the only lead I had up until today.”
Anton or Henry would never harm anyone. The idea made absolutely no sense.
“You’ve met my fathers. How in God’s name could you ever take them for killers?” Another possibility popped into her head. It would have knocked her to her knees if she hadn’t already been sitting. “Was taking my case just a way to get closer to them? Was this whole thing a setup?”
He rocked back on his heels and studied the worn couch. “At first,” he admitted.
“You bastard.” Bitterness landed like a rock in her stomach. “Tell me everything, and do not leave anything out.”
He strode past the rolltop desk, across the thick, gray carpet to a bookcase jam-packed with football players’ biographies and framed photos of gap-toothed kids and smiling adults. He pulled one of the pictures down from the top shelf. His face pinched with pain as he gave it a long look and then strode back over and shoved the picture into her hands.
She stared down at the two men in dress blues mugging for the camera. Tony stood a few inches shorter than the man next to him who had two mile-deep dimples that had probably turned girls’ knees to jelly and made their mothers worry.
“I fucked up, and because of that, Keith died. I couldn’t walk away from even the slimmest of leads. And your dads were all I had.”
She stopped his words with an upraised hand. “Back up and start again.”
“Keith and I grew up together. He was at my house so much we might as well have been brothers. When we got partnered up together on vice, we had a snitch who happened to
be a photographer. He told us about a major player in Harbor City’s fashion scene that was keeping the models in blow. We went undercover as photographer assistants.”
Nothing shocking in models buying drugs. More than one used cocaine to keep their weight down to an insane level, deal with the hectic hours, and let off steam. Getting a nice powder high added zero calories to their daily diet, unlike alcohol or chocolate cake. Ugly but true.
“And you thought Henry and Anton were dealers?” Not likely. Anton had been clean for more than a decade by the time she estimated Tony’s partner died.
“We traced a delivery to BC Designs. Then another. About two weeks before Keith died, we got word something was wrong with the cocaine. Someone had cut it with PCP and people were losing their minds. At least four deaths were tied to it. We had to go in.”
“Emily Rossi.” Her heartbeat sped as she remembered the six-foot-tall Nordic goddess who had been a regular at the BC Designs shows. She’d been Harbor City’s runway darling until she’d stepped in front of the number six bus while screaming about the demons stalking her every move.
Tony nodded. “Her death was one of the four. Whoever the dealer was, they were high up the ladder at BC with plenty of no-questions-asked access to fashion events. Everything went to shit before we got a chance to infiltrate the company.”
“What does that mean?”
“We were following a bike messenger with a package we knew was destined for your dads’ studio across town. The messenger made us and took off. We were on foot but went after him anyway. Keith and I got separated. He ran track in high school. There was no way I could keep up. I was crossing Delany Street so focused on not losing sight of Keith or the bike that I never saw the car come around the corner. Next thing I knew, I was waking up in the ambulance, my leg a fucking shredded mess.”
He sank down next to her on the couch and rubbed his right knee. “It wasn’t until after surgery that they told me about Keith. Two shots to the head. Close range.” He inhaled a ragged breath. “We never caught the guy who did it. Every lead fizzled out. Requests for overtime got turned down. Snitches went to ground. Rumors started about the brass shutting down the case.” He shook his head in disgust. “I left the force and started Maltese Security. But I kept copies of my case files and notes—including Anton’s mug shot. Keith wasn’t just my partner; he was my best friend. I still see his mom around the neighborhood. I won’t stop until I find his killer, no matter how long it takes. I owe him that.”
