by Lisa Plumley
On top of all that, he was mashed up in close quarters with his newfound dream girl, taking nonerotic orders from her.
This wasn’t what he’d expected. Short of last night—which had been purposely footloose—Shane always got what he expected.
After a punishing day at Campania, Shane banged into his apartment, threw down the notebook he’d filched, then groaned.
“Look what the cat dragged in.” Startled out of the work she’d been doing arranging fake mail on his peninsula—all the better to create a sham sense of authenticity—Lizzy glanced up. “You look like hell. Tough day at work, honey?”
Grumpily, Shane squinted at her. “Why do you have one hand behind your back?”
“Because I’m hiding something from you.”
“Be serious. I don’t have the patience for games.”
“I am being serious.” Contravening her words, Lizzy showed him her hands, both of which were empty. “Want a drink?”
Wearing a vivid yellow dress, tights, and boots, she strode to the lacquered antique liquor cabinet near his black marble fireplace. She was wearing her glasses today. Those horn-rims made her look like a studious, hot-to-trot librarian. Only her punk-rock layered haircut ruined the illusion, but even that was partly covered with a knit beanie. Taken aback, Shane frowned.
“You’ve gone native, all of a sudden. The hat, the glasses, the dress—all of it screams cute Portland indie girl.” He gave his assistant a don’t-mess-with-me look. “What are you up to?”
“The usual.” She opened the cabinet and took out two cut-crystal glasses. “I stocked this today. Vodka or whiskey?”
“You know I don’t drink whiskey.” His adoptive father had ruined its flavor for him, shortly after his toast “to Shane’s new life.” “You also know I’m familiar with your past. You could have pocketed whatever you were hiding without my seeing.”
Lizzy waved away his insinuation. “Bygone days. I’ve moved on since then.” She poured a whiskey for herself, then tilted the vodka bottle toward him. “Looks like a two-shot day for you. I’ll have you fixed up in a jiffy.”
She did. A minute later, Lizzy strolled toward him, gave him his usual expensive vodka, then clinked glasses. “Cheers.”
Despite his suspicions, Shane relaxed a fraction. He liked it when Lizzy looked after him. He also knew that she knew that he liked it. He still wanted to know what she was hiding.
“You look like a burnout with bad fashion sense.” She eyed him. “Also, you smell like pizza. Did you bring any home?”
Hopefully, she looked at the things he’d brought. None of them were a tasty tomato-basil pie. She made an unhappy face.
“No. I see that all you brought was a notebook. Boo.”
“It’s full of dough formulas.” He’d lifted it while Gabby’s back was turned. Longtime force of habit had made him do it, but Shane still felt like shit about it. “It’s all I got today.”
“Well, you should go take a shower. Your eau de pizzeria is making me mad hungry.” A curious look. “How’s the job going?”
“How do you think it’s going? I had to improvise.” Newly agitated, Shane put down his drink with a clatter. He paced. “I had to make up a whole new playbook off the top of my head. I was on the hop from the moment I arrived at Campania.”
He’d been desperate for a cigarette, too. That was … telling.
“Hmm. Maybe you should have studied your dossier harder.”
“Maybe you should have told me that you situated my apartment right next door to a restaurant-industry hangout!”
Because of the coincidence involved in their two fluky meetings, Gabby (rightly) hadn’t trusted him today. Not at first. Frankly, Shane would have thought less of her if she had.
It’s just that this is a huge coincidence! Seeing each other today after running into each other last night—
At a brewpub frequented by restaurant-industry types, Shane had guessed in the most reasonable tone he could muster … and Gabby had bought it, confirming his story without a blink.
Shane hadn’t been sure the brewpub was a foodservice haunt when he’d thrown out that justification. But he’d needed a plausible explanation for their meeting, and he’d gambled hard when providing that one. He was lucky Gabby had taken the bait.
Alibis were always better when the most doubtful person involved originated them. By not going overboard with excuses, Shane had led Gabby to the explanation he wanted her to believe … and the rest of his story had taken root from there.
He’d been helped along by her fake name, too. It was credible that Gabby Vivaldi was not Gabriella Grimani. But Shane knew he couldn’t afford another coincidence. It couldn’t happen.
“A hangout down the street?” Lizzy asked. “Which one?”
“The brewpub.” Shane named it. “It was crawling with all the people I needed to be undercover with, starting today.”
“So? That sounds convenient. You got an early start.”
“Right. Except I wasn’t looking for an early start.”
“What were you looking for?”
Affection. Laughter. Sex. Sentimentality. Smiles.
Gabby. Shane shoved away the sappy thoughts that threatened to overwhelm him all over again. “Your poor planning and idiotic location spotting put the whole job at risk.”
Lizzy’s expression hardened. “Hey. Easier is better. My job is to make things run smoothly for you. That’s what I did.”
At that, Shane gave a bitter chuckle. “It wasn’t easier.”
“Well, maybe you don’t have a knack for real work.” Carelessly, his assistant gestured at his workaday getup of a worn T-shirt and work pants. “You are a trust-fund kid.”
Shane’s mood darkened. “Don’t push me. Not tonight.”
In the silence that fell, Lizzy studied him.
Then, “Maybe I’m pushing you on purpose.”
“That would be stupid.”
With confounding certainty, Lizzy downed the rest of her whiskey. “I’m not stupid. I just think you need to confront your demons, that’s all. And I didn’t blow this job. I’m the proximity and logistics girl. I did what I was supposed to do. You’re close to your target. This apartment is perfect.”
“This job is a fucking mess.” He strode onward.
“Look, recon is your responsibility,” Lizzy pointed out in a practical tone. “You should have done due diligence.”
Annoyed that she was right—that he’d been too distracted by feeling good in Bridgetown to do a proper job of investigating the things he needed to—Shane tossed her an irked glance.
“I read the dossier.” Briefly. “It was outdated. Full of bad intel. I met everyone at Campania today. They weren’t the people I read about. They didn’t behave … predictably, either.”
Instead, Gabby’s crew had been weird. Idiosyncratic. Hostile to the new guy and—to his surprise—their boss, too.
Shane was going to have to do something about that. For Gabby. He didn’t like seeing her struggle unnecessarily.
“If you wanted predictability, you should have orchestrated it.” Lizzy’s levelheaded tone suggested that, to her, reality was malleable. “Didn’t you put a couple of ‘ringers’ in place?”
Shane didn’t want to answer that. His methods were private. Even—especially—when they involved implanting people he knew he could trust behind the scenes on the fixes he was doing.
It was always helpful to have an inside advantage.
“Come on,” Lizzy coaxed good-naturedly. With her glasses, she seemed especially clever—and persistent. “I wasn’t born yesterday. I know how you work. I know how wide a network you’ve built. It’s full of miscreants like yourself. If you hadn’t put in a ringer or two, I’d have been concerned about you.”
“Don’t be. I can take care of myself. I always have.”
Her warmhearted look surprised him. “Someday, maybe you won’t have to. Maybe someone else will take care of you.”
Her words pu
t Lizzy’s recent caretaking in a whole new light. Then there was her seductive attire, her flirty tone…. Suspiciously, Shane frowned. “Are you making a move on me?”
Her laughter could have blown off the roof. It was, in a word, insulting. “It’s not an outrageous idea,” he grumbled.
“You’re right.” His assistant sobered long enough to throw him a nod. “It’s not. It’s just … geez, Shane. You’re like my brother. The last thing I want is to knock boots with you.”
Full of relief, Shane agreed. “Then why all the lovey-dovey talk? Let’s face it—you’re about as interested in sentimentality as I am.” Which, until recently, had meant not interested.
“I know what you’ve been up to, that’s why. I saw the state of this place when I got here.” Lizzy poured herself another drink. Shane could have sworn that she stealthily stashed something in the liquor cabinet while she was at it. Hmm … “If you want to hide your romantic liaisons, boss,” she went on, “you’ll have to start by making your bed in the morning.”
In a flash, Shane remembered the rumpled state of his bed linens. The overall clothing-strewn ambiance of his new apartment. The sights and sounds and smells of Gabby, moving against him, whispering racy suggestions, kissing him senseless …
Everything looked spotless now, though.
“I have a housekeeper.” With renewed guardedness, Shane regarded Lizzy. She stood with her back to him, admiring the view of the city below. “You shouldn’t have seen any of that.”
“You shouldn’t have done any of that,” his assistant admonished, turning away from the sparkling city lights. “I understand needing to blow off steam before a job, but—” Lizzy stopped abruptly as she caught a look at his face. Then she continued, “But this was more than that, wasn’t it?”
Shane drained his vodka. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Right. I would have believed that two days ago.” Another uncomfortably shrewd look. “But tonight? Not a chance in hell.”
“You’re fishing. It won’t work.”
“It’s already worked.” A tone of awe worked its way into Lizzy’s voice. “You’re … different tonight. What happened?”
I remembered Gabby … and everything we meant together .
“I already told you. You set me up for a fiasco with this location. It’s too close to the action. I can’t relax.”
She watched him deliberately fidget. Then she scoffed.
“You never relax. There’s more to this.”
“The dossier.” Irately, Shane waved his arm toward it. “It’s no damn wonder I was in over my head today. That thing is so full of bad intel, it’s worse than a joke. It’s like—”
At the same time, an unwanted revelation struck him and Lizzy alike. His assistant’s eyes went wide behind her specs.
“It’s like the previous fixer set you up to fail!” she breathed, voicing one of the most obvious explanations.
“Or the previous fixer is still on the job,” Shane said, coming up with the other. At the prospect, his mind reeled.
Yes, his father’s company had dismissed the other fixer. Yes, Gregory Waltham had called in Shane to finish the job. But fixing was freelance work. Its practitioners weren’t employees in the usual sense. They were guns for hire. They couldn’t really be fired. Not if they didn’t want to be. Technically, if they brought in the prize, they earned the bounty.
“I might have a competitor on this one,” he said.
The idea didn’t sit well with him. This job meant a lot to him. All of a sudden, so did Gabby. If an unknown rival fixer got the jump on him, Shane would lose control of the situation.
“Do you think Mr. Waltham kept on a backup?”
“It would be like him”—not to trust me—“to play it safe. He didn’t amass a fortune by working fast and loose with details.”
“But he knows you’re on it now!” Lizzy’s aggrieved tone owed itself to her devotion to him, Shane knew. “That bastard—”
“Is the same man he’s always been. The same man who used me to add a little ‘downtown’ flavor to his boring, country-club life. The same man who pitted me against my stepsiblings in everything from table tennis to college admissions.”
Wearily, he regarded his assistant. “It’s possible that my dad double-crossed me, is what I’m saying. He might have wanted insurance on this job. It’s an important one.”
Looking infuriated, Lizzy paced. Her eye-popping yellow dress swirled around her kick-ass boots and tights, moving with the same intensity she did. She flung her arm in the air.
“‘I’m counting on you, Shane!’” she mimicked in a dead-on imitation of Gregory Waltham. “‘I need your skills for this one.’” Lizzy whirled to face him. “‘I need you!’” Exasperated, she put her hands on her hips. “Doesn’t that mean anything?”
Shane had been hoping like hell it did. Now, he wasn’t so sure. But he couldn’t back down. He couldn’t give in.
This job was all that stood between him and happiness.
At least whatever happiness he could manage as a fixer.
“I appreciate your outrage. But we have to be deliberate, here. I took this fix, and I’m not quitting.” Shane folded his arms, frowning at his misleading damn dossier. “If I didn’t quit this morning, I sure as hell am not quitting tonight.”
Alerted by that, Lizzy gave him a puzzled look. “This morning? What made you want to quit this morning?”
Gabby, Shane knew. Gabby had made him want to quit. Realizing that he’d been hired to take over her pizzeria—to forever alter her family’s legacy—had shaken him to the core.
So had Gabby’s staunch loyalty in her family’s defense.
My family means the world to me, she’d said when he’d remarked upon her necklaces. I would do anything for them.
He’d never seen anyone look more defiant, more fired up, more passionate than Gabby had in that moment.
Ruefully, Shane pursed his mouth, considering how much to tell Lizzy. “I have a … not inconsequential obstacle in this job.”
Gabby was formidable. He couldn’t underestimate her.
For a long moment, Lizzy only wrinkled her nose at him. She glanced around his apartment (and at him) as though searching for clues. She reached back in her memory to recall their earlier conversation, employed every ounce of street smarts she had….
“You slept with the target!” she blurted. “You got lucky last night with Gabriella Grimani, the owner of Campania!”
Lizzy’s tone of triumph irritated him. “You don’t have to sound so damn cheerful about it. It’s a fucking mess, I said.”
Her dancing eyes suggested otherwise. “I knew you would!”
“Then you should have told me.” Pacing again, Shane thrust his hand in his hair. “Because I sure as hell didn’t.”
“You two are so alike, you’re practically two sides of the same coin. On paper, at least, you’re perfect for one another—except for being on opposing sides, of course. I know that,” Lizzy crowed, “because I read the dossier from front to back.”
“So did I!” Shane groused. “The photo of ‘Gabriella Grimani’ was a blurry snapshot of a fifty-something woman.”
“Probably Donna Grimani, Gabriella’s mother.”
“Probably.” Deeply distraught at the idea that he’d been duped by another anonymous fixer—not to mention misled by his own stupid sentimental impulses last night—Shane clenched his fist. “That means I can’t trust a damn thing in that dossier.”
“Well, was the sex good, at least?” Lizzy chirped, angling her head to the side. “I mean, if you have to be a screwup—”
“I’m not a screwup.” Shane rounded on her. “Not anymore.”
Alarmed by his threatening tone, Lizzy raised her palms. “Whoa, there, Hulk! I didn’t mean to make you angry.”
“You won’t like me when I’m angry.”
“Tell me about it.” His assistant doled out an uncommon smile. “Nobody likes you when you’re angry. Good
thing it doesn’t happen very often. Usually your charm prevails.”
Seeing that smile of hers—so infrequently given—made Shane wonder, not for the first time, exactly what Lizzy had been through in her life. When they’d met, she’d been closemouthed. She still was. At least when it came to talking about herself.
“Okay, fine. No sex talk,” she amended. “Will the job be safe?”
“I think so.” Shane paced, considering it. “Only stage three personnel were supposed to see this place, once I’d secured the pizzerias. Gabby wasn’t ever supposed to—”
“‘Gabby’?” Lizzy arched her brows. “Cozy nickname.”
“Yes.” He ignored her meaningful look. “Bringing Gabby here set up a dichotomy,” Shane went on. “It didn’t match the approach I had in mind.” Plus, when I saw her this morning, looking so sassy and pretty and in charge, I couldn’t dredge up a single coherent thought. “Like I said, I had to think on my feet. I told her I’m an aspiring restaurateur who’s doing research while considering opening a small pizzeria of my own.”
“Good one.” Lizzy approved, dutifully noting his revised tactics. “You always were good at improvising.”
He shrugged. “It was expedient.” It got me nearer to Gabby. That’s all I wanted. “She’s letting me trail her at Campania.”
Lizzy nodded, well versed in the lingo for a variety of industries after the jobs they’d done together. “If you’re doing applied research, we won’t have to downplay your wealth,” she remarked. “Only your connections to Waltham Industries.”
Shane brooded, unhappy with the situation. “Whatever you need to do. I’m on it. But Gabby doesn’t care about my money.”
Lizzy raised her eyebrows. “She loves you for your lies?”
Uneasily, Shane frowned. “I haven’t told that many.”
“Not yet, you haven’t.” Cheerfully, Lizzy set her glass on the liquor cabinet. “Well, I’m out of here. I have plans.”
Shane went still. “What plans?” He stared at her. “Do they have to do with whatever you were hiding when I got here?”
Lizzy shook her head. “Would I actually tell you?”
