“Too long. Too long. You both look good.” The blond detective looked Grant and me over from head to toe a couple of times and then took a quick turn around the penthouse. “I should’ve stuck with the two of you back in the day. Apparently whatever you’re doing for a paycheck beats the hell out of the police force.”
“Let’s sit down, please. Can I get either of you something to drink?” I offered, reminding Josh of the partner standing beside him.
“Shit, sorry, man. This is my partner, Detective Branson Hale.”
I shook the stout man’s hand, introducing myself. “Sebastian Shark. This is my chief of operations, Grant Twombley.” Grant leaned in to shake Detective Hale’s hand too.
“Drinks? Anyone?” Grant asked, heading toward the refrigerator as I motioned to the sofas for the detectives to get comfortable.
“No, thank you,” they answered in unison. Josh chuckled but Branson winced.
“We won’t take up much of your time, Mr. Shark. We have a few routine questions regarding an incident that took place this morning on the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro.”
Grant rejoined us while Detective Hale spoke, and I made eye contact with my old friend, Josh. I could already tell his partner was a completely by-the-book kind of police officer.
Good. I had nothing to hide, and the sooner any suspicion surrounding my name was cleared, the better.
“Judging by the chaos in front of your building, I assume you’re familiar with the incident in question. Or do you always have that many reporters and groupies with signs hanging out near the entrance of your office?” Josh asked, more lighthearted than his partner.
“No,” I said, forcing a laugh. “That’s a new development.”
“So how did you know Ms. Mansfield?” he asked, brows raised.
“I’m not sure I do. Or did, rather.”
“You never met the woman?” Hale twisted his mouth with doubt. “Odd, since she claimed you were dating. And that you broke her heart.”
“We definitely weren’t dating. I don’t date.”
Hale went on as if I never spoke. “She went through great lengths to secure a suicide note, detailing the whole thing, to her body before jumping off that bridge.”
“I don’t know how else to word it, Detective. I don’t date women. I fuck them. Usually once. That’s it.” I shrugged. Seemed pretty cut and dry to me. I looked at Grant, and he gave a matching shrug.
See? He understands where I’m coming from.
“Why do you think this woman, Ms. Mansfield, would say that you broke her heart, then? That seems a bit extreme if you only slept with her one time.”
I pushed Josh’s knee so it knocked into his other one, playing up our friendship. “You know how women can get after you sleep with them—all starry-eyed. Add in my money and shit, maybe she thought I was going to be her next sugar daddy? I don’t know.”
But Hale was like a dog with a bone. Question after question until I finally stood up, calling an end to the interrogation. “I think I should probably have my attorney present if you gentlemen need to ask me anything else.”
“I think we have everything we need for now. Here’s my card—”
Hale made to offer his card, but I held my hand up to stop him. “I don’t need your card, man. You can leave it with my assistant if you feel like you need to, but I won’t be using it. Guaranteed.”
“Sebastian.” Josh shook my hand, giving me a solid smack on the shoulder while doing so.
“Grant.” He repeated the gesture with my best friend while I showed them to the door. “Thanks for taking the time to chat with us. It was great to see you two.”
“Same here, Josh. Take care,” Grant said as he closed the door and faced me.
“What in the actual fuck is going on?” I asked him, rubbing my throbbing forehead.
“I was just going to ask you the same thing.”
Chapter Three
Abbi
My lungs screamed and my thighs burned, but I pushed myself to finish strong on the final leg of my sunset jogging loop along Venice Beach.
Though I usually avoided the shorefront trail at this time of summer—when runners and cyclists were joined by tourists, street performers, and the owner of every sculpted body in Southern California—the chaos was a welcome distraction for my mind right now.
Ever since the bizarre turn of events on Monday, I’d refused to return to the Shark Enterprises building.
Clarification. I’d pulled myself out of the picture, not Abstract Catering. I was shaken, not stupid. Rio, like the superstar she was, had jumped in on covering the downtown route after I’d sneaked in a sentence about the media mob freaking me out—not completely the truth, though not a lie—but now it was Thursday, and the reporters were tiring of Shark’s information blackout regarding what had happened to Tawny Mansfield.
Not that he gave a crap that they all needed to make a living too—or that some people in this city might care about what had driven a woman to take her own life. A woman he didn’t even remember, if I was correctly interpreting the snippets I’d heard during his chat with Grant Twombley on Monday.
Yeah. A freaking chat. As if they were shooting the breeze about the Dodgers’ winning streak or a fluctuation in the stock market, not a woman who’d been dead for less than twenty-four hours.
I forced my eyes open, grimacing into the wind as I paced in a circle, hoping to walk off a cramp. The pain didn’t dissipate. Neither did my memories of those unbearable, unnerving, utterly arousing moments.
“No.”
I plopped onto a bench and dropped my head onto my crossed arms.
I couldn’t take it back. I’d finally admitted the truth. I’d been standing in Sebastian Shark’s office, aroused as hell and trembling like Red Riding Hood in the middle of a wolf pack.
All while being assessed by the pack’s alpha himself.
At least he’d come all the way out from the computer monitor man cave. For the first time, I’d discovered Sebastian Shark actually had legs—and they were glorious. And of course, they were topped by an ass that belonged on some graceful angel, not a devil with ice-blue eyes and a steel-angled jawline.
By the time I realized we weren’t alone in the room, his right-hand man had witnessed our mutual gawk fest. Not that it bothered Shark—in the least. After all, what was another lascivious leer of another pair of breasts and thighs to the man? Hell, they probably had a good laugh at my expense after I tripped out the door in frustration. Just thinking about it now made me wince with residual mortification.
The alarm from my calendar app cut through the playlist still filling my ears. I needed to get across town for a hair appointment I’d scheduled weeks ago after Rio encouraged me to try something new for summer.
Who was I kidding?
“Something new” could be as simple as a two-inch trim instead of the half inch I normally went with. Rio teased me mercilessly that I acted more like a steadfast sixty-two-year-old woman instead of the twenty-two-year-old I actually was. Rio thought I should be footloose and fancy-free—her words, not mine—and I couldn’t even come up with a valid excuse not to be. Because she wasn’t wrong.
When I got to my truck in the public lot, I whipped my sweaty T-shirt over my head and grabbed a fresh one out of the bag on the passenger seat. Just as I was plugging my phone into the charger, I received a text.
Hello Abbigail. It’s Viktor Blake. Pardon the note on your personal device, but your sister-in-law was just here delivering lunch and said it would be fine to contact you. Hope you are feeling better and will soon be back to brightening our days.
I sighed, watching the dots bounce from his end as if he had more to say, but after I started the engine and my phone connected to the truck’s Bluetooth, they were gone.
Thank God.
I didn’t want to wake my cell back up from sleep mode, for fear of what the screen would bring from my “friend,” so I put the truck in drive and headed toward my haird
resser.
No matter what Rio was attempting to spin, the man wasn’t my friend. Honestly, I wondered how many friends Viktor Blake actually had. There was something off about the way he handled himself, always ready to greet me like some housewife from a forgotten era.
It was creepy.
Which made his text really creepy.
Amber, my hair girl, had a shop located about half the distance between the beach and my condo in Torrance, and the late-afternoon traffic gods smiled down on me. I made the journey in about forty-five minutes, which also gave me enough time to check in with Rio while I drove to my appointment.
“Greetings, savior of my sanity,” I said into the open cab of my truck when the phone call connected. It wasn’t the first time, especially in the last few days, that I’d given Rio an honorific greeting of one type or another. I owed her—big-time—for taking the heat around Shark’s offices, but she was so much better at handling stressful situations than I was. Plus, there was the whole obsessed with the man and the way he looks at me situation that I was secretly dealing with and had no intention of sharing with Rio.
“Mmm, I don’t know, Abs. You might want to go light on the savior awards today.” She cleared her throat nervously.
“Why? What happened?” I forced myself to sound easy. Didn’t think I was fooling her, though.
“I just want you to understand that I didn’t start it, Abbigail.” Rio sounded like a schoolgirl hurrying in from recess to tattle on a classmate.
“Shit.” Did we lose the contract at Shark Enterprises?
“I did not do a thing, Abs,” Rio insisted.
“I heard you the first time, Rio, and I believe you. Just tell me what—”
“I walked into his office, dropped the tray on the table in front of the couches, and then left.” She let out a deep sigh. “Well, I tried to leave.”
“What happened?” And why was I so torn between being worried for her and being jealous of her?
“At first, it was just like every other day.”
“A few growls from the wall of computer monitors?”
“Bull’s-eye.”
“Okay . . . ” Just the thought of Rio in the same room with the devil from my fantasies infected me with more dark envy—and a swath of shame. “So what was the problem?”
“Well . . . he was the problem.”
“In what way?” I was trying to not sound too curious. And again . . . didn’t think I was fooling her.
“He ordered me to stop. Like . . . in my tracks. And I wasn’t bothering him at all. I didn’t say a damn word to him, Abbi. I promise.”
“Rio. I believe you. He can be very demanding. He’s like that to everyone,” I said conspiratorially to ensure Rio knew I was sympathizing with her. “Routinely.”
I rubbed at the ache in my belly. “So why did he order you, as you called it, to wait?”
“Well . . . ” Her pause was strange because my sister-in-law was never at a loss for words. Ever. “It was because of . . . you.”
“Me?” I stopped rubbing. It wasn’t going to help. “Why me?”
And tell me everything he said. And how he said it. And what he looked like while he was saying it.
“I think his opener was, ‘Where is Little Red Riding Hood?’”
Against every logical bone in my body, a giggle burst free. Maybe it was all the tension that had built up while I’d been waiting to hear her big reveal a moment ago. “Okay, that’s pretty funny.”
“Funny? Why?” Rio demanded, still frustrated from the day’s events.
“In my mind, I always compare him to a wolf. The way he stalks around. Silently. You know?”
“Lovely. You have a nickname for him.” Her tone shifted to accusatory. “What exactly goes on in that penthouse when you deliver his lunch?”
“You can’t tell me you don’t see the wolf analogy!” I ignored her second comment altogether. Her imagination was at least twenty-three times more active than mine. “Don’t you think?”
After a few seconds, she conceded. “Okay, fine, I get the wolf thing. But getting back to the bigger point, please?”
“Which is? I don’t think you’ve gotten to it yet, sister dearest.”
“He asked about you, Abbi. Demanded, actually.”
“Shut. Up.”
“He knew exactly how many days you’d been gone and wanted me to tell him why.”
My stomach was done aching. The whole thing flipped now, plunging my psyche into trepidation. “You didn’t . . . I mean . . . Wh-What did you tell him?”
“That it was none of his damn business.”
I gasped.
“What? That was the most tasteful thing I could come up with. He has the superpower of getting under a person’s skin in record time. Haven’t you noticed that?”
Silence. I was still trying to digest the fact that she told Sebastian Shark it was none of his damn business.
“Or is that just me?” Rio asked hurriedly. She never could stand quietude.
A laugh burst out before I could stop it. “Superpower for sure. I think that might be one of the reasons his business is so successful. People just give in and do what he wants.”
“Hmm. Well, anyhow, that was all the explanation he got from me regarding your absence.”
That, along with my laugh, helped me take a normal breath again. “Sorry, girl, but seriously, to have been a fly on that expensive wallpaper . . . ”
Her mirror of a chuckle had me wondering whether to be heartened or worried. “Well, I’m glad to hear that longing.”
“Do I even want to know what you’re talking about, Rio?” Suddenly, the stomachache I’d dropped a few exits back on the 405 was back.
“Pretty simple, Abs. If Abstract Catering wants to keep Shark’s business, you will be delivering his lunch tomorrow. Not me. You.” She pushed out a final defined breath in emphasis. “Tomorrow.”
“Are you messing with me, Rio? This isn’t funny. I don’t joke about business, and you know that.” My voice grew louder as I finished my sentence.
“Wish I were, mami—but no. Shark insisted I bring his decree back to you. Word for word.” She sucked in a breath so sharply, I feared something might have happened to her.
“And, Abbigail,” she breathed more than spoke.
“Rio, you’re freaking me out! What? What is it?”
“If you saw the look on that man’s face when he was telling me all that? Holy. Mother. Of. God. I’m pretty sure I’ve never been so scared and turned on and confused . . . and turned on.” She drifted off for a few seconds and then, as if catching herself, said, “Shit, I said that already—but yeah . . . just from a look. Why doesn’t he have a wife? Or a girlfriend at the very least? My guess is he’s lethal in bed with all that game.”
I really didn’t need the syllable-by-syllable breakdown. My imagination was already at work just from what Rio had supplied, hearing every note of his lush baritone . . . and seeing it roll off his broad, full lips . . .
“I’m sorry, honey. I know you needed space from him, even if the media circus wasn’t the real reason”—her defined drop in tone betrayed how she knew that part this whole time—“but he told me that if you’re not the one delivering his lunch tomorrow, with the silverware wrapped in a dark-red linen, he will terminate our current contract and reject your bid for the Edge as well.”
I sat up so high and stiff, I bounced up off the seat. “He’ll do what?”
Rio cleared her throat. “You really need me to repeat it?”
I answered with the defined thwonk of my hand against the steering wheel. “Dammit! Sparkle City Catering is probably waiting for his call.”
“Well, of course they are. On their knees with their mouths open.”
“I really want to laugh at that.”
Rio’s shrug was evident in her comeback. “Well, you know what they say.”
“If you’re not laughing, you’re crying?”
“Yep. And if you’re not crying,
you’re not sucking hard enough.”
This time I did laugh. “Christ, you’re impossible.”
“And you love me this way.” She meshed her good-natured chuckle to mine. “Just tell me this isn’t going to be impossible for you.”
“Impossible?” I countered. “What do you mean by—”
“It’s really none of my business, okay? But the truth is, I’m worried about you, Abs. I mean, about you and him. About Shark.”
“Huh?” I hated how I had to bring out my Oscar contender skills to play innocent about her words. “Why? I . . . I mean, what are you worried about?”
“What am I not worried about?” she rebutted. “That man . . . he’s a real hunter. I don’t know, and don’t want to know, all the things that make him tick. But that shark celebrates the smell of blood. Rejoices in it.”
“And your boy Blake doesn’t?”
“Point for the redhead. But—I don’t know how to explain this.” She hummed in the back of her throat. “There was a gleam in Shark’s eyes when he talked about you . . . ”
Somehow, I managed a dismissive pffft—for myself as much as her. “He’s like that about everyone, Rio. He’s passionate.”
She pffft right back. “You can say that again. But not about everyone.”
“I’m serious.”
“I am too.” She subjected me to her exasperated sighs as she banged around in the background. “All right, just tell me this, then. Why don’t we have all this extra drama when servicing Viktor Blake’s office?”
I started my incensed groan before she was finished. “Are you even kidding me right—”
“What? They’re in the same business, they’re about the same age, and their offices are only three blocks from each other.”
“And one of them is starting to creep me out.”
“Huh? What?”
“Not important.”
I didn’t want to think about explaining myself right now. I was already obsessed with steeling myself for the return to downtown—and handling the dread that was mounting along with it.
Shark's Edge Page 4
