by Gayle Wilson
When Diego returned for the tray, she was sitting on the bed, defeated, bitter, and feeling very stupid. The empty plate and coffeepot were on the dresser, along with all the utensils. So much for idiotic ideas, for visions of arranging her own rescue. She might as well have tried eating her way through the window as prying those nails out.
“He invites you to dinner,” Diego said. “Tonight. Downstairs.”
“Please convey my apologies,” she said with sarcastic politeness, “but I’m sure I have other plans.” She managed a small smile at the feebleness of her pull on the tiger’s tail.
“At eight.”
“He can go to hell.”
“If you aren’t ready by then, he said I’m to help you dress.”
“You always do what he says?” she asked, feeling despair. This, too, was a battle she would lose, she knew.
“I’ll come for you. He sent you this.”
The garment bag had remained out of sight in the hall until the invitation had been properly delivered. It was opaque and zippered. Nothing of what it contained could be seen. When she didn’t move in response to its appearance, Diego stepped to the closet and placed the crook of the hanger over the frame of the double doors. He never turned his back on her. He walked to the dresser and picked up the breakfast tray, carrying it out to the hall table where he carefully set it down to relock the door.
When she was alone, she was fully aware of the tension she’d been hiding. She took a couple of deep breaths, forcing her hands to unclench. She wasn’t enjoying his game of cat and mouse—threats followed by seduction.
She got up and walked across the room to the garment bag. Curious, she unzipped the heavy plastic and slipped it off to reveal the dress it contained.
You should be dressed by one of the Paris fashion houses, draped in diamonds, laughing on a lover’s arm, he had said. If she were, this was certainly what she would be wearing.
Against her will, her fingers caressed the material. She wasn’t even sure what the fabric was, but it was heavy, expensive, and very beautiful. The black would be a perfect contrast against the ivory of her complexion, and with her hair.
You bastard, she thought, her lips lifting involuntarily into a smile. Even I didn’t know I’d be attracted to something like this, so how could you have known?
She found the label, hand-stitched into a seam, and recognized the name. She couldn’t pronounce it. She had never heard it pronounced, but she’d seen it a dozen times in the social pages, the gossip columns—things she would deny that she ever took time to read. Curled up in the big chair in her apartment, wearing outsize sweats and wool socks against the cold, she read about parties that might as well have taken place on the moon as across town on Embassy Row.
She wondered if it would fit. She knew then she was caught. There was no way she was going to let this hang here and not try it on. Not to wear it for him, but for herself. Just once to see how she would look…dressed by one of the Paris fashion houses.
She slipped out of her clothes and stood a moment in her utilitarian bra and panties. It seemed a sacrilege to put the dress on over them. Under its decolletage, her bra would certainly show. Even as she thought that, her eyes moved back to the bag. Of course, he’d taken care of that, too. The undergarment she found there was black and one-piece, silk and lace, designed to follow the cut of the dress. There were also off-black silk hose and high heels. Everything was her size. She wasn’t sure whether to be angry or flattered. Or amused, she thought, smiling again. She imagined that dark seductive voice reeling off her sizes to some saleswoman.
She resisted for at least ten seconds and then peeled off everything she was wearing. She slipped into the teddy, fastening the strategically placed hooks and eyes, and found that it fitted perfectly. Ignoring the sheer stockings, she stepped into the high heels and walked to the mirror.
The woman reflected there was no one she knew. She shook her head, but as she had known she would from the beginning, she turned back to the dress. She slipped it off the hanger and dropped it over her head to settle like a second skin against her body. She reached behind to fasten the zipper. When she turned back to the mirror, it was to confront her own reflection with a sense of wonder.
Unconscious of the very feminine gesture, she watched the hands of the woman in the glass gather strands of long red hair and hold them on top of her head. Tendrils escaped to spill over her cheeks and neck.
It was so damned perfect. So right. It was nothing she would have chosen, even if she had been able to afford it. This was not the way she saw herself. Sophisticated and sexy. Soft and seductive. The reflection in the mirror was not the cop. Not Austin Phillips’s daughter, who had won her first marksmanship medal at seven.
At the thought of her father, she released the curling strands, allowing them to fall in disorder around her face. She stood for a long time, looking at the stranger in the mirror. She had denied selling out the courier, had reacted with anger to his accusations, but she had been mesmerized by his bribe, his gift. She wondered how he could have known she would be tempted by this when she had not.
“No,” she said aloud, denying its pull, and hurriedly her fingers found the zipper.
When the beautifully feminine garments were all safely hidden by the opaqueness of the bag, she dressed once more in the slacks and shirt she had worn earlier. She didn’t have a choice in whether or not she went downstairs tonight-Diego had made that plain—but she certainly had a choice in what she wore.
She lifted her suitcase again onto the foot of the bed and began to sort through for something that would serve as appropriate dress for dinner with a drug lord.
LONG BEFORE EIGHT, she was sitting carefully on the edge of the bed. She felt the fine tremor in her fingers grow the longer she waited, and then the door opened and it was time.
Diego held the hated blindfold and, recognizing that in this also she had no choice, she stood patiently as he fastened it over her eyes and checked its tightness. He made no comment about the dark green cotton dress she had chosen to wear instead of what his boss had sent up.
Although she had dreaded the awkwardness of blindly stumbling with Diego down the long staircase, he guided her instead to an elevator. She tried to decide if the descent was one floor or two, but the ride was quick, and then they were on a surface that clicked under their heels.
Diego knocked and at the response, took her arm to guide her inside and seat her again in a wing chair. She could feel the softness of the covered arms under her fingers. She placed her hands in her lap, forcing them to relax, and then recognized the familiar fragrance touching her senses.
“Thank you for joining me,” the deep, accented voice said, very close to her.
Definitely Cesar Romero, she thought, her lips lifting. Old movies. Black-and-white. The suave Latin lover. It was exactly what he sounded like.
“I wonder what that thought was,” he said, amused, but she only shook her head.
“I’m sorry the dress didn’t fit.”
“It fit,” she said, and then regretted letting him have the satisfaction of knowing she’d tried it on.
“But for some reason you chose not to wear it?” There seemed only polite interest in the question and apparently no anger.
“My mother warned me never to accept gifts from strangers.”
“Most women your age have learned to ignore their mother’s advice or at least to temper it with their own wishes. I was looking forward to seeing you dressed as a woman so beautiful as you should be dressed. I hope I haven’t offended you.”
“You don’t give a damn whether I’m offended or not. You’re just used to having your own way.”
“You’re probably right,” he said, laughing, this time letting his amusement show. “And you, of course, are determined that I won’t ‘have my way’ as far as you’re concerned.”
Have my way piqued a definite reaction in her mind. She wondered if he realized the sexual connotations of that old phr
ase. The Victorian villain trying to have his way with the trembling virginal heroine.
“I didn’t like the dress.”
“You’re a very poor liar, Ms. Phillips,” he said softly. “The dress was perfect and you know it.”
Because she did know it, she was left momentarily with nothing to say. He, of course, didn’t appear to have any problem handling her refusal of the garment he had chosen for her. The perfect host, he simply moved on to other things.
“Would you like wine?”
She felt her heartbeat accelerate. Drugged? she wondered briefly. “The better to eat you with, my dear,” said the Big Bad Wolf. The analogy certainly fit. Would he prefer her that acquiescent? Drugged and dressed in that damned black teddy? Her mouth quirked again, refusing to picture herself in the role of helpless, subdued maiden.
“And I’m still wondering what amuses you,” his silken voice questioned.
“I would like wine, please,” she suggested instead. At least she would have something to do with her hands besides let them tremble.
She listened to the shifting of ice as the bottle lifted, the soft tumble of the liquid against the glass and then someone took her hand and, turning it, placed the glass into her fingers. Diego or his boss? she wondered, but somewhere inside she knew. Her stomach had again reacted to the simple touch of those long, lean fingers.
She raised the glass to her mouth and drank too much. Like some wino, she thought, wondering if he would be amused by her obvious lack of sophistication.
“Do you approve?”
“Are you asking my approval of the wine? What do people say when they don’t know anything about art? ‘I only know what I like,’” she mocked.
“Do you?”
“What?” She was thrown off by his calm response.
“Like the wine? It seems a simple question. I didn’t ask for the vintage.”
“God, you could probably do that,” she acknowledged, laughing. “Roll it around on your tongue and reel off the year and vineyard. ‘Grown on the south slope during a very dry summer.’ I didn’t go to that school. While you were raking in millions in the street trade, I was working my way through college and law school.”
“You’re a lawyer?” he said, the interest clear in his voice.
“I told you. I’m a cop. I never finished law school.”
“Why?”
“Lack of ambition?” she lied, mockingly, remembering her father’s death and the endless anger and depression that had sapped her concentration, driving her to more immediate goals.
“So you became a cop. Are you happy being a cop? Are you a good cop, Ms. Phillips?”
He was making fun of her, she supposed, but she wasn’t ashamed of what she did, certainly not ashamed in front of this South American gangster.
“When we’re successful, I’m happy. When one of you succeeds in escaping justice, I’m not. And I was good enough to put a major hurt on your little operation. That was a very happy moment.”
“The money-laundering crackdown? You were happy despite the fact that important links in that chain escaped?” he asked, his tone quietly ridiculing her claim. “In spite of the fact that your own friends have paid the price for the ineptness of Hardesty’s entire operation? In spite of the fact that you are here as a direct result of its failure? Is that your definition of success?”
She knew he was right—that his sarcasm was probably justified, based on recent events. And that angered her. “I have very few regrets about the success of that operation.”
“And those include?”
“The fact that you’re here is obviously one. The others are none of your business,” she answered childishly, thinking of the man who had given them the information She regretted his death, his suffering, but she believed that, like her colleagues, whose deaths she also regretted, the courier had been willing to sacrifice himself to bring these people down.
He laughed softly at her answer, but he didn’t ask again. She sipped her wine and gradually became aware of the music that surrounded them as delicately as his expensive cologne. Classical, she supposed. That was something else an education in the school of hard knocks didn’t include.
She thought of her father saying he loved “the classics,” and of her eventual discovery that he meant the classics of rock and roll, of the late fifties and the glorious sixties. Those were her classics, too. She wondered if this sophisticated gangster beside her knew Buddy Holly or the Coasters. Eat your heart out, Bach, she thought, unconscious that she was smiling again.
“Perhaps it’s I who amuse you?” he suggested.
She thought she could detect a slight annoyance in the dark voice and found she couldn’t resist goading him.
“You really shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble—the wine and the music. I’ve heard of trying to impress a girl, but you’ve got a captive audience. The James Bond routine really isn’t necessary.”
His startled laugh was genuine. Her own lips lifted again, in involuntarily response to his ability to accept that she was laughing at him for a change. She silently acknowledged the self-confidence that allowed him to recognize her ridicule and be amused rather than angered by it.
“James Bond?” he repeated finally, unbelievingly, and then he laughed again. It was, she was forced to admit, a very pleasant laugh. “I suppose that puts me in my place. A prick to any man’s ego.”
“No pun intended?” she questioned innocently and was again rewarded by his laughter.
Stop it, her rational mind scolded. Who do you think this is? Dudley Doright? He kills people for a living, and you’re flirting with him like a freshman at her first prom.
She became aware that he was saying something to her, and she bent her mind to the task at hand, which, in spite of the way she had been reacting, was not repartee.
“So that I hesitate to tell you what’s on the menu. I should have sent out for hamburgers, I suppose.”
“Chinese,” she said unthinkingly. “I’m a sucker for Chinese.”
“I’ll remember that,” he replied softly.
“For my last meal?” she asked, the bitterness not feigned.
“Are you always so pessimistic?”
“No, nor am I stupid. Are you trying to convince me that you’re going to let me go?”
“Even if I don’t plan to release you, it doesn’t necessarily follow that I’m going to need to have a last meal prepared for you.” The gentle amusement at her expense was this time not upsetting, considering the topic.
“So you’re not going to kill me and you’re not going to let me go,” she said, allowing her disbelief to show. “What does that leave? Selling me to the white slavers?” She mocked his attempted assurances, assurances she wanted very badly to believe. “Making me your personal—” She stopped suddenly because that idea, given the atmosphere tonight and the remembrance of the black silk teddy, was no longer so far-fetched nor the least bit humorous.
“Go on,” he suggested softly, the dark voice flowing over her like warm honey.
She found she could no longer mock the idea of something happening between them. There were too many emotions trapped in those thoughts. She didn’t want to die, and she was honest enough to admit that she had to keep reminding herself of who he was and of what he did. It was all so foreign to the man he seemed. There was nothing coarse about him. The sophistication she had tried to ridicule seemed as genuine as his attraction to her. Unconsciously, she had been aware of that attraction from the beginning, from the night she’d awakened to find him sitting in her room, concerned about whether she had a concussion.
She wondered how far she’d be willing to play to that attraction in order to stay alive. She should be disgusted by the very thought of catering to his feelings for her, of using them, but in all honesty, she wasn’t. She had even flirted with him, and she began to try to rationalize why. He’d had her brought here, but he hadn’t hurt her. Not really. His goon had, of course. The thought was sudden but, in re
membering, somehow she was very sure: the angry voice in the conversation after this morning’s incident had been his, furious over Diego’s treatment of her.
The silence stretched between them. She was glad he couldn’t see her eyes, grateful for the first time for the concealment of the blindfold. She knew how dangerous her attraction to him was, but she couldn’t make him fit what she knew about the murdering scavengers who ran the cartels.
Her rational mind might issue all the reminders, but when he talked to her in that dark, seductive voice, she wanted to believe what he said. She had wanted to believe him from the beginning, when he’d been so comfortingly amused by her fear of torture. She’d blamed it then on her aching head, on her desire to know more about what had happened the night the courier was betrayed, but she admitted now that those were not the only reasons. Part of it was her fascination with him, with that damnably alluring voice and those caressing fingers, with the fact that he had sat up all night to watch over her because he’d been afraid she might have a concussion. Fascinated against her will with his perfect, beautifully accented English and his scent. With his wine and his choice of music. Nothing he had revealed indicated he was the kind of man she knew he had to be.
Somewhere a door opened, and she listened to heavy footsteps cross the floor toward them. Diego, she realized suddenly. Damn it. They had been alone and she hadn’t even known it. She had assumed his bodyguard had been behind her chair as he had been before. Instead…Damn it, she thought again, bitter at the missed opportunity.
“What is it, Diego?” he asked, but she was unable to read the emotion hidden in the velvet voice. Annoyance at the interruption, perhaps? She wondered if she had thought that because it was an emotion fluttering somewhere in the back of her own mind.
There was a softly whispered message, delivered too discreetly for her to make any sense of the hissing sibilants that were all she heard. She waited, wondering about the implications of whatever was happening for her situation. Whatever was going on, he hadn’t been expecting it. She had read that clearly enough in his voice when Diego entered the room.
