She tried to sidestep him, but he held her tightly. “Let go of me,” she said. “I can’t think with you... with your hands on me like this.”
He realized with astonishment that she was trembling—not how he would have expected Zara Sutcliffe to react to a man’s touch. Not only was she a divorcée, but the tabloids were full of pictures of her on the arms of rock stars and Hollywood big shots.
Nevertheless, he eased off a bit, releasing her shoulders, but standing dose enough that he could stop her if she tried to make a run for it. “I didn’t come all the way from Arkansas for nothing,” he said. “You made an appointment, and you’re damn well gonna keep it.”
“Look.” She glanced at her watch again and talked fast. “I have six minutes left. I’m sorry about the appointment. It was supposed to be canceled. That girl, Tina, she made phone calls this morning—”
“I was in the air this morning. She could have left a voicemail. Better yet, she could have called me yesterday, before I went to the trouble of flying all the way up here.”
“I don’t know why she—”
“I don’t, either,” he said. “But now that we’re both here, we can have our meeting.”
“But I have to be—”
“You have to be somewhere in six minutes. Cancel that appointment.”
“I can’t. There’s no way!” Her chin began to wobble.
“Don’t.” He pressed his thumb in the indentation in her chin, just as he’d been wanting to do.
Damn. He was going to cave in. He felt it in his bones. Damn, damn and double damn.
Gage was a sucker for vulnerable women, always had been. It was all his mother’s fault. She never should have convinced him, after he’d had the temerity to return Evil Evelyn Platt’s roundhouse punch in the second grade, that it was his duty as a gentleman to protect the fairer sex; he was supposed to take it, but never even dream of dishing it out. He’d long since realized that females weren’t, in his father’s words, “the weaker sex,” they were just the smarter sex, but he couldn’t seem to rein in this knee-jerk compulsion he had to safeguard them. All of them.
Even a barracuda like Zara Sutcliffe.
He was about to tell her she’d won, and he’d come back and meet with her tomorrow, because he wasn’t flying back until the day after, but before he could, she said, “This has gone on too long. I’ve got to tell you the truth.”
Gage’s ears tickled at the word truth.
She drew in a shaky breath and looked everywhere but at his eyes. “I’m not Zara Sutcliffe.”
He stared at the top of her head. “Say what now?”
“I’m her twin sister, Emma, and I know it sounds crazy, but I had to pretend to be Zara, and now everything’s going wrong,” she blurted out in a rush. “And I have to go, I have to. You have to let me go, please.” She raised those chocolatey cat eyes to his imploringly. “Please.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said, outrage moving in quickly to replace any misguided urge he may have had to play the Southern gentleman in this particular scenario. “You just made your fatal error, sweetheart—tryin’ to slither out of this with a tale like that. If there’s any one thing that gets my panties in a twist, it’s being lied to.”
“B-but I’m not lying,” she stammered. “I’m really Zara’s twin—”
He took her by the arm and pulled her away from the door, then opened it and yelled, “Tina!” down the hall.
The receptionist materialized in the open doorway. “Uh, may I help you, sir?”
“Who is this?” he asked, tilting his head toward the shivering woman in his grip.
Tina hesitated, her eyes darting back and forth between them.
“It’s not a trick question,” he said.
“That’s Zara Sutcliffe.” Tina zapped a look toward her boss, as if to say, What the fuck?
“Thank you,” he said, in a tone of dismissal She turned and left, giving them a wary glance over her shoulder.
Zara eyed the open doorway.
“Don’t even think about it.” Gage tightened his grip on her arm. “We’re gonna have our meeting now.”
“Let me reschedule you. Please!”
“’Fraid not. You don’t exactly have a sterling track record for keeping appointments.”
“I’ll keep this one!”
“Prove it.”
“How?”
He allowed himself a mean-spirited little smile. “By making the appointment for—” he glanced at his phone “—4:58 and keeping it now.”
“It’s 4:58?” She actually grew pale, and for a second there he thought she might faint smooth away. But then a sense of calm seemed to overtake her. He felt her relax beneath his grasp, and he loosened it experimentally. She didn’t move. “You win,” she said. “We’ll have our meeting now.”
“Hallelujah,” Gage said, pleasure in his victory warring with suspicion.
She extended her free arm toward her desk. “Any objection to sitting down for this, or would you prefer to back me against the door again? Or maybe throw me to the floor?”
Not trusting himself to answer that one, he released her and followed her across the room, admiring the way her round little bottom stretched that yellow leather. She was tall in those mile-high heels, but without them she’d be maybe five-six. She had the legs of a Rockette, though, long and elegantly muscled.
He sat where she pointed, a black leather chair facing her desk.
“I’m sorry we started things off on the wrong foot,” she said smoothly, her transformation to coolheaded businesswoman eerily thorough. “It was all my fault and I apologize.
“It’s perfectly all right,” he mumbled, trained since infancy to accept apologies graciously, even when the situation was most decidedly not perfectly all right, and even if he had a pretty good idea she was up to something.
“I do have some promotion ideas I want to run past you,” she said, circling the desk and pulling out her chair. “And if you haven’t thought about selling to Hollywood, this is the time to talk about that. In my opinion, seven figures is not unrealistic.” She picked up one of the books that littered her desk and handed it to him. “This author got a million five for the movie rights.” She winced as she started to sit. Opening up the gold raincoat, she chuckled at the ray gun taped inside. “Excuse me.”
Shrugging off the coat, she crossed behind him to the coatrack. Gage looked at the book she’d handed him: Low-fat Recipes from the Great Chefs. He leafed through the pages. It was a cookbook. Who’d pay a million five for movie rights to—
He swung around in his chair. The coat stand was empty. The door stood open.
“Shit!” Hurling the book to the floor, he bolted up from his chair and sprinted out of the room, skidding on the marble floor of the hallway.
“Where’d she go?” he barked at the receptionist.
Tina glanced toward the glass door, beyond which the elevator doors were sliding shut.
“Stairs!” he shouted. “Are there stairs?”
She pointed mutely. Gage raced down seven flights two steps at a time and hurtled outside, into the mayhem of rush hour in Manhattan. The sidewalk was a moving river of pedestrians—a river that had, for all intents and purposes, swallowed Zara Sutcliffe whole. Figuring she might try to hail a cab, he muscled his way to the corner, only to find the intersection jammed solid with bumper-to-bumper vehicles snared in a two-way standstill. Voices bellowed an international chorus of profanity as car horns trumpeted in accompaniment. There were cabs in that throng, but none of them was going anywhere. If Zara Sutcliffe meant to get to that precious appointment of hers, she’d either have to walk or...
There she was, a flash of gold among a group of people snaking their way between the gridlocked cars to get to the other side of the street. Peering at the opposite corner he saw her obvious destination—a subway stairwell, into which dozens of bodies were descending as one.
Gage groaned. Everything he despised about this town—the c
rime, the filth, the smells, the noise—was superconcentrated once you got underground. Whenever he came to New York—which, thankfully, wasn’t that often—he somehow managed to get sucked down into the subway system, and every time, he promised himself it wouldn’t happen again.
She’s not worth it, he told himself as he watched the glimmer of gold join the stream of humanity pouring into the stairwell. Count your losses and walk away.
EMMA TRIED TO TURN ON her phone to check the time, only to find it had given up the ghost. Whatever, she thought as she weaved through the afternoon crowd on the subway platform. She knew she was late. If Mac had already left his office in SoHo, thinking he was being stood up, he would soon. If only Gage Foster had let her go sooner. Now the deal was blown, and she’d have to tell her sister, and their mother would live with them forever, and people were bumping into her, and she wasn’t sure which train to take anyway, and she couldn’t breathe down here, and she wished she were dead.
From within the milling throng, she noticed a figure moving toward her with what looked like a sense of purpose—an oddity in an environment in which everyone studiously ignored everyone else. Then she recognized him, having seen him a couple of minutes ago, hanging around outside Zara’s office building. From all appearances, he was a bum. That was probably a politically incorrect term, but she didn’t know any other word for a guy with long, scraggly hair who wore about seven layers of shabby clothes and one layer of what looked like plain old dirt.
He’d started to approach her up on the sidewalk as she surveyed the traffic jam that had taken all the cabs out of commission. Then she’d spied the subway entrance across the street and made a beeline for it. She thought she’d shaken him off—strangers made her nervous, and this stranger made her very nervous—but here he was again, looking oddly determined as he strode toward her.
He probably wanted money, but Emma had one ten-dollar bill in her wallet, and she wasn’t about to give it away. She tried to remember how much she had in change, but the whole station was vibrating with the approach of a train through the tunnel and she couldn’t think.
As the bum closed in on her, she saw that he had his eyes trained on her shoulder bag.
Uh-oh. Tightening her grip on the bag, Emma backed up fast through the swarm of commuters. She shouldn’t have let herself look so lost and vulnerable. Criminals preyed on the weak; that’s why this guy had picked her to rip off, out of the hundreds of other candidates.
She stopped when the crowd thinned out. Glancing behind her, she found she was at the edge of the platform. When she looked back around, the bum was right there, reaching for her bag. He tore it away from her with one hard yank. “No!” she screamed.
He met her gaze, his eyes glowing in his filthy face.
Two horn blasts made her jump. An express train roared into the station.
The purse snatcher smiled.
And then he pushed her off the platform.
CHAPTER THREE
EMMA CLAWED AT THE AIR as she toppled over, her scream absorbed by the thunder of the oncoming train. Pain warred with panic as she landed on the tracks. Thank God, she’d missed the third rail.
Headlights bore down on her. Could she hoist herself up onto the platform? She clambered to her feet as the train barreled toward her, its horn blaring once, twice, three times.
There’s not enough time. This is it.
Someone else landed heavily on the tracks and pushed her to her knees. For an insane moment she thought it was the purse snatcher, but when she looked up she saw... Gage Foster?
He’s crazy! She struggled to rise, but he shoved her roughly into a narrow recess beneath the platform that she hadn’t noticed. He came in after her, banding his arms around her and crushing her against the concrete wall as a deafening rumble filled her ears and racked her body.
They both shook as the train stormed through the station, its wheels mere inches away. She couldn’t see a thing, but she could smell hot metal and sizzling electricity.
His arms tightened around her, one hand cupping her head against his shoulder, the other gripping her waist beneath the raincoat. Her heart felt as if it might explode right through her chest. She felt his mouth moving against her hair and realized he was speaking to her, although his words were swallowed up by the din that enveloped them. There was something surreal about somebody talking under these circumstances, yet she found the fact that he could do so, and that he wanted to do so, strangely comforting. She strained to hear his words, but they were lost in the metallic scream that reverberated all around them.
This can’t be happening, she thought wildly. Things like this don’t happen to me.
The great roar receded; air rushed into their little niche. The train was leaving the station, she realized, although she couldn’t seem to move, even to the extent of opening her eyes. Gage rubbed her back in a soothing, circular rhythm. She still felt the movement of his lips against her hair, and now she could feel his warm breath as well, ruffling the unruly strands.
“It’s all right, now,” he murmured. “Everything’s gonna be all right....”
Her legs were tangled with his, her hands gripping his leather jacket. She tried to unclench them, but couldn’t.
“It’s all over. You’re fine. Everything’s okay....”
Yeah, everything’s just dandy. Some lunatic snatched my bag and pushed me into the path of an oncoming train, and now I’m suffering from hysterical paralysis and they’re going to have to separate me from you surgically, but hey! That’s life in the big city.
“Are you laughing?” he asked.
Even as she shook her head, she realized that she was laughing. She was also perilously close to tears. But she’d moved! Progress!
“Come on, sweetheart.” He eased away from her fractionally and gently pried her fingers loose from his jacket. “Let’s get topside before another train comes.”
“Another...” The threat of being trapped in that cranny by another train pumped an energizing jolt of adrenaline through Emma. She pushed against him. “Move! What are you waiting for?”
Chuckling, he rolled away, and she scrambled out after him. The crowd on the platform cheered as he helped her to stand.
A towering clone of Kareem Abdul Jabbar lifted her up and set her carefully on her feet; she teetered, oddly off balance. “You all right, miss?” He slid a phone out of his pocket and punched out 911.
“I...” Emma looked down at herself. The gold raincoat was soot smudged, although she still felt the weight of the ray gun taped inside, so she knew it hadn’t gotten dislodged. Her stockings were a network of runs. Both knees were scraped, one pretty badly, but she felt no pain. “I’m missing a shoe.” That’s why she’d felt off balance. One foot remained miraculously stiletto heeled; the other was bare.
“Here you go.” Gage, still standing on the track, tossed the missing shoe onto the platform, then planted his hands on the edge and vaulted himself up, with remarkable grace. Squatting down, and taking the shoe in one hand, he grasped her ankle. His fingers felt warm through the taut nylon of her stocking. “Lift your foot.”
She did, but had to lean over and hold on to his shoulders for balance. Cradling her foot, he slipped the shoe on, wriggling it into place. The action felt so... intimate that for a moment she couldn’t breathe.
Get a grip, Emma. He’s just putting on your shoe. And she was just the world’s most repressed virgin, to be unnerved by it.
She lowered the foot and released his shoulders, but her legs still wobbled; her knees didn’t seem to be doing their job very well just now.
Gage glided his hand from her ankle to her calf and inspected her knees, and then looked up at her, his blue eyes incandescent in the dismal subway station. “You cryin’?”
“No,” she sniffed, as hot tears trickled down her face.
“Yes you are.” He stood, looking concerned and more than a little perplexed, as if it had never before occurred to him that the human eye could produce l
iquid, and now that he was faced with that reality, he was at a complete loss as to how to proceed. Patting all his jacket pockets, one after the other, he said, “Now, that’s enough of that.”
“Okay,” she replied dutifully in a wet, quavering voice.
“Come on, now.” Finally producing a folded white handkerchief, he blotted her cheeks, then rubbed firmly. “At least all that black shit’s coming off.”
Black shit? Did he mean soot or...
Emma groaned as her mind’s eye conjured up a picture of herself, eyeliner and mascara coursing down her face in inky rivulets, to be mopped up by a nonplussed but solicitous Gage Foster. Could her humiliation be more complete?
Gage frowned in concentration as he deep-sixed the eye makeup Emma’s mother had so painstakingly applied. Then he paused, his gaze fixed on her mouth. With a dazed sense of unreality she watched him fold the handkerchief over to expose a clean spot, which he wiped, for some reason, over her lips. It came away streaked with crimson. He folded and wiped again, then again, until all traces of her lipstick—or rather, Zara’s lipstick—were eradicated.
And then he smiled, first at her lips and then at her eyes—a slow, sweet smile, as if he were seeing her for the very first time. “That’s better,” he said, and shoved the handkerchief back in his pocket.
“I saw the guy who did it,” Kareem offered.
“Yeah, so did I,” Gage said, “from the back.” He scanned the crowd. “I doubt I’d even know him if I saw him again.”
“I’d recognize him anywhere.” Emma said. “His eyes, they were... like a wolf’s eyes.”
“Uh-huh.” Gage rubbed the back of his neck. “Think you can be any more specific?”
“Gold, they were golden. And... savage. When I was a kid, my father had this painting of a wolf in his den. Its eyes used to give me the creeps big-time.” John Sutcliffe had liked wolves, creatures as cold-blooded and pitiless as himself.
“That was quick,” said Kareem as two men in dark blue uniforms approached them through the milling onlookers, who pointed in her direction. From a distance—and even from close-up as they came near—they looked eerily like Bill Hader and Seth Rogen’s doofus cop partners from Superbad—one tallish, dark-haired and bespectacled, the other shorter and sporting unfortunate facial hair. Emma wondered if they’d been paired up deliberately for comic effect.
Good to Be Bad (Double Dare Book 1) Page 4
