He patted his pockets restlessly, as if he wanted a cigarette. “They’re at the house, shaggin’ like rabbits, I assume. John asked me to take the dogs, but I don’t like keeping them locked up at the pub during the day if I can help it.”
“Hmmm,” Lille murmured. “So you brought them to me. How helpful of you.”
“Don’t be a bitch, lass. We both know ye like the dogs.”
Lille tossed her hair. “That doesn’t mean I want to be responsible for them all day.”
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t.” He looked disgusted. “But Jordan will be fine with it.”
He turned around to leave, and Lille hesitated, wanting to call him back, tell him she was happy to take the dogs, but she resisted; it was better if he thought she was a bitch, better if he didn’t like her too much, especially since she planned on making a scene in his bar tonight. The angrier he was, the more interesting Kim’s video would be. Nothing like a little drama to catch people’s attention.
So he left, closing the door behind him, and Lille was left feeling alone in the quiet.
She turned smartly on her heel and headed back to her office. She planned to leave the door open in case any customers came inside, but she wanted the negatives. She wanted to add the images to the Web site—with everyone’s permission, of course—but she needed them converted to digital files.
The dogs followed her, sniffing briefly around the office as if checking to make sure nothing had changed. She was reaching up on her toes to pull one of the hatboxes off the top shelf in the office closet when she heard the bell to the door jingle.
Max, she thought, and her heart kicked up a beat.
She left the hatbox where it was and walked back into the store, following in the wake of the dogs. They were trained not to go beyond the counter unless it was someone they knew, but they both stood at attention next to the long table that served as the register.
“Sit,” Lille ordered, and both dogs obeyed, but Bambi’s big shepherd ears remained fixed on the intruder.
A man in jeans and a polo was looking at the lingerie. Warily, Lille approached him and put on her best shopkeeper smile. Bambi and Atticus watched from the counter, alert with interest.
“Welcome to the Fetish Box. May I help you?”
He turned around and smiled warmly at her. He had dark eyes and very little hair on top of his head, but he had a pleasant face, a little bit like Stanley Tucci.
“You can. In fact, I was hoping you’d be here.” He held out his hand. “Benson Hunter. Ben.”
Even more wary, Lille shook his hand. “Lille Marceau. Tell me, Ben, why is it you were hoping I’d be here?”
He chuckled and said, “Are you kidding? I’ve been watching your online videos. This place is great.” He gestured around him broadly.
“I see.” Lille struggled with both discomfort—she didn’t like people watching her online and deciding to come in to talk to her—and pride at the way the Box had turned out. “So how may I help you?”
“Well”—he ducked his head in an aw-shucks move that she felt was a little practiced—“I don’t normally do this, but I’m a pilot on JetBlue, headed back to JFK tomorrow, and I was hoping you’d have dinner with me tonight.”
“You came here to ask me to dinner on your layover?”
“I did.”
“Just dinner?” She arched a knowing eyebrow.
“Well, a man can hope.”
Lille contemplated him without actually considering his offer. He seemed like a decent enough man, but she’d known enough sleazy pilots to be wary. If she were back in San Francisco, she would go to dinner with him, but not here, not where she was known as the Fetish Queen. Besides, she had plans to go to the pub tonight with a small Asian girl in tow and piss off a large Irishman with an unfortunate personality.
Still, she didn’t like to offend potential customers, so she smiled at him and pouted a little. “I’m afraid I have plans tonight, Ben.”
He looked let down, but not completely crushed. “It was too much to expect a woman as beautiful as you are not to have plans, I suppose.”
“No,” she disagreed. “It’s always worth asking.”
“All right, then.” He nodded to her. “Next time I’m in town, I’ll stop by and ask again.”
“I’m afraid my answer will be the same.” Lille smiled to soften the blow. She didn’t want anyone who watched her online to think she was available.
He nodded again—she detected a bit of surprise, maybe anger—but he didn’t say anything else, just left the store, hands in the pockets of his jeans.
Lille watched him go, a slight frown drawn between her eyes. A part of her, a very small part, thought that maybe knowing a pilot would be a good thing, that if she had to run, a pilot would make doing so easier. She could start over in a new place.
She brooded as she walked back into the office, her earlier enthusiasm for the task of making over the Box’s Web site dimmed by a nagging fear—a fear that, as Carl had pointed out, could be completely groundless. She had been very young when she’d run away. And her mother had trained her to be wary—always uncertain, always on guard. Carl had mentioned “dealing with her problem as a family,” but she wasn’t sure what he meant by that exactly.
She was tired, she realized, collapsing in the office chair without her usual grace. Bambi came over and licked her hand, and Lille petted her big head absently. She wanted to stay here; she wanted the challenge of running this place and making it profitable. But she’d been going nonstop since she’d arrived—she hadn’t even been to the beach since that first day. She glanced at the Casablanca movie still. She was like Rick, she realized with a self-mocking grin, though Max was the bartender. Everything about him spoke of roots grown deep; he had a bar, a home, a dog. The man was domesticated, whether he knew it or not, and she . . . she wondered if maybe she had isolated herself too long, if maybe there was no place she really belonged.
Wary of where her thoughts were heading, she straightened and began making notes of changes she wanted made to the Web site. She also placed a call to a private investigator she knew in San Francisco. If her father intended to do her harm, she wanted to know about it.
CHAPTER Fourteen
More than anything in the world, Carl wanted his stepbrother, Max, to be happy. Though sociable on the surface, Max isolated himself from any real interaction with people. He’d been that way since he’d arrived from Ireland as a kid, a quiet, skinny thing with thick black hair. Of course, he’d been raised—if you could call it that—by a couple of lunatic women in the middle of the countryside.
When Max arrived at the Miami airport, Carl had already been living with their uncle Mike for a year. His mom and her new husband, Max’s father, had taken off after knocking over a credit union in a north Florida town. Like Max, Carl had mostly raised himself until his uncle Mike had taken him in, but unlike Max, those early years had made him almost maniacally sociable. Carl was known as the king of the good time, which was how he wanted it, but Max . . . Max needed something to shake him out of his pattern of work, fuck, read a book. For like a second, Carl had thought that Mary would make a good partner for Max; she was lovely and unique and charming, but she was not a force to be reckoned with. Max needed someone at least as temperamental and strong-willed as he was to stand up to him when he got in one of his moods. He’d seen the sparks Max and Lille threw off each other, and Mary had filled him in on their encounter several weeks ago. In Carl’s opinion, Max needed someone like Lille, and Carl intended to do everything in his power to see the two of them together.
The first part of his plan revolved around Kim, who was an excellent filmmaker and in desperate need of a job. He knew Max would hate the idea of anyone displaying their lives on film, but he also knew that Kim, in her own unique way, would take the more-than-a-little-cheesy notion of a sex shop documentary and make
it as emotionally fucking moving as a Sundance Film Festival favorite. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. It would drive business to the store, which he knew hadn’t been doing well for a few years, not since Amazon had made online ordering the name of the game, and it would irritate Max enough to bring him out of his shell. Max didn’t like change. He liked his world the way it was—but that didn’t mean he was happy, not at all.
Carl thought that Lille’s arrival was a very good thing for both the store and Max. In the two weeks that she’d been working there, she’d reorganized, redecorated, and added a life that the store had been missing since Mandy died. Mary’s arrival had helped some, but she didn’t love the business; her heart was set on her paintings, which had been selling well at his gallery. Lille, on the other hand, was a born saleswoman and, underneath it all, quite level-headed and practical.
The dichotomy of her character was interesting. Alone, in the office, she worked on spreadsheets, completed cost analyses, placed orders, and organized with the soul of an accountant, but as soon as a customer arrived, she would straighten, arrange her body as if she were posing for a show, and set her face in a mask of charm and wicked delight. She flirted and teased but always maintained her slightly aloof manner, making sure everyone knew she was the one in charge.
Wonder if I come off that way, he thought, glancing at the printed inventory lists that covered his desk. He’d received a shipment of paintings this morning from an Argentinean artist he adored—Gabriel Montenegro. Carl’s assistant, a sweet girl named Jo, hadn’t been able to handle the delivery while also taking care of any customers who came to the gallery.
His gallery showroom consisted of two areas: the public area and the private room where he kept Mary’s paintings, along with those of a few other select artists whose work was not quite acceptable to the majority of the public. Mary’s paintings were mostly sensual rather than outright explicit, unlike Debbie Valley’s photography. Gabriel’s work was somewhere in between, mostly compelling images of death, combined with references to popular culture, and a few nudes with hints of decay and destruction entwined.
Carl smiled into the dark eyes of a stygian beauty and rubbed a bit of dust off of her frame. He breathed in the smell of sawdust and packing material as the rest of Gabriel’s paintings were unloaded; then he walked back toward the section that housed Mary’s work. As always, his eyes were drawn first to the painting of Max, naked and tied to a chair. He didn’t look vulnerable; instead, the image reminded Carl of the story of Prometheus chained to a rock, his liver eaten out each day by an eagle. Not vulnerable, but tormented and hopeful . . . Max would have sold it months ago if Carl could bear to part with it. The truth was, he’d always loved his stepbrother, and John as well. The three of them had been friends for so long, three boys without fathers, raised by Max’s uncle and Mandy.
Carl pressed a hand to his heart. He was destined to live a life of unrequited love for his two best friends, but unrequited love suited him, he decided, at least for the moment, at least until he found real love, which was much less dramatic but probably more satisfying.
“Hang the Montenegros in here,” he told the boys, waving a hand at the wall space he’d allocated to the artist, who’d yet to come and visit him, despite his repeated requests.
They did as he directed while he checked his new phone. His missing keys worried him, though he knew John would change the locks when he arrived for the night—it felt like a stretch that what had happened to him the previous night was linked to Lille, but if it was . . . why would someone bother to drug him and take his phone and keys? Did they just want information? Were they planning to break in? It seemed unlikely that any thief interested in breaking into the Fetish Box would go to the trouble of stealing keys, and his apartment had a doorman and an alarm, so keys wouldn’t help that much there. Still, the story she’d told about her father worried him. Someone connected to the Russian mob—she’d said he was the son of a Russian mobster—would surely have found her by now, unless she’d been mistaken all those years ago. She’d run away so young; it was possible she’d just misunderstood, wasn’t it?
Carl had a feeling that something else had made Lille afraid and wary of people. No one reacted that dramatically to the threat of someone she’d never met unless she had reason to be afraid, to know what it was like to be hurt—one of her mother’s other boyfriends, maybe? Carl wasn’t certain, nor did he believe that digging up everything from the past was the only way to move forward. After all, he knew very well what had happened to him at the hands of one of his mother’s boyfriends, and knowing about it didn’t help one bit.
He shrugged his shoulders, uncomfortable even thinking about it, and texted Kim Chan instead: “Make sure you get Max and Lille together on film tonight.”
She texted back “Duh,” which made him laugh. No one would guess that she was from an upper-middle-class family in Houston, or that she’d run away at sixteen and had turned eighteen only a few weeks ago. He’d met her when he’d been volunteering at the local soup kitchen in Miami. She’d been in line for food but had also been filming with an expensive digital camera. As far as he could tell, it was the only possession of any value she had to her name.
“Love you, too, sweetie,” he texted back.
She didn’t respond, but he hadn’t really expected her to.
He put the phone in his pocket and patted it absently, thinking about this morning. It had been a long time since he’d blacked out so totally that he woke up not knowing where he was or what had happened. He was usually more careful, or maybe just lucky.
He wasn’t sure, but after what had happened to Mary, he didn’t want to take stupid chances. If there was a connection between what had happened to him and the phone call Lille had received about her father, he wanted to know it. He intended to go back to the Box this evening and hopefully convince her to talk about her father with John and Mary before they went over to the pub. If she didn’t want to talk about it, he’d tell John privately.
He also knew a private investigator in Miami; he’d sworn he’d never lay eyes on the man again after last time, but Benson Hunter was the best in the business, if your business was getting dirt on people.
Several hours later, he’d left a message for Benson, asking to meet him tonight at Jobman’s Pub, and he’d managed to get all the paintings hung and on display. He wasn’t happy about the lighting in one section, but he’d get that fixed in the morning. Truly, though, he wanted to have a party to promote the opening of the gallery. He’d never had one to introduce Mary’s work to the public, too much had been happening at the time, and now with the addition of Gabriel’s work, it seemed like an excellent time to celebrate, not that he needed the excuse.
Pulling out his phone, he made a note on a couple of dates in his calendar. He’d check with Lille and Mary, see if they wanted to help with the planning. Lille had mentioned a Halloween party at the pub, but maybe they could have it at the gallery instead. As he checked his calendar, he noticed that it was almost two in the afternoon and that he had a text message from Jordan.
I’m in love. But she hates me.
Carl laughed, understanding immediately whom Jordan was talking about.
“She hates everyone,” he texted back.
Help me.
Kim barely seemed to tolerate Carl’s presence; he could only imagine her reaction if he suddenly starting encouraging her to date his friends.
“Think she’s gay,” he responded, which was only part of the truth. He thought Kim swung whatever way pleased her in the moment.
Maybe I can change her mind.
Carl winced. So it was like that. He’d been there before. Really, he could offer only his encyclopedic knowledge of 1980s movies as a guide to the hopelessly lovelorn. “‘That’s why they call them crushes. If they were easy, they’d call them something else.’—Sixteen Candles.”
After a minut
e, his phone beeped.
Know what the quote’s from. Not helpful.
Lol. Sorry, honey.
That’s okay.
Carl sighed—even Jordan’s texts sounded despondent. “There in a little while,” he texted his friend. He still had to finish up a few things and head back to Hollywood.
Okay. John and Mary should be here soon. Lille getting ready to go to pub. Kim is making a virtual tour.
“Great. Max coming?” Carl texted back. He had forgotten to check with him earlier to find out.
He will.
Warn him?
Hell no.
Yeah, Carl nodded to himself, pressing the button to lock his phone. He wasn’t going to tell Max, either—it would be much more interesting to see what happened next, kind of like when a bird landed in Mary’s cat-infested yard. Let the fur and feathers fly.
CHAPTER Fifteen
Kim filmed Lille’s reflection in the bathroom mirror as the woman put on eyeliner. She was wearing lingerie and fishnet tights with a pair of slippers and a silk robe. She hadn’t let Kim film her in the lingerie.
“I’m not aspiring to be a porn star,” she’d told Kim in that snotty tone, which Kim had faithfully recorded. But she thought that maybe Lille didn’t need to be in lingerie for people to want to watch her—she thought that not having Lille in lingerie would actually bring in more ratings.
“Darling, let me do that.” Carl came into the bathroom at the Box carrying a bouquet of fire-and-ice roses. He was also carrying a vintage opaque white vase with little dots all over it.
The bathroom at the Box was for employees—Jordan had confided in Kim that they used to allow the customers to access it, but that had turned out to be a mistake. Now they let customers try on only some of the costumes, and someone kept an eye on the bathroom the whole time.
The bathroom was next door to Mary’s office, and it looked the way it had in 1956 when the house was constructed, salmon pink tiles and flamingo wallpaper included. Kim had been sure to take in every horrifyingly ugly detail, idly thinking that her mother would have loved it.
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