Seduced by a Dangerous Man

by Cleo Peitsche

  I went to see what they needed, notepad at the ready, but excitement had my thoughts in a rush. It was better not to dwell on the fact that I was excited about the appearance of another dead body.

  It had to be Corbin’s doing. The timing gave it away. The cops wanted to see me, and the next day someone turned up, drawing attention away from me.

  I just hoped he hadn’t actually killed someone for me. It was a chilling thought, all the more so because Corbin had sworn to me that he didn’t want to do that anymore.

  Was that why he’d disappeared? Had he done something horrific, something unforgivable, and now was afraid to face me? He’d been obligated to go… wherever he’d gone. If that job had demanded murder, there weren’t too many ways around it, regardless of how motivated he was.

  … Or if I’d become the stand-in for morality, and if he’d been unable to stop killing, he might not have believed there was a place for me in his life, and vice versa. On several occasions, he’d said I should run away from him.

  I chewed my lower lip and tasted iron. Instead of blurting that I loved him, I should have convinced him that I didn’t care who he was or what he did. Should have convinced him that the present was all that mattered—

  “Did you hear me?” The elderly woman tapped her checkbook on the tabletop.

  I had no idea what she’d said, but it seemed obvious. “The check, right?”

  “We want to know what the dessert special is.” All three of the women were giving me funny looks, like I was the one with violet hair and bedazzled cat-frame eyeglasses and lip liner so far around my mouth that it looked like a high-water mark.

  “Blueberry cobbler,” I said.

  “We’ll share one. Three spoons. Now, we don’t want it too hot, but it should be warm enough that the ice cream melts a little.”

  I spent fifteen minutes attending to my job, all the while wondering if I should pump Henry for more information or if I should just avoid him. The best thing would be to find a way to smooth things over. For Rob’s sake. And my own sanity.

  Henry had won. I didn’t have the resources or the connections to beat him. But I couldn’t give him what he wanted: Corbin. The helplessness made me angry. Avoidance, then. At least it would stop things from getting worse.

  But he and Butch were still sitting at my table. Time to move them along.

  “Apple pie,” Butch said when I walked over. “Don’t forget the smile.”

  I pulled my lips back from my teeth in what I knew was a grimace. I didn’t even pretend.

  “You were much more charming when I took you to the airport,” Butch said. “You never look happy anymore. You’re frowning from the moment you leave your house to the last second before you go to bed.”

  “You don’t think being followed everywhere has something to do with that?”

  Butch looked down, unable to hold my gaze.

  I put my hands on my hips and glanced over my shoulder to make sure Janet was out of earshot. “No dessert for you. Why did the cops want to talk to me?”

  Henry sat back against the red plastic booth and draped his arms along the top of the bench. All he needed was a piece of hay dangling from between his lips to complete the image of pure self-satisfaction. If Henry looked happy, then I would probably soon look sad.

  “I recalled that Zak had called me the night he disappeared,” he said.

  “So?”

  “He said he was worried about you and your friend. Said he was afraid for his life.”

  I felt the blood drain from my face.

  He pursed his lips and squinted his eyes. “Memory is a funny thing. As I was poring through your cell phone records again, I suddenly remembered the rest of my conversation with Zak that night. It jogged my memory. But lucky you, looks like a scapegoat conveniently turned up.”

  I turned their bill over and scrawled “Have A Nice Day!” on the back. A little proof in case Janet gave me a hard time about my attitude. “Pay at the register and don’t let the door hit you,” I said.

  Henry pulled out a ten-dollar bill and waved it at me. “Because you look like you’ve fallen on hard times.” When I didn’t move to take it, he put it under the dripping ketchup bottle.

  I left it for the bus boy.

  ~~~

  By some miracle, I managed to make it to the end of my shift without incident. The relief of learning that I wasn’t going to be faced with human lie detectors was more than offset by my certainty that Corbin was back… and avoiding me.

  Avoiding me, but thinking about me. Looking out for me. Some women read too much into flowers and casual statements about the future—well, I was quite capable of obsessing over the way that Corbin had easily referred to us as having a future. Which was part of the reason I couldn’t give up on him no matter how hard I tried.

  Me, I was ready to deduce declarations of love from the appearance of a convenient corpse. What the hell was wrong with me? Someone had died, and that was horrible, even if he was a bookie and who knew what else. I prayed that he hadn’t been sacrificed.

  The whole thing was overwhelming. The last fifteen hours had wiped me out. I would run the errands for Rob, then get some sleep. When I woke up, I was going to have a long, serious talk with myself.

  The grocery store parking lot offered a wide choice of spaces. Even after working a double, I was still finished before the nine-to-five crowds.

  Yawning, I grabbed a cart and wobbled into the produce section. After what felt like years of gray skies and dirty snow, the explosion of greens and yellows and reds of the fruit never failed to dazzle me. It was like I’d been living in black and white, then stepped into full color.

  Imported stuff, and expensive as hell. But… I’d had a narrow escape, I needed some kind of treat, and anyway the display of crisp golden apples was obscenely appealing.

  I chose four juicy apples and tried to pretend that the diaphanous plastic bag didn’t smell stronger than the fruit. I turned to put the full bag into the cart, and that was when I saw him, not twenty feet away.

  It was like some weird déjà vu that took me back to the first time I’d seen Corbin. I stood there blinking like that would bring him into sharper focus: a tall man, broad of shoulder, wearing a long coat and a cowboy hat jammed low over his face.

  I knew it wasn’t Corbin. There were things that didn’t mesh. Like the wedding band on the hand that reached for a bag of carrots. But that desperate, fucked-up part of my brain believed it anyway. Corbin was back, and he had gotten married to someone else.

  And damn if the guy didn’t look like him from the back. It was just a silhouette and an outfit, though maybe the man wasn’t quite as big as Corbin.

  The man turned, head still down. His open coat revealed blue flannel tucked messily into tight jeans. Unlike Corbin’s expensive bought-in-an-upscale-department-store flannel, this guy’s clothing was cheap, made for work and easily replaced. He was probably a lumberjack or a rancher, had likely earned those muscles through long hours of backbreaking labor.

  But it didn’t matter. Flannel. Cowboy hat. The size of him. My racing heartbeat said he might as well have been Corbin.

  He looked up. His jaw wasn’t as broad as Corbin’s, and he had a smaller nose, too. His Adam’s apple was more prominent. But his body…

  The man stared right at me, likely sensing the laser intensity of my stare. His eyes were blue. Boring blue. Nothing wrong with them, but they weren’t electric. They didn’t glow. They didn’t flash with energy and life.

  The man tilted his head slightly, a confused smile coming to lips not nearly as full as the lips I’d been dreaming about. When he smiled, the last of the spell was broken, and I struggled to catch my breath.

  I walked out of the store, got in my car, and drove home in an oblivious daze.

  I found myself curling up on my bed without bothering to drag back the blankets. I turned away from the afternoon sun streaming in through the windows.

  When I’d decided the night before
that I wasn’t going to return to the cabin, I had meant it. Even though I’d broken that promise before, the previous times I’d known I wasn’t finished.

  And I had never seriously considered going to the gorgeous mountain house where Corbin and I had spent so many happy hours together. While it was fully wired with security, due to the leaks it wasn’t completely off the radar like the secret cabin was. The luxury mountain house was a place where Corbin’s private life and his assassin life crossed, and I had been told to stay away.

  But if Corbin was back and avoiding me, that was where I’d find him.

  I needed to talk to him. To demand an explanation. He had promised never to play games with me, and what was this if not a game?

  He didn’t want to be with me, fine. Who could blame him? I’d confessed my love to him twice, both times during sex. Not exactly a sign of emotional maturity. And then I’d taken it back the first time. And the second time…

  “Oh, God,” I whispered, awash in humiliation again. I had bawled like a baby. During sex. Never mind that there were tons of extenuating circumstances. And all Corbin had said was, “Thank you.”

  I balled my fists. Of course he was avoiding me. I had started our “relationship” by asking him about one-night stands. Fun and easy, right? And then somewhere along the way, I had changed my mind.

  Corbin was a gentleman, notwithstanding all the spanking and, somehow, despite the assassin thing. He wasn’t going to respond to my declaration with, “Flattered, but not feeling you, babe.” Especially a few hours before we parted ways, with my dad fighting for his life on the operating table and Henry threatening to have me arrested.

  If I had kept my fucking mouth shut…

  “You home?” came Rob’s voice up the stairs.

  I sat up and looked at the clock. It wasn’t even 5:00 yet. Too soon for Rob to be back already. “Yeah. Up here.”

  My brother’s condo was carpeted, but I sensed him coming up the steps. I swung my feet off the bed and tried to assemble my sour mug into something that didn’t scream “nervous breakdown in progress.”

  But then I saw Rob’s face, his features pinched, his brown eyes weary. “What happened?” I asked. I already knew it was Henry, that he was punishing Rob.

  Rob shook his head. Light glinted off his glasses, off his straight red hair. “Work stuff. I can’t wait until October. You still want to do the bounty stuff with me when our non-competes expire?”

  “And private investigation. Of course.” Even though I was worn thin from my own drama, I found a smile for Rob. It was the least I could do considering that this was my fault. “Come in and tell Auntie Audrey about it.”

  That was all the prompting he needed. He entered the room, grabbed the chair from the desk and whipped it around. “Henry is an ass,” he said, straddling the chair. “And I’m a jackass. Today he decided he wants me working volume. As in, let’s see how many five-hundred-dollar bounties I can snag in a day.”

  It was weird to hear Rob complaining about not getting enough work. He really had changed. “That blows. You still get a base salary, though.”

  “He cut it.”

  I gasped. “He can’t do that.”

  “He can. The contract I signed when he raised the salaries says he can substitute other pay structures. It’s dependent on how much each employee earns on average. Now that he’s brought in all his former cop friends and sheriff friends and other buddies, there’s no room for me. And here I’d thought Dad’s part-timers were the worst. I actually miss those guys. Henry’s crew is… not nice.”

  “Damn.”

  “Damn,” Rob repeated, dejected.

  I scrabbled my curls into a messy ponytail. “If he weren’t following me all the time, I would help you.”

  “I know you would.”

  We were both quiet. Originally, Rob had wanted to bring me back as a consultant.

  “Maybe it’s for the best,” I said, picking at my fuzzy, pilling sweater. “There’s something appealing about starting over.”

  Rob looked at me as if I were crazy, but then his expression suddenly changed to one of… relief? “Maybe it is for the best,” he said softly. “How was work?”

  But I wasn’t ready to change the conversation yet. “You think Henry planned this?”

  “I don’t know. But we had a lot of contracts before Henry came on. Dad says Henry brought cash, and I guess he did, but he sure is borrowing heavily.”

  “You can’t put bribes on a credit card.” Henry loved to buy information. He had nearly ruined a lot of lives thanks to the FBI agents on his payroll. Corbin wasn’t FBI, but he worked with them at times.

  I contemplated what Rob had said about Henry borrowing. Dad had always run the company in the black. “What does Kat think about all this?”

  Rob aimed a disdainful look my way. “He’s giving her the good cases.”

  Kat was nothing if not practical. “I don’t see how he has the energy to do all this evil stuff. Half the time he’s up my ass.”

  Rob nodded. “The hemorrhoid is right outside. I don’t understand why you won’t get a restraining order,” he said a little angrily.

  That had me shaking my head. With my Zachary-sized secret, I couldn’t risk stirring up more trouble. I wished I could tell Rob why Henry was suddenly coming down hard on him, but if I did, and if Rob confronted Henry, Henry would probably delight in sharing his suspicions about Zachary. I couldn’t risk that, so like a coward, I said nothing.

  “Is it too early to drink?” Rob wanted to know.

  “Not if Henry’s your boss.”

  “Christ. What a mess.” He wiped his hand over his face and stood slowly. “Think I’ll go to the gym instead. Gonna make myself a peanut butter sandwich. Want one?”

  I started to shake my head, then bolted to my feet and started looking for my keys. “I didn’t get the groceries. I’ll go now.”

  “No biggie. I’ll do it after the gym. Keep gas prices low.”

  That each of my excursions involved Henry or one of his henchmen following me in a separate vehicle had become a curdled joke, but I laughed anyway.

  Feeling guilty as hell, I decided to clean up while Rob was gone, starting by straightening up the hill of shoes just inside the entrance. Next I sorted through the heap of mail on the small dining room table. It was mostly Rob’s. Now that I didn’t have any utilities, I hardly received anything.

  As I was thinking that Rob needed to transfer more of his bills to online pay, I came across a light blue envelope addressed to me. It had been buried down toward the bottom of the pile.

  I peeled up the flap and immediately recognized the handwriting. Veronica. She had been my best friend for ages, but then she’d moved a few towns over. At first we had visited each other frequently, but as she got more wrapped up in her new life, and as I got more wrapped up in my own insanity, we had drifted apart. I hadn’t talked to her in a couple of months—before all the drama with Henry and Corbin.

  Veronica was indirectly responsible for my first meeting with Corbin. I had spotted him in a greeting card store while I was looking for a discounted Halloween prop like one she owned.

  Thinking of that night made me wonder what had happened to the eavesdropping device I’d used to get his name. All my gadgets were packed away in Rob’s garage, but because I hadn’t done the packing—hadn’t even planned on moving—I had no idea which box they were in. Or boxes. For all I knew, they’d gotten strewn everywhere.

  My dearest Audrey, the letter started. That made me smile. Veronica was more likely to address me as whore or bitch than dearest. I missed her like crazy.

  The letter was her attempt at a formal invitation to a party the weekend before. Frowning, I checked the postmark date on the envelope and realized that the letter had been forwarded from my old apartment.

  Knowing Veronica, the party had been wild. I ran up to my bedroom and found my phone. I’d lost her number when I’d destroyed the other phone, but lucky for me, she had includ
ed her contact information in the invitation. All part of the formality.

  “Hello?” she answered, circumspect.

  “It’s me!” I was so excited to hear her voice that my heart threatened to explode.

  “Audrey? You’re on my shit list! I’ve been trying to call you.”

  “I upgraded my phone and then broke the new one,” I said. Broke it by throwing it into a water fountain to keep it out of Henry’s clutches. It had died nobly.

  “So why didn’t you power up the old phone?” Even though she had an enviably feminine voice, she managed to imbue it with enough scorn and condescension to make any boot camp drill sergeant green with envy. But I knew she was the nicest person ever, so I wasn’t worried.

  “Dumped it once everything was transferred over,” I said with a sigh. “Lesson learned. I moved, by the way. Only saw your invite today.”

  “Moved? The city condemned that rathole?”

  “Well…” I didn’t want to tell her I’d lost my job. That would only lead to more questions than I could stomach at the moment. I glanced around at my bright bedroom. “I upgraded to a very nice condo. It’s even got curtains and sheers. White lace, if you can believe that.”

  “Bitch, where the hell have you been? You could have gotten my number.”

  I could practically see her, her warm brown eyes angry but hurt, her purple-tipped fingers raking through her Goth-black straight hair, an Uma Thurman Pulp Fiction pageboy. Veronica was a natural blonde, so when she had roots, it sometimes looked like the dark hair was levitating over her head.

  “I’m sorry. I suck. Catch me up. You had a party,” I said. Veronica loved to talk. At any given time, there were always fifteen different things annoying her, and while she complained loudly, she didn’t take any of it too seriously. We’d long ago made a pact that as old ladies, we would live together, drink on the lawn in bikinis to horrify the college boys.

  “Remember my downstairs neighbor?” she asked.

  “The guy who sings show tunes?”

  “He moved out, so I threw the party to get to know the new neighbor a little better. Only problem is he’s kinda shy, so I had to go the extra mile.”