by Suzie Quint
“Dave Marsh,” Alec said.
Willa snapped her fingers and pointed at Alec. “Of course. That’s it. I must have blocked it.” She turned toward Cleo. “I was engaged once to a guy named Dave. A real rat bastard. Jealous and controlling when he was sober, abusive when he was drunk, which was most of the time.” She picked up a piece of fish and dredged it through the tartar sauce. “Just like my dad, really.” She looked up. “I was only nineteen, you know. Too dumb to realize I was on the road to being one of those abused women.”
Cleo hadn’t known that but she did know Willa had never been married. “You obviously wised up and didn’t marry him.”
“No, I didn’t, but not because I got smart. He was coming back from a ski trip with his brother. It was late, you know, and the mountain road was slick. His car went over the edge.” She gave them a sardonic smile. “I thought I loved him, but when he died, all I felt was relief. Him dying was the nicest thing he ever did for me.”
Her attitude struck Cleo as a little hardhearted, but then she’d never been abused. Maybe she didn’t get to judge. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
Willa flapped a hand. “It’s okay. It taught me to really look at people, you know. Before I let them too close. Now I look for kindness and a good heart.”
Willa had depths Cleo had never suspected. How she’d ever become friends with Annaliese was a wonder. Not that her mother was unkind—she could be surprisingly gentle with Jada—but she expected the world to steamroll her if it got the chance, and she lived in accordance with that expectation. Which was why she valued loyalty so highly.
“How did we get to talking about me anyway?” Willa asked.
“Dave Marsh,” Alec said.
“Oh yes.” She finally took a bite of her fish. “Let’s see.” She chewed for a few moments then swallowed. “He’s a nice looking guy. A bit short for Liz, but height isn’t everything, you know?”
“You said before that you told Sebastian about him,” Cleo prompted, hoping for something more relevant.
“Yeah. It wasn’t really all that much. I saw him and Liz eating together between shows a few times. Normally, that wouldn’t have been a big deal, but there was something a little too chummy looking about them, you know? Their body language I guess. You know if you really pay attention, you can usually tell when two people are doing it. Or about to do it. They had that look.”
With Willa’s addiction to gossip, being able to tell who was sleeping with whom would be quite an advantage, but Cleo thought she probably saw it because that’s what she wanted to see.
“You two, for instance,” Willa said, and Cleo froze. Everything but her eyes, which snapped to Alec.
His eyebrows were up. So were the corners of his lips.
“What about us?” Cleo asked.
“You’re doing it,” Willa said matter of factly.
“What makes you think that?” Cleo asked.
Willa looked back and forth between them. “Well, there’s a synchronicity in your movements. Trust me. You can’t fool a dancer about that. Not even a retired one.” She smiled. “And the first thing you did when I said you were doing it was look at each other. That just screams guilt, you know.”
Cleo tried not to do it, but she couldn’t help it and apparently neither could Alec. They both straightened, turning their bodies into unsynchronized positions, which probably only made them look even guiltier.
Willa smiled smugly.
Okay, so maybe she did more than guess.
Chapter 17
“She lied to us,” Alec said as he held the car door for Cleo.
She slid into the seat, feeling a little like a princess from the attention. “You think so?”
“I know so. I just don’t know what she was lying about.” He shut her door and walked around to the driver’s side.
Cleo waited impatiently for him to get in. Even when he was gallant, he found ways to annoy her. When he slid into his seat, she asked, “What do you mean? If she was lying―”
“Just because someone’s lying, it doesn’t mean you can tell what part of what they said wasn’t true.” He started the car and backed out of the parking space.
“If you don’t know that, then what makes you so sure she was lying?”
“I wrote an article on how to tell if someone is lying to you.”
Was there anything the man hadn’t written an article about? “And?” She felt the sudden urge to squirm. She’d told him so many lies.
“Some so-called experts will tell you that if a person looks in one direction, they’re making stuff up, but that’s not reliable.” He eased the car into traffic—blessedly light at this hour—and turned toward home. “It’s all about baselines. You have to be familiar with someone and then you watch for deviations from their normal behavior.”
She swallowed. Maybe he didn’t have a baseline on her. “And you saw something out of the ordinary?”
“No. I heard it. Or more accurately, I didn’t hear it.”
Her chest felt as though it was locking up. She glanced at him, wondering if he’d ever questioned her veracity, but his eyes were locked on the road, not giving her any sign that he was subtly telling her to ’fess up.
“The woman can barely string two sentences together without saying ‘you know,’” he said.
She started breathing again. Maybe this was all about Willa. “So?”
“Once you asked her about the muscle relaxers, she never said it once. Not until the topic changed.”
She shoved her private worries aside to focus on his observations about Willa. Was he right? She would have sworn she was paying close attention to what Willa said and how she said it, but she couldn’t remember if Willa’s catchphrase had been there. It usually started irritating her after the third or fourth repetition, but it was a familiar irritant. Something she brushed off the way she’d shoo away a persistent fly. “And she didn’t ask us why it mattered.” Willa was like a bloodhound about rumors. She should have asked.
He took his eyes off the road long enough to meet her gaze with a look that said you got it.
“So she lied about the muscle relaxers,” Cleo said.
“I think so. But whether it was because she was the one who told Jada to use them or whether it’s because she knows who did, or”—one of his hands left the steering wheel long enough to gesture his uncertainty—“because of something I haven’t even imagined, I can’t say. She could be protecting someone, or she could be distancing herself because she doesn’t want to have to talk to the police.”
Or the truth might be that she’d told Jada to drug Sebastian exactly as Jada said she did.
Except, as Willa had said herself, why would she? Unless she’d known about Annaliese’s deal with Sebastian. Cleo couldn’t ask her directly because if Willa didn’t already know about it, she would after hearing the question, and sharing that with Las Vegas’ biggest gossip didn’t seem like a smart thing to do.
~***~
“Why do people have sex?” Cleo asked the next morning as she fastened her bra. She was already wearing her jeans. A forest green shirt lay on the bed, waiting for her to don it.
Alec looked up from where he was thumbing through the cash in his wallet, counting it. “Geez, if you have to ask, I’m not doing it right.”
She didn’t believe the look he shot at her. “Oh, don’t try to look hurt and insecure. You know you’re good in bed.”
The truth was, he was awesome in bed. She’d had a hell of a good time after they’d gotten home, courtesy of Mr. Rodriguez, and a wake-up call not an hour ago that had curled her toes. The weird part of both events was he had been in his Chatty Cathy mode, and she hadn’t lost sight of the goal line once. She was starting to think her difficulties with sex were trust issues. She utterly trusted him to not finish before her, and if he did, she trusted him to make sure he put a smile on her face before he rolled up the red carpet. That wasn’t something she could say about anyone before him.
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“Well, I thought I was decent in the sack,” he said as he tucked his wallet into his hip pocket. He was dressed in slacks and a sky blue button-down. A sports jacket hung from the bedpost. Appropriate attire to attend a memorial service. “I mean, I’ve never had any complaints, but you can be challenging. So if you’re not dissatisfied, what are you really asking?”
He was going to think she was an idiot. “The syntax. The way we talk about it.” She picked up her shirt and stuck her arm through a sleeve. As she buttoned it, she asked, “Why do we have sex? Why don’t we talk about ‘doing’ sex?”
“We have dinner, so what’s wrong with having sex?”
“Dinner is a noun.”
“So is sex.”
“Yes, but it shouldn’t be.” She stepped into the bathroom, picked up her hairbrush, and bent at the waist, flipping her hair forward so she could brush the underside. “It’s not a thing. It’s an activity. I can take a picture of dinner. I can put it in the oven or in a picnic basket and move it from place to place. I can look at it, touch it―”
“Taste it,” he said, a smile in his voice, and she knew he wasn’t thinking about mashed potatoes, but she was too off-and-running with the puzzle of language to be sidetracked.
“—But I can’t put sex on a shelf to admire later.” She straightened and checked herself in the mirror. Why was she babbling about this?
She already knew the answer. She was having an attack of nerves. This was exactly the sort of thing she’d done before she’d gone into dangerous situations in pursuit of her border story. Her brain took off on completely irrelevant tangents as though looking for a way to relieve itself of the stress building in her nerve endings.
Alec stood on the threshold, leaning on the doorjamb. “Okay, I don’t know why we have sex, besides that it’s fun. If it bothers you that badly, maybe you should give it up”—he leaned close—“and stick to making love.”
She met his smiling eyes in the mirror. He didn’t look the least bit freaked out about changing the terminology, but she was. A little. If she started thinking of it in those terms, she’d be hurt when they went back to Denver and everything ended.
Had she really just thought about going back to Denver—back to the tabloid—as if it wasn’t a fate to be avoided at all costs?
Though she was willing to concede it wasn’t as horrible a place to work as she’d first thought, she still didn’t belong there. She hadn’t risked her life getting her border story just to end up at a tabloid.
“Are you ready?” Alec asked.
No. “Yes.”
How she felt about the tabloid was a moot question. Until she had a story to take to Martin, she was locked in. In the meantime, they needed to break into Sebastian’s office and save her mother.
~***~
The executive suite was dark as Alec approached, and he feared they’d closed the office early for Sebastian’s memorial. Wouldn’t that be just their luck? All their planning gone to shit because they hadn’t checked on something so basic. But the outer door opened easily when Alec pulled on it and a light shown through the glass sidelight beside Bales’ office door.
The overhead lights clicked on when he stepped inside the suite. Motion sensors. He should mention that to Cleo.
He placed one of the lockdown magnets on the door before it swung shut then headed for Bales’ office.
Her door was unlocked but her office was empty. He crossed to Sebastian’s office. That door was unlocked as well, but she wasn’t in there either. Wherever she’d gone, he was sure she wouldn’t be gone long. He reached into his jacket pocket for another lockdown magnet.
“What are you doing?” Bales said in a measured, suspicious tone behind him.
Damn. He pulled his empty hand from his pocket as he turned. “I was looking for you.”
Her lips were tightly compressed. “Well, you found me. What do you want?”
“They read the will this morning.”
He hadn’t thought her lips could get any tighter, but they thinned until just a bloodless line slashed across her face.
“So you want to know who struck it rich. Well, why the hell not? It’s going to be all over the casino by nightfall.” She stalked across the room and into Sebastian’s office to sit heavily in the chair behind his desk. Her hands caressed the leather arms as though memorizing the feel of them.
Alec followed, his sensors on alert. But he was a reporter and, even though he wasn’t there for a story, when he sat opposite her at the desk, he couldn’t help himself. He leaned forward as though decreasing the distance between them would make her words reach him faster. “Who gets it?”
“His ex-wife. Can you believe it? Except for a few measly bequests—some more measly than others—he left everything to his ex.”
With four exes and one in the wings, he didn’t think his odds for guessing were that good. “Which one?”
She stared at him blankly for several long moments. “Samantha,” she said at last, the name dripping off her tongue like poison.
“Samantha?” Alec flipped through his mental files. “His first wife?”
“Can you believe it? He hasn’t seen her in more than two decades! She’s had nothing nice to say to his kids about him, never sent him a wedding announcement when the kids got married or birth announcements for the grandchildren. Not once. She’s even remarried, for crying out loud. But who does he leave it all to?” She shook her head violently. “I could understand leaving it to his children. But Samantha? No. That’s not how it should be.”
It actually made a warped kind of sense to Alec. Sebastian had been married to her for nearly twenty years. She was the mother of his children, and by all accounts, she’d stood by, keeping the home fires burning while he’d struggled to reach his goals. And he’d done wrong by her. Maybe he thought she deserved it. And who knew? Maybe he’d still loved her.
But none of that explained why Bales was taking the news so personally. Unless . . .
“Those measly bequests. Who were those to?”
Her lips tightened.
He waited.
Finally, she said, “His other exes. A few longtime friends.”
“Did he remember you with a bequest?” he asked softly.
Her lips were pressed tightly together again, but her chin had crinkled the way some women’s did when they were fighting tears. “He promised―” Her voice broke. She cleared her throat then continued in a flat voice that only trembled a little. “He promised he would. He knew my mother was in a nursing home and that it costs a fortune. He said I wouldn’t have to worry.”
Her voice sharpened, her anger giving it strength. “After everything I did for him. All the women I juggled, the presents I bought for his anniversaries, the lies I told his wives and his mistresses . . . I was more loyal than any of them and he . . . and he . . .” Her voice broke again and she gasped for air, strangling on the tears she was fighting so hard not to shed.
There was nothing Alec could say that would make it better. She wasn’t the kind of woman who would normally appreciate sympathy. Before he could decide if this moment was traumatic enough to be an exception, she straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin.
“He left me a lousy twenty grand. As if he was pensioning off a servant.” She snarled the last word.
“That’s rough,” Alec said in his most sympathetic voice.
“Do you know what nursing homes cost?”
He shook his head.
“Over two hundred dollars a day. That’s seventy thousand dollars a year plus change.”
He swallowed hard and thanked God he had six siblings who would help share the cost if it ever came to that, though he couldn’t imagine his sisters allowing either of his parents to be put away in some sterile environment.
“You know what I regret the most?” Bales asked.
He shook his head again.
“That Annaliese didn’t make Sebastian’s death more painful.” She picked up a letter opener
with a fancy scrolled handle from Sebastian’s pen box and leaned forward, eyes narrowed and glittering dangerously as she pointed the business end at him. “Or that I didn’t do it myself.”
If he’d ever thought Bales might have killed Sebastian, he didn’t now. He eyed the blade of the letter opener, hoping she didn’t want to make him pay for Sebastian’s sins. Where the hell was Martin? Alec could really use an interruption right about now.
She let the letter opener drop to the desk, pushed back her chair, and stood, turning to stare out the window at the overcast day. “What do I do now?” she asked. “I’ve been such a fool.”
He couldn’t run, even though every instinct wanted him to, so he rose and stood behind her. “What you’re going to do is get through today. You’re going to go downstairs to the memorial―”
She shook her head.
“Yes, you are.” He turned her to face him and held her arms, so she couldn’t turn away. Her gaze locked on his chest. “You’re going to go with your head high because, if you don’t, everyone will think you’re beaten. When they get Sebastian’s body back and they’ve buried him, you can go there in the middle of the night and dance on his grave and tell him what a miserable S.O.B. he was, but today, you’re going to show them all that no matter what promises he broke, you are still here and he’s not.”
Bales sniffed and he put his arms around her and pulled her close.
She laid her head against his chest, but she didn’t cry. He was impressed. The woman was made of steel.
He felt like an absolute heel, encouraging her to go to the memorial because he needed her out of her office. Especially since she might come to regret following his advice.
“You’ll be there? At the memorial?”
“Yes.” Thank God he could promise that. “I’ll even dance on his grave with you if you want me to.”
She gave a watery chuckle. “I may hold you to that.”
The sound of a throat clearing made him freeze for half a second. Of course, Martin would pick this moment to finally appear.
