by Jill Shalvis
They arranged to meet at eleven thirty. Ali turned her phone over so she didn’t have to look at the lit-up screen that revealed no missed texts or phone calls.
Her own doing, of course. But though she’d managed to get her heart broken, she refused to have her spirit broken too. Hell no. She was on a mission to fix her crazy life.
She’d worry about her heart later.
She parked, turning to look as Leah slipped into her truck and handed her a brown bag.
Ali peeked in the bag. “What are these?”
“B and E clothes. All black.”
Ali pulled out black jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt and then eyed the taller, leaner Leah doubtfully. “I hope these are your fat jeans.”
“Just strip. I’ve got an hour before I have to get back to give grandma her meds.”
Ali pulled off her clothes and shimmied into the ones Leah had brought, which wasn’t so easy behind the steering wheel.
“Cute undies,” Leah said.
“Stop looking.”
“Hard to miss the neon-pink boy shorts and demi bra. Victoria’s Secret?”
“Fifty-percent-off sale.”
“Nice,” Leah said. “The bra makes your boobs look perky.”
Yeah, well, that was a complete waste given how her day had gone.
Or how her love life was going.
“So what’s the plan here?” Leah asked.
“We wait for Bree,” Ali said. “I think she’s going to come here to his house.” And hopefully not in black leather. “It’ll feel safer to her than risking the office again.”
Leah eyed Teddy’s dark house. “Maybe she’s already been, or she’s there right now. We should call her, except I don’t know her number.”
Ali had an “aha” moment and tore through her purse for the book from Russell.
“You’re going to read?” Leah asked. “Now?”
“No, I think I have her number.” Come on, Russell, come through for me… Ali flipped through the pages, hoping and praying.
As an interior designer, Bree had ordered lots of flowers from Lucky Harbor Flowers, and indeed, she had her own page with preferences and contact information. Ali pulled out her cell phone and punched in Bree’s cell number.
“What are you going to do if she answers?” Leah asked.
Ali wasn’t quite sure until indeed, Bree answered.
“Hello? Who’s this?”
“Ali Winters. I was just calling to see if you really wanted this delivery at midnight.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Well, Russell left me directions to make a delivery for you.” At the lie, Ali looked at Leah.
Leah covered her mouth with her hand to hold back her horrified laughter.
“I don’t have a delivery on order right now,” Bree said, sounding like she was on the move.
Ali strained her ear to the phone. Had that been a horn she’d heard? “Are you sure?” she asked. “Where are you right now, because I can bring it by and—”
“It’s late,” Bree said.
Definitely in a car, Ali thought. There was a radio playing softly and an engine running. “Oh. Right,” she said. “Well, okay, then. So…how about a drink? Or a late-night brownie at Eat Me?”
Click.
Ali winced and slid her phone away. “She didn’t want to talk. Nor did she mention where she was. But I’d bet my last dollar she was in her car.”
“Maybe she’s on her way.”
“Or she’s on her way back to the office,” Ali said. “Hey…” she peered out the window, looking down the street to the Lexus parked in front of Teddy’s place. “That’s Teddy’s car. He must have gotten a ride with the other guys to their fishing thing.” She turned to Leah. “Let’s peek inside.”
“You have his keys?”
“I know his code.” They got out into the dark night in their black B&E gear and sneaked up on the car. Ali punched in the code. “I’m getting into the back,” she said, eyeing the gym bag on the seat. She opened the back passenger door and quickly turned off the dome light to avoid highlighting her activities to any neighbors who might still be up.
Leah got into the front seat and shut her door. Ali didn’t shut hers, because she wanted to be able to hear someone coming up on them. “I’ve got his gym bag,” she said. “I bet my iPod’s in here. He stole it.”
“Seriously?”
“I had better music, and he was always borrowing it for workouts. I want it back.”
Leah flicked on a penlight and twisted to shine it so that Ali could see.
“Nice,” Ali said.
“I like to be prepared.”
“You have any candy in there? You know, in the name of preparation?”
Leah handed her a lollipop.
“I love you,” Ali said. She popped the lollipop in her mouth and unzipped the gym bag. In unison, they both wrinkled their noses and jerked back from the odor of stinky guy emitting from the bag.
“Ew,” Leah said. “Guys are disgusting.”
Ali pulled the lollipop out of her mouth and stared into the bag. How badly did she want her iPod? Enough to move the stinky clothes around?
“Just do it,” Leah said.
“You sound like a Nike commercial. I need more light.”
Leah leaned closer with the light. “Hey,” she said.
“What?” Ali instinctively checked out the windows to see if anyone was coming. “What’s wrong?”
“You tell me. You’ve been crying.”
Ali sighed. “Forget it.”
“Oh, crap,” Leah said. “What did he do?”
“Who?”
“Luke.”
That Leah assumed Luke had blown it brought a warm fuzzy to Ali’s heart, even as she laughed without much mirth. “It was me,” she admitted. “He’s got this way of making me feel like the prettiest, smartest, most wonderful woman on earth,” she said.
“That bastard.”
“No, you don’t understand.” Ali hesitated. “I fell for him. And it’d never work between us.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” Ali stared at her. “Have you seen him? He’s totally out of my league.”
“Bullshit,” Leah said.
“And he’s law enforcement.”
“So, hot guy with a gun.” Leah shrugged. “Still not seeing the problem here.”
“My people don’t go out with law enforcement,” Ali said, “it just isn’t done.”
Leah laughed. “Your people? You mean women? Because, honey, women in general melt over guys like Luke Hanover.”
“Yes,” Ali said, diving into the unpleasant task at hand to search Teddy’s bag. “But you can’t make him melt back, now can you?”
Leah paused. “He doesn’t feel the same as you?” she asked, sounding quite up in arms over this possibility.
“Actually, I’m pretty sure he does,” Ali said, “but he told me right up front, he wasn’t going to get involved. I wasn’t going to get involved either, so there’s no one to blame here but my inability to follow my own decree.”
“Men suck.”
“I am in complete agreement. And look.” Ali pulled her iPod from a side pocket of Teddy’s gym bag.
“Wow. He’s perfect for politics. He’s got that lying, cheating, stealing thing down.”
“Are you keeping a lookout?”
“Yeah— oh shit.”
This was immediately followed by the back door opening, and a big body sliding in next to Ali. “Yeah, oh shit,” said a low male voice. A low, unbearably familiar voice, and both Ali and Leah squeaked.
“Luke,” Ali breathed, a hand to her chest.
“I need the both of you to go back to your vehicles and drive away,” he said in his cop voice.
Ali blinked. “What’s going on?”
Luke slid a look at Leah. “Give us a second?”
“No,” Leah said.
“Excuse me?” he asked, voice still low an
d authoritative but with a hint of disbelief.
Women probably didn’t tell him “no” very often.
“No,” Leah said again, “I’m not deserting Ali.”
He softened slightly. “You aren’t deserting her,” he said. “You wouldn’t. But I need a moment with her, alone.”
Leah looked at Ali questioningly. Ali nodded, and Leah started to get out of the Lexus, but then whirled back and put a finger right in Luke’s face. “I’m watching you,” she said.
Luke didn’t laugh. He didn’t get pissed off. Instead he nodded seriously and touched the tip of his finger to Leah’s. “I’m watching me too. It’s okay, Leah. It’s going to be okay.”
Leah stared at him for another moment, then nodded. “See that it is.”
Ali had no idea what to make of that exchange, but apparently Leah didn’t have the same problem. She flashed Luke a small, but much warmer, smile and then vanished into the night.
In the dark interior of the car, Ali closed her eyes. “You didn’t go. Why didn’t you go?”
“I couldn’t leave you.”
Oh. Oh damn, that was good. “Luke—”
“What are you doing here?”
“Aubrey called. Bree’s gone off the deep end. I think she’ll come here.”
“I told you she was under surveillance.”
He had told her that. Why hadn’t she remembered that?
“Listen to me, Ali,” he said, all cop again. “Teddy’s car, house, and office are under surveillance too. Half the police department is staking out Town Hall. Bree’s already been there. Aubrey finally left work for the night, and Sawyer’s covering all the bases. We’ve got someone in place in Teddy’s backyard. No one’s home that we can see.”
“So…you want me to go.”
“I want you out of here, yes. I want you safe. Bree’s moving the money tonight. We’re sure of it. She needs to get rid of it since the word is out about an arrest first thing in the morning.”
Ali nodded. She understood all that, but she didn’t move. She couldn’t take her gaze off his face. “I really thought you were gone,” she said softly. “Oh, Luke. Your job. Your review—”
“It’ll have to wait.” He paused. “Or not. Ali,” he said very seriously, “I know that the men in your life have fucked you over. I promised myself that I wouldn’t do that to you. I didn’t want to get involved.”
She tried not to react to that blow. “I know.”
“But things change.”
She tried to see his expression, but with little to no ambient light in the backseat, she couldn’t see it clearly. “Your job, your life, is in San Francisco.”
“As it turns out, only the job,” he said. “And it also turns out that I’m not just the job.”
She wasn’t sure what that meant, whether to accept the odd surge of hope that suddenly blocked her throat or go with the panic licking at her gut. She worked at getting herself calm and wasn’t entirely there yet when she said, “I’m sorry I said you’re distant and that you don’t feel. I shouldn’t have. I picked a fight because I was hurt.”
“I know. But you did mean it, and that’s okay. It’s true. And I want you to say what you mean, always. I can take it.” He paused. “We can take it. We’re tougher than words, the two of us.”
Ali’s heart stopped and then started again in staccato beat. “Luke—”
The front passenger door jerked open. Cool night air rushed in and so did a figure.
A female figure, but not Leah.
Luke squeezed Ali’s thigh, but she didn’t need the warning to be quiet.
There was a fiddling in the front seat and a very small beam of light. The woman had a flashlight.
Bree.
“Shit,” she muttered when she couldn’t get the glove compartment open. “Shit, shit, shit…” Then the thing suddenly opened and some stuff fell out.
“God, he is such a slob,” she said, dumping everything in the glove box to the floorboards. Then she began to stuff something back in there from the duffel bag in her lap.
Money.
Chapter 26
Ali couldn’t believe it. Bree was working on getting money—and lots of it—into the glove compartment. But then she couldn’t get it closed, no matter how much she pushed and shoved and swore. Bills were sticking out, and Bree swore at them too. Finally, she used the heel of her very wicked-looking boot to kick it closed.
Luke was doing something with his phone. Ali was working really hard on holding her breath, because Bree’s perfume was getting to her. She was running out of air…
And then it escaped, a very loud, unladylike sneeze.
With a startled shriek, Bree whirled around, penlight in her mouth.
And a gun in her hand.
“Oh for God’s sake,” she muttered when she saw who it was. “Could this get any worse? Hands up,” she ordered, swinging the gun back and forth between Ali and Luke like a pendulum.
Ali raised her hands, but Luke was slow to respond.
“Now,” Bree warned him.
“You need to put the gun down, Bree,” he said calmly.
She didn’t. “What the hell are you two doing here?” she asked. “Especially you,” she said to Ali.
“Me? What about you?”
“I’m having a fucked-up day, obviously!” Bree yelled. She blew a strand of hair out of her face, which was damp. In fact, she was uncharacteristically ruffled from head to badass-boot-covered toe.
“Put the gun down, Bree,” Luke said again.
“Well, I can’t now!” She glanced at Ali. “You screwed everything up. Everything,” she said. “You and your stupid, sweet, easy-going, artsy-fartsy ways. This is all your fault, you know that? Teddy was mine. And then you fell for him, and he couldn’t resist you, another sweet little thing who thought he walked on water. He was mine first, dammit!”
“But”—Ali stopped to sneeze again, twice in a row—“you’re married to the mayor.”
“Yeah. And he’s also a financial planner, don’t forget. I can’t, because he’s always working. He’s a workaholic whose lover is his job. And the great thing for him is his lover doesn’t care that he stopped working out and snores.”
Ali just stared at her. “So you started sleeping with the town clerk?”
“Teddy fell in love with me,” Bree said, jabbing the gun near Ali’s face. “Said he needed a seasoned woman, one who knew what to do with a man. He said that no one else could keep up with him. Well I managed to keep up with him just fine. I gave him whatever he wanted.”
Ali didn’t want to think about what that meant. She sneezed again.
“Stop that!” Bree yelled.
“It’s your perfume. And you’re making me nervous. Why do you even have a gun?”
“We live in Washington. Everyone has a gun.” Her eyes were dialed to straight-up, bat-shit crazy. She was flushed, and her hair was sticking to her face. “Is it hot in here? It feels hot in here. Fucking hot flashes. It’s the twenty-first century, and we can’t cure hot flashes.”
“I wasn’t the only one Teddy was with,” Ali said. “You know that, right? He was cheating on all of us, Bree, not just you.”
“He told me you two were just roommates,” Bree said. “And I didn’t know about Melissa until the night of the auction, that skinny, young, taut-skinned bitch. I wanted to kill him, but he told me that it didn’t mean anything, that I was still his one and only.”
“So you forgave him by stealing the money?” Luke asked.
“Hey, sometimes a woman snaps, okay?” She swiped her forehead with her free hand. “My God. Someone open a fucking window!”
“Put down the gun, and I’ll open all the windows,” Luke said.
She jabbed the gun at him again. “Listen, smartass, you might be sexy as hell, but I’ll shoot you if I have to. Dammit!” She fanned her face. “This is out of control. All I wanted was to be in a position to frame Teddy so he’d straighten up. But you!” She whipped the gun back
to Ali. “You went into his office and blew it.”
“Hey, half the town was in his office that night.”
“But you took the pot, the one I’d put the bill wrapper into,” Bree said. “To frame him, not you.”
“Yeah,” Ali muttered, “I’ve really got to stop doing that.”
“Marshall’s not worth this, Bree,” Luke said. “It’s not too late to stop. Give me the gun.”
Bree’s face crumbled a bit, but she kept the gun level at his face. “The heart wants what it wants,” she said. “And I wanted Teddy. Only he turned out to be as big an ass as the rest of them. Hell, look at his life. He’s sleeping with half the women in town, and no one even knows. I tried to frame him, and he walks. Shit just doesn’t stick to him. And the bastard never breaks a sweat. He’s like the Energizer Bunny; he can keep going and going. A girl can’t do that. We get bladder infections.” Bree swiped her forehead again. “Tonight was the night that his luck was going to change. I put the money in here, and I was going to call the police.”
Luke had been slowly lowering his hands. Ali was going to trust that he knew what the hell he was doing, because she could scarcely draw air into her lungs. It was the gun. Every few seconds, it swung from Luke to her, back and forth. It was one thing to see it happen on TV, it was another entirely to be faced with the reality of it.
“Stop moving,” Bree screeched, and Ali went still. Except then she realized Bree was talking to Luke. “I told you, hands up.”
Luke ignored her directive, leaving one hand half raised, the other dropping to scratch his chest. “You never said—how did you get the money in the first place?”
“After we did it on his couch, I found a red silk bra behind a cushion. Melissa’s, of course, as I learned later. So when he left the office to get rid of the condom—he thought he was being clever by doing that in the hallway bathroom so that no one would ever find out about us—I took the money from his bottom drawer and dumped it into my briefcase. I left one of the money wrappers in his stupid pencil holder so he’d have evidence on him.”
“And he didn’t notice any of this when he got back from the bathroom?” Luke asked.
“No. He suggested I leave first so that we weren’t seen together, which worked for me. I wanted him to be the last in the office—not realizing, of course, that Miss Perfect over here was going to fuck that all up. Twice.”
