My vision exploded with falling stars. How could I have been so stupid? The wood headboard didn’t even twitch at my violent, jerking pulls. I kicked out and connected not with him, but with the end table. Searing pain shot through my calf. The old article had stolen a chunk of my skin, leaving burning in its wake.
Nate leapt backward—the table missed him and landed sideways.
My eyes squeezed shut to block the sight of his arrogant-ass grin. “I’m not an FBI agent,” he said.
No shit! “Nohsfdjhd!”
“I’m not crazy, either. I have a few things I must do, and you’ve been, unfortunately, caught in the middle. When I’m finished, which will be shortly, I’ll disappear, and you can go on your merry way. Look at me.” He sobered, gesturing with placating hands. “Samantha, your boss really is an art thief, and he really is attempting to kill you, so you need to stay here. I swear. Scout’s honour.”
“Hhnfihfa iuofsiuhf!”
Nate the non-FBI Agent shook his head. “You turn so red when you get excited.” He propped the bed pillows under my head and behind my arms, jutting backward above me. Yes, indeed—that made my imprisonment much more comfortable. What a testament to the gentlemanly arts this fellow was.
The dastardly dimple left me there, handcuffed to the bed.
Chapter Four
Do-Si-D’oh!
A week ago, when I had fantasised about being handcuffed to the bed by The Accountant, it had sent my lady bits throbbing.
What a difference seven days made.
The sun set, streaking bursts of angry orange and pink through the limp motel sheers. For the thousandth time I clenched my muscles against the restraints. Stinging fire emanated from my skin, raw and red from the bindings. My struggling only made it worse, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
I was a complete fool and he would kill me. The police would attempt to find my mother to tell her I had died, but Mom lived in Las Vegas now with her new husband Diego. Who was twenty-nine. And whose name she’d taken. They’d find my dad in Utah. He’d bemoan the modern way of life and call me a slut. The newspaper headline swam before me—Failed Actress Too Stupid to Live, Also Wearing Heinous Shoes.
He’s not going to kill you.
My butt was so asleep it began to fuse with the vintage furniture.
He’s not going to kill you.
The saliva-ridden gag tasted noxious, the chewy fabric rancid in my mouth. Tears tumbled into the already wet pillows below me.
The key turned in the lock.
Damn him—he would not catch me crying! I strained to wipe my eyes against my grimy shoulder in a futile attempt at dignity.
Nate scurried in with two knapsacks. My broken spirit lifted a wee bit as I recognised the gym bag Ellen had made for me. A grim half-smile curved my lips. I would be mourned by my best friend at least. But who brought toiletries to the girl they planned to stuff in a Dumpster? Maybe there was hope yet.
He greeted me with a grin too cheeky by half. I threw angry juju at him with every fibre of my being. The beams were neutralised by his shiny hair and clean black button-down shirt. Sitting on the bed beside me, Nate took my wriggling face in his hands, brushed my tears away and removed the gag. His lips fell. “Jesus, Sam. I told you it will be okay. Don’t. Don’t cry.”
Great, gushing sobs volcanoed from my eyes, accompanied by lava rivers of snot. I showed him. Next time he’d kidnap a girl with fewer bodily fluids.
Awash in the male panic that often accompanies tears, he fumbled to find the key to the handcuffs and released me.
With a whimper, I rolled onto my side and clutched my deadened arms, riding waves of prickling pain. My muscles stung with big, fat needles as they awoke.
“I got you your stuff,” he whispered.
“Is toothpaste the proper gift to bring to a kidnapping?” I got you your stuff. Like it was a big fucking favour. Well, this overwhelming kindness clearly negated my anger at being kidnapped. My close-up view of the bedspread tinged red.
Nate did not reply. His hand grazed my hip and urged me to turn in his direction. The touch, full of gentle soothing, made my blood boil over. I turned and swung a roundhouse punch to his belly.
“Ow!” he cried indignantly, followed by, “Oof! Ow! Damn!” I threw a blow for every lie, every indignity. In his surprise, I got the better of him and launched my body atop his, my knuckles curled into walloping weapons of fury. With one final, satisfying crack to his face, I scrambled across the bed towards freedom. “No, no, no!” He grabbed my ankle and pulled me back underneath him. Nate held me there, wheezing, dripping blood from his nose onto my T-shirt.
He rested his head on my stomach and growled, “No one’s in the rooms adjacent to us. No one will hear.” He laughed, short and harsh. “Shit, that sounded creepy. I’m sorry, okay? I swear I’m not going to hurt you, so please stop fucking hitting me!”
“We passed ‘creepy’ hours ago, asshole!” It gave me grim satisfaction to see he wasn’t so pretty with his face scrunched and bleeding. I laughed back at him. “You swear on what? What holds value to a lying sack of crap like you?”
His eyes clouded with pain. He licked a fleck of blood off his lip. “I swear on my grandparents.”
“I don’t see them here to hold you accountable.”
“Probably because they’re dead.”
I sucked in a breath.
He squeezed his eyelids shut. “Don’t look at me like that. You can’t possibly feel sorry for me.”
We stayed there—him atop me—for a few minutes, regaining equanimity. Funny enough, I now believed him when he said he wouldn’t hurt me. At least not directly. My psychological damage, on the other hand…
My tear ducts finally dried and the empty, yawning sensation returned to my befuddled head. The heavy weight of him pressed me into the mattress. “How does this end?” My voice came out small.
Nate sat up, straddling my hips and drawing his eyebrows together. “I was sent to take that Picasso from Oliver’s office. I succeeded.”
“Sent by whom? Did you—you stole the painting? Just now?” I kept losing ground minute by minute, inch by inch. “What the hell happens to me? You disappear, Mister Criminal Person, and I do what? Get hunted down by The Scorpion?”
For the first time Nate looked at a loss. He kneaded the back of his neck. “I should never have asked you to let me into his office.”
“Well, no, you shouldn’t have. Especially since you just stole it on your own anyway! You got kicked out of Thief Camp, didn’t you?”
He had the audacity to laugh.
“Argh!” I flailed anew against him.
“No more of that!” Iron hands bound my wrists. “Stealing it was easier than I’d thought, once you gave me the code. Thanks to my great taste in girls, Walt is my buddy now. He sends his regards.”
Et tu, Walt? Despair spidered through my veins. I gritted my teeth to quell unshed tears—I would not drip any more for him. I’d been enough of a drip. “So, thief genius, what the hell do I do?”
“Nothing. This is between…my organisation and Oliver’s. We’ve expressly told them you’re not involved. That you don’t know anything.”
His gentle, silken hands brushed across my forehead. My hair must have been made of golden tractor beams—he could never seem to leave it alone. I closed my eyes. Such a comforting touch. At another time. From anyone else.
“Oliver will just believe that?” I whispered, shaking my head.
“Well, maybe you should move and change your name.”
I dripped.
“No, no. It was a joke.” He cupped his hands on my cheeks, wiping the tears away. “Please don’t cry, Sam.” His gaze dipped down to my nose. “You have…um…a little… I’ll get you a tissue.”
He returned from the bathroom with a giant wad of them. Clearly I wasn’t about to win Miss Kidnapped America. He, too, was a mess—we cleaned up our gross noses together like any good, dysfunctional couple.
Once w
e were again safe for consumption, Nate’s eyes grew dark as he examined me for damage. I turned away from his seeking gaze and stared at the door, for once not in the mood to look at him. He pulled back with an apologetic exhalation of breath. I clenched my eyelids closed.
The explosion opened them again.
We convulsed as one from the crash of the window breaking inward. Gunshots thudded into the faded wallpaper. Covering me like a second skin, Nate rolled us off the bed, away from the invaders. We thumped to the floor, the air knocked from me as if by a baseball bat. “Crawl to the bathroom!”
He didn’t need to say it twice. I twitched with every crack of gunfire. The carpet reeked of decomposing food and old feet.
Nate slammed the bathroom door behind us, our stuff in tow. I gripped the toilet plunger with sweating palms and fractured the dingy, frosted window overlooking the parking lot, then the dinky layer of chicken wire. Chicken wire? Nate huffed an impressed, “Nice.” He hefted me upward so I could crawl out. He threw our bags to the ground and followed, barely squeezing through. We ran, the bleeding boy and the bled-upon girl.
* * * *
Nobody runs in LA. Especially not in bunny slippers. The next time I absconded from my apartment in the dead of night because a man tried to kill me, I would wear my trusty Nikes.
My lungs threatened to burst. Finally, Nate stopped his sprint in the shadows of a huge parking lot. Thank God. His panting didn’t inspire confidence. Criminals should exercise so they can flee.
The Christmas lights of the Westside Mall blinked balefully at us. “Come on. We’ll lose them in here.” Without asking for my opinion of his plan—which had heretofore turned out shitty, it should be noted—Nate pulled my already smarting arm and dragged me through the mall doors.
It was so…normal inside. The ambient music complained of the weather being frightful. Sinatra didn’t know the half of it. Nate took off again down the candy cane-bedazzled lane. I tripped over a Kwanzaa fruit broom outside the Hallmark. My knees slammed into the tile floor, and I yelped good and loud.
“You’re supposed to jump over that.” Nate lifted me to standing in one pull.
“I’m not marrying you. Tripping is more in line with our relationship.”
Nate glanced over my shoulder and smiled. “Oh, good.”
“What’s good?” I followed his gaze to a storefront and a crowd. The Second Annual Knights of Columbus Christmas Square Dance for the Cure! at the Dress Barn was good, apparently.
Before I knew it, we’d hustled into the Barn O’ Dresses in order to get lost in the charity square dance. Although I had no idea what I would cure by dancing, I felt smug all the same. Even at a time of great personal hardship, it was important to make meaningless philanthropic gestures.
While I peered out of the doors of the store to see if anyone had followed us, Nate handed me clothes from the Ladies’ Auxiliary Sale table. We followed the volunteers’ directions and found the small employee bathroom so we could change into our new get-ups. Our old garments were stowed in our knapsacks and hidden under the sink.
Minutes later I stared, open-mouthed, into a sea of ballooning blue gingham dress. I was Dorothy from the Wizard of Obnoxious. The skirt puffed as wide as I was tall, but it did make my waist appear smaller. Yes, I was shallow enough to look on the vain side of things, even when pursued by thugs. The only other pleased parts of me were my feet, wiggling ecstatically into non-bunny slipper white flats. Not even Serial Mom could begrudge me these shoes after Labour Day.
Movement behind me in the mirror drew my attention, and I suppressed a guffaw. My not-an-accountant, not-an-FBI-agent partner in crime also sported the terrible blue gingham in the form of a snap-button shirt. He was country-fried silly in that outfit, which featured the tightest jeans in the history of the world. Somehow I’d missed them before—probably because he hadn’t tucked in his shirt at the crappy motel. Oh, and because I’d been handcuffed and almost riddled with holes.
Helloooooooo, tight jeans. Did I mention the jeans were tight? Tight! Damn. I told myself I ought to stop staring at Nate’s crotch. The Knights of Columbus probably had bylaws against that sort of thing.
The dimple returned while he gawked at me. Dimple and jeans—a one-two punch of screw-up-my-life. I did a pretty good job of failing all by myself, thankyouverymuch.
“How do I look?” he asked, eyebrows hopeful.
“Stupid.” Fantastic. Ugh, I was the worst woman in the world. Any moment now a team of lady Navy SEALS would swoop in and tear up my Feminist Card.
“For you.” Nate plopped a white, straw hat on my head. It matched his. “They aren’t going to search for us in here.”
“Wonderful. If we square dance forever we’ll be fine. Hope they have a lot of food.” Did I smell fried chicken? My sniffing nose knew what the priorities were and led us out to the dance floor.
I surveyed the room. No one was waving a gun. Progress. “So who was shooting at us?” I almost said ‘shooting’ without shuddering. Progress.
Nate took my hand and buried it in the crook of his arm. “Steak on a Stick strikes again, I’m guessing.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t your accomplices? I can imagine they might want to kill you.” I delivered this with a fiendishly large smile.
His long legs walked us into the crowd of happy, clapping folks. “I’m shocked you would think such a thing. I am an excellent thief, and my boss loves me. Why, just last year I won Best Stealer of Cute Ladies at the annual banquet.”
I jerked my hand away from him and smashed it to my other one, clapping in rhythm to the square dance caller’s nasal voice.
He stared down at me while I pointedly ignored him. “You smiled at me a lot more at the Christmas party last night.” Nate shoved his hands in his painted-on pockets. “You kissed me a lot more, too.”
“No one shot at me at the Christmas party. I had a job last night. And an apartment. Now I just have”—green sometimes brown eyes and tight jeans—“you, my award-winning kidnapper. By the way, I await your formal apology for handcuffing me.”
The flush of guiltiness coloured his cheeks. “I was afraid you’d run off, and they’d find you.”
“They did find me.”
“And I was there to help!”
I ground my teeth until my sudden burst of rage dissipated. “Did you just say to me that you kidnapped me as a favour because evil men were after me because you caused them to be after me?”
He ran a hand along the back of his neck and paled. After taking a moment to stare at his shoes, he said, “I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry, Samantha.”
Oh, how contrite. Enough. I’d had enough of Sir Lies-a-Lot. “I’m taking over this operation.” I couldn’t do any worse.
“What operation?”
“Exactly! Now…” I put my determined face on. The one I used to wear constantly until working at Steak on a Stick had killed my will to be uppity. “Shake your money-maker, mister. Do-si-do or hump-de-hump or whatever it is we’re supposed to do here to confuse the bad people.” I wagged my finger in his face. “The other bad people, I mean, because don’t you think that I think you’re a good person. Your white hat is bullshit, and you know it, and I know it, and I don’t think that you appreciate that I know what you think you’re not telling me. It is a fact known to both of us.”
“What?”
I’d lost the thread of that little speech about three words in. I crossed my arms and blurted, “You heard me.”
“Yes’m.” A dangerous glint glinted in his eye. Uh-oh.
An old guy in red gingham sauntered over to us. Sauntering was de rigueur at a square dance. “Howdy!” he said.
Howdy? Maybe the gingham had caused it.
“Howdy!” replied a chummy Nate. “I’m George. This here’s Jane, my wife.” He spun lies like they were plates on a stick.
“Hi,” muttered ‘Jane’.
“I’ve never seen you two at one of our dances before. I’m Wayne.”
Nate nodded. “We almost called our son Wayne, but we named our boy Elroy.”
I burst into laughter. Nate’s eyes crinkled as he grinned. Damn him and his eye crinkles and his dimple! I rustled the ruffled layers of my ridiculous costume and buried my face in his shoulder to stop laughing.
Nate took my hand and wrapped it in his big, warm one. “Well, Wayne, gotta let the wife dance. She gets terrible ornery otherwise.” He tugged me onto the teeming floor before I could kick him in the ornery.
The music changed. A little girl in pigtails came to the mic and sang, “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.” Did hippopotamuses square dance? I sure hoped so.
I laughed again. Must be hysteria. We joined a cluster of people boot-scootin’ in a vague line. The way they looked at us, there was no question we were in the wrong place. But what was new?
The caller told us to “Do paso.” I paso’d my do. The caller told us to “Swing.” Nate swung me around with rock-hard arms. I relaxed a bit, figuring killers didn’t shimmy in tight jeans thatta way. I flew through the air, breathless.
How did he know square dancing?
I decided to use my brain for my own good, the better to not contemplate his other talents.
For I had a plan.
* * * *
We square danced for an hour. ‘Square danced’ might be a generous phrase. Nate approximated the called-out steps with semi-confident accuracy at the periphery of the group. I clomped along, giving my North Carolina accent a workout and pretending I was Dolly Parton. All the while we scanned the room for trouble. But trouble didn’t promenade tonight—at least, not in the Dress Barn.
Nate pulled me into the ladies’ room after the crowd had thinned. His sweaty sheen gave him an alluring glow. The colour in his face bloomed, and his hair had rumpled under the cowboy hat, and he looked good enough to…to…to do filthy things with that nice girls don’t do with scoundrels.
The Dimple of Doom (Samantha Lytton) Page 5
