by M. J. Lowell
I pressed myself even farther back into my doorway. My heart was pounding so hard I was afraid they could hear it. This was surreal, I thought in disbelief. Were these men really planning a murder? No, they couldn’t be. Things like that didn’t happen, not in real life. This must be some kind of bizarre joke. Maybe they were actors, rehearsing lines for a play.
But if they were actors, they were so chillingly convincing they should have been starring on Broadway, not lurking on a Bowery street corner.
“People really do that autoer— whatever you call it?” Cigarette asked.
“Autoerotic asphyxiation.” Skullcap enunciated each syllable with care. He shrugged. “Yeah. Something about not being able to breathe is supposed to heighten the sensation. People really get off on it. But then they accidentally hang themselves while they’re getting off. We’re supposed to make it look like that’s what happened to the guy.”
This was no joke. They really were planning a murder. I had to call the police and tell them. Warn them to stop these men before they could kill anyone.
“And there she is, the lovely and faithless Mrs. G,” Skullcap said. Across the street I saw a woman getting out of a cab. She was wearing a long mink coat with her hair tucked up under a matching fur hat.
“She’s a looker, ain’t she?” said Cigarette. His voice held a mixture of longing and regret.
“Sure, if you like ‘em blonde and stacked and slutty, and who doesn’t?” Skullcap agreed.
The woman in the mink paused at the curb and tilted her head up at Rhys Carlyle on his balcony. As I watched she blew him a playful kiss, and he beckoned for her to join him upstairs.
Skullcap sighed as she disappeared into the hotel. “The guy doesn’t even realize he just signed his own death warrant,” he said.
My entire body began to tremble. These men weren’t going to kill just anyone.
They were going to kill Rhys Carlyle.
Chapter Three
Cigarette cracked his knuckles. “Think we can grab a drink while we wait for things to get started? I’m freezing my nuts off.”
Skullcap thought it over. “Yeah, but it’s gotta be a quick one. We want to catch ‘em in the act, but we don’t want her to have too much fun before we get there.”
Cigarette took one last drag on his cigarette and dropped the butt onto the pavement, grinding it out under his heel. “Let’s go.”
They waited for the light to change and made their way across the street, going in through the same entrance the woman in the mink had used only moments before. With shaking fingers I dialed 911. I was so freaked out I could barely hold onto the phone.
“What’s your emergency?” said the crisp voice of an operator.
“There’s going to be a murder,” I whispered.
“Please speak up, ma’am. Are you reporting a crime?”
“Yes. No. I mean, there’s going to be a crime, but it hasn’t happened yet. I just heard two men say they’re going to strangle Rhys Carlyle in his suite at the Bowery Hotel.”
“We’ve had no complaints from the Bowery Hotel.”
“This is a complaint. I’m complaining. Some guy’s wife is having an affair with Rhys Carlyle, and the guy sent two men in leather jackets to kill him. They’re supposed to make it look like an accident.” I was babbling, but I couldn’t help myself.
“Ma’am, has a crime been committed?”
“No, but it’s about to be committed. You have to send someone—”
“Ma’am, there are more than eight million people in New York City, and almost three million of them are married. Do you know how many of them are cheating on each other?”
“No, but—”
“Approximately one million. And do you know how many people want their spouses dead?”
“Uh, no, but—”
“Approximately 750,000. And do you know how many people are both cheating and want their spouses dead?”
I didn’t, but I did know that a quick drink couldn’t take very long, and Rhys Carlyle was the only person who might be able to tell me what really happened to my father. That was the only explanation for what I did next.
I begged the operator one last time to send help. Then I hung up the phone and stuffed it back in my bag.
I didn’t want to risk going through the lobby and running into Skullcap and Cigarette. Instead I dashed across the street and around the corner, to the service entrance of the hotel. A busboy was coming out, and I slipped inside before the door could close behind him.
I found myself in a stark, harshly lit cinderblock hallway. Judging by the clatter of pots and pans and the savory aromas in the air, the hotel kitchen was to my right, but I made for a staircase up ahead, taking the steps two at a time to the second floor. I’d been wondering why a guy like Rhys Carlyle hadn’t insisted on the penthouse, but right now I was lucky he hadn’t.
The door from the stairwell to the corridor was like a portal into a different world. The cinderblocks and fluorescent lights were gone, replaced by soft carpeting and rich muted colors – but I didn’t have time to appreciate the décor. I tried to get my bearings, to figure out which door would belong to Rhys Carlyle. It could only be the one at the far end of the hall, I decided. The other doors were too close together to accommodate the expansive dimensions of his suite. Besides, his was the only one where the telltale Do Not Disturb light already glowed red.
I rushed down the hallway and pounded on the door, but there was no answer. I pounded again, and then a third time. Still no answer. I was about to pound a fourth time when the door swung open.
Rhys Carlyle stood before me, his cobalt eyes blazing with fury. And I was immediately, utterly overwhelmed by the sheer physical impact of him.
Nothing I’d read, nothing Val had told me, nothing I’d observed from a safe distance through my telephoto lens could have prepared me for this, for him. The sight of his bare, sleekly muscled athlete’s torso, covered only by the bath towel wrapped loosely around his hips, sent an involuntary tremor through me.
“Which part of Do Not Disturb is unclear?” he demanded. His British accent, rough and gravelly and miles from the honeyed poshness of Downton Abbey or anything on Masterpiece Theatre, teased the backs of my knees. I found my eyes avoiding his furious ones, following the planes of his stomach down to the top of his towel, where I could just picture—
Stop it, I told myself. What was happening to me? “I’m sorry,” I said, apologizing, retreating from his dangerous pull into the shell of politeness, of being the good girl. “It’s just that the woman you’re with, uh—”
“The woman I’m with is none of your bloody business, and if I needed housekeeping I would have rung for it,” he growled and moved to shut the door.
I thrust myself between the door and its frame. “Her husband’s sending people to kill you,” I blurted.
He cocked one eyebrow. A slow, mocking smile spread over his full sensuous lips, and I couldn’t help imagining what they would feel like against my bare skin. “Is that right?” he said, but it wasn’t really a question – his tone was mocking, too.
“That’s right,” I said trying to sound like his every word didn’t send an astonishing ripple of heat through me. “And I’m not housekeeping.”
Those cobalt eyes took me in, sweeping from my face down my body and then up to my face again. His gaze left a tingling trail in its wake, making the breath catch in my throat. “No, you’re not, are you?”
If this was the Ninth Sexiest Bachelor, I never wanted to meet the man who came in first. With his eyes on mine I completely forgot what I was doing there, forgot to breathe, forgot my name.
I heard the elevator chime at the other end of the hall. There wasn’t a second to spare. “Who I am isn’t important,” I said, pushing past him and into the suite. “What’s important are the men who are on their way to murder you. They’re supposed to make it look like an accident.”
He shook his head, bemused, then let the door close behind hi
m and turned to lean against it, arms crossed over his sculpted chest. “Which lunatic asylum did you escape from and who can I ring to have you escorted back there?”
“I know it sounds crazy, but I swear it’s true.”
“Of course it is,” he said dryly. He moved toward me.
My head spun and my heart pressed against my chest. I took a step back. “Really. I heard two guys say their boss told them to kill you.”
He advanced another step forward. Every cell of my body was sounding an alarm, warning me that this man was dangerous, that I should get out of there, but his magnetism held me, made leaving unthinkable.
“Did these gentlemen have names?” he asked.
I took another step back and almost stumbled over a chair. “N-no. I mean, they probably do, they must, but I don’t know them.” His presence was pure heat and I was melting under his onslaught, exposing parts of myself I’d thought were buried for good. I had the insane desire to run my finger across the faint line of stubble on his chin, to lay my palm on his chest and feel his heartbeat, to press my face against his neck and breathe in the scent of—
“Baby, what’s going on out there?” a sultry voice purred from an adjacent room. “The water’s getting cold. And so am I.”
Reality came flooding back. “Is that Mrs. G?” I asked.
“That’s not what I call her—” he started to say. Then he caught himself. “How did you know?”
“Because they said their boss wanted them to make Mrs. G watch while they killed you.”
He considered this. “That does sound like precisely the sort of twisted thing he’d go in for.”
And at that moment we heard the soft slithering of a keycard being inserted in the lock.
I froze like a deer in headlights. Now what?
Rhys’s eyes blazed again. “Do Not Disturb really doesn’t carry the weight it used to,” he said, grabbing me around the waist and pulling me into the adjacent room, shutting the door behind us.
My first thought was “Oh, that’s what Mrs. G meant about the water getting cold.” My second thought was that if we were going to be cornered by professional killers, at least we were doing it in one of the world’s nicest bathrooms. It was enormous and as sleek as Rhys Carlyle himself, all granite tile and gleaming chrome, with a tub the size of a small swimming pool smack in the middle.
And smack in the middle of the tub was Mrs. G, minus the mink and everything else she’d been wearing. She was gorgeous and tanned and perfectly groomed and looked completely assured despite her nakedness.
“It seems your husband’s henchmen are in the process of breaking in,” Rhys said in a low voice as he tossed her a towel. “Go out the back way. Leave your coat and hat here.”
He spoke with the unconscious authority of someone who was used to being obeyed without question, and Mrs. G did exactly as he said. Without a word she stepped gracefully out of the tub and vanished through the other doorway.
Rhys Carlyle watched her go with a look of approval. Then he turned to me.
“Take your clothes off,” he said.
Chapter Four
“I, uh, think you have the wrong idea—”
His gaze pierced me like a laser. “I thought you wanted to save my life.”
“I did. Do.”
“If those men come in here and don’t find a woman with me, they’re going to guess what happened and go after Talia— Mrs. G. So stop acting like a silly virgin, strip off your bloody clothes and get into the bloody bath.”
He spoke to me in the same authoritative way he’d spoken to Mrs. G, and I found I didn’t like it. He might be handsome – incredibly, heart-stoppingly, outrageously handsome – but that didn’t mean I would just—
“You have sixty seconds. I won’t be able to hold them off longer than that,” he said tersely and disappeared into the other room, shutting the door behind him.
I glared at the space where he’d just been. Arrogant, condescending, rude, ungrateful, full-of-himself bastard. Did he seriously think I’d jump when he snapped? Just because other women might drop their clothes at the blink of his eye, he had no right to expect I’d do the same thing.
I was about to exit through the same door Mrs. G had used when I heard Rhys say, “Good evening, gentlemen. Odd, I don’t recall ordering—”
His voice was cut off by the sickening crack of a fist smashing into flesh. I froze.
“Where is she, Carlyle?” someone asked. It sounded like Skullcap.
“I take it you’re not room service?” Rhys said.
I heard a nauseating crunch. Skullcap murmured, “I forgot, this one likes to play games.”
“We’re not playing games,” added Cigarette. “We don’t like games.”
“Pity,” Rhys said. “I have several you would—”
His sentence ended in a sharp thud, followed by a low moan.
It was the moan that did it. Hands shaking, I tugged the zipper of my jacket down as I kicked off my boots. I pulled my sweater over my head and yanked off my jeans. Surely I could leave my bra and panties on, though. I was shy enough in a bathing suit at the beach – I wasn’t about to get completely naked in front of strangers. Besides, I reasoned, it was entirely possible that in this hypothetical situation Rhys Carlyle had cooked up I simply hadn’t had time to finish undressing before Cigarette and Skullcap barged in to interrupt us. Then I looked down.
Oh no. I was wearing my Tuesday underwear.
Which would’ve been mortifying in and of itself, especially since Val said nobody who was actually old enough to know the days of the week wore day-of-the-week underwear. But the fact that it wasn’t even Tuesday took mortifying to a whole new level.
I heard another thud and another moan, louder this time, and that was enough to make me forget which day it was altogether. I stripped off the panties and bra and leaped into the tub, leaning back in the perfumed water and closing my eyes like I was oblivious to what was happening in the other room.
The door swung open a moment later.
“Babe, the water’s getting col—” I said, trying to sound like Mrs. G as I lazily opened my eyes. But I gasped when I caught sight of Rhys.
Blood poured from his nose and a bruise was already forming along one side of his rib cage, just above where the towel was knotted around his hips. He seemed barely on the edge of consciousness as Skullcap dragged him through the door. Without thinking, I stood and reached for him, heedless of the water streaming from my naked body.
Skullcap pulled away and did a double take. “Who the hell are you?”
“Who the hell is who?” said Cigarette, pushing his way in to join us.
And that’s when I saw it. While Skullcap and Cigarette were busy gaping in surprise, Rhys winked at me. Winked!
He was faking. That arrogant, condescending, rude, ungrateful, full-of-himself bastard was faking. And there I was, stark naked and dripping wet, undergoing a thorough visual examination by three virtual strangers, two of whom were professional killers. It was completely infuriating.
But somehow the anger made me forget I was terrified and helped me keep it together to play the role I needed to play.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded of Skullcap and Cigarette. “And what the hell did you do to my, my— special friend?”
Rhys gave a small choked cough that I could have sworn was covering up a laugh.
“She’s no blonde,” Cigarette announced, his eyes taking me in. “And she ain’t exactly stacked, either.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty clear,” Skullcap said in a tone that was far from flattering. He nodded to Cigarette. “Check the place out. Our lady must be here somewhere.”
“Lady? What lady?” I glared at Rhys. “Please tell me you don’t have one of your various floozies stashed here. Because if you do I will happily let these two goons have another go at you. I might even help.”
“Now that hurts my feelings,” said Cigarette sadly. “I hate when people call us goons.” He sighed an
d disappeared through the doorway Mrs. G had used.
“No,” Rhys said in a strangled tone
“No, what?” I snapped at him. “No, they’re not goons? Or no, there’s no floozy?”
“No floozy,” he managed, gritting his teeth in a way I was pretty sure had more to do with not cracking up than pain. As soon as I got rid of Skullcap and Cigarette, I was going to kill him myself. But not until he’d told me everything he knew about my father.
I turned back to Skullcap. “If you don’t, don’t— unhand him this second I’m going to call the police.” I stepped out of the tub and made a move toward the phone mounted on the wall next to the sink.
“Relax,” Skullcap said, putting himself and Rhys between the phone and me. “This is just a little misunderstanding. Soon as my colleague assures me there’s nobody else here, we’ll be on our way.”
“You’re just going to sashay on out of here after what you’ve done?” I said.
“That’s the plan,” said Skullcap. “And it looks to me like you’re not armed.”
“So?”
From out of nowhere, a gun had appeared in his hand, pointed at Rhys’s stomach. He grinned. “So I am. Which means I’ll sashay when I’m ready to sashay.”
“No one else here,” Cigarette returned to report. But he was carrying the mink coat and hat. He glanced over at me. “These yours?”
“Of course they’re mine,” I told him in my most offended tone, hoping PETA would excuse me under the circumstances.
“Funny thing,” he said, in a way that made it clear he didn’t think it was funny at all. “They got the initials of a friend of ours embroidered inside.”
What was it with rich people and their need to monogram everything they owned? “Apparently your friend and I have the same initials.” I said.
“So your name would be?” He smiled an unpleasant smile, revealing nicotine-stained teeth.
I thought fast. Mrs. G’s last name began with a G, obviously, but her first name –what had Rhys called her? Sonia? Natasha? No, Talia. So her initials were T.G.
I said the first two words that came into my mouth. “Tuesday Granite. My name is Tuesday Granite.”
