by Celia Mulder
“Too much whiskey?”
“Too much freesia.”
After they’d settled into their suites, they reconvened in Michel’s sitting room.
“Which room is Sylvia staying in?” Lucille asked, tapping notes on her tablet.
Michel was already wearing a Speedo and nothing else. “Hmm...I forgot to ask.”
Lucille tried to exchange a look with Brett, but he was busy pouring himself a drink at the bar. His grimace indicated his arm was still hurting. And no wonder. They hadn’t gotten him to a hospital to have it checked out.
Lucille wondered about what it would be like to have sex with a man with a dislocated shoulder. He’d probably be weak and vulnerable, easy to flip on his back and have her way with. She shivered at the thought. Or at the air conditioning that came on at that moment and cold-showered her.
Back to the fuck-up at hand. “What do you mean you forgot to ask? How do you forget to ask?”
Michel looked cranky. “I don’t know. It probably had something to do with the fact I’ve had a very emotional few days. Not to mention being drugged by my supposed best friend yesterday.” It was Michel’s turn to shoot a glare at Brett.
Brett shrugged and poured another drink.
Lucille frowned at Michel. “Did you insist on bringing Brett along so you could keep an eye on him?”
“Keep your enemies close.”
“Hey,” Brett protested. “You don’t honestly think that I had something to do with Sylvia’s kidnapping.”
Michel sat in one of the sitting area armchairs, his abs rippling on the descent. “No. But it is fucking annoying being roofied by your best friend.”
Brett snorted. “It was for your own good.”
Lucille relaxed and started typing again. For a minute she’d thought Michel actually suspected Brett but no, just the men being flippant in the face of danger. Again.
“Whatever.” Lucille cut him off. “We don’t have time to deal with the rift in your bromance. There is a homicidal heiress who needs rescuing somewhere on this island, and I, for one, am going to go ask the desk staff if they know anything about it.”
But she never made it down to the front desk. She didn’t even make it out of the suite. The next moment Lucille found herself hurled across the room. Time slowed down, but her body wasn’t responding. She saw the floor coming toward her, felt the heat on her side, smelled the tang of burning hotel furniture, and couldn’t do a thing about it. Her only thought as she fell was, What the shit?
In another moment, it was all over. Lucille was still awake and alive, but covered with a layer of plaster and ash. She coughed and pushed the debris off of herself. The soot would never come out of her clothes. There goes a perfectly good outfit.
Nearby, more debris was moving. Michel spluttered to the surface, his mostly naked body covered in small scrapes. Lucille couldn’t help thinking his change into the Speedo had been a bit preemptive, considering. Still, she needed to make sure he wasn’t injured. He was her client, after all. But she couldn’t pick herself off the floor just yet.
“Michel, you’re bleeding.”
“What?” Michel shouted, squinting at her through the unsettled dust.
She motioned to his chest.
Michel looked down at his sculpted abs and the tiny rivulets of blood running down them. He pulled a splinter out of one of the scrapes. “Ah. Hmm. What happened?”
“The room exploded.” Lucille’s ears still vibrated in the aftermath of the blast. She shook her head. It didn’t help.
“What happened?” Michel shouted again.
Lucille shook her head, this time at him. “The room. That room”—as she pointed to the direction the blast came from, she frowned—“Brett’s room, exploded.”
“I can see that.”
“Then why did you...? Oh never mind.” Lucille gave up when Michel cupped his ears and frowned at her. The next moment, though, it was she who shouted at him. “Where is Brett?”
Their eyes met in a mirror of panic. They scanned the sitting area, finding Brett against the wall beside the bar, still clutching his broken glass of whiskey, awake and moaning in pain.
“Brett! Are you hurt?” Michel pushed the remaining debris from his body and stumbled over to this friend, kneeling beside him so that Lucille had a front-row view of his ass. She tried and failed not to look.
“No more than I was,” Brett said, his teeth grinding together. “What the hell happened?”
“Someone blew up your room,” Michel said, running his hands over Brett’s body.
“Dude. What are you doing?”
“Checking you for injuries.”
Brett looked at him. “I will say this again. You are not a doctor. Nor do I want you touching me when you’re only wearing a man thong. Understood?”
Michel rolled his eyes. “You are a terrible patient. Fine, have Lucille check you.”
Lucille met Brett’s eyes. He raised his eyebrow at her.
“As much as you might enjoy that, we need to figure out how Sylvia got a bomb in here,” Lucille said. She still hadn’t stood up. She didn’t think she was injured; all her limbs certainly had feeling, bruised and battered feeling, but feeling nonetheless. And yet, for all the levity of Michel’s life-or-death situation, this had been a close call. A very close call. If she thought about it too much, she’d realize how a few feet and the wrong room were all that had stood between her and death.
Brett nodded slightly, looking around at the remains of the bar, the shattered bottles, the liquor dripping to the floor. Lucille followed his gaze, feeling his pain. If she had to be a walking bruise, at least she wanted to be a drunk one.
Michel appeared to think for a moment, still kneeling like a bloody, Speedo-clad imitation of The Thinker. “I don’t think Sylvia did this. It isn’t her style.”
Lucille and Brett stared at Michel.
“So what, now there are multiple people trying to kill you? Who the fuck else wants to kill you?” Brett broke the smoldering silence.
“No, think about it. Sylvia’s other murder attempts were all at our house, out of sight, quiet. Not explosive.”
Lucille nodded. “True. So I don’t think we should rule out the idea that someone else was trying to kill you.”
Michel stood, looking very much like a centurion statue after the fall of Rome. “I don’t think they were trying to kill me at all. I think they were actually trying to kill Brett.”
Her attention turned to Brett, who was still in deep consideration of the bar. “What?”
“Who did you piss off? An ex-girlfriend? Wife? Stalker? Super fan?”
Brett’s scowl deepened. “No one.”
Michel, still talking to Lucille, added, “I don’t think Brett has any super fans or stalkers. Certainly no girlfriends he was with long enough for them to want to kill him.”
Brett clearly didn’t like this recap of his life. He slid his leg out and kicked Michel in the kneecap as hard as he could in his current position. Which, judging by Michel’s lack of reaction, was not hard.
Lucille rolled her eyes at them. “I, for one, would rather discuss this when we aren’t sitting in the middle of a bombed-out hotel room. I need a drink, and since Michel’s bar just blew up—”
The hotel manager who’d greeted their limo burst through the destroyed door. He stopped when he saw them and sighed, grasping at his heart in relief. “You are okay. You are alive.”
It wasn’t hard to tell he was talking only to Michel.
“Not really,” Brett said unhelpfully.
Lucille waved at him to be quiet. “We’re fine. But we have some questions for you.”
The man shook his head. “They’ll have to wait. Everyone must evacuate immediately. Take the stairs and stand away from the hotel until we give word.”
Lucille shook her head. “We’re not going to do that. And you are going to answer our questions. Now.”
Someone laid a hand on her arm. She thought it was Brett and w
ent to throw him off when Michel spoke.
“I think we’ll all feel better when we’ve changed and calmed down.”
Lucille bristled but kept quiet.
“But sir! It’s not safe in here. I must insist—”
“Then we’ll move to the other room,” Lucille said. “Mr. Polce is not going outside covered in dirt and blood, and neither are the rest of us.”
“We’ll be in the lobby in ten minutes. Then you’ll answer our questions,” Michel added.
The man shut his mouth, nodded, and left.
No one moved or said anything right away, the shock of the bomb still overwhelming.
“I think I need a Band-Aid,” Michel said finally.
Lucille, annoyed Michel had sent away the person they needed to interrogate, glanced at him. Sure enough, Michel’s scratches were still bleeding. “I don’t think one Band-Aid is going to cut it. Let’s get you cleaned up and changed.”
Brett cleared his throat.
They turned to him, sitting on the floor with his injured arm and dirty, soot-covered body.
“I’d really like to change too, but someone just blew up my clothes.”
Michel walked over and pulled Brett to his feet. “You can borrow mine.”
Lucille smirked when she caught sight of Brett’s alarmed face.
Chapter Thirteen
In theory, Brett and Michel were the same size. Only Michel was taller, broader, and way more muscular. And, apart from the current Speedo exception, exclusively wore suits. Brett grimaced at the closet of them, already pressed and hung in rows of subtly changing hues. He scowled down at his jeans and t-shirt. They would have been dirty but acceptable, torn from his fall down the stairs the day before but only at the knee. But then Michel had bled all over them while he was playing doctor, again. They’d have to go.
Then there was the problem of the arm. It hurt when he lifted it. It hurt when he didn’t. He could write a fucking rhyme about all the ways it hurt. There was no way he could get out of his shirt without assistance. Assistance Michel couldn’t provide while he was covering himself with Band-Aids. Brett didn’t like his other option. Not because he didn’t want her to see him naked; he did. But there were so many important, crucial things they had to deal with right now, and he didn’t think his libido could handle another booty call near-miss.
His eyes scanned the bedroom, hoping to find another solution or that another person would magically appear. The room, with its breezy resort furniture, remained shiny, spotless, and empty. Aren’t bellhops and valets supposed to magically appear when you need them? What kind of five-star establishment is this?
He sighed. At least he could change his pants on his own. No way in hell was he having Lucille zip up his fly unless there was some hanky panky involved first.
Hanky panky? Who even says that anymore?
He got the pants on, using his free hand to pull up one side and then the other, all the while trying not to get the blood from his shirt on them. By the time he was done, he was winded. From putting on pants. Things had really gone downhill lately.
He picked up the crisp, white button-down shirt—no way was he wearing a jacket in this heat—and headed down the hall to the room on the far side of Michel’s. The hallway was deserted, evacuated after the blast. In the space that had once been his suite, there was smoke and the sound of a fire crew putting out the last of the flames. He could see lumps of blackened furniture, now soggy and dilapidated nearly beyond recognition.
The bomb had taken out his entire suite, the sitting area wall of Michel’s suite, and the bedroom wall to the room on the other side. Brett wondered what the people in that room had thought or if maybe, horribly, they’d been hurt in the explosion. Who would do such a thing? Not only that, but who gets the room number wrong? Thank God they had or he wouldn’t be standing there, half alive in a bloody shirt. But seriously. First the stairs and now the hotel. The murderers were losing their game. And where the hell was Sylvia? Wouldn’t she want to be present when her fiancé-killing plot finally succeeded? Or maybe his earlier suspicion was wrong and Sylvia actually had been kidnapped.
Brett rubbed his head. Too many questions on not enough sleep, whiskey, or pain meds. He turned away from the wreckage and knocked on Lucille’s door instead.
She opened the door at once, as though expecting him. She’d changed, replacing her business suit get-up with a sleek white dress that wrapped around her neck at the top, pushing her breasts in and up. Her hair was pulled back in a messy sort of bun and she wore some excessively strappy sandals on her feet. She was applying sunscreen.
“You’re putting on sunscreen,” Brett said, standing in the hallway in his bloody t-shirt and suit pants.
Lucille shrugged. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. I figure I’ll get more out of the guests if I blended in. As opposed to dressing like whatever you’re supposed to be.”
Brett winced. “Michel only brought suits.”
“And the Speedo.”
“Yeah.” He winced again and looked suspiciously at her. “And the Speedo.”
Yep, she’d noticed his ripped, swimsuit model friend. If she was expecting anything of the sort from him, his chances of getting laid would plummet to nothing. Damn Michel and his stupid Italian good looks and confidence in his sexuality.
“So, what do you want? We have to be down in the lobby in a few minutes.”
Brett shifted. This situation kept getting worse and worse. Now he wasn’t worried about them having sex right now, lost in the throes of passion brought on by his naked chest. No, now he was worried this would ruin their chances of banging at all. He wasn’t fat, but he didn’t have rippling muscles either. “Right. So. I can’t put on my shirt with this sling, and Michel is still Band-Aiding himself and hopefully getting dressed. Who knows how long that will take, so can you help me change my shirt?”
Lucille raised an eyebrow. He saw her swallow, and it made his heart leap a little. Something else twitched, too; something he was hoping would take no notice of the situation and stay where it was in his pants.
“Sure, come on in.” Lucille stepped aside. She spoke in a clipped tone, not seductive, but not unaffected either.
Brett walked into the hotel room, identical to Michel’s and what his used to look like. Lucille closed the door and turned to stand in front of him. She took the clean shirt out of his hand and laid it on the back of a chair.
“Are you right handed?” Her fingers closed around the hem of his t-shirt and tugged upwards.
Brett swallowed, his throat blocked by his pounding heart. “Yes,” he croaked. “Why?”
Lucille’s eyes were on the shirt she was pushing up over his stomach, slowly and purposefully revealing skin. When he replied, she looked pained, but her eyes didn’t leave their hungry pursuit. “I was just wondering about whether you could write, and I guess you can’t.”
Brett’s breath sped up.
Lucille reached up and unbuckled the sling from around his neck, holding one hand under his arm while she detached it from its white cloth casing.
“Good thing I’ve got terrible writer’s block.” Brett meant to say it in a light, joking tone, but he wasn’t capable of jocularity at the moment. That he was able to speak at all proved miracles exist.
Lucille didn’t react to his comment. She slid his arms out of the t-shirt, first his good one and then, even more gently than she’d removed the sling, his injured side. T-shirt freed, she folded it and placed it on the back of the chair, picking up the white shirt as she did so. This time she started with the bad arm, easing it through the sleeve, guiding his fingers through with hers. She moved behind him to pull the shirt around and put the left sleeve on. Shifting to stand in front of him again, she buttoned the shirt, top to bottom, her fingers resting on his hot skin as they pulled the sides of fabric together. Last, she replaced the sling, adjusting it so it went around the collar and not into his neck. When it was done, she stood back and eyed him up and down,
a smirk on her lips.
Brett exhaled, releasing the air he’d been holding for the past minute. There hadn’t been any gropage; no untoward touching of any kind. So why did he feel like they’d just had sex when all she’d done was put on a shirt?
If he had two good arms, he would push her up against the wall right then and take her there, standing up. If she wanted to, of course.
“You guys are not the same size,” Lucille said. She turned away, picked up her purse from the side table, and swaggered out of the room, the smirk still dancing on her lips.
Brett crumbled where he stood. The control that woman had was unbelievably sexy. She knew he was in the palm of her hand, knew she’d left him on the edge and walked away, knew she could take what she wanted from him but didn’t. He revised his earlier fantasy. If he had two good arms, he’d let her tie them to the bed and ride him all day long.
Had he really thought that? He wasn’t into bondage. It must be the ocean breeze fucking with his brain. That or the pain and sobriety.
“Lucille Anton, you temptress, you minx, you siren.” No, if he had two good arms, he knew what would happen. He’d be up all night writing horrible love poetry while she was off fucking Michel.
The thought had the cold-shower effect. Brett shook himself and caught up with Lucille and Michel at the elevator. They headed down to the main floor, where the rest of the hotel had also gone.
The tiled floor of the lobby was littered with irate guests, half-packed luggage, and stressed hotel staff. Brett and Lucille scanned the area for Sylvia or suspicious-looking people who could be kidnappers. It was tough. Everyone looked suspicious, half-clothed and scared, demanding increased security, early checkouts, transportation to the airport, or a new room away from the bombed floor. There was no sign of his cousin and no one who fit his stereotypical image of a kidnapper, bomber, or attempted murderer: a big man with an eye patch and a creepy leer.
Michel left and returned, dragging behind him the harried manager who was still shouting orders to his staff and encouragement to his clientele. When they reached Lucille and Brett, the man gave a long-suffering sigh and motioned them through the employee-only entrance.
