Out loud.
My sister hated this about me. She despaired of my imagination because she was also pretty sure I had an undiagnosed case of Tourette’s syndrome – this despite being genetically identical to her – and the combination inevitably resulted in unfiltered fantastical nonsense spewing forth with horrifying regularity.
The silence at my right ear was deafening for the space of several exceptionally loud heartbeats before a low chuckle sent my sweaty butterflies into frantic flight.
“It’s a cat,” he purred.
A cat?
The cat purred? No, the man purred. Men didn’t purr, did they?
I threw the switcher on my brain-track and wrenched it back to the situation at hand. The silken ivy I’d pictured wrapped around my ankles was, of course, an actual cat winding itself around my legs.
“I knew that,” I said. “You purred when you said it, though. Are you some relation?”
“To the cat?” Darius Masoud stepped around my shoulder to look into my face. The sweaty butterflies hung suspended in mid-flutter, and I grinned because they weren’t making me sick at the moment, which was reason to celebrate.
Darius seemed to think the grin was for him though, and his slow, answering smile started the fluttering right back up again. “Don’t do that,” I said with a scowl.
“Don’t smile?” A look of confusion dimmed the smile down to something the butterflies could manage, and I nodded.
“Thank you. The sweaty butterflies were making me a little ill.”
Now, I’d always been totally conscious that I sounded like a fruitcake when I spoke in situations like this. The problem was that a: I didn’t care, and b: I didn’t often have much to say in the matter. The filter between my brain and my mouth had always been tenuous at best, but it completely disappeared whenever sweaty butterflies got involved.
The Disney prince’s expression had begun to shift to something much more familiar. The “this one’s a whackjob” face that started looking for the exits. And as pretty as his face was to look at, I didn’t have time or attention for sweaty butterflies or Disney princes. I had a house to scout, its owner to seduce, and a panic room to find. I pulled on a benign smile – the one Colette said made me look dim – and waited for him to find an excuse to run away.
2
Darius
“Unexpected things take your breath away. She wasn’t just unexpected, she knocked the wind out of me and ran away laughing.”
Darius Masoud
She was waiting for me to run away.
The woman in front of me, with whom conversation was akin to playing barefoot hopscotch on hot asphalt, who walked like shoes confused her, and who smelled of a spring breeze through a field of wildflowers, expected me to turn tail and bolt.
I rarely did the expected, however, and often made choices that flew directly in the face of convention. And as nothing about this woman or this conversation was conventional, I stayed.
And I laughed.
This startled her, and she suddenly dropped to the floor in what seemed at first to be a defensive maneuver, but was actually a crouch in order to pet the cat. Her posture put her face at approximately groin height, and for the space of exactly one half-second, I considered remaining in place to see if she would notice. But chivalry got the better of me, and I knelt down beside her.
Her face flamed bright red, and for a moment I thought she was ill.
“I was just staring at your penis, wasn’t I?” she said in a tone of complete chagrin.
Rarely did I meet someone even more straightforward than myself, and I attempted a benign expression. “Were you?”
The delightful girl sighed. “I was. I’m sorry.” But then a mischievous glint came into her eyes, and she said in a perfectly benign tone, “So, what do you think about my pussy?”
I choked on a startled bark of laughter, and she allowed herself a small grin as she deliberately ran her hands through the fur of the very contented cat.
“On that note, I believe it’s time for me to find something red to drink to match the color of my face,” she said, as she rose to her feet. She wasn’t graceful about it, but she was strong and didn’t wobble until she tried to take a step. She’d managed to stand on the hem of the pink silk gown she wore and winced at the sound of her heel tearing the fabric.
“Well, now I’ve officially hit my humiliation quota for the night. Enjoy the party, Mr. Masoud,” she said brightly, as she hurried away across the room. I let her go without further comment, though my eyes tracked her as she plucked a glass of red wine from a passing tray and finished half of it in one large gulp.
Sterling Gray chose that moment to greet her. She smiled at him and said something that turned his expression predatory. My eyes narrowed at the way Gray touched her arm, and I wondered where her blush had gone. She smiled brightly, despite her pale cheeks, and he leaned in to whisper something into her ear.
Another Sterling Gray conquest, albeit an odd choice for him. Gray was predictable in his companions – slender blondes with long hair, small waists, and high breasts were favorites. And though at first glance, this one fit the requirements, her hair was unruly and verged on wild, her arms and shoulders had the kind of muscle that spoke of outdoor fitness rather than polite gym sessions, and she seemed uncomfortable with the amount of skin her dress revealed. And all of that was before she even opened her mouth.
I smirked at the memory of the least conventional conversation I had perhaps ever had. This woman was far too unfiltered and odd to be an obvious match for one of Chicago’s richest, most eligible, and most image-conscious bachelors.
I had no desire to observe the mechanics of Gray’s hook-up and turned to the bar for a mineral water. Gray’s dates were not my problem, his father’s security systems were, and I made a mental note to speak to Marcel, Gray’s butler, about the guest list. That the woman’s name was sure to be on it was not a motivating factor.
When I turned back to observe the room, Gray was standing with a couple who wore the approximate net worth of a small kingdom in clothes and jewels, and the blonde woman in the pink dress had disappeared.
3
Anna
“Life is not a fairy tale. If you lose your shoe at midnight, you’re drunk.”
From the T-shirt collection of Anna Collins
Hot pink was not a stealthy color, and stiletto heels were approximately as subtle as gunshots on the long marble hallway that led to a back staircase. I paused to slip off the shoes, for which my aching feet thanked me in ALL CAPS, and then had to wipe the smudge of my handprint off the high-gloss walls.
Who did that? Who used high-gloss paint on walls? People who didn’t clean their own walls, that’s who.
The marble floor was cold under my bare feet, and I had to hike the pink silk up over one arm so I could run down the empty hall. The sounds of the party receded when I reached the staircase, and the carpeted steps even felt quiet as I climbed them.
All the art in the public rooms was large-scale black and white photography – iconic images that were probably numbered and signed by people with names like Leibovitz, Beard, and Avedon. The walls of the back staircase were paneled in warm-toned wood and opened up to a second-floor landing that overlooked the garage. The space was a pass-through, with pretensions declared by a couple of small landscape photographs in gilt frames hung on the walls and a decorative hall table sporting a nude statue of a ballet dancer.
Yeah, right. Keep the toe shoes, lose the tutu. Like that would ever happen in real life.
I slunk down the hallway as a mental conjuring of the naked ballerina stepped off her pedestal and whirled past me in her toe shoes. I admit, I checked out her butt-to-thigh junction with a degree of envy that would’ve made my sister laugh and everyone else shake their head and look worried for my sanity.
I wasn’t worried, though. I mean, who would want to live in a world where naked statues didn’t step off pedestals and dance away? Besides, this naked
dancer stopped and pirouetted in front of a built-in bookcase that fit the approximate location of the door to the panic room.
I loved secret bookcase doors. I’d had to drag a bail-jumper out from behind one once, and solving the puzzle of how to open that door had been the best thing about the whole job. That had been an old Victorian house, and even though the bones of Sterling Gray’s mansion were old, the remodel was all high-gloss and tech. I doubted this secret door puzzle would be quite so easy to solve.
I glanced at the floor first, then the ceiling. Nope, no metal tracks. The thing about bookcase doors was that they were incredibly heavy when they were full of books and generally required a track on which to slide open and closed. The fact that this one didn’t have a visible track meant that the door opened into the panic room, which placed the door pin inaccessible within the undoubtedly steel doorframe and made it infinitely easier to bar from the inside.
I’d been watching for cameras since I slipped away from the party, and so far I’d counted six, which meant there might be eight or nine between me and the ballroom. According to the wiring schematic, this panic room was the hub for all the optics cabling, and was therefore the logical place to put a control room. One of the primary reasons I’d come to Sterling Gray’s party was to find out whether that room was manned by a security guard, monitored remotely, or was just a place to record the footage for later review. There was one unscientific way to find out.
I stood in front of the bookcase and searched the book titles as if I were just a regular guest who got lost on the way to the bathroom and decided to bring some reading material in with her. Because taking a book into a stranger’s toilet was how I rolled.
I tilted a couple of the books toward me, choosing titles at random. They were leather-bound classics for the most part, with gilt edges and uniform heights. The gray leather bindings marched along the shelves in alphabetical order like Virginia Military Institute schoolboys with their brass buttons and gold trim, and names like Scott, Shakespeare, and Shaw called out with a sharp “here!” with each tug of my hand. If the latch was book-operated, a wire would be strung up through the shelf and attached to a plate inside the book, but the spines gave no indication of any differences in construction from one book to the next.
The uniformity was like an itch I couldn’t reach to scratch, and I had the sudden urge to rearrange the perfectly ordered books. First, I switched Orwell and Huxley next to each other, because a dystopian debate among the books might liven things up. Then I put Mary Shelley next to Octavia Butler so they could discuss all the things. And finally, humming I like big books and I cannot lie under my breath, I decided to group Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, and Herman Melville together. It was when I tugged on Moby Dick that the latch finally clicked open.
“No!” I whispered gleefully as the heavy bookcase slid open on soundless rails. Either Sterling Gray was the most insecure pinkie-dinkie on the planet, or his security guy was laughing his butt off at him. I knew the camera had already caught my literary mischief, so I donned a look of stunned surprise worth the year of acting lessons Colette had demanded we take when we were kids, and leaned forward to peek inside.
The room was longer than it was wide – sort of like a double-sized walk-in closet – and it was empty of anything with a heartbeat. A dim light glowed from one long wall where a large screen television displayed the various security camera views. Below the TV was a long cabinet that included an under-counter refrigerator, an espresso maker, a stocked bar, and several computer hard drives. A low sofa that probably converted to a bed was pushed up against the opposite long wall, and a plush carpet and a coffee table filled the middle of the floor. I had the impression of luxury and comfort, but my eyes lost all focus on anything other than the gilt-framed painting on the wall behind the sofa.
It was a portrait of two sisters in the style of the Chasseriau painting that hung in the Louvre Museum. The women were dark-haired and breathtakingly beautiful. They were my mother, Sophia, and her older sister, Alexandra.
Movement on the monitor caught my eye as a lone male figure climbed the back staircase. I stepped back into the hall and pulled the bookcase door closed with a quiet click, then tugged a book off the upper shelves and opened it to read.
The words on the expensive paper swam out of focus as I turned all my senses toward the sound of the man reaching the top steps. I heard his hesitation when he saw me, but I pretended to be completely engrossed in the book I’d found. Which I might have been, if the book had been intelligible.
Black dress shoes with extra-long pointy toes that looked like wardrobe for a Goth vampire stopped in front of me, and I looked up with a gasp. The fake gasp turned real at the sight of Sterling Gray’s narrowed eyes.
“Colette,” he said, as though my sister’s name were a full sentence.
“Sterling,” I replied in the same tone.
“What are you doing up here?”
“Reading…” I turned the book over, ostensibly to show him the title, and then had to bite the surprise out of my own voice, “…Beowulf.”
“In old English?” His tone sounded more stunned than suspicious.
“English major,” I shrugged. Aaaaand, my boob popped out. “Damn it!” I clutched the shawl around myself furiously and managed to smack myself in the chest with Beowulf. “Oww!”
“Is everything okay here?” an elegant voice asked from the end of the hall. Heat flushed through my body, and I turned away from both men to shove the offending nipple back inside my shockingly inadequate dress.
“It’s fine. I’m fine,” I said to the bookshelf. I took a moment to replace Beowulf on the high shelf, and then had to grab at my shawl to keep it from slipping off my shoulder. “Damn it!” I whispered fiercely. So much for avoiding anyone’s notice.
I heard a chuckle behind me, and I scowled. I had to play this cool for Colette to get her invitation back here, but I was almost certain Sterling Gray was laughing at me … her. I pasted a charming smile on my face, relaxed my death grip on the shawl, and turned to face Gray. My gaze flicked to the Disney Prince who was standing behind him, and his look of concern made some damn butterfly take flight from its perch on one of my ribs. I forced my gaze back to Sterling, and the butterfly froze in place and then dropped like a drunken frat boy.
“It’s so odd how nervous I get around you, Sterling,” I breathed. Those acting lessons were really paying off. Either that, or I’d suddenly become asthmatic. “It’s like I’m sixteen again.” I was laying it on with a trowel, and he was either an idiot or … yeah, no, he was an idiot.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Gray said with a slow smile that told me volumes about his feelings about nervous sixteen-year-old girls.
Over his shoulder I could see Darius’s eyes narrow, and for one brief moment I had the impression he might actually dislike Sterling Gray too. But then he inclined his head very slightly and took a step back. “I’ll just return downstairs.”
He turned to go, and I had to tear my eyes away from broad shoulders that filled out his tuxedo jacket as though it had been sewn directly onto him.
Gray traced a line down my bare arm with his finger. It raised goosebumps on my skin that resembled the approximate texture of a recently plucked chicken. “What were you really doing up here, Colette?”
Breaking into your panic room. I almost said it out loud, and the part of my brain that reveled in verbal diarrhea really didn’t like the metaphorical muzzle I clamped over it. I appeased it with a slightly less damning version of the truth. “I wanted to see your house, so I took myself on a tour. But books are my squirrels, so I stopped to look through yours, and here I am.”
“Books are your … squirrels?”
“You know, like I’m just going along, minding my own business, when … ‘SQUIRREL!’ and bam! My attention is all about the books.”
He was starting to get that look for the exits look so I changed tactics and kissed him.
Hi, my
name is Anna Collins, and I make good choices.
Sometimes. Just not today.
It surprised him, so that was good. After a startled half-second, he slipped his tongue into my mouth and licked my teeth, and that was just gross. Who licks teeth? Granted, I wasn’t a kissing expert, or really, even kissing proficient. Actually, despite a fairly decent list of one-night stands, I hadn’t had all that much experience in really good kissing because I didn’t usually kiss the same guy twice.
I pulled back, ostensibly to breathe, but really because I needed his tongue out of my mouth. A smile curved his lips, and in that moment I realized that Sterling Gray was actually pretty handsome. He was six-foot-something, gym-fit, with green eyes, well-styled brown hair, and a chiseled jaw. I had a thing for chiseled jaws, probably because a person couldn’t have a weak chin with a chiseled jaw – it’s structurally impossible. And nature abhors a structural impossibility, so, there you go.
“You’re unbelievably sexy.” His voice was low and growly. I didn’t get called sexy. I might get ‘pretty’ on a good-hair day, or ‘cool’ when I stepped off a motorcycle in my leathers, and once I even got ‘hot’ from a guy standing below me as I scaled a rock wall. That one baffled me because those climbing harnesses did nothing for a person’s rear view. But ‘sexy’ just wasn’t in my repertoire, and if I was totally honest with myself, it kind of made his tongue a little less gross. Until he opened his mouth again.
“I wanted you the first time I saw you, Colette. I couldn’t take my eyes off you.”
Oh right. Colette was the sexy one. How could I forget?
“I have to put in an appearance at another event tonight,” I said, trying to sound like I hadn’t practiced the words, “and you’re busy being the host here. But maybe, if you don’t have other plans, I could come back for a nightcap?”
Code of Honor Page 2
