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For a moment he looked pensive, she thought. “There are a lot of maybes,” he said finally. “And I have a feeling that it’s going to take us all night to unravel even a portion of them.”
“I’m very good at unraveling.”
He grinned again as he joined her at the door. “I’m very good at prognosticating. And procrastinating.”
Was he using the convoluted words again on purpose? Was he still hung up on the intelligence issue? She had the feeling that he could be like a dog with a bone when it came to something that bugged him. He wouldn’t let it go.
Grace decided that the best she could do was step around the issue. “At four hundred an hour?” She yanked the door open and stepped out into the hall.
“Is that what you’re costing me?”
“I’m the new kid on the block. I come cheap.”
“Do you now?”
Her heart jerked. How many hours was it going to take her to learn that this man could twist anything she said? She headed for the stairs.
“You’re just hired?” He followed her. “I got the rookie?”
“Lutz wasn’t going to charge you at all until you acted like a five-million-a-year extortionist.”
“I acted like no such thing. So what would a veteran cost me?”
“Five hundred and up.”
“I don’t have that kind of money.”
Grace snorted, doubting that. “I guess you’re stuck with me then.”
“Not necessarily. There are other firms, lesser fees.”
She stopped cold in the building lobby to stare at him. “Are you trying to convince me you’re stupid?”
“Wouldn’t take much work, would it?”
His face had hardened. She didn’t like the fact that it unnerved her a little. “I never said that, never insinuated it.”
“We’ll get into what you’ve insinuated once I’ve got you locked in a hotel room.”
“I’m not going to be locked there. You are.”
“You’re very argumentative. Did anyone ever tell you that?”
How had she come to be nose to nose with him? Grace backed off. She jerked toward the lobby door and all but jogged out onto the street.
The cab was still waiting and it was probably going to cost her a hundred dollars by now. Lutz was going to have a stroke when she put this expense in to the firm. Then again, he had just given up a room at the Hyatt for this character.
By the time they landed at the hotel, the meter had steadfastly clicked its way up to $67.40. Grace didn’t have that much cash on her. She rooted through her briefcase twice and still came up short by almost ten dollars. She squeezed the bills that she did have in her fist and closed her eyes in a last-ditch effort at composure. When McKenna’s voice came from beside her, it sounded amused. “Problem?”
She opened her eyes carefully. “Yes. You’ve been one since you first walked into that interrogation room.”
“No way can you hang it on me if you don’t have enough money on you.”
“You don’t have money?” the cabbie demanded, alarmed.
“I have money, damn it!” Grace shouted. So much for composure. “I can get more.”
“Is that your way of saying you are short?” McKenna asked.
Grace pushed on her door to open it and slid out.
“You know, this wouldn’t be a problem if you had just let me take my billfold from the jail,” McKenna said from inside the car.
“It was either you or your wallet,” Grace leaned back into the car to remind him. “Fire me if you’d have preferred to stay there yourself tonight!”
“I was saving the subject of firing you until we got inside,” McKenna answered. “Assuming we ever get there.”
Grace slammed the cab door on him. She managed to take two steps before the cabbie grabbed her from behind, someone else touching her without permission. But this was someone she didn’t have to toe any lines with. She spun back to him, snarling. “Get your hands off me.”
He hesitated, but then he dropped his hands and stepped back. “Can’t let you go in there, lady, not without paying me. That’s a hell of a fare you ran up.”
“Tell me about it,” she grated. “Here.” She shoved the fifty-eight dollars at him that she’d managed to rummage from her briefcase. “It’s short,” she said before he could point that out.
“I’m going inside to get the rest. You can keep…keep…” Temporarily, words failed her. “Him.” She gestured at the car. “For collateral.”
“What am I supposed to do with him if you don’t come back?”
Grace wasn’t even sure what she was supposed to be doing with him. “I’ll be back.”
Getting cash wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be. She didn’t see an ATM anywhere in the lobby but she had the key, and the room was reserved in Lutz’s name. They had her boss’s credit card number on file. The desk clerk wanted to extend Lutz’s guest any courtesy, but how many women had the man brought here anyway? Grace wondered. Enough that forking over cash to be charged to his credit card alarmed the staff, she answered herself.
“I’m only asking for twenty dollars,” Grace hissed at the woman. Even as she spoke, she heard a horn bleating outside—again and again and again. She wondered if it was a traffic jam or the cabbie.
She hated McKenna.
“I’ll have to check with Mr. Lutz first,” the woman said. “I have his phone number on file—”
“No!” Grace raised her voice again, alarmed, as the woman started poking at the computer keyboard. She’d already been chastised once by Lutz for not keeping enough cash on her and she had only been with the firm for four weeks. She didn’t want him to know that she’d gotten caught short again.
There was an answer to this conundrum, but it made her skin itch a little. “Here,” she said, and dug her own credit card out of her briefcase. “Put it on this.”
“You want me to charge twenty dollars to your credit card and give you the cash?” The woman looked doubtful.
They could easily do it, Grace thought, but there’d be more fuss and she was in a hurry to pay the driver. “I want you to put the room on my credit card—and an extra twenty—and I want you to give the twenty dollars to me.” She’d put the whole damned expense into the firm and hope that Lutz didn’t ask her why she’d done it this way.
The clerk finally took her card and Grace felt a little out of breath again. She could have tried to tell herself that it was the stress of the past few hours but she didn’t bother. She felt a sudden, mini-panic-attack coming on at the idea that she was about to wham the hell out of her Visa with what would probably amount to a several-hundred-dollar charge. Not that the card wasn’t good—it was fine. She rarely used the thing and she paid off the balance monthly. But there was always that nagging question of what if?
What if something catastrophic happened to her and she needed to lay her hands on a few thousand dollars in a hurry before she paid the card off again? What if the firm didn’t reimburse her quickly enough and when an emergency came up, she was a few hundred dollars short because this expense was on there? What if there was no money left for groceries or for the electric bill or…
“You’re not looking too good there, lady.”
Grace turned sharply at the sound of McKenna’s voice. The abrupt movement, coupled with the fact that she hadn’t breathed right for probably thirty or forty seconds, almost had her passing out. Her vision got fuzzy around the edges.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“You brought me here.”
“The cabbie was supposed to be holding you for ransom.”
“I threatened him and he let me go.”
“You what?” She was appalled. He’d end up back in jail before the night was out on a totally unrelated charge and what would that do to her career?
“You need to calm down, honey,” McKenna said. “Seriously, you’re pale.”
Honey. He was calling her honey again. “I thought we agreed on ‘lady.’” Or had it been Ms.?
“By any name, you’re white as a sheet.”
“Has it occurred to you anywhere in that warped brain of yours that maybe you’re the cause?”
He seemed to honestly think about it. “I guess warped is a step up from stupid. Is it?”
“I never said you were stupid!” she screeched.
People around them took several quick, alarmed steps back. Grace caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and she was horrified at herself.
She wanted to cry, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried.
“Ms. Simkanian?” the desk clerk said tentatively.
Grace spun back to her. She was holding out her Visa, the receipt, and a twenty-dollar bill. Grace snatched all of it from her hand then somehow found the presence of mind to be polite.
“Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m fine now.”
“If you say so,” McKenna said.
She all but galloped out of the lobby. Part of it was the fact that she was afraid the cabbie would get tired of waiting for her to come back and call the cops. The other part was that she just wanted to get away from McKenna.
It was going to be a very long night.
Chapter 3
Aidan watched his attorney whip through the hotel door. What exactly did he have on his hands?
He wasn’t a man who gave undue thought to his problems. Life was full of them, after all, and he knew what mattered in life. Family mattered. Love mattered, not that he’d ever want any of his buddies to hear him say that. The love of a good woman, the love of a niece or nephew who thought he was one step short of God, yeah, those things mattered. He tried to shrug off everything else.
Big problems could trip him up for a few strides, sure. But he’d been blessed with very few big things going wrong in his life until lately.
Grace Simkanian was a small problem, but she was nagging at him anyway. For reasons that totally escaped him, he liked her. He liked the heat of her temper and her cool rigidity and her mind. But she didn’t like him and at the moment he had big problems that mandated that his attorney at least tolerate him.
He really ought to fire her, but he didn’t want to.
She came back into the lobby, then she cut through the air beside him, heading right past him.
“I guess this means we’re staying?” he asked, going after her.
She stabbed the elevator button. “For $762 plus tax, you damned well better believe I’m staying.”
Aidan whistled under his breath. The big guy with the firm liked good rooms.
He caught her hand to stop her assault on the defenseless button. She did the same thing she had done all night when he’d gotten too close. She stopped breathing before she bristled. That intrigued him.
If he was going to succeed in disliking her, he was going to have to strip her of all this mystery she had going on, he realized. There was nothing more deadly than a beautiful, mysterious woman.
He leaned closer to her anyway, stopping only when his face was inches from hers. He kept holding her hand. He needed another beautiful, mysterious woman in his life right now like he needed a firing squad, and the fact that this one obviously believed he was guilty made her all the more treacherous. But he whispered to her all the same.
“In…out,” he said.
“What?” She gasped the word and suddenly he could feel her trembling under his touch. Oh, man, he thought. Beautiful, mysterious and trembling.
“Inhale, exhale,” he explained. “That’s what I meant.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. You’re not breathing.”
“I’m breathing.”
“Not well. And your pulse is going off like a machine gun.”
“What kind of mind uses machine guns in an analogy?”
He tightened his grip on her wrist. She tugged at his hold but she wouldn’t embarrass herself by going into all-out war to dislodge his grip.
“Maybe a criminal mind,” he suggested. “Maybe dark characters excite you.”
“Excite—” She choked then broke off.
“You,” he finished for her.
“Go to hell.”
“I might, for what I’m thinking about doing to you right now. You know, there are only so many miles of legs, so much dark, tossed hair a man can stand.”
That did it to her. She panicked and wrenched away from him. When she was free, she attacked the elevator button again, slamming her palm against it. She looked close to tears.
Good show, Aidan thought. Beautiful, mysterious, trembling and tears. Oh, yeah, he was on a roll here. The thought doused him enough that he stepped back suddenly to give her room.
