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“Sorry,” he said shortly.
She turned her head to glare at him. “For behaving like an ignorant ass?”
“That, too.” He couldn’t resist. “And for turning you on.”
Her eyes went huge. “You did not—”
“Lady, you were as ‘on’ as a bug in a rug.”
“That’s ‘in’!”
“Well, actually, it was snug, but that brings us back to fit, and that takes us to—”
“Shut up!”
Yeah, he thought, he rattled her. He really rattled her and he didn’t understand why. All this mystery was going to make for one very long night.
The elevator finally came and Grace all but leaped inside. It was crowded but that offered her no hope. Everyone spilled out into the lobby and left her alone with McKenna. She pressed herself into a corner as the doors slid shut again.
If he got out of line now, she could kill him without risking witnesses. And she wouldn’t give a damn about her credit card bill, either, when she fled the scene.
He stood in the middle, his back to her, silent. The elevator was quiet as a breath and moved like an underwater dream, and still he said nothing. The car reached their floor with a delicate chiming sound. The doors parted again soundlessly. Grace waited for him to move first since he was closest to them. He didn’t.
After all that nonsense downstairs, now he was mute, she thought. Deaf and blind, too. She stepped around him. The doors began closing again. She shot a hand out to hold them open. “Can we just do this now? Please?”
One corner of his mouth crooked up. Now what had she said? Grace felt her skin heat and she was reasonably sure that she hadn’t blushed since the age of fifteen.
Let him stand here, then, she decided. He could ride the elevator up and down all night. She had a job to do. She left the car and was four strides down the hall before she remembered that she couldn’t do the job without him. By then he was behind her. She went to their room and shot the key card into the lock.
The room staggered her. Her first thought was that Lutz really liked whomever he had been planning to bring here. Her second thought was that maybe he just really liked to pamper himself. She had never set foot in a place such as this in her life.
There were no visible beds and she blessed fate for that. God only knows what McKenna might pull with a bed in evidence. But there were doors on either end of the room and she figured that there was a bedroom beyond one, if not both, of them. Separating them was a sea of rich cream-colored carpet. Grace stared down at it almost dumbly. In a hotel? Weren’t hotel rooms supposed to be serviceable, built to withstand the masses? Then again, how many people could afford a place like this? In the Hyatt’s defense, there wasn’t a stain or a smudge to be found, not that she could see. And the decorator had had the good sense to place a forest-green and gold Persian rug beneath the cherrywood dining table, a table that could quite possibly be the size of her bedroom.
The chairs bracketing the table were done in the same elegant deep green as the rug. So were both of the sofas that formed a wedge at the far wall. There was a bar sided in smoky bronzed reflecting glass. Grace figured that, given the tab for this place, they’d probably already charged her for every bottle of liquor there. Opposite that was an armoire so huge she had to wonder how much clothing people generally brought to a place like this.
McKenna went to it and grabbed one of the brass handles to open the center doors. Of course, the people who stayed here would not want to store their clothes in the center room, Grace thought. It held a television the size of the country she’d escaped from as a teenager.
“We’re not here to watch TV,” she said a little hoarsely when he found a remote and stepped back to turn it on and play with the channels.
Flick, flick, flick. Channels flashed and vanished again as Grace watched.
“Of course not,” he said. “We’re here to—how did you put it?—just do this.”
She’d known that comment would come back to haunt her. Grace took her laptop to the table. “I’m not paying for premium channels.”
“No need. They’re free up here in heaven.”
“Are you serious?” She turned back to him, surprised.
McKenna switched to a skin flick and stepped back so she could see it. “That’s premium,” he observed.
“That’s—oh, my God!” Grace jerked around again fast and put her back to the television.
“Ah, come on. A savvy attorney like you, caught short on cab fare, must have more than enough aplomb to deal with a little skin-to-skin action like this.”
“That’s not skin-to-skin. It’s liver to pancreas.”
His laugh was rich, rumbling, genuinely amused. It made something kick inside her and Grace almost turned around again in surprise. She wondered if a man could manufacture a laugh like that just to make a woman move when she really didn’t want to.
She focused on plugging in her computer. “If the…ah, action on the television gets to be too much for you, you can simply grunt in response to my questions.”
“Will do.”
She would not look around at him. Her laptop purred to life and Grace seated herself at the table. “Let’s start at the beginning. You mentioned earlier that this is payback. I need to know exactly what you did to warrant payback of any sort.”
“I—whoa.”
“Whoa what?”
“Can women actually move like that?”
She would not look. “Stop it!”
“Well, you know, it’s bound to make a guy curious.”
“You’re paying four hundred dollars an hour to be curious?”
“Good point.”
Blessedly, there was another click and then the television went silent. Grace let out a careful breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. He wouldn’t back off that easily. She knew the whole business with the skin flick had only been to get a rise out of her.
“Want a drink?” he asked. “It says here that the booze is complimentary.”
“The hell it is. I already paid for it. This room would have been three hundred dollars without it.”
“Well, we’re going highbrow tonight. So what do you think?”
“I think I just want to get your statement.”
“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll help myself to a little of this Jameson’s. The better to dredge up nasty memories with.”
“By all means,” she said shortly. “As I said, it’s paid for.”
“That credit card receipt really knocked your socks off, didn’t it?”
“I’m wearing hose.”
“Oh, I noticed.”
Grace bit down hard on her tongue. “Exactly what did you do to warrant payback?” she tried again.
“I told you that already. At the restaurant.”
“Tell me again and give me the details.”
She heard ice tinkle into a glass. Something splashed delicately, then there was the suction-hissing sound of a bottle of cola opening. Grace couldn’t help it. She twisted around in her seat then she stared at him where he stood at the bar. “You’re mixing Jameson’s with cola?”
He cut a glance at her. “It’s Jameson’s, not vintage Bushmills.”
She didn’t know the difference. All she knew was that this room had cost her—until she put the chit in to the firm—seven hundred dollars plus change, so the liquor ought to be distilled from gold.
But she didn’t plan on admitting that she didn’t know the difference between Jameson’s and Bushmills until her next life. Grace lofted her brows. “I am impressed with a worldly man.”
“He would be your next case, honey. This man likes his Irish watered down. It lasts longer that way.”
He brought his glass back to the table and sat. He finally sat. Grace told herself that she should be grateful for that—now maybe they could get some work done. She watched him take a long swig of the whiskey and cola. He closed his eyes when he did it and he seemed to appreciate it deep in his bones.
“With the money they’re saying you took, you shouldn’t have to stretch out your whiskey,” she observed.
“The operative words there are…they’re saying.”
“Talk to me.”
“Sure. I grew up in a household where Jameson’s was considered manna from heaven. I still can’t take it for granted.”
Grace had to shake her head a little to clear her mind. She thought she’d finally gotten him on track. “Does that have anything to do with who’s…ah, framing you?”
He put the glass down on the table. “You were doing fine up until that ah.”
“What ah?” She pressed her spine to the back of the very well upholstered chair.
“As in…ah, framing you.”
“You said someone was framing you.”
“And—” He broke off to swig more whiskey. “You said ah.”
“What’s your point?”
“You don’t believe me. That ah was a classic measure of salt.”
That was an expression she knew. Grace clenched her jaw until it hurt. “My belief or lack thereof is not the issue here.”
“Of course it is. It’s the crux of the whole thing. It’s what stands between me keeping you or firing you.”
“We’ve been through all that.”
He grinned again. This time, she thought, it was the look of a wolf scenting prey. “No, honey, we haven’t.”
The tension in her jaw was giving her a headache. A worse headache, she amended. “Stop calling me that.”
“What you need to relax you is some Jameson’s,” he decided.
Arguing with him would get her nowhere. She already knew that. Grace told herself that that was why she clamped her jaw shut again and let him get up from the table to make her a drink. His voice came back to her from the bar, warm as smoke now.
“If you don’t know the difference between Jameson’s and Bushmills, the cola probably won’t throw you off too much,” he commented.
“I never said I didn’t know the difference between Jameson’s and Bushmills.”
“This may come as a shock to you—lady—but you’re as transparent as a hooker’s negligee.”
It was her curse, Grace thought. She’d escaped Maruja to come to America and her cross to bear for that was going to be a lifetime of weird analogies—first Jenny’s and now this man’s. The difference was that Jenny’s made a kind of sweet, warped sense, and McKenna’s were…heated.
She wasn’t sure what bothered her most—that heated reference or the fact that he thought she was transparent. Grace went for the latter and set about contradicting it.
“You see what I want you to see,” she told him.
He brought her the drink. Grace took the glass and sipped, choking as the fire went down.
“Whoa,” McKenna said.
Grace bore down hard on her breath. “I like Jameson’s.”
He gave that laugh again.
She couldn’t do this, Grace thought desperately. She could handle the crime he was accused of. She could handle his total disrespect for the situation he was in, and she could even handle his innuendos if she had to. But she could not handle that whiskey-rich laugh.
“You’re going to say ‘stop it’ again, aren’t you?” He sat and watched her. He was amused. “Or ‘shut up.’”
“It never occurred to me.” Grace took more whiskey.
“What is it about me that bothers you so much?”
“Wait. Hold on. Let me find my list.” She bit her tongue as soon as she said it, because it made him laugh again. “Please, I just want to do my job here and go home.”
He relaxed in his chair. “Let’s get back to the discussion of whether or not you even have a job—with me, that is.”
Every time he said that, it made her blood chill. Yes, Grace thought, yes, she had to fix that little issue right off the bat. “Are you telling me the truth?” she asked. “About being framed?”
“My ma would kick my butt for lying.”
“I’ve never met your mother, so I’ll settle for a simple yes or no here.”
“Then yes. I am telling the truth.” This time, when he got up, he brought the whole pint of Jameson’s back to the table, along with another bottle of cola. He topped his glass off with both of them. “But that isn’t the issue. The issue is that you don’t believe me.”
Grace sat back in her chair and gave him a level look. “Do you believe it?”
He frowned. “What kind of question is that?”
