Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

“You look remarkably well this morning, Mr. Randolph,” she commented.

“And you.”

“I haven’t fallen off a mountain, merely come up one to stay a while.”

“You’re living at the facility now?”

“I could hardly meet with you daily if I wasn’t.”

“Daily. Somebody with deep pockets likes me.”

“Deep pockets?”

He rubbed his fingers together. They ached, but were more flexible than yesterday. “Gelt.”

She nodded. “Mr. Randolph . . . senior . . . spares no expense on your account.”

He eyed her mouth. “He’s a discerning old gentleman.”

“You Americans! You’re such serious flirters.”

“Flirts,” he corrected. Her response to colloquialisms was totally European.

“Flirts. You have a seriously bruised spine; two pins in your fractured legs underneath those casts; a concussion at the back of your skull; a skinned cheek. And a memory as solid as a, a . . .”

“Sieve,” he suggested.

“A seine, I was about to say. A fishing net.”

“A sieve is for flour. It’s finer.”

“You can be quite the pessimist.”

“Realist.”

“Really, Mr. Randolph. You need to get serious and help me to help you. Has anything about the accident come to mind?”

He checked the internal data bank. “Nothing. Except—”

“Except.”

“I hit a cliff. A high, solid cliff.”

It was true. He’d just had a flash of that dark looming wall. Yet a mountain cliff ought to be white. And the object of his mental impact was black. And reflective. Black ice.

“That’s good.” She was leaning forward, watching him intently. “Something has come back.”

The tremor of excitement in her voice echoed in his chest. If only he could trust her. He needed a coach, a passionate partner in his recovery. No. Not trustworthy. No one here was, except for Garry. Garry. Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana . . . it was some silly song. Garry. The name was all right, but he remembered the man by something else. A nickname? Ga . . . Gan . . . Ga! The memory search was painful.

She was removing his hand from his forehead, her face very close. European women wore perfume like mink wore pheromones, as an alluring personal miasma, touched at all the pulse points. His senses were spinning between pain and pleasure.

“Don’t think too hard. Your brain can’t take it yet. Let the memories flow. Don’t even say them aloud yet.”

Not self-serving advice for an undercover interrogator, if she indeed was one.

But a ring of pressure around his brow was pounding. Thinking had become a painful process. Jerky. Unreliable. He sensed that he had once moved like coiled steel, had thought as hot and fast as sheet lightning. Not now. Not . . . yet.

She’d put his suddenly trembling hand on her knee, covered in silky, opaque hose, her other hand atop it.

Was she seducing him, or saving him? And did he care which?

He loved the game of wondering, he understood almost at once. A worthy opponent. He loved the edge of fighting his own mind and body for supremacy. Or dueling a sexy, dangerous woman.

Maybe he was inventing a sinister history for her. Or himself. She was too obviously attractive to trust. Apparently, he distrusted fair surfaces most of all. Why?

“You can’t expect to climb the wall of your mind in one day,” she was saying.

It was an apt metaphor. He had a long climb back ahead of him.

His fingers flexed in the sandwiched warmth of her knee and hand.

“You hurt,” she said. “All over. Everything. It’s to be expected from an accident so severe. Better?’

He flexed his fingers again. He could feel her thigh muscles tense under them. Smooth, strong. As he would be again.

Ministering angel, detached professional, enemy in his weakest moments?

“Not . . . yet.”

Her lips made a small moue, that subtly French expression. A French twist of the lips.

He felt a sudden pang. Mental not physical. He knew it was a warning from deep in his unremembered past.

Was it . . . worry? Danger? Or . . . guilt?

Slippery Slope

If Temple’s fingernails were bitable, she would have nibbled them off on the long, bouncing drive into the dark of desert. But they were disgustingly strong and her current coat of nail polish always wore out before they did.

Trying to read the map screen on Van’s dashboard, while jolting over obscure roads was like translating Sanskrit when you didn’t even know Latin.

“I’m really not sure why we’re all rushing to a murder scene at a bordello,” Temple said.

“It could be fun?” Electra suggested. “I kinda got into crime-solving at that Red Hat Sisterhood convention. We really should have called my Red-Hatted League chapter members in on this. We were a great team.”

“No.” Van wrestled the wheel around a tight curve and slowed down. “The fewer people who know about this the better. There it is.”

Kit and Electra craned their necks over the front seat backs to stare through the middle of the windshield.

A cluster of gleaming yellow and blue lights glittered like an electric oasis in the dark.

“They must have their own generator and well out here,” Van murmured. “They’d have to be totally independent operationally. And the cell phone limitations wouldn’t bother them.”

“Why not?” asked Kit, the New Yorker who was always plugged into something. “Oh! Right. They wouldn’t want customers getting rung during interesting moments.”

“They must have some reliable way of communicating,” Electra said. “They have to make appointments and such.”

“Awesome,” Kit said. “Imagine men driving all the way out to this wilderness to get a little nookie. This is the real West!”

“It’s an adventure,” Van said. “Some customers don’t feel satisfied with entertainment that’s too easy to come by. The Strip has everything at hand. Coming out here feels special. It’s a marketing ploy. What’s hard to get is better.”

“How can sex for sale in Las Vegas be hard to get?” Electra wondered.

“Harder,” Van explained with a smile in her voice. “Selling sizzle is always a mystical process.”

“I suppose,” Kit said, “that what Minnesota-born and bred girls like Temple and me will have to keep in mind, when we see our intendeds in the ambiance of a brothel, is that such establishments are perfectly legal here.”

“What you and Temple have to keep in mind,” Van said grimly, “is that our nearest and dearest were kidnapped to this slightly seedy environment . . . and immediately phoned home to us for help.”

“Yeah,” Electra said, “but that was only after a dead body turned up.”

“So says the cynic,” Temple put in, “the five-times-married woman. I can promise you that Matt would have never gone willingly along with this prank.”

“Nor Nicky,” Van said.

There was a silence.

“I’m not sure about Aldo,” Kit said, “which is what makes him so interesting. I can hardly wait to confront the dirty dog and extract suitable promises of ‘making it up to me.’”

Temple sighed. They could joke about it, but this jaunt to a bachelor party had turned into a very sticky wicket. How was she going to clear everybody’s favorite guy in less than twenty-four hours when they were dealing with a totally unknown cast of possible victims and predators?

Van nudged her knee. “We are going in there like gang-busters. We control the vertical and horizontal. They will all do as we say while we sort things out. Girls who are bridesmaids or bedmates, boys who are the innocent ours. We either run the investigation or we call in the police, right?”

Temple winced at the idea of calling in the police, which to her always meant surrendering to Lieutenant Molina.