Carla Neggers - Cut and Run

She drank down half the glass and wiped her mouth with a cocktail napkin, her eyes glittering. “It’s good to be back.”

“No Club Aquarian in New Zealand, huh?”

She was beaming. “Nope.”

Len slid the postcards across the bar to her. “No slides of you up on a mountain?”

“It’s hard to take pictures of yourself.”

She turned her back to the bar and looked around, checking out what there was of an early crowd. When her eyes fell on the guy sitting alone, her smile vanished and her cheeks went white, the too-red blush she used suddenly looking false and garish, not so fun anymore.

“Something wrong, babe?” Len asked, cool.

She shook her head and put her cold glass to each of her cheeks, the condensation on the glass running the pancake makeup. But some of her natural color returned. Her lavender-tinted hair looked as stiff as she did. She said tightly, “It’s nothing I can’t handle myself.”

Still in her silk-stockinged feet, she took her mineral water down to the end of the bar and jumped onto the stool next to the dude in the black leather jacket. He was a tough-looking bastard, and Len didn’t especially want to mess with him, but he would if he had to. At night he had a bouncer, but during the day he was his own bouncer. He was damn good at it.

All he needed was a reason.

Matthew held back a grin as Juliana turned to him and blinked her sparkling gold eyelids at him, pursed her very red, very kissable lips, and said, her liquid voice frozen into pointy icicles, “You followed me.”

“That’s right, I did.” He motioned for another beer. She was still breathing hard from having pelted out those high notes with her feet. She had her toes curled around the bottom rung of the stool; they were the kind of toes he could too easily imagine trailing up his calves in the middle of the night. He wasn’t sure he liked the effect that Juliana Fall-or whoever she was-was having on him. “Hard to lose that purple hair in a crowd.”

“How dare you,” she said, so pissed off she was gritting her teeth.

“‘How dare you’ is what cool, sophisticated, world-famous concert pianists say. Hot little jazz pianists who play with their feet say, ‘fuck you.’”

“Of all the sneaky, arrogant- ” She sucked in a breath and let it out. “Damn you.”

Matthew grinned. “That’s better. I like the gold eyelids, by the way. They set off the purple hair. Very regal looking.”

He sipped his fresh beer, watching her breathe in through her nose. He’d have been embarrassed as hell getting caught with purple hair, but she seemed more furious than anything else, which was okay with him. He liked it that she was willing to take him on. He scared the shit out of most people. He’d spotted her strutting out of the Beresford with that crazy hair and had recognized her immediately-he’d been paying more attention to that cute little shape of hers than he’d realized. At first he thought she’d seen him from her living room window and had donned her silly disguise to get past him, but her arrival at the Club Aquarian squelched that theory. The purple hair and old clothes and raccoon coat, and, Jesus, the red vinyl boots were for real.

He gave her a long look, trying not to appear too entertained. If he pissed her off too much, he might not get anything out of her at all. Her blouse was low-cut for Juliana Fall, but on J.J. Pepper it looked just right-crooked, a peek of one pale breast and white, lace-trimmed bra showing. Very sexy and very disconcerting.

“I take it I’ve stumbled on a little secret of yours,” he said.

She didn’t say a word. Ahh, what a clever bastard you are, Stark thought sarcastically. Won’t Feldie be impressed with this major discovery. And, shit, he couldn’t wait to tell Weasel. Wouldn’t he be proud of what his buddy Matt had turned up?

“From what I gather,” he went on, “Len Wetherall doesn’t know about Juliana Fall. He assumes you’re really J.J. Pepper.”

“I am really J.J. Pepper.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t know about Juliana Fall. Right?”

“Shhh!”

“My, my, Shuji?”

Her eyes shut, then opened, and she shook her head. “He doesn’t know.”

“Aha.”

This time the eyes narrowed, deep and vivid and fierce. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“This is a hell of a story, you know. ‘Internationally acclaimed concert pianist dyes hair purple and bangs out jazz in SoHo nightclub with silk-stockinged toes.’ Wow.”

“It’s not dye, it’s mousse.”

“Mousse, then.”

“And the feet-I’ve never done that before.”

“All the better. Feldie’d love it.”

Feldie would bounce his ass off the paper if he turned in a story like that.

Juliana gripped her glass, and for a second he thought she was going to throw her water at him. Instead she set the glass down hard. He could see her fighting to maintain her composure. He admired the struggle, admired her control. He knew he was giving her a hard time. But, he thought, remembering her fight with Shuji, her ego was strong enough to handle anything he dished out. And if she slipped, even just a little, she might tell him something he could use. Not about J.J. Pepper. If dressing up weird and playing jazz alleviated her boredom, gave her something to worry about besides the morning reviews, that was fine with him. Maybe it was her version of living life on the edge. He wanted to know her connection, however tenuous, to Sam Ryder, to the tiny, tragically dead Rachel Stein, to the Dutchman Hendrik de Geer, to the diamond one or all or none were after.

“Are you going to do the story?” she asked tightly, but the fierceness was still there.

Hell, yes, he thought, that would drive in the last nail on the coffin lid of my reputation. “Maybe.”

“You’re lying. You’re just trying to make me talk about something I’ve already told you I know nothing about. You’re trying to blackmail me, aren’t you?”

“I think of it as a deal.”

“Bullshit,” she said.

Down the bar, Len Wetherall slid to his feet, as graceful and big as Stark remembered him from when he was with the Knicks. Getting slam-dunked by a six-foot-nine, two-hundred-forty-pound ex-basketball superstar not known for his even temper was not Matthew’s idea of a graceful exit. He tried to look a bit less menacing to Juliana, not that his menacing looks were having any discernible effect.

“Look,” he said, “I’m not interested in hurting you. A buddy of mine is in some trouble. To help him, I need your cooperation.”

“Or you’ll do the story-or just give it to someone else on the Gazette who’d do it?”

She gave him an I-dare-you-fucker look, but this time she was the one bluffing. He had her scared. She didn’t want her secret to get out.

He sighed. “No, I won’t do the story, and I won’t give it to anyone who would. I’ve never been one for blackmail. And I frankly don’t care if you can play piano with one hand and one foot tied behind your back. My editor doesn’t care, my readers don’t care, and probably ninety-nine percent of the people in the world don’t care. Ninety-nine percent of the people in your world may care, but they don’t read the Washington Gazette. ”

Her mouth drew in in a straight line, and she looked away. This time he didn’t care if she felt bad. If she couldn’t stand the truth, then she’d better get the hell out while she was still young enough to do something else with her life.

“Talk to me, Juliana,” he said.

The softness of his voice surprised him, and her, he would have guessed, but before he could find out for certain, a giant hand clamped down on his shoulder and lifted him up off the stool. Matthew looked up into the deep brown eyes of Len Wetherall. It wasn’t only Wetherall’s size his colleagues had respected, but also his tenacity and his intelligence-not to mention his temper.