Elizabeth Bevarly - Undercover with the Mob

“Connected,” her landlady finished for her, her mind clearly pondering things that Natalie’s mind was trying to avoid. “That’s the word I’ve been looking for. He’s connected. And now he’s singing like a canary. And all his wiseguy friends are looking to have him capped.”

Natalie stared at her landlady through narrowed eyes. Forget about the tea smoking. What on earth had Mrs. Klosterman been reading?

“You just wait,” the other woman said. “You’ll see. He’s in the Witness Protection Program. I just have a gut feeling.”

Natalie was about to ask her landlady another question—one that would totally change the subject, like “Hey, how ’bout them Cardinals?”—when, without warning, the very subject she had been hoping to change came striding into the kitchen in the form of Mr. Miller himself. And when he did, Natalie was so startled, both by his arrival and his appearance—holy moly, he really did look like a Vinnie “The Eraser” Mancuso—that she nearly dropped her still-full cup of tea into her lap. Fortunately, she recovered it when it had done little more than splash a meager wave of—very hot—tea onto her hand. Unfortunately, that made her drop it for good. But she scarcely noticed the crash as the cup shattered and splattered its contents across the black-and-white checked tile floor. Because she was too busy gaping at her new neighbor.

He was just so…Wow. That was the only word she could think of to describe him. Where she and her landlady were still relaxing in their nightclothes—hey, it was Saturday, after all—John “The Jack” Miller looked as if he were ready to take on the world. Most likely with a submachine gun.

Even sitting down as she was, Natalie could tell he topped six feet, and he probably weighed close to two hundred pounds, all of it solid muscle. He was dressed completely in black, from the long-sleeved black T-shirt that stretched taut across his broad chest and shoulders and was pushed to the elbows over extremely attractive and very saliently muscled forearms, to the black trousers hugging trim hips and long legs, to the eel-skin belt holding up those trousers, to the pointy-toed shoes of obviously Italian design. His hair was also black, longer than was fashionable, thick and silky and shoved straight back from his face.

And what a face. As Natalie vaguely registered the sensation of hot liquid seeping into her fuzzy yellow slippers, she gaped at the face gazing down at her, the face that seemed to have frozen in place, because Jack Miller appeared to be as transfixed by her as she was by him. His features looked as if they had been chiseled by the gods—Roman gods, at that. Because his face was all planes and angles, from the slashes of sharp cheekbones to the full, sensual mouth to the blunt, sturdy line of his jaw. And his eyes…

Oh, my.

His eyes were as black as his clothing and hair, fringed by dark lashes almost as long as Mrs. Klosterman’s were in their daddy-longlegs phase. But it wasn’t the lashes that were scary on him, Natalie thought as her heart kicked up a robust, irregular rhythm. It was the eyes. As inky as the witching hour and as turbulent as a tempest, Mr. Miller—yeah, right—had the kind of eyes she figured a hit man would probably have: imperturbable, unflappable. Having taught high school in the inner city for five years, she liked to think she could read people pretty well. And usually, she could. But with Mr. Miller—yeah, right—she could tell absolutely nothing about what he might be feeling or thinking.

Until he cried, “Jeez, lady, you tryin’ to burn me alive here or what?”

And then she realized that it wasn’t that Mr. Miller had been transfixed by her. What he’d been transfixed by was the fact that hot tea had splashed on him. Which was pretty much in keeping with Natalie’s impact on the opposite sex. Long story short, she always seemed to have the same effect on men. Eventually, they always started looking at her as if she’d just spilled something on them. With Mr. Miller she was just speeding things up a bit, that was all. Not that she wanted any things to even happen with him, mind you, let alone speed them up. But it was good to know where she stood right off the bat.

And where she stood with Jack Miller, she could tell right away, was that she was stuck on him. In much the same way that melting slush stuck to the side of his car, or a glob of gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe. At least, she could see, that was the way he was feeling about her at the moment.

“I am so sorry,” she said by way of a greeting, lurching to her feet and grabbing for a dish towel to wipe him off. “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

Hastily, she began brushing at her new neighbor’s clothing, then realized, too late, that because of their dark color, she had no idea where her tea might have landed on him, or if it had even landed on him at all. So, deciding not to take any chances, she worked furiously to wipe off all of him, starting at his mouthwateringly broad shoulders and working gradually downward, over his tantalizingly expansive chest, and then his temptingly solid biceps, and then his deliciously hard forearms. And then, just to be on the safe side, she moved inward again, over his delectably flat torso and once more over his tantalizingly expansive chest—you never could be too careful when it came to spilling hot beverages, after all—back up over the mouth-wateringly broad shoulders, and then down over his delectably flat torso again, and lower still, toward his very savory—

“What the hell are you doing?”

The roughly—and loudly—uttered demand was punctuated by Jack Miller grabbing both of Natalie’s wrists with unerring fingers and jerking her arms away from his body. In doing so, he also jerked them away from her own body, spreading them wide, giving himself, however inadvertently, an eyeful of her…Well, of her oversized flannel jammies with the moons and stars on them that were in no way revealing or attractive.

Damn her luck anyway.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Miller,” she apologized again. “I hope I didn’t—”

“How did you know my name?” he demanded in a bristly voice.

She arched her eyebrows up in surprise at his vehemence. Paranoid much? she wanted to ask. Instead, she replied, “Um, Mrs. Klosterman told me your name?” But then she realized that in replying, she had indeed asked him something, because she had voiced her declaration not in the declarative tense, but in the inquisitive tense. In fact, so rattled was she at this point by Mr. Miller that she found herself suddenly unable to speak in anything but the inquisitive tense. “Mrs. Klosterman was just telling me about you?” she said…asked…whatever. “She said you moved in this week? Downstairs from me? And I just wanted to introduce myself to you, too? I’m Natalie? Natalie Dorset? I live on the third floor? And I should warn you? I have a cat? Named Mojo? He likes to roll a golf ball around on the hardwood floors sometimes? So if it bothers you? Let me know? And I’ll make him stop?”

And speaking of stopping, Natalie wished she could stop herself before she began to sound as if she were becoming hysterical. And then she realized it was probably too late for that. Because now Mr. Miller was looking at her as if the overhead light in the kitchen had just sputtered and gone dim.

Although, on second thought, maybe it wasn’t the overhead light in the kitchen that had sputtered and gone dim, Natalie couldn’t help thinking further.

Oh, boy…

“Mr. Miller,” Mrs. Klosterman said politely amid all the hubbub, as if her kitchen hadn’t just been turned into a badly conceptualized sitcom where a newly relocated former mobster moves in with a befuddled schoolteacher and then zany antics ensue, “this is my other tenant, Ms. Natalie Dorset. As she told you, she lives on the third floor. But Mojo is perfectly well-mannered, I assure you, and would never bother anyone. Natalie,” she added in the same courteous voice, as if she were Emily Post herself, “this is Mr. John Miller, your new neighbor.”