Elizabeth Bevarly - Undercover with the Mob

“Jack,” he automatically corrected, his voice softer now, more solicitous. “Call me Jack. Everybody does.” He sounded as if he were vaguely distracted when he said it, yet at the same time, he looked as if he were surprised to have heard himself respond.

For one long moment, still gripping her wrists—though with an infinitely gentler grasp now, Natalie couldn’t help noticing—he fixed his gaze on her face, studying her with much interest. She couldn’t imagine why he’d bother. Even at her best, she was an average-looking woman. Dressed in her pajamas, with her hair pulled back and her glasses on, she must look…Well, she must look silly, she couldn’t help thinking. After all, the moons and stars on her pajamas were belting out the chorus of “Moon River,” even if it was only on flannel.

But Mr. Miller didn’t even seem to notice her pajamas, because he kept his gaze trained unflinchingly on her face. For what felt like a full minute, he only studied her in silence, his dark eyes unreadable, his handsome face inscrutable. And then, as quickly and completely as his watchfulness had begun, it suddenly ended, and he released her wrists and dropped his attention to his shirt, brushing halfheartedly at what Natalie could tell now were nonexistent stains of tea.

“’Yo,” he finally said by way of a greeting, still not looking at her. But then he did glance over at Mrs. Klosterman, seeming as if he just now remembered she was present, too. “How youse doin’?” he further inquired, looking up briefly to include them both in the question before glancing nervously back down at his shirt again.

Okay, so he wasn’t a native Southerner, Natalie deduced keenly. Even though she had grown up in Louisville, she’d traveled extensively around the country, and she had picked up bits and pieces of dialects in her travels. Therefore, she had little difficulty translating what he had said in what she was pretty sure was a Brooklyn accent into its Southern version, which would have been “Hey, how y’all doin’?”

“Hi,” she replied lamely. But for the life of her, she couldn’t think of a single other thing to say. Except maybe “You have the dreamiest eyes I’ve ever seen in my life, even if they are what I would expect a Mob informant in the Witness Protection Program to have,” and she didn’t think it would be a good idea to say that, even if she could punctuate it with a period instead of a question mark. After all, the two of them had just met.

“‘Yo, Mrs. Klosterman,” Jack Miller said, turning his body physically toward the landlady now, thereby indicating quite clearly that he was through with Natalie, but thanks so much for playing. “I couldn’t find a key to the back door up in my apartment, and I think it would probably be a good idea for me to have one, you know?”

Mrs. Klosterman exchanged a meaningful look with Natalie, and she knew her landlady was thinking the same thing she was—that Mr. Miller was already scoping out potential escape routes, should the Mob, in fact, come busting through the door with tommy guns blazing.

No, no, no, no, no, she immediately told herself. She would not buy into Mrs. Klosterman’s ridiculous suspicions and play “What’s My Crime?” Mr. Miller wanted the key to his back door for the simple reason that his back door, as Natalie’s did, opened onto the fire escape, and—let’s face it—old buildings were known to go up in flames occasionally, so of course he’d want access to that door.

“I forgot,” Mrs. Klosterman told him now. “I had a new lock put on that door after the last tenant moved out because the other one was getting so old. I have the new key in my office. I’ll get it for you.”

And without so much as a by-your-leave—whatever the hell that meant—her landlady left the kitchen, thereby leaving Natalie alone with her new mobster. Neighbor, she quickly corrected herself. Her new neighbor. Boy, could that have been embarrassing, if she got those two confused.

The silence that descended on the room after Mrs. Klosterman’s departure was thick enough to hack with a meat cleaver. Although, all things considered, maybe that wasn’t the best analogy to use. In an effort to alleviate some of the tension, Natalie braved a slight smile and asked, “You’re not from around here originally, are you?”

He, too, braved a slight smile—really slight, much slighter than her slight smile had been—in return. “You figured that out all by yourself, huh?”

“It’s the accent,” she confessed.

“Yeah, it always gives me away,” he told her. “The minute I open my mouth, everybody knows I’m French.”

She smiled again, the gesture feeling more genuine now. “So what part of France do you hail from?”

His smile seemed more genuine now, too. “The northern part.”

Of course.

She was about to ask if it was Nouvelle York or Nouveau Jersey when he deftly turned the tables on her. “You from around here?”

She nodded, telling herself he was not making a conscious effort to divert attention from himself, but was just being polite. Somehow, though, she didn’t quite believe herself. “Born and bred,” she told him.

“Yeah, you have that look about you,” he said.

“What look?” she asked.

He grinned again, this time seeming honestly delighted by something, and the change that came over him when he did that nearly took her breath away. Before, he had been broodingly handsome. But when he smiled like that he was…She bit back an involuntary sigh as, somewhere in the dark recesses of her brain, an accordion kicked up the opening bars from La Vie en Rose.

“Wholesome,” he told her then. “You look wholesome.”

Oh, and wasn’t that the word every woman wanted to have a handsome man applying to her? Natalie thought. The accordion in her brain suddenly went crashingly silent. “Wholesome,” she repeated blandly.

His smile grew broader. “Yeah. Wholesome.”

Swell.

Oh, well, she thought. It wasn’t like she should be consorting with her new mobster—ah, neighbor—anyway. He really wasn’t her type at all. She preferred men who didn’t use the word “whacked,” even in relation to cockroaches. Men who didn’t dress in black from head to toe. Men who weren’t likely to be packing heat.

Oh, stop it, she commanded herself. You’re being silly.

“Sorry about the tea,” she said for a third time.

He shrugged off her concern. “No problem. I like tea.”

Really.

“And don’t worry about your cat,” he added. “I like cats, too.”

Imagine.

Mrs. Klosterman returned then, jingling a set of keys merrily in her fingers. “Here’s the new key to your back door,” she said as she handed one key to him. “And here’s an extra set of both keys, because you might want to give a set to someone in case of an emergency.”

Natalie narrowed her eyes at her landlady, who seemed to be sending a not-so-subtle signal to her new tenant, because when she mentioned the part about giving the extra set of keys to someone in case of an emergency, she tilted her head directly toward Natalie.

Jack Miller, thankfully, didn’t seem to notice. Or, if he did, he wrote it off as just another one of his landlady’s little quirks. He better sharpen his mental pencil, Natalie thought. Because he was going to have a long list of those by the end of his first month of residence.

“Thanks, Mrs. K,” he said.

Mrs. K?

Mrs. Klosterman tittered prettily at the nickname, and Natalie gaped at her. Not just because she had never in her life, until that moment, actually heard someone titter, but barely five minutes ago, the woman tittering had been worrying about waking up in the morning with her throat slit, and now she was batting her eyelashes at the very man who she’d been sure would be wielding the knife. Honestly, Natalie thought. Sometimes she was embarrassed by members of her own gender. Women could be so easily influenced by a handsome face and a tantalizingly expansive chest, and temptingly solid biceps, and deliciously hard forearms, and a delectably flat torso, and a very savory—