An Offer He Can't Refuse (15 page)

Pop.

Pop. Pop.

Pop pop pop.

Johnny leaped up, flinging the 'phones away. As tires shrieked against the driveway outside, he tripped over the pair of Air Jordans he'd left out, then ran in his stocking feet along the cool floors through the dark house. After only a few hours in his father's new place, he made a wrong turn, jamming his toes against the leg of a sturdy side table.

"Dad?" he yelled, switching directions and limping as fast as he could toward the front door. "Dad?"

The silence turned his heart into a battering ram. It pounded against his chest as he flung himself through the entry and into the warm night, running down the path and past the newly completed lagoon to the circular parking area by the garage.

"
Dad
?" Even the insects had been silenced.

His father lay on the ground beside his Cadillac, the driver's door still open. Bullets had shot out the interior lights.

Bullets had left dark holes in Giovanni Martelli's body.

Johnny tried to keep those holes from leaking, pushing hard here, there, and there. Shoulder, chest, arm. But it kept bubbling out. Blood. Life.

He ran for the nearest phone, leaving scarlet prints on floors, doors, walls. The 911 operator told him to stay on the phone, but he threw it aside and went back to his father.

To his father's body.

The knees of his jeans soaked up blood as he begged his dad to open his eyes, to speak to him.

"Johnny? Johnny, are you there?"

The voice yanked him out of the nightmare. "Téa?" he croaked.

"Johnny? What's the matter?"

Like that afternoon at her house, Téa was able to pull him from the vacuum-suck of the past. He followed her voice, holding onto the sound of it, holding onto that feeling of her vital and alive and so damn sexy in his arms when he'd kissed her, letting that more recent memory lead him back to the present. Letting
Téa
bring him back to the present.

The shirt he was wearing was soaked with sweat. His hair was wet with more of it. He smelled fear. He smelled
of
fear.

He couldn't, wouldn't, live like this any longer.

"Johnny, speak to me."

"I'm here." He swallowed, struggling to bring his voice back to normal. "I'm right here."

"Did you hear what I said?"

He swallowed again, and lifted a trembling hand to comb back his hair. "What you said about what?"

"That I have a problem with the job… with your house."

Join the club. But he was going to do what he must to exorcise its demons and lay his own ghosts to rest.

"What kind of problem?" The question came out rougher than he liked.

"Maybe we should talk about this tomorrow," she said, her voice puzzled. "You sound as if you need some sleep."

He laughed, a harsh sound. "You've got that right."

'Tomorrow, then."

'Tomorrow." Yeah. He'd face whatever was inside that house tomorrow.

The increasing number and intensity of the flashbacks demanded it. Tomorrow, he'd move into the house. And closer to Téa. She was both a link to his past and a salvation from it. Until he had all the answers he needed, he'd use her for both.

He'd told her they needed to settle things. And tomorrow he would. No more doubts, no more Mr. Nice Guy. He was going to get the truth and he was going to get
her
.

"Oh! Lady Be Good"

Ella Fitzgerald

The First Lady of Song
(1949)

All good things ended. She already knew that. Téa
reminded herself, so there was no reason to feel such sharp disappointment as she arrived—early, of course—for her appointment with Johnny. Unlike her first visit to the compound on El Deseo Drive, this time hers was the sole car in the parking area by the large garage. Like her first visit, as she walked past the lagoon on her way to the front door, a chill crept down her spine.

But the little shiver was chased off as she pushed through the overgrowth beyond the murky body of water and reached the concrete steps leading up to the house itself. This part of the estate had been better cared for than the rest. On either side of the wide, shallow stairs were manicured bushes showing just the slightest shagginess. Beyond them was a sloping, well-watered lawn. As she reached the last step, she took in the smooth concrete walkways that swirled left and right to follow the contours of a generous free-form swimming pool. The water looked turquoise in the morning light, and revealed partially submerged boulders before it took a turn inside the house to flow under a glass panel that delineated one wall of the foyer.

The house itself was stunning too, its flat roof, glass walls, and box shapes seeming to grow out of the low-lying, granite-studded hills surrounding it. Following the curve of the pool, Téa passed tall fan palms and mounds of feathery grasses. At the front door, she turned, catching the breathtaking view that showed the distant and dramatic barren mountain slopes across the valley floor.

"Already?" Johnny's voice said.

Téa jumped, then spun to confront him. He'd come from another direction, around the side of the house. One hand gripped a Starbucks cardboard cup carrier.

"You're early," he remarked.

"I'm always early," she murmured, disappointment piercing her again. Not over the lost design job this time, but over losing him, or her contact with him, anyway. He was every inch the OOD—Object of Desire—that Rachele had once called him, and that based on his voice alone.

Now—in the flesh and in soft-washed khakis and a white silk T-shirt—he was STWSADOI personified. Sex the Way She'd Always Dreamed of It.

"The quintessential good girl, aren't you," Johnny said, plucking a cup from the carrier and holding it out.

She was forced to close her fingers over it. "Thank you. I, well, I…"

A redwood trellis above them created diamond-shaped patches of shade, and Johnny leaned against one of its supports to sip from his own coffee. "We've got to do something about that."

But there wasn't going to be any "we," she knew, because this property had once belonged to Giovanni Martelli, a man the Carusos were rumored to have killed in retaliation for her father's murder.

"Listen, Johnny. There's something I should have told you last night…" He was digging in a brown bag centered on the carrier and she let her voice die out as she stared at the shock of golden hair falling over his forehead. Last night she'd been half-asleep during the first moments of the call. Then, later, when she should have told him she couldn't take the job, she hadn't wanted to.

She'd wanted to see him one more time. One last time. That perfect hair, that rangy yet elegant body, those long, strong fingers that had touched her face and cupped her cheek, the mouth that had made her want to strip off her clothes and her common sense to let all her badness out.

Her chest rose on a deep breath, and then she forced open her mouth again. "Johnny, the fact is, I can't—"

He pushed a morsel of something from the bag between her lips.

"—mmf." The taste of buttermilk and cinnamon melted against her tongue, derailing her train of thought. It was good. It was
so
good. She swallowed, the sweetness conga-dancing like a train of wanton women through her system. "What
is
that?"

"Cinnamon scone." He pinched off another piece and held it out to her.

"No." She stumbled back, then quickly righted herself, aware of the pool just behind her. 'Thank you, but no. I don't eat sugar."

"No
sugar
?'

"As little as possible." Téa brushed at her tan dress, a bias-cut sheath with a flaring skirt that fell just below her knees, to make sure crumbs weren't clinging. No sense in setting up an opportunity for a traitorous wet fingertip to go looking for them later.

Johnny was staring at her, golden eyebrows raised, still holding the piece of scone between his fingers.

"What?" she asked.

"I had no idea it was this bad," he said, frowning.

"This bad? This bad how?" She wanted to step back again, but there was that pool and she
wasn't
going to sabotage her professional image this time by falling into it. "What?"

He seemed to shrug off the thought. "Never mind."

Oh, yeah, as if she could let it go
now
. "Tell me. What? What's bad?"

"This is more than a typical good-girl thing, Téa. This is some serious self-denial."

She made a face at him and his diagnosis. "Oh, come on. It's watching my weight."

"No." He shook his head. "It's more. You don't allow yourself any of the sweet things in life. Now why is that?"

He had stepped closer to her. Uncomfortably close. Hadn't he?

Because she could see the gray pinwheels in his blue eyes and the way the sun had tipped the very ends of his hair an almost baby-blond. When she took a quick breath, over the roasty scent of Starbucks she smelled a faint tang of chlorine. "You've been swimming."

"Thirty laps in the hotel pool. But you're avoiding the question."

Because she should be avoiding him, and avoiding thinking of his long body stroking through the water, shoulders rearing up, hair slicked back to expose all the masculine angles of his face.

I'd like to back you into that pool and dive in after. Right here, right now. Both of us wet. You getting wetter.

At that imaginary Johnny-voice in her head, her gaze jumped to his face. He was looking down at her, his expression bemused. "What are you thinking now?" he asked.

Not what
he
was really thinking, was it? Of course not.

Blame it on the swimming. She'd had a thing for swimmers since the last summer Olympics. To be truthful, she'd had a thing for the jock Johnnys of the world since she was twelve years old and dreamed of class rings and homecoming dances to escape the reality of missing fathers and FBI raids.

"Téa?"

"This coffee is making me hot." She fanned herself with her free hand.

He lifted a brow and one corner of his mouth turned up. "Téa, Téa, Téa… "

Just the way he was saying her name, and smiling, made her want to run screaming for safety. Could he hear her thoughts in
his
head? The mortification!