Back in Black (38 page)

“Oh, yes, I see the note here. I’m sorry for the confusion, Ms. West. If you could show me your passport, please.” The concierge raised his hand and a uniformed bellman immediately appeared with her luggage. “Paco will take you to your room.”

She’d spent hours during the past winter poring over guidebooks and surfing websites trying to decide where to stay—the Grand Hotel in Sorrento or the Capri Palace Hotel on the island of Capri? But Positano had held her under its spell and, while she planned on visiting both Sorrento and Capri during her stay, this was her ultimate destination. The room didn’t disappoint, with its private terrace displaying a colorful bougainvillea-framed view of the pastel sunlit town hugging the rugged cliffs that plunged down to the blue waves of the Mediterranean.

John Steinbeck was right. This place was a “dream.”

The dream was interrupted by the sound of her stomach growling. She needed to eat something and fast. The hotel dining room was serving for another hour, Paco the bellman informed her in a sexy Italian accent, his liquid brown eyes gazing at her with Latin approval.

Faith was starving. But not for male attention. She handed Paco his tip and showed him the door.

She barely had time for a fast bathroom stop, where she looked at the thick towels and large tub longingly before hurrying down to eat. Knowing that nearby Naples was the birthplace of pizza, she quickly ordered a pizza margherita.

And waited. And waited. Other diners were seated on the sunny terrace dining area. Two guys in particular made a point of staring at her sitting all alone. She wasn’t pleased to see their food arrive before hers. They hadn’t even ordered Italian, but steak and fries. The skinnier of the two men gave her a leering look. He poured ketchup onto his plate and then dipped a fry into it, holding it up and taunting her with it before he chomped into it with gusto.

Normally Faith would have looked away and ignored him, but she wasn’t feeling very generous toward the opposite sex at the moment.

Faith gave the man her best withering librarian look.

He responded by smacking his lips at her.

She made an
Ew, yuck
face.

He dipped another fry in the ketchup and waved it at her before sucking it into his mouth in one go. An instant later the man grabbed his throat and started turning red then blue.

Before she could react, another man smoothly moved past her and gave the choking man the Heimlich.

Faith sank into her chair. She felt guilty that while trying to impress her, the idiot had ended up choking and nearly killing himself. Was there some kind of Italian curse that was reserved for brides who came to the Amalfi coast without their grooms?

Then all thought went out of her head as she got her first good look at the rescuer. Dark hair, dark eyes, stubble-darkened cheeks and chin. A dark knight. A man meant to get a woman’s juices flowing.

He stopped at her table and stared down at her before saying with amusement, “I’ll say this, you sure know how to make an impression on a guy.”

T
HIRTY thousand hotel rooms in the city of Chicago, and Cameron Lynde managed to find one next door to a couple having a sex marathon.

“Yes! Oh yes! YES!”

Cameron pulled the pillow over her head, thinking—as she had been thinking for the past hour and a half—that it had to end
sometime
. It was after three o’clock in the morning, and while she certainly had nothing against a good round of raucous hotel sex, this particular round had gone beyond raucous and into the ridiculous about fourteen “oh-God-oh-God-oh-Gods” ago. More importantly, even with the discounted rate they gave federal employees, overnights at the Peninsula Hotel weren’t typically within the monthly budget of an assistant U.S. attorney, and she was starting to get seriously P.O.’ed that she couldn’t get a little peace and quiet.

Bam! Bam! Bam!
The wall behind the king-size bed shook with enough force to rattle her headboard, and Cameron cursed the hardwood floors that had brought her to such circumstances.

Earlier in the week, when the contractor had told her that she would need to stay off her refinished floors for twenty-four hours, she had decided to treat herself to some much-needed pampering. Just last week she had finished a grueling three-month racketeering trial against eleven defendants charged with various organized criminal activities including seven murders and three attempted murders. The trial had been mentally exhausting for everyone involved, particularly her and the other assistant U.S. attorney who had prosecuted the case. So when she’d learned that she needed to be out of her house while the floors dried, she had seized on the opportunity and turned it into a weekend getaway.

Maybe other people would have gone somewhere more distant or exotic than a hotel three miles from home, but all Cameron had cared about was getting an incredibly overpriced but fantastically rejuvenating massage, followed by a tranquil night of R&R, and then a brunch buffet in the morning (again incredibly overpriced) where she could stuff herself to the point where she remembered why she made it a general habit to stay away from brunch buffets. And the perfect place for that was the Peninsula Hotel.

Or so she had thought.

“Such a big, bad man! Right there, oh yeah—right there, don’t stop!”

The pillow over her head did nothing to drown out the woman’s voice. Cameron closed her eyes in a silent plea.
Dear Mr. Big and Bad: Whatever the hell you’re doing, don’t you move from that spot until you get the job done.
She hadn’t prayed so hard for an orgasm since the first—and last—time she’d slept with Jim, the corporate wine buyer/artist who wanted to “find his way” but who didn’t seem to have a clue how to find his way around the key parts of the female body.

The moaning that had started around 1:30 A.M. was what had woken her up. In her groggy state, her first thought had been that someone in the room next door was sick. But quickly following those moans had been a second person’s moans, and then came the panting and the wall-banging and the hollering and then that part that sounded suspiciously like a butt cheek being spanked, and somewhere around that point she had clued into the true goings-on of room 1308.

WhaMA-WhaMA-WhaMA-WhaMA-WhaMA-WhaMA
...

The bed in the room next door increased its tempo against the wall, and the squeaking of the mattress reached a new, feverish pitch. Despite her annoyance, Cameron had to give the guy credit, whoever he was, for having some serious staying power. Perhaps it was one of those Viagra situations, she mused. She had heard somewhere that one little pill could get a man up and running for more than four hours.

She yanked the pillow off her head and peered through the darkness at the clock on the nightstand next to the bed. 3:17. If she had to endure another two hours and fifteen minutes of this stuff, she just might have to kill someone—starting with the front desk clerk who had put her in this room in the first place. Weren’t hotels supposed to skip the thirteenth floor, anyway? Right now she was wishing she was a more superstitious person and had asked to be assigned another room.

In fact, right now she was wishing she’d never come up with the whole weekend getaway idea and instead had just spent the night at Collin’s or Amy’s. At least then she’d be asleep instead of listening to the cacophonous symphony of grunting and squealing—oh yes, the girl was actually
squealing
now—that was the current soundtrack of her life. Plus, Collin made a mean cheddar-and-tomato egg-white omelet that, while likely not quite the equivalent of the delicacies one might find at the Peninsula Hotel buffet, would’ve reminded her why she’d made it a general habit to let him do all the cooking when the three of them lived together their senior year of college.

Cameron sat up in bed and looked at the phone on the nightstand. She didn’t want to be that kind of guest that complained about every little blemish in the hotel’s five-star service. But the noise from the room next door had been going on for a long time now and at a certain point, she felt as though she was entitled to some sleep in her nearly four-hundred-dollar-per-night room. The only reason the hotel hadn’t already received complaints, Cameron guessed, was due to the fact that 1308 was a corner room with no one on the other side.

She was just about to pick up the phone to call the front desk when, suddenly, she heard the man next door call out the glorious sounds of her salvation.

“Oh shit, I’m cooommmminnggg!”

A loud groan. And then—

Blessed silence. Finally.

Cameron fell back onto the bed.
Thank you, thank you, Peninsula Hotel gods, for granting me this tiny reprieve.

She crawled under the covers and pulled the cream-colored king-size down duvet up to her chin. Her head sank into the pillows and she lay there for a few minutes as she began to drift off. Then she heard another noise next door—the sound of a door shutting.

Cameron tensed.

And then—

Nothing.

All remained blissfully still and silent, and her final thought before she fell asleep was on the significance of the sound of the door shutting.

She had a sneaking suspicion that somebody had just received a five-star booty call.

Cameron shot up in bed, the sound from next door waking her right out of her sleep. She heard muffled squealing and the bed shook against the wall again—harder and louder than ever—as if its occupants were
really
going at it this time.

She looked at the clock. 4:08. She’d been given a whopping thirty-minute reprieve.

Not wasting another moment—frankly, she’d already given these jokers far too much of her valuable sleep time—she reached over and turned on the lamp next to the bed. She blinked as her eyes adjusted to the sudden burst of light. Then she grabbed the phone off the nightstand and dialed.

After one ring, a man answered pleasantly on the other end. “Good evening, Ms. Lynde. Thank you for calling Guest Services—how may we be of assistance?”

Cameron cleared her throat, her voice still hoarse as her words tumbled out. “Look—I don’t want to be a jerk about this, but you guys have
got
to do something about the people in room 1308. They keep banging against the wall; there’s been all sorts of moaning and shouting and spanking and it’s been going on for, like, the last two hours. I’ve barely slept this entire night, and it sounds like they’re gearing up for round twenty or whatever, which is great for them but not so much for me, and I’m kind of at the point where enough is enough, you know?”

The voice on the other end was wholly unfazed, as if Guest Services at the Peninsula Hotel handled the fallout from five-star booty calls all the time.

“Of course, Ms. Lynde. I apologize for the inconvenience. I’ll send up security to take care of the problem right away.”

“Thanks,” Cameron grumbled, not yet willing to be pacified that easily. She planned to speak to the manager in the morning, but for now all she wanted was a quiet room and some sleep.

She hung up the phone and waited. A few moments passed, then she glanced at the wall behind the bed. Things had fallen strangely silent in room 1308. She wondered if the occupants had heard her calling Guest Services to complain. Sure, the walls were thin (as she definitely had discovered firsthand), but were they
that
thin?

She heard the door to the room next door open.

The bastards were making their escape.

Cameron flew out of bed and ran to her door, determined to at least get a look at the sex fiends. She pressed against the door and peered through the peephole just as the door to the other room shut. For a brief moment, she saw no one. Then—

A man stepped into view.

He moved quickly, appearing slightly distorted through the peephole. He had his back toward her as he passed by her room, so Cameron didn’t get the greatest look. She didn’t know what the typical sex fiend looked like, but this particular one was on the taller side and stylish in his jeans, black corduroy blazer, and gray hooded T-shirt. He wore the hood pulled up, which was kind of strange. As the man crossed the hallway and pushed open the door to the stairwell, something struck her as oddly familiar. But then he disappeared into the stairwell before she could place it.

Cameron pulled away from the door. Something very strange was going on in room 1308 . . . Maybe the man had fled the scene because he’d heard her call Guest Services and was abandoning his partner to deal with the fallout alone. A married man, perhaps? Regardless, the woman in 1308 was going to have some serious ‘splaining to do once hotel security arrived. Cameron figured—since she already was awake, that is—that she might as well just sit it out right there at the peephole and catch the final act. Not that she was eavesdropping or anything, but . . . okay, she was eavesdropping.

She didn’t have to wait long. Two men dressed in suits, presumably hotel security, arrived within the next minute and knocked on the door to 1308. Cameron watched through the peephole as the security guards stared expectantly at the door, then shrugged at each other when there was no answer.

“Should we try again?” the shorter security guard asked.

The second guy nodded and knocked on the door. “Hotel security,” he called out.

No response.

“Are you sure this is the right room?” asked the second guy.

The first guy checked the room number, then nodded. “Yep. The person who complained said the noise was coming from room 1308.”