Brutally Beautiful (8 page)

“Did you enjoy that?” he murmured against her ear.

“Yes.”

He lowered her skirt. Her panty hose must be a mess. Now his smile was caring, all soft. “Okay?”

“Yes, I think so.” She glanced around wildly. “Where’s the condom?” she whispered. For answer, he opened his hand and showed her a scrunched handful of tissues.

“I’ll dump it in the bathroom,” he said. “Did you think I’d use it as a bookmark?”

The reminder of where they were made her look around wildly. But nobody had arrived; nobody had seen them. “Do you do this often?”

“First time.” He moved away, giving her space to clean herself up as best she could. She took off her shoes long enough to dispose of her wrecked panty hose and then put them on again. She had a spare pair of pantyhose in her desk drawer at work, although she’d never have guessed she’d have to use them in circumstances like this.

Her mind dotted between practicalities and the reality of what they’d just done. Fucked in the stacks. Shit, they’d actually done it. And she’d come. Wildly, gripping him until he’d come too. He seemed the same. The look he affected for work didn’t seem much different with a few extra creases. He held out his hand, and she went to him. “Have you had lunch?” he said, as if they’d merely been discussing the poetry of—who was it? Tennyson. She nodded dumbly. She hadn’t, but she wanted time to think, time on her own.

Shit, she’d done it with a poetry professor in the library. Well, a near professor.

That still boggled her mind most of all. The poetry bit.

While he found it hard to resist Gen, Nick had other reasons for fucking her brains out: to stop her thinking and to find out if she enjoyed what he did. It had been insane, what they’d just done. He wasn’t kidding when he’d told her anyone could have come and seen them. If anyone had realized what they’d been doing, he’d only have had his ability to fast-talk to get out of the situation. If he lost his job, he’d lose his application for citizenship, because the promise of the professorship and his work here kept him legitimately in this country. Well, almost legitimately. Nobody had noticed that he hadn’t obtained his documents and passport through the usual channels.

One thing nagged him, something he needed to work out. How had she known to find him here? Had Odell said something? No, that man was so discreet even Nick didn’t know everything about him. It wasn’t him. Nick couldn’t remember saying anything about where he worked either. She’d said she was studying for a degree. Was it here? Coincidence? Over the years Nick had become skeptical of coincidences, but it wasn’t out of the ballpark. A lot of students lived in and around Brooklyn, and she could be one of them. Her little apartment certainly suggested a lack of funds, but it was furnished well, and the clothes she wore weren’t cheap or the kind students went for. A skirt suit suggested a job. Full-time or one of the part-time fillers students took to pay their way? Still, it was a good suit, the creases he’d put in the fabric dropping out already. Nick had an eye for quality. He’d needed it, once upon a time.

He was looking at it now, and he didn’t mean her clothes. His instincts told him if he explored further, he’d find her honest, but he couldn’t afford to let everything rest on his instincts. He hadn’t survived for the last five years without examining everyone who tried to get close to him or had power in his life. It had hurt to let other people control his fate—and he’d had more of that recently than ever before. His lecturers when he’d first come over here had done it, then the people he did menial jobs for, flying under the radar while he established his credentials, then the head of his department. So often he’d been offered opportunities to slip back to his old ways. So easy to renew contacts, to go back. But he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do that and reminded himself that one day he’d get to see Larry again if he didn’t slide back.

He had to keep her close and do some basic investigation. Keeping her close wouldn’t be a problem. Recalling that, he slid his hand around her waist in a proprietorial gesture. “So are we sorted out?”

He spotted the confusion in her eyes before she masked it. She had as many worries about him as he did of her. Not quite, of course, with not as much at stake, but he didn’t intend to make things easy for her. If she started digging into his background here, one of the triggers he’d set in place would go off, namely, one of the network of women and men who serviced the place. People ignored them, the personal assistants, the cafeteria workers, the information officers. The infrastructure. Nick never made that mistake. If there was information, they usually had it or knew where to get it. So he drank with them, gave them little treats that came his way, just chatted to them and remembered their names. Someone would tip him off if anyone had made more than usual inquiries.

And he’d just risked all that for a quick fuck. What was worse, he knew, deep down, that he’d do it again to see that spark in her eyes, the way she responded to him and followed him into the abyss of oblivion. To feel the total abandonment of letting everything go for a brief, blissful moment. The need to have her had shocked him, but he couldn’t fight it. That worried him.

He dropped a quick kiss on her lips. “Still want to have dinner tonight?”

“At that restaurant?”

“Unless you have your heart set on it, I want to change the plans. I want you to myself for a while. Come to my place instead. I’ll make us something. We can eat it naked in bed if you like. Just say the word.” His voice lowered to a purr, and he enjoyed the spark of arousal. She wet her bottom lip, swiped her tongue over it, so he followed suit, tasting where she’d just been. “What do you say?”

“Yes.” Her voice was hardly audible, but he heard it.

He bent to capture her lips just once more. “Bring a change of clothes for the morning. Once we get into bed I don’t want you rushing away.” He wondered at himself for allowing a woman he’d only just met into his private space. But this felt right, better than a meal at a fancy restaurant where they’d have to behave themselves. He didn’t want to behave himself with her.

When she tried to break away, he pulled her back as if the thought had only just occurred to him. “By the way, I have one more question. How did you know where to find me?”

She grinned. “You gave me your card, remember?”

Ah, shit, yes he did. He’d scrawled his cell number on the back of one, hadn’t he? It had his name, and the legend
MA, DUNY
on it. She studied here, and the university wasn’t huge. She might have decided to trawl the libraries of the six main buildings on the off chance. Still, he didn’t like the coincidence that they were attending one of the smallest universities in New York and they happened to meet in the unlikeliest off-campus venue.

After she left, he sat down and tapped into his laptop, engaging one of the proxy servers he used when he wanted to go a little deeper. Being inside the university network gave him an advantage, but although his computer skills were better than average, they were limited. He needed someone like Jim Goddard, who worked for Symbiotics, the company Nick’s sister-in-law worked for and now partly owned. At the thought of Yolanda, he grinned. Once he’d seen the blonde Texan beauty, he knew why his brother had risked everything for her. If Nick’d been in the same situation, he’d have done something similar. Perhaps not as risky, but then he wasn’t in love with Yolanda, only in lust with her. He’d have shared her in a heartbeat if his brother had been amenable. Most men would have felt at least uncomfortable, sporting an erection in such close proximity to a blood relative, but not the O’Donnell brothers. They’d spent part of their formative years tag-teaming rich women, trying to make enough money to get ahead. Sexual favors had paid for more meals than honest work, even when they could get the honest work.

The memory reminded him of two things: how much he missed his brother and what he’d done to survive. When poverty came in the window, morality flew out the door, at least that was what his mother had said, the dimly remembered woman who’d abandoned them without so much as looking back. She’d left only a cheap, thin gold ring as a reminder of her existence.

All gone, he told himself as he had so often before when the pangs of memory threatened to destroy his focus. Pain like that wasn’t worth dwelling on, because he couldn’t do anything about it now. Done and gone.

There. He’d drilled into Gen’s department and found records of her classes, making a mental note of them in case they proved useful in the future. Gen was telling the truth; she was majoring in sociology. She had credits from her previous university in Idaho and had started the course fast-tracked. She was part-time, so it would take her another two years to complete her studies. She was working somewhere, but he couldn’t discover where. She’d worn office clothes, but that could mean anything. She had a small studio apartment in a not so good part of an area that until recently had a dire reputation for poverty and gang activity. That was why he’d taken notice of the locks. Pretty sure he could get into the public parts of her building without too much trouble, but he’d been glad to see the complex locks on her private door and the alarmed windows. Fairly standard for New York, but some people still lived as if they believed it couldn’t happen to them. The trouble was, “it” often did. Their trouble, not his; although he didn’t take part in such things anymore, he knew about them.

But now he had a lecture to deliver on the poem he’d tried to teach the girl having what he suspected were fake problems. Only because she touched him a little too often, smiled at him too warmly, came too close. He huffed a laugh. If that was his only concern, he’d be a happy man.

As it was, he could let everything go for the next hour and immerse himself in two of his greatest pleasures: wallowing in High Victorian poetry and trying to explain it to a class of people who preferred Kanye West to Tennyson. Changing their minds challenged him, gave him intellectual and emotional release when he did so. And he’d never failed in swaying a class to his point of view. When he was a kid, a battered version of the
Golden Treasury
had given him peace from the grind of daily life, and ever since he’d turned to poetry for solace. Mind, if any of the types he’d tangled with in those days had found out, his cred would have disappeared in a puff of smoke. So it was nice to finally let it out. Better than nice.

He carefully logged off and disengaged the proxy server before stuffing the laptop in his bag and setting off for his class.

As he left, something fell to the floor with a flirtatious tinkle. He bent and picked it up, then wished he hadn’t. That fucking ring. He should have left it where he was. He still wasn’t sure why he carried it, except it reminded him of what he could have become, a place he never wanted to go. He’d carried it around all his life because he didn’t want to end up the way his mother had, and this was a constant reminder. Shoving the piece of jewelry in his pocket, he strode away.

His mother hadn’t even been married, so fuck knew what she was doing with a wedding ring.

Coming out of his lecture after pausing to answer the questions of a few of the students, Nick allowed himself a self-indulgent wallow in euphoria. He enjoyed teaching, much to his surprise, and he never passed up an opportunity to savor it.

That was when his phone rang. Pausing in the hallway outside the lecture theater, Nick checked the caller, then thumbed the Answer button and ducked into a nearby storeroom. “I didn’t know you were up this early,” he said.

“Who do you think runs this club?” Odell demanded. “Santa’s little helpers?”

“Odell’s little helpers.” Naked and greased and ready to go. A little different from an elf in a red hat.

“Anyhow, I have some news. Not welcome news, but you’d better know. Come around and chat.”

“Now?”

Nick sighed, his mood of well-being collapsing like a week-old balloon.

“Now.” The urgency in Odell’s tone warned Nick that he needed to know this, fast. A sense of foreboding gripped his stomach, and he recalled the ghost of the ulcer he’d finally vanquished three years ago.

“I’m on my way.”

Odell met him at the back door, the one the strippers used. Nick enjoyed the double take when the club owner saw him in his college get-up. “Overdoing the student?”

He often wished for the days when he’d just run a razor over his baldpate, but he couldn’t risk it. People would recognize him. “Nobody thinks a guy with floppy hair is dangerous.”

Odell picked up a corner of the thick cotton plaid shirt. “Or someone who dresses in a shirt a size too big for him.”

“Two sizes. Know how long it took me to track these suckers down?”

Odell regarded him distastefully. “You look like a tiger in kitten’s clothing.”

Nick gave him a shameless grin. “Oh yeah.” It added to the way he kept as much under the radar as he could. Already people took him for granted; he’d been in the department for so long. He’d come over to do his degree at DUNY, carried on with his masters, and transferred to the doctoral course when he wanted to develop his dissertation. He had the reputation of being bright, also of not needing grants or jobs. He’d let it be known that he’d inherited money, but not too much. Didn’t want to attract attention, just give a plausible reason for his lifestyle. So far it had worked. He didn’t see any need to explain any of that to Odell.

The man led the way to his office and offered a drink. Nick accepted a bourbon and lounged on the sofa he’d occupied with Gen the other night. Already he felt like that was history, that they’d discovered so much since then. Stupid. He hardly knew her at all, but the thought didn’t help. The sooner he got this meeting over with, the sooner he could prep for dinner tonight. “So what couldn’t you tell me on the phone?”

“The guy you caught slipping a mickey?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s dead.”

A pause, but Nick controlled his reaction of utter shock. “How?” His brain clicked into analytical mode, the mind that had controlled groups of supposedly uncontrollable people and had to be bigger, tougher, and cleverer than any of them. “I know it wasn’t my punch. I barely clipped the guy.” He just wanted to shut the fucker up and get back to the woman who’d fascinated him from the moment he’d first laid eyes on her.