Neck & Neck (36 page)

And God help her, in spite of his threatening pose, the only thing she felt in that moment was completely turned on.

So he’d been right after all, she thought. Whatever it was burning up the air between them, it was founded in the physical, not the emotional. Oh, sure, there was a thin line between love and hate and all that, but no woman in her right mind would be turned on by a guy who was angry at her.

“I started over here ten minutes before the news came on,” he began, grinding the words out through gritted teeth, “after picking up my messages and seeing about two hundred from eighty different media outlets asking me to confirm Russell’s appearance at a party this weekend.”

“Oh, stop,” she said, waving a dismissive hand and hoping he didn’t notice how much it was shaking. “We may be the seventeenth largest city in America—or maybe it’s the sixteenth, I can never quite remember, though I think Rand McNally might have proven it’s more like twenty-third—but we don’t even have eighty media outlets here, so you couldn’t possibly have had two hundred messages from anybody. We
have
been named one of the top twenty best places to live, though,” she added. “At least, I think it was the top twenty. Maybe it was the top twenty-five. And we have two—or is it three?—high schools on
Time
magazine’s list of the three hundred best public schools in the nation. Did you know that? Isn’t that cool?”

“Oh, no you don’t,” he said, holding up both hands now, palm out, in an obvious gesture of self-preservation. “You are
not
going to mess with my head again with that weird, roundabout way you have of talking. It’s not going to work this time.”

Ignoring him—What was he talking about anyway?— Natalie continued, “But getting back to the media outlets, let’s see . . . There are the three local network affiliates, two—or maybe three now—independent stations, two educational channels, one daily newspaper, several weeklies, though the two biggies there would be
Velocity
and
LEO
, and let me tell you, if you haven’t picked up a copy of
LEO
while you’ve been in town, you absolutely have to, because it’s so funny and well-written and irreverent. And here’s a tidbit I bet you didn’t know.
The Louisville Eccentric Observer
—that’s what
LEO
stands for—was actually started by one of our congressmen who—”

“Stop,” Finn interjected before she even paused for a breath.

“But this is—”

“Just stop, Natalie.”

“But this—”

“No. No more.”

“But—”

“It’s my turn to talk now.”

“B—”

“And then,” he interrupted her again, “
then—
”

“You didn’t let me finish,” Natalie interrupted him right back. “There are a bunch of local magazines, too.
Louisville
magazine, of course, but also
Today’s Woman
and—”

“And then,” he repeated, clearly not going to let her finish. Damn. A perfectly good stalling tactic ruined. “
Then
when I tried to call them all back to tell them that no, as a matter of fact Mr. Mulholland would
not
be making an appearance at the aforementioned party, all I got were recordings telling me to call back during regular business hours, or people’s voice mail because it was too close to airtime for any of them to be answering their phones.” He dropped his hands to his hips again and glared at her some more. “I ought to sic Russell’s attorneys on you.”

“Me?”
she exclaimed. “
I’m
not the one who told everybody Russell was coming to Clementine’s party.”

He arched a dark brow at that, clearly not believing a word. “No?”

She shook her head, but the look on his face made her want to shrink into the floor and never come back. Because even if it hadn’t, technically, been her to spill the beans to all the newspeople, she had been the primary source of the information. Still, if Clementine had kept her promise, none of them would be in this situation right now. They could have put this situation off for at least another twenty-four hours.

“I, um . . .” she hedged. “I, ah . . . Well, see . . . It’s like this . . . I mean, what happened was . . .” As she stammered, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other and back again. Then she lifted her hand to the back of her neck and rubbed it anxiously. “Actually,” she tried again, “it’s kind of a funny story.”

“Oh, I’ll just bet it is.”

She expelled an impatient sound. “Okay, so maybe funny is relative in this situation.”

“I don’t know, Natalie.
Truth
seems to be relative in this situation as far as you’re concerned.”

Yeah, okay, so he had her on that one. “The point is,” she tried again, “that I only told
one
person that Russell would be attending Clementine’s party. But I swore her to secrecy until I had all the kinks ironed out.”

“One of those kinks being that you knew Russell wouldn’t be attending.”

“I thought maybe if I had another chance to talk to him, explain about the party and the charity it’s raising money for, he’d change his mind.”

“I promise you, Natalie, he won’t change his mind about this. Russell never, ever, attends this sort of function. At best, it takes too much out of him to be nice to a bunch of strangers for any length of time. At worst, the security sucks at these things, and it’s too dangerous for him to attend.”

“But if I could just talk to him, Finn. I know he’d change his mind if he heard more about the charity Clementine’s sponsoring.”

“No way. The last thing Russell ever wants to hear about is disadvantaged people.”

“And why is that?” Natalie asked pointedly.

“Don’t try to change the subject.”

“I’m not. I—”

“Who did you tell that Russell would be coming to the party?”

She bit her lip, sighed again, and then made a defeated sound. “Clementine Hotchkiss. The one who’s giving the party.” She hurried on, “But, Finn, if you just knew the circumstances, you’d understand.” She opened her mouth to tell him about Glenda Hightower, and how she could put her daughter Tootie to shame when it came to making people feel small, but he cut her off before she could get the words out.

“You lied to your client for the sake of monetary gain.”

She prickled at that. A lot. “No, I didn’t.” That much, at least, was true. The fact that Clementine was a paying customer hadn’t had anything to do with Natalie’s actions this afternoon. “I told her what I did because . . .” She sighed heavily again, lifting a hand to her forehead, as if that might keep all her jumbled thoughts from tumbling out. “I did it because Clementine was in a tight spot, and I needed to help her out of it. And dammit, Finn,” she added, her own anger bubbling up now, “I did it because the money her party’s going to raise with Russell attending is going to an extremely worthy cause, one that Mr. Mulholland—and you—should want to see succeed, because he—and you—could have benefited from it yourselves when you were kids. If you would just let me talk to him one more—”

Instead of mollifying him, her explanation only seemed to make him angrier. Nevertheless, he said, “Oh, I’ll let you talk to him, all right, Natalie. In fact, you can talk to him right now. I’ll drive you over myself.”

For one brief, euphoric moment, she thought everything was going to be all right. Even if Finn was still bent out of shape, surely once she had five minutes of Russell’s uninterrupted time—sober this time—she would be able to at least make
him
understand, and he would be happy to make an appearance at Clementine’s party. Natalie would be vindicated, Clementine wouldn’t be humiliated, and Kids, Inc., would bank a nice, fat check that would go a long way toward making their new facility a reality.

Then Finn added, “I’ve arranged a conference call with his attorneys on the West Coast and, interestingly, it should be starting right about the time you and I arrive.”

Her heart fell at that. Evidently, Natalie would instead be eviscerated, Clementine would be humiliated, and both she and Kids, Inc., might very well end up tied to a nice, fat lawsuit with Natalie and Party Favors. And it would be all her fault.

“Let me go change my clothes,” she said despondently.

Finn grabbed her wrist and gave it a less than gentle tug. “There’s no time. We’re leaving now.”

She gaped at him. “Shoes?” she asked sarcastically. “The Brown isn’t the kind of place to tolerate bare feet.”

He looked down at her feet, wrinkled his nose in disgust at the orange polish, then returned his attention to her face. “You have thirty seconds,” he told her.

“Thir—”

“Twenty-nine,” he corrected. And then, just to hammer it all home, continued, “Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six.”

“All right, all right,” she muttered as she turned to take the stairs two at a time. Under other circumstances, she would have tried to steal a few minutes to get dressed, too. But knowing Finn, in his current state, he’d drag her out of the house halfway through her efforts and dump her in the backseat in her underwear—if she even got that far. So she searched her bedroom for her sneakers, found only her pink fuzzy bedroom slippers, and stuffed her feet quickly into those instead.

From downstairs, she heard the ominous sound of “Five . . . four . . . three . . .” so she grabbed her purse and hurried out of the bedroom. Sure enough, Finn was halfway up the stairs and looked fully capable of throwing her over one shoulder and hauling her out to the car that way.

“I’m coming!” she yelled as she hurried down the steps past him. She came to a halt by the front door with him still standing in the middle of the stairwell, then crossed her arms over her midsection and tapped her pink-fuzzy-slippered foot impatiently. “Well?” she said pointedly. “I’m ready for my command performance for the king. What’s the holdup?”

Very slowly and very deliberately, Finn began to make his way down the stairs, his gaze never once leaving Natalie’s. And with every thump of his foot on the next stair, her heart began to thunder harder in her chest. Because with every thump of his foot, his expression darkened, his mouth tightened, and his eyes grew harder.

And Natalie, God help her, just got more and more turned on. By the time he stood beside her in the doorway, towering over her, his scent and heat neatly enveloping her, she was near meltdown. When he bent his head until his mouth hovered right beside her ear, she could barely control the shudder of desire that skittered down her spine and pooled deep in her midsection.

“Don’t push me, Natalie,” he whispered, his voice as coarse as sandpaper. “Just don’t . . . push me.”

Push him? she thought wildly. That was a laugh. All he had to do right now was touch the pad of his finger anywhere on her body, and she would come apart in his hands.

He straightened and pulled the door open, tilting his head toward the night outside. “Let’s go,” he told her. “The king is waiting.”

Natalie would just bet he was. And he was probably sharpening the blade of the guillotine himself.

 

 

FINN LEANED AGAINST THE WALL OF RUSSELL’S SUITE, feeling like the king’s favorite fool. The conference call with Russell’s West Coast attorneys hadn’t materialized after all, because Russell himself was currently missing in action.

Okay, so maybe Finn should have checked to be sure the guy was in his suite before he’d stormed off to drag Natalie back here and threatened her with legal action that might not even materialize because he wasn’t sure she’d done anything illegal. He’d simply assumed that, because he’d been doing his job properly, Russell would be where he was supposed to be, where he’d assured Finn he
would
be, in his room for the entirety of the evening. Then again, he’d been assuring Finn of that nearly every night for the past week, and it wasn’t like Russell to
not
go out. As reclusive as he was, he wasn’t willing to give up the joys of nightlife, particularly when that nightlife involved the sort of tawdry activity that diverted attention away from himself and onto the—choose one—naked women onstage, naked women on poles, or naked women on one’s lap.

He wondered how many other nights Russell had snuck out undetected. And he wondered where he’d gone. No place tawdry, because he wouldn’t have risked it without security. Even though he could move in such environments with fairly little risk of detection, he was smart enough to realize the potential for, at best, mischief and, at worst, crime. Russell might not practice common sense in some ways, but in that way, he was definitely smart. So if he’d been sneaking out, without security, it was because he wanted to go somewhere—or be with someone—he didn’t want security to know about. And he could only be going to places—or be with someone—where he felt safe.

Which made absolutely no sense, because Russell didn’t consider anyplace—or anyone—safe. He was even worse than Finn when it came to not trusting people. Russell didn’t even trust himself.

Finn withdrew his phone and punched in the numbers of Russell’s private line
again
. But after one ring, it went right to voice mail, meaning the phone had been switched off. Hopefully, Russell was the one who had done that. Otherwise, he might be tied up in a car trunk somewhere, and any minute now, a note would be tucked under the door of the hotel suite composed of letters cut out of magazines demanding millions of dollars in unmarked bills, and Natalie’s probably-not-illegal-anyway stuff would be nothing.

He flipped his phone shut and stuffed it into his back pocket. His gut told him Russell was fine, and his gut had never been wrong before. Well, except where Natalie Beckett was concerned. Because as much as Finn had told her—and himself—that he didn’t, couldn’t trust her, he realized now that he had. When he’d come in to find all those messages wanting to verify Russell’s appearance at the party he had repeatedly assured Natalie that Russell wouldn’t attend, something in Finn’s chest had clenched tight, then frozen solid and dropped to the pit of his belly. He’d felt betrayed. By Natalie. Which was how he knew he’d placed his trust in her. Without even realizing it, he had. No matter what his conscious mind told him, somewhere in his subconscious, he
had
trusted her. For the first time in his life, he’d allowed himself to think the best of someone, allowed himself to believe in her integrity.