Taste for Trouble (11 page)

She
glanced at James, made a
get us out of here, pronto
face at him. But his
gaze was glued to Audrey, waiting like the good soldier he was for the lady’s
instruction.

“But
I want Audrey to help us,” Will said, a sly triumph sliding through his voice. “No
other waitress will do.” He turned away from the manager and sent Audrey that
awful smile. “Come on, honey. Be nice and there could be another twenty in it
for you. As you’ve surely noticed, I’m pretty free with my brother’s money.”

Color
rushed into her cheeks while something both resigned and livid leapt in her
eyes. Bel caught her breath and thought
this is not going to make Jeff happy
.

“You
know what? This one’s on the house.” Audrey elbowed her boss aside and stuffed
Will’s money into the breast pocket of his tux. Bel winced. There went the
perfect crease she’d ironed into his hanky. “You want the truth? Okay, fine. You
caught me. I lied to your brother last night. I’m not going to Tucson. Not now,
not ever. It was a big, fat lie. So sue me. I didn’t figure anybody would mind.
Why would they? The more we lie, the more you pay. You think all those boobs
are real? The hair? The tans? The interest? Right.

“But
since you’re suddenly hell-bent on the truth, try this on for size. I didn’t
give your brother my number because I didn’t like him. Or you.
Or
your
famous brother. You’re all pathetic losers with more money than class who have
to pay to see a girl shake her goodies and I don’t want anything to do with you
apart from dropping off your drinks and picking up my tips. Is that honest
enough for you?”

Will
ran his tongue over his teeth as if checking for blood. “Yeah, that ought to do
it,” he said. He turned his gaze to the horrified manager. “You really get what
you pay for around here, don’t you?”

Jeff
grabbed Audrey by the arm. “I’m
so
sorry. Please excuse her behavior,
gentlemen. I’ll take care of this.” He cut urgent eyes toward the nearest
waiter, who trotted over to thrust a tray of champagne at the Blake brothers. He
hauled Audrey off and Bel sighed, making a mental note to come back tomorrow to
salvage the girl’s job if she could.

She finally
caught James’ eye and he gave her the tired shrug of somebody who’d done this
too often to summon up the outrage it called for. Will checked his watch,
smiled and tossed back the entire glass of champagne in one swallow.

“We’re
leaving,” James announced.

“So
soon?” Will set aside his empty glass. “I was just hitting my stride.”

“Yeah,”
he said. “I know.”

CHAPTER NINE

Will
rode shotgun on the way home, his face to the window. He watched the lights of
DC stream by in a fluid blur and tried to ignore the silent condemnation
filling up the truck like poisonous gas. It radiated off his brothers and their
pretty new nanny in thick, baffled waves, pressing him deep into his seat like
one of those lead blankets they put on you at the dentist. Every time he
swallowed, he tasted shame and sour champagne.

“For
God’s sake,” he said finally. “It was just a stripper.”

“
She
,”
James snapped. “Not
it
, Will.
She
. A person. A whole human being.”
He steered with one hand and landed a solid punch on Will’s upper arm with the
other. Will’s head threatened to split open and his stomach turned over
dangerously. Fucking champagne. As a rule, he and alcohol got along just fine. Better
than fine, in fact. But champagne was the exception that proved the rule, and Will
added that last glass to his growing list of tonight’s regrets. “And
she
wasn’t a stripper. She was a waitress.”

“At
a
strip club
.” Will felt dirty but he blanked his face and met James’
furious eyes. “Excuse me if I don’t split hairs.”

“Split
hairs?” James hit him again. Will relished the pain even as he prayed not to
puke on the floorboards. “Split
hairs
? You acted like the girl was a two
dollar hooker, Will.”

“Oh
spare me the outrage.” Will turned back to the window and concentrated on
breathing. “If it had been you doing the asking last night instead of Drew,
she’d have tucked her number into your pocket personally and given you a hand
job while she was in there. So do me a favor and don’t try to pretend there’s a
big moral difference between a whore and a star fucker. It’s all about currency
one way or another.”

Shocked
silence filled the air again, along with another dose of smothering
disapproval. When, oh Jesus,
when
would somebody just put him out of his
misery? He didn’t know how much more of himself he could take.

“Will.”
Drew’s voice from the backseat was quiet. Careful.
Kind
. Will’s stomach
cramped relentlessly and oh
fuck
, were those tears stinging his eyes? “What’s
wrong
with you?”

I
don’t know
.

The
answer screamed itself inside his head, the words bouncing around like those bullets
that exploded after impact, sending shrapnel every fucking where. But nothing
came out of his mouth. Because yeah, something
was
wrong with him. Very
wrong. And honest to God, Will didn’t know what it was.

But
only because he didn’t want to know.

See,
Will’s wrongness lived inside him. It
was
him—a monster with an appetite
for destruction who lived in the darkest corner of his mental cellar. And when
that kind of darkness starts creeping up the stairs and scratching at the door,
what kind of idiot invites it in for a good look? Not Will. He, like any sane,
rational soul, shoved it right back down the stairs. Alcohol worked nicely. Most
of the time, anyway. And when it didn’t? Well, then he had to give in and feed
the thing.

Often,
Will could provoke one of his brothers into kicking his ass. (Usually James, as
Drew had always been more inclined to laugh than punch, the lucky bastard.) His
subconscious wanted pain? Blood? Destruction? Fine. Here you go. Plus it made
him feel sort of normal. Brothers fought all the time, right? Nothing weird
about that.

So
tonight, when his beast had seized him by the throat, Will had marched off to
do some damage in the sincere hope that one of his brothers would eventually
consent to bust up his face for him. Unfortunately, James and Drew were too
sick of him lately to even bother taking a swing. And the rest of the world was
too interested in James’ money to risk punching out his asshole brother. A
crazy leap of fear and pain jittered into Will’s roiling stomach and he
swallowed hard. He was pushing his brothers awfully close to washing their
hands of him, wasn’t he? It was like standing on the edge of a cliff, looking
at the drop and wondering.

He
dragged his thoughts away from that charming little precipice and sent them
elsewhere.

To
that little waitress. Hey, how about her? Audrey, wasn’t it? Now
that
girl hadn’t been afraid to take out James Blake’s big brother. She’d put up her
dukes. Dropped the truth on him like a fucking guillotine and—figuratively, at
least—Will’s head was still rolling across the floor.

His
monster typically viewed verbal abuse as kiddie play but Audrey’s
tongue-lashing had been a goddamn work of art. Her scalpel-sharp dissection of
his character, plus the unholy beauty of that face calmly spitting fury? It had
been like watching a cathedral burn. And it had sent his monster straight back
to the cellar.

He’d
have to think about that.

They
hit the beltway and James laid the pedal down. The truck leapt forward and Will’s
stomach cramped again. Christ. He must have made some sort of pained noise
because James gave a humorless chuckle. “Serves you right, asshole.”

Will
shrugged. “Your floorboards.”

“Don’t
you dare.”

Will
consulted his stomach. “We’ll see.”

“Fuck.”

Four
hours later, Bel stood at the granite island counter, spooning loose leaf tea
into a paper tea bag. It was late but she couldn’t sleep. She’d taken the time
to put her own linens on the bed in the pretty room she’d chosen for herself in
the east wing, but even the comfort of a familiar and elevated thread count
couldn’t push her over the edge from exhaustion into sleep.

Every
time she closed her eyes, all the day’s misgivings and resentments crept into
her head where they started tumbling around together like a pack of cracked out
monkeys. Take that along with the pointed silence emanating from the north wing
where the Blake brothers had headquartered the bedlam of their lives, and
suddenly Bel was dragging on her robe and padding down that ridiculous staircase—
fiddledeedee,
Ashley
—to put on the kettle.

Well,
to put on the pot, anyway. She hadn’t had time to unload her own cookware, so
she was still using the single pot and pan she’d unearthed in James Blake’s
gorgeous waste of a kitchen. She stared into the steady blue flame licking at
the sauce pan and twitched her shoulders under that disconcerting
silence
.

The
Blake brothers struck her as brawlers—hadn’t they already engaged in fisticuffs
over a fork, of all things? After tonight’s little showdown, Bel had expected a
late night full of stomping and raging and finger pointing. Violent cursing. Possibly
the punching of walls.

But
no. Nothing.

Okay,
not nothing exactly, Bel mused, pouring boiling water over her tea bag. The
scent of citrus and vanilla billowed into the kitchen and she leaned into the
steam to bask in the comfort of her favorite key-lime custom blend tea. This
wasn’t just the absence of sound. It was like a vacuum. A black hole that
sucked up everything in its gravitational pull, a menacing void that promised
death and destruction, or at the very least, the permanent disappearance of
anything unlucky enough to wander too near its sphere of influence.

She
wondered briefly if she ought to keep an eye on the driveway. In case there was
some furtive attempt at body disposal in the dead of the night.

Maybe
one of those bodies would be James’. It was a comforting thought in her current
state of mind. Not that she wanted the guy dead or anything, but if he happened
to be the unlucky victim of fratricide this evening, some small, mean part of
her might think
that’ll teach you to play me on the red carpet, buddy
. Fate
might always ding the good girls, but it did occasionally ding the rich, famous
and lucky, too. And if ever there was a night that James Blake deserved to get
a little comeuppance, it was tonight.

Because
James had played her.

Her
cheeks burned as she remembered the perfect innocence and sincerity with which
she’d clapped a hand to his behind. She rewound the tape in her head to that
exact moment, forced herself to shove away the memory of all that warm, animal
sleekness under her hand and concentrate instead on his face. She played it
back frame by frame until she was sure she could see the surprise in his eyes
melting into calculation and then into a self-satisfied smirk.

Because
accidentally-on-purpose showing off your shorts at a gala thrown by the people
who paid you to wear them was a public relations gold mine. Nobody would have
been embarrassed by that blown-out seam, least of all James. He probably would
have gotten a bonus out of it, for God’s sake. But she’d gone ahead and thrown
herself—and, let’s be honest, her dignity—into the breach, and grabbed herself
a big old handful of James Blake’s behind.

And
he’d returned the favor. Her nervous system helpfully provided an instant
replay of that big, hard hand cupping her own behind—

She
lifted her mug for an abrupt, scalding gulp of tea, which she forced herself to
swallow. That way, when heat flashed through her belly, there was a fifty-fifty
chance it was from the tea rather than the memory of James’ touch. There was a
certain comfort in even odds.

A
comfort which evaporated when James suddenly spoke from directly behind her.

“What
in the name of
God
is that smell?”

Her
heart crashed into triple time and she clapped one hand to her chest to keep it
contained. Pain, bright and burning, flashed through her other hand as tea
slopped over the rim of the mug onto her fingers. She dropped the mug in order
to flap her burnt fingers in the air while mentally reviewing all the curse
words she’d forbidden herself to use out loud.

The
mug was no match for James’ imported glazed porcelain tiles, though. It
shattered, unleashing yet another wave of boiling tea in the neighborhood of Bel’s
bare feet. She gathered herself for a heroic leap back, but found her feet
already dangling four inches above the floor.

“Well,
that was a little extreme, don’t you think?” James’ voice came, exasperated and
amused, just below her ear. His hands were tough under her elbows, his body warm
and strong against her back as he carted her bodily toward the sink. He flipped
on the faucet and shoved her hand under the gush of cold water. “I don’t happen
to care for boiled lawn clippings myself, but that doesn’t mean you can’t drink
them.”