The Fifth Favor (9 page)

Reaching out to brush his hair from his forehead with maternal tenderness, she added, “It’s excruciatingly erotic, is it not? To have such an important political figure melt to thrashing, raw, needful female under your touch? These hands…” She grasped his fingers, held them to her cool ivory cheek. “These hands could hold more power 46

The Fifth Favor

than all the forces of Capitol Hill combined. The senator’s good mood will stretch far into the next week, I’m certain. Does it ever occur to you how your talents might just influence the state of our nation?”

Adrian looked at her in astonishment and laughed, a short, humorless sound. “It might if I were fucking all of Capitol Hill. Something I’m sure you wouldn’t hesitate to arrange for the right price.” He withdrew from her grasp and headed back to the bathroom to finish shaving.

Azure appeared in the doorway behind him, her ethereal image reflected in every corner of the mirrored room. “You’ve grown distant,” she said, using the sharp tone she saved for miscreant companions. “Your outburst at lunch was totally unprovoked and uncharacteristic of you. I know you’re grieving. But don’t burn your bridges here at Avalon, Adrian. It’s your home, and we’re your family.”

He re-lathered his face, dipped the razor beneath the faucet and stroked it along his jaw, meeting her gaze squarely in the mirror. “What family would condemn their own son? I sat at that table today and realized…if you’re my family, I’m a stray. If this is my home, I’m dispossessed.”

She started to speak, anger flickering like hot blue flames in her eyes, but he shook his head. “I’ve helped to make you an extraordinarily wealthy woman, Azure. Don’t burn your bridges with
me
, because I’ll walk. There’s nothing to hold me here now that Lucien’s gone. Nothing.”

He stared at her in the mirror and read the conflict in her face, a mixture of fury and regret, then a gradual, dawning recognition that his threat was real.

A mask of conciliatory mildness dropped over her features, and she approached him from behind, sliding her slender arms around his waist.

“Dear Adrian,” she whispered, the brush of her words like a feather stroked over his naked back. “How I miss you. Your smile, your gentleness. Won’t we be friends again?”

He closed his eyes and dropped his head, drained of anger and drowning in sadness. “When you finally realize Lucien only wanted to fly,” he said hollowly.

* * * * *

Billie waited two weeks before she ventured to contact Azure Elan. She knew the final appointment she’d scheduled with Adrian had been canceled, but it was amazing what a little persistence could accomplish.

She left four messages with the woman’s secretary, each more urgent than the last, before Azure finally returned her call.

47

Shelby Reed

“I’m sorry, Ms. Cort,” the club owner said, her voice as smooth and sweet as butter cream, “but Avalon is already receiving too much peripheral publicity from this situation. Your research has met a dead end, I’m afraid. Adrian’s no longer available.”

Disappointment crushed the last vestiges of Billie’s hope. “Did you fire him?”

Azure’s hesitation reverberated with surprise. “He’s taking some time off while this tragedy is settled. Of course I can’t tell you where to find him, and he wouldn’t want to talk to you anyway. Not with all the chaos. I told you he’s intensely private.”

Billie ignored the discouragement. “Is he in custody, Ms. Elan?”

“No,” Azure said, sharply enough to serve as a warning. “Now I really must say goodbye. Good luck to you, Ms. Cort.”

“Wait—”

A muffled click, followed by the drone of the dial tone, told Billie she had as much a chance of touching Adrian again as she did the face of the moon.

48

The Fifth Favor

Nothing soothed a case of supreme frustration quite like a banana cream cheesecake from Nirvana Gourmet Market. Billie had to drive five miles out of her way in rush hour traffic to reach the nearest store, and she always had to wait for the bakers to put one of the creamy, luscious concoctions together, but it was worth it. Better than sex, she thought as she sat in gridlocked traffic. At least better than sex with her ex-fiancé had been.

Normally she hated shopping. Grocery stores everywhere were inevitably filled with married couples, families or young mothers pushing squalling kids in rickety metal carts.

It wasn’t the sound of crying babies that bothered Billie. It was the dearth of a child’s sounds in her own life, and the constant lack of opportunity to experience a real family.

Billie’s father had left when she was a baby; her mother, while hardworking and kind, hadn’t known what to do with her singular, precocious daughter. Silence reigned in every apartment they’d lived in. Her mother hadn’t liked to be bothered in the evenings when she got home from a ruthlessly demanding job as a brokerage secretary, and often Billie had tucked herself into bed without exchanging more than a handful of words with her. In the end, the damage to Billie’s heart came not from being broken too many times, but from lack of contact, stimulation and challenge.

Until Ted Chadwick, brilliant law professor, handsome, witty, sophisticated. Who, with his false promises of love and security, had made up for all the romantic rejections her heart had never suffered with one single, supreme infidelity.

It was hard to believe only a handful of months had passed since he’d left. Billie wondered if he and his socialite princess were living in newlywed bliss in some sterile, gated community around the Beltway. She wondered if Vickie St. Claire of Potomac had trouble sleeping when Ted shook the house with his snoring every night, or if his penchant for throwing his dirty socks at the foot of the bed had yet to get under her skin.

She wondered if the new Mrs. Chadwick liked to share the comics section with him on Sunday mornings over a cup of his famous coffee, thick as gravy and strong enough to curl the toes, or if she enjoyed lazy, hand-in-hand walks with him in Rock Creek Park every Saturday afternoon as much as Billie had.

Bitterness sat like an aching knot in her sternum.

Up ahead in the creeping line of traffic, a horn sounded, followed by screeching brakes and angry voices floating on the air. A fender bender—a sure-fire way to spend one’s evening stuck bumper-to-bumper.

49

Shelby Reed

Billie had nothing better to do. She sighed and turned on the radio.

The sun was sinking behind the tree canopy when she finally parked her car in the crowded grocery store lot and headed straight for the bakery inside the cavernous brick building.

She stood in line, placed her order over the wide glass showcase then wandered down a nearby aisle while she waited. She had all the time in the world…and an empty, sterile apartment waiting at the other end of the night.

Every item on the shelves appealed to her rumbling appetite, even the healthy stuff.

As she wound through the fresh produce, inhaling the snappy scent of bell peppers and citrus, an eerily familiar male voice floated over the fruit stands.

“So young, and already so charismatic.”

Billie stopped. Clinging to a wisp of breathless hope, she backed up behind a pyramid of oranges and stared at the man talking to a woman with a toddler on her hip.

Impossible.

Her pulse kicked up dust and she silently muttered thanks to Mother Fate for her infinite lack of predictability. Adrian, the mysterious, now-somewhat-sinister object of her musings, stood in the middle of Nirvana Market, his forearms braced on a shopping cart handle, smiling at a baby who held a handful of his sleeve in her tight little fist.

He looked nearly inconspicuous, a handsome man in faded Levi’s and tennis shoes.

A Yankees baseball cap covered his dark hair, the bill shadowing his features. Casual.

Beautiful. A day’s growth of beard on his jaw did little to detract from his excruciating attractiveness.

“She’s eight months old, but she knows how to flirt,” the baby’s mother said. “Let go of the nice man’s shirt, Gabbi.” She dislodged the child’s hand, then told Adrian,

“I’m sorry. She must like the colors on your T-shirt.”

Eight-month-old Gabbi’s big blue eyes were fixed on Adrian’s face, not on his Tshirt. Billie released a shaky breath. Good God. Even babies weren’t immune.

Adrian smiled at the toddler. “She’s a beauty.”

So are you
, the young mother’s tremulous laughter said. She tilted her head and asked him in a mildly flirtatious tone, “You wouldn’t happen to know what kind of apples are right for baking pies, would you?”

Hidden behind the stack of oranges, Billie rolled her eyes.

“My mother uses Granny Smith,” Adrian said, but the woman appeared to have already forgotten about apples, or pies, or even the restless baby on her hip. She smiled back, as suckered by his good looks as any of the jet-setting heiresses floating nightly through his bedroom.

Crouching there with the sweet, tangy scent of citrus filling her senses, Billie imagined a storewide announcement blaring overhead.
Special in the produce aisle. Every
woman’s fantasy can be yours for the low, low price of a thousand bucks an hour
.

50

The Fifth Favor

But the fantasy was human after all. He had a mother. One who baked pies, no less.

And it appeared he liked children.

He chatted with the woman for a few seconds, then stroked the baby’s soft, downy hair and bid mother and child goodbye.

Besieged by curiosity, Billie crept around the fruit kiosk behind him and watched as he sauntered down a nearby aisle, leaning on his mostly-empty cart.

He liked thirty-dollar wine, she soon discovered, and pasta. Steaks. Skim milk.

Frosted Flakes? The world’s most desirable male escort ate kids’ cereal for breakfast?

The realization did little to take the edge off her surge of sexual awareness when he stopped to examine laundry soaps and she had a chance to study his sculpted backside in faded jeans.

Billie forgot about the banana cream cheesecake, the protests of her empty stomach, everything except Adrian as he strolled through the market, disguised as Every Man.

When he went through the check-out line and toted his two plastic grocery bags through the automatic doors, she followed, vaguely aware of a tugging in her center, as though he led her by an invisible string knotted around her heart.

She paused and hung back behind a concrete column, waiting to see where he’d parked. He crossed the lot on foot, though, slipped between a Mercedes and a Dodge pickup and headed down the sidewalk toward the suburb of Chevy Chase.

Billie had to run to keep him in sight, not an easy feat in toe-pinching pumps.

God
, she thought, hobbling half a block behind him.
Doesn’t the man own a car?
But he obviously enjoyed the evening stroll. At one point, he stopped by a crumpled mass of army blankets and newspaper that turned out to be a homeless man. Transferring his groceries to one hand, he withdrew his wallet from his back pocket and pulled out a few bills.

The homeless man took the offering, they exchanged a few words and then Adrian kept walking, his stride graceful and brisk.

Billie trailed him past two apartment buildings, a shopping center, three gas stations. Twenty minutes later, just when she was seriously considering abandoning the chase, he veered off to a driveway that circled in front of an exclusive, high-rise condominium building.

Billie forgot her cramped toes and ran, panicked she’d lose him inside the building.

Ducking behind a limousine parked in the drive, she heard the red-coated doorman say,

“Evening, Mr. Antoli,” as he swung the door wide for Adrian. “Need help with those groceries?”

“I’ve got it, Marvin.” Adrian’s low voice floated on the night air before he passed inside and headed up a shallow marble staircase.

Antoli. Antoli
. It rang in her mind as she hunkered by the limousine’s rear bumper.

His last name was Antoli. Italian. Dark good looks. Midnight eyes. Of course.

51

Shelby Reed

The limousine driver peered through his side mirror at her. She straightened and returned his annoyed stare, then slid around the back of the stretch Mercedes and cautiously trailed an elderly man with a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag who approached the glass doors from the sidewalk.

Marvin the Doorman stood in the lobby with his back turned to the entrance, having stepped inside to answer the phone on the reception desk.

“Mind if I slip in behind you?” Billie asked the pedestrian. “I’m staying with a friend here and I seem to have lost my—er, entry card.”

The man offered a tentative smile, nodded, and stuck his access card into the electronic lock.

Billie waited with one eye on the doorman’s red-coated back. This was too easy.

There had to be some sort of stumbling block, but she hadn’t encountered it yet. She murmured thanks when the elderly man held the door for her, and followed him inside as though she had every right to step into the affluent building where Adrian Antoli lived his very private life.

The doorman didn’t so much as glance at them. Holding her breath, Billie followed the elderly resident up the marble stairs, where he continued toward a hallway to the right.

While she paused, trying to decide which route to take, the doorman hung up the phone. On impulse she dashed left, down a chandelier-lit corridor that intersected the central hall where Adrian had disappeared. She might be on the wrong path, but she was in. Now what?

Someone was baking with cinnamon. The warm scent drifted in the hall as she took a few steps down the plush ruby runner and found herself staring at an alcove filled with rows of brass mailboxes, their little glass windows glistening in the dim light.

Stepping into the niche, Billie held her breath.
L-1, Francois
, read the label on the first box.
L-3, Thompson
. The residents’ surnames were listed with the apartment numbers.

She skimmed mailbox labels for a good five minutes before her eyes passed over
1401, Antoli
. Rising on tiptoe, she peered into the tiny glass window. Adrian Antoli, or whoever he was, hadn’t yet retrieved his mail. She couldn’t quite make out the printed name on the envelopes, and damn it, she had to know his real first name. She slid to the left a little, her eye against the window, breath fogging the glass…