Undercover with the Mob
Elizabeth Bevarly
It's true what they say–all the good guys are married……or have Mob connections!And Natalie Dorset should know. The guy who moved in downstairs may be gorgeous, but the things he says–who uses "whacked" anymore?–and the way he dresses… Well, let's just say that Jack Miller isn't the type you bring home to Mom. Good enough reason for Natalie to stay clear.Too bad their landlady is cracking matchmaking schemes that make covert ops look like child's play. But before this little–okay, it's a pretty big–attraction can get out of hand, Natalie is determined to get to the bottom of Jack's story.Because maybe…just maybe…this time the good guy wears black.
Dear Reader,
I had so much fun writing my first Harlequin Flipside! In fact, I have already plunged into my second.
Undercover with the Mob came about because of two fascinations I have: one with true crime, and the other with mistaken identity. Although I’m a total wimp when it comes to gritty reality (or any reality, for that matter), reading true-crime books has always been a guilty pleasure of mine, particularly those dealing with organized crime. (I have no idea why. Probably for the same sick, twisted reason that I actually like broccoli.)
As for mistaken identity, I love writing about what happens when one person makes erroneous assumptions about another, probably because whenever it happens zany antics invariably ensue. And if an erroneous assumption winds up skirting the edge of potential danger, well, that just ups the ante. Which, in turn, ups the antics. And that’s when writing becomes the most fun.
Like I said, I had a blast writing about Natalie and Jack. I hope you have a good time reading about them, too.
Have fun!
Elizabeth Bevarly
“I’ll kill ’im. No way will I let ’im get away with that.”
Natalie stopped dead in her tracks—and then she really wished she’d come up with a better way to think about that than dead in her tracks—at the sound of Jack’s words through his apartment door.
Telling herself she was just imagining things, Natalie turned her ear closer to the door. She thought she heard him use the word whacked. But he might not have said whacked. He might have said fact. Or quacked. Or shellacked. And those were all totally harmless words.
Then again, maybe he’d said hacked, she thought as a teensy little feeling of paranoia wedged its way under her skin. Or smacked. Or even hijacked. Which weren’t so harmless words.
Her world went a little fuzzy, and she had to sit down. Which—hey, whattaya know—gave her a really great seat for eavesdropping on the rest of his conversation.
“Hey, I know what I’m being paid to do, and I’ll do it.”
Jack wasn’t a Mob hit man turned Mob informant. He was a Mob hit man period!
Undercover with the Mob
Elizabeth Bevarly
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Bevarly is the USA TODAY bestselling author of more than forty novels and novellas. Her books have been nominated for a variety of industry awards, including the prestigious RITA® offered by Romance Writers of America, and she has won the coveted National Readers Choice Award. Her novels have been translated into two dozen languages and published in three dozen countries, and there are more than seven million copies of her books in print worldwide. Although she has claimed as residences Washington, D.C., Virginia, New Jersey and Puerto Rico, she currently lives in her native Kentucky with her husband and son.
Books by Elizabeth Bevarly
SILHOUETTE DESIRE
856—A LAWLESS MAN
908—A DAD LIKE DANIEL * (#litres_trial_promo)
920—THE PERFECT FATHER * (#litres_trial_promo)
933—DR. DADDY * (#litres_trial_promo)
993—FATHER OF THE BRAT † (#litres_trial_promo)
1005—FATHER OF THE BROOD † (#litres_trial_promo)
1016—FATHER ON THE BRINK † (#litres_trial_promo)
1053—ROXY AND THE RICH MAN ‡ (#litres_trial_promo)
1063—LUCY AND THE LONER ‡ (#litres_trial_promo)
1083—GEORGIA MEETS HER GROOM ‡ (#litres_trial_promo)
1124—BRIDE OF THE BAD BOY ** (#litres_trial_promo)
1130—BEAUTY AND THE BRAIN ** (#litres_trial_promo)
1136—THE VIRGIN AND THE VAGABOND ** (#litres_trial_promo)
1184—THE SHERIFF AND THE IMPOSTOR BRIDE
1196—SOCIETY BRIDE
1231—THAT BOSS OF MINE
1252—A DOCTOR IN HER STOCKING * (#litres_trial_promo)
1269—DR. MOMMY * (#litres_trial_promo)
1291—DR. IRRESISTIBLE * (#litres_trial_promo)
1323—FIRST COMES LOVE
1337—MONAHAN’S GAMBLE
1363—THE TEMPTATION OF RORY MONAHAN
1389—WHEN JAYNE MET ERIK
1406—THE SECRET LIFE OF CONNOR MONAHAN
1474—TAMING THE PRINCE
1501—TAMING THE BEASTLY MD
SILHOUETTE SPECIAL EDITION
557—DESTINATIONS SOUTH
590—CLOSE RANGE
639—DONOVAN’S CHANCE
676—MORIAH’S MUTINY
737—UP CLOSE
803—HIRED HAND
844—RETURN ENGAGEMENT
For Wanda, Birgit and Brenda, with thanks for welcoming me into the Harlequin family.
Contents
Chapter 1 (#ueedd2426-bf5c-5ddd-8d62-c6c919965470)
Chapter 2 (#ude4f62af-246c-5106-8751-65e3025e2904)
Chapter 3 (#u3f1dd2d3-5379-5d55-9e67-ecd22511608d)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
1
NATALIE DORSET WAS enjoying her usual Saturday morning breakfast with her landlady when her life suddenly took a turn for the surreal.
Oh, the day had started off normally enough. She had been awakened at her usual weekend hour of 8:30 a.m. by her cat, Mojo, who, as usual, wanted his breakfast—and then her spot in the still-warm bed. And then she had brewed her usual pot of tea—her Fortnum & Mason blend, since it was the weekend—and had opened her usual kitchen window to allow in the cool autumn morning. And then she had fastened her shoulder-length brown hair into its usual ponytail, had forgone, for now, her usual contact lenses to instead perch her usual glasses on her usual nose and, still wearing her blue flannel jammies decorated with moons and stars, she had, as usual, carried the pot of tea down to the first floor kitchen, which Mrs. Klosterman and her tenants generally used as a general meeting/sitting area. It was also where Natalie and Mrs. Klosterman had their usual breakfast together every Saturday morning, as usual.
And now it was also where Mrs. Klosterman was going off the deep end, psychologically speaking. Which was sort of usual, Natalie had to admit, but not quite as usual as the full-gainer she was performing with Olympic precision today. You could just never really tell with Mrs. Klosterman.
“I’m telling you, Natalie,” her elderly landlady said, having barely touched her first cup of tea, “he’s a Mob informant the government has put here for safekeeping. You mark my words. We could both wake up in our beds tomorrow morning to find our throats slit.”
Mrs. Klosterman was referring to her new tenant, having just this past week let out the second floor of her massive, three-story brick Victorian in Old Louisville. Now, only days after signing the lease, she was clearly having second thoughts—though probably not for the reasons she should be having them, should she, in fact, even be having second thoughts in the first place. Or something like that. Mrs. Klosterman did have a habit of, oh, embellishing reality? Yes, that was a polite way of saying she was sometimes delusional.
Natalie had lived in Mrs. Klosterman’s house—occupying the third and uppermost floor, where her landlady claimed the first for herself—for more than five years now, ever since she’d earned her Masters of Education and begun teaching at a nearby high school. Other tenants who had rented out the second floor had come and gone in those years, but Natalie couldn’t bring herself to move, even though she could afford a larger space now, maybe even a small home of her own. She just liked living in the old, rambling house. It had a lot of character. In addition to Mrs. Klosterman, she meant.
And she liked her landlady, too, who didn’t seem to have any family outside her tenants—much like Natalie herself. Because of the tiny population of the building, the house had always claimed a homey feel, since Mrs. Klosterman had, during its renovation into apartments, left much of the first floor open to the public—or, at the very least, to her tenants. At Christmastime, she and Natalie and whoever else was in residence even put up a tree in the front window and exchanged gifts. For someone like Natalie, who’d never had much family of her own, living here with Mrs. Klosterman was the next best thing. In fact, considering the type of family Natalie had come from, living here with Mrs. Klosterman was actually better.
Of course, considering this potential throat-slitting thing with regard to their new neighbor, they might all be sleeping with the fishes before the next Christmas could even come about. And their gifts from the new guy might very well be horses’ heads in their beds. Which, call her stodgy, would just ruin the holiday for Natalie.
Putting aside for now the idea that she and her landlady might wake up with their throats slit, since, according to her—admittedly limited—knowledge of medicine, a person most likely wouldn’t wake up had her throat indeed been slit, and the relative unlikelihood of that happening anyway, she asked her landlady, “Why do you think he’s a Mob informant?”
Really, she knew she shouldn’t be surprised by Mrs. Klosterman’s suspicions. Ever since Natalie had met her, her landlady had had a habit of making her life a lot more colorful than it actually was. (See above comments about the sometimes-delusional thing.) But seeing as how the woman had survived all by herself for the last twenty of her eighty-four years, ever since her husband Edgar’s death, Natalie supposed Mrs. Klosterman had every right to, oh, embellish her reality in whatever way she saw fit. She just wished the other woman would lighten up on the true crime books and confession magazines she so loved. Obviously, they were beginning to take their toll. Or maybe it was just extended age doing that. Or else Mrs. Klosterman was back to smoking her herb tea instead of brewing it. Natalie had warned her about that.
“I can just tell,” the older woman said now. She tugged restlessly at the collar of her oversized muumuu, splashed with fuchsia and lime green flowers, then ran her perfectly manicured fingers—manicured with hot pink nail polish—through her curly, dyed-jet-black hair. Whenever she left the house, Mrs. Klosterman also painted on jet-black eyebrows to match, and mascaraed her lashes into scary jet-black daddy longlegs. But right now, only soft white fuzz hinted at her ownership of either feature. “I can tell by the way he looks, and by the way he acts, and by the way he talks,” she added knowledgeably. “Even his name is suspicious.”
Natalie nodded indulgently. “What, does he wear loud polyester suits and ugly wide neckties and sunglasses even when it’s dark out? Does he reek of pesto and Aqua Velva? Is his name Vinnie ‘The Eraser’ Mancuso, and is he saying he’s here to rub some people out?”
Mrs. Klosterman rolled her eyes at Natalie. “Of course not. He wouldn’t be that obvious. He wears normal clothes, and he smells very nice. But he does talk like a mobster.”
“Does he use the word ‘whacked’ a lot?” Natalie asked mildly.
“Actually, he did use the word ‘whacked’ once when he came to sign the lease,” her landlady said haughtily.
“Did he use it in reference to a person?” Natalie asked. “Preferably a person with a name like ‘Big Tony’ or ‘Light-Loafered Lenny’ or ‘Joey the Kangaroo’?”
Mrs. Klosterman deflated some. “No. He used it in reference to the cockroaches in his last apartment building. I assured him we did not have that problem here, so there would be no whacking necessary.” Before Natalie had a chance to ask another question, her landlady hurried on, “But even not taking into consideration all those other things—”
Which were certainly incriminating enough, Natalie thought wryly.
“—his name,” her landlady continued, “is…” She paused, looking first to the left, then to the right before finishing. And when she finally did conclude her sentence, she scrunched her body low across the table, and dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “His name,” she said quietly, “is…John.”
Now Natalie was the one to roll her eyes. “Oh, yeah. John. That’s a Mob name all right. All your most notorious gangsters are named John. Let’s see, there was John Capone, John Luciano, John Lansky, John Schultz, Baby John Nelson, Pretty John Floyd, Johnny and Clyde…”
“John Dillinger, John Gotti,” Mrs. Klosterman threw in.
Yeah, okay, Natalie thought. But they were the exceptions.
“And it’s not just the John part,” Mrs. Klosterman said. “His full name is John Miller.”
Oh, well, in that case, Natalie thought. Sheesh.
“But he tells everyone to call him ‘Jack,’” her landlady concluded. “So you can see why I’m so suspicious.”
Yep, Natalie thought. No doubt about it. Mrs. Klosterman definitely had been smoking her herb tea again. Natalie would have to find the stash and replace it with normal old oolong, just like last time.
“John Miller,” Natalie echoed blandly. “Mmm. I can see where that name would just raise all kinds of red flags at the Justice Department.”
Mrs. Klosterman nodded. “Exactly. I mean, what kind of name is John Miller? It’s a common one. The kind nobody could trace, because there would be so many of them running around.”
“And the reason your new tenant couldn’t just be another one of those many running around?” Natalie asked, genuinely anxious to hear her landlady’s reasoning for her assumption. Mostly because it was sure to be entertaining.
“He doesn’t look like a John Miller,” she said. “Or even a Jack Miller,” she hastily added.
“What does he look like?” Natalie asked.
Mrs. Klosterman thought for a moment. “He looks like a Vinnie ‘The Eraser’ Mancuso.”
Natalie sighed, unable to stop the smile that curled her lips. “I see,” she said as she lifted her teacup to her mouth for another sip.
“And even though Mr. Miller was the one who signed the lease,” Mrs. Klosterman added, “it was another man who originally looked at the apartment and said he wanted to rent it for someone.”
Which, okay, was kind of odd, Natalie conceded, but certainly nothing to go running around crying, “Mob informant!” about. “And what did that man look like?” she asked, telling herself she shouldn’t encourage her landlady this way, but still curious about her new neighbor.
Mrs. Klosterman thought for a moment. “Now he looked like a John Miller. Very plain and ordinary.” Then her eyes suddenly went wide. “No, he looked like a federal agent!” she fairly cried. “I just now remembered. He was wearing a trench coat!”
Natalie bit her lower lip and wondered if it would do any good to remind Mrs. Klosterman that it was October, and that it wasn’t at all uncommon to find the weather cool and damp this time of year, and that roughly half the city of Louisville currently was walking around in a trench coat, or reasonable facsimile thereof. Nah, Natalie immediately told herself. It would only provoke her.
“I bet he was the government guy who relocated Mr. Miller,” Mrs. Klosterman continued, lowering her voice again, presumably because she feared the feds were about to bust through the kitchen door, since in speaking so loudly, she was about to out their star witness against the Mob, who would then also bust through the kitchen door, tommy guns blazing.
“Mrs. Klosterman,” Natalie began instead, “I really don’t think it’s very likely that your new tenant is—”
“Connected,” her landlady finished for her, her mind clearly pondering things that Natalie’s mind was trying to avoid. “That’s the word I’ve been looking for. He’s connected. And now he’s singing like a canary. And all his wiseguy friends are looking to have him capped.”
Natalie stared at her landlady through narrowed eyes. Forget about the tea smoking. What on earth had Mrs. Klosterman been reading?
“You just wait,” the other woman said. “You’ll see. He’s in the Witness Protection Program. I just have a gut feeling.”
Natalie was about to ask her landlady another question—one that would totally change the subject, like “Hey, how ’bout them Cardinals?”—when, without warning, the very subject she had been hoping to change came striding into the kitchen in the form of Mr. Miller himself. And when he did, Natalie was so startled, both by his arrival and his appearance—holy moly, he really did look like a Vinnie “The Eraser” Mancuso—that she nearly dropped her still-full cup of tea into her lap. Fortunately, she recovered it when it had done little more than splash a meager wave of—very hot—tea onto her hand. Unfortunately, that made her drop it for good. But she scarcely noticed the crash as the cup shattered and splattered its contents across the black-and-white checked tile floor. Because she was too busy gaping at her new neighbor.
He was just so…Wow. That was the only word she could think of to describe him. Where she and her landlady were still relaxing in their nightclothes—hey, it was Saturday, after all—John “The Jack” Miller looked as if he were ready to take on the world. Most likely with a submachine gun.
Even sitting down as she was, Natalie could tell he topped six feet, and he probably weighed close to two hundred pounds, all of it solid muscle. He was dressed completely in black, from the long-sleeved black T-shirt that stretched taut across his broad chest and shoulders and was pushed to the elbows over extremely attractive and very saliently muscled forearms, to the black trousers hugging trim hips and long legs, to the eel-skin belt holding up those trousers, to the pointy-toed shoes of obviously Italian design. His hair was also black, longer than was fashionable, thick and silky and shoved straight back from his face.
And what a face. As Natalie vaguely registered the sensation of hot liquid seeping into her fuzzy yellow slippers, she gaped at the face gazing down at her, the face that seemed to have frozen in place, because Jack Miller appeared to be as transfixed by her as she was by him. His features looked as if they had been chiseled by the gods—Roman gods, at that. Because his face was all planes and angles, from the slashes of sharp cheekbones to the full, sensual mouth to the blunt, sturdy line of his jaw. And his eyes…
Oh, my.
His eyes were as black as his clothing and hair, fringed by dark lashes almost as long as Mrs. Klosterman’s were in their daddy-longlegs phase. But it wasn’t the lashes that were scary on him, Natalie thought as her heart kicked up a robust, irregular rhythm. It was the eyes. As inky as the witching hour and as turbulent as a tempest, Mr. Miller—yeah, right—had the kind of eyes she figured a hit man would probably have: imperturbable, unflappable. Having taught high school in the inner city for five years, she liked to think she could read people pretty well. And usually, she could. But with Mr. Miller—yeah, right—she could tell absolutely nothing about what he might be feeling or thinking.
Until he cried, “Jeez, lady, you tryin’ to burn me alive here or what?”
And then she realized that it wasn’t that Mr. Miller had been transfixed by her. What he’d been transfixed by was the fact that hot tea had splashed on him. Which was pretty much in keeping with Natalie’s impact on the opposite sex. Long story short, she always seemed to have the same effect on men. Eventually, they always started looking at her as if she’d just spilled something on them. With Mr. Miller she was just speeding things up a bit, that was all. Not that she wanted any things to even happen with him, mind you, let alone speed them up. But it was good to know where she stood right off the bat.
And where she stood with Jack Miller, she could tell right away, was that she was stuck on him. In much the same way that melting slush stuck to the side of his car, or a glob of gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe. At least, she could see, that was the way he was feeling about her at the moment.
“I am so sorry,” she said by way of a greeting, lurching to her feet and grabbing for a dish towel to wipe him off. “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
Hastily, she began brushing at her new neighbor’s clothing, then realized, too late, that because of their dark color, she had no idea where her tea might have landed on him, or if it had even landed on him at all. So, deciding not to take any chances, she worked furiously to wipe off all of him, starting at his mouthwateringly broad shoulders and working gradually downward, over his tantalizingly expansive chest, and then his temptingly solid biceps, and then his deliciously hard forearms. And then, just to be on the safe side, she moved inward again, over his delectably flat torso and once more over his tantalizingly expansive chest—you never could be too careful when it came to spilling hot beverages, after all—back up over the mouth-wateringly broad shoulders, and then down over his delectably flat torso again, and lower still, toward his very savory—
“What the hell are you doing?”
The roughly—and loudly—uttered demand was punctuated by Jack Miller grabbing both of Natalie’s wrists with unerring fingers and jerking her arms away from his body. In doing so, he also jerked them away from her own body, spreading them wide, giving himself, however inadvertently, an eyeful of her…Well, of her oversized flannel jammies with the moons and stars on them that were in no way revealing or attractive.
Damn her luck anyway.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Miller,” she apologized again. “I hope I didn’t—”
“How did you know my name?” he demanded in a bristly voice.
She arched her eyebrows up in surprise at his vehemence. Paranoid much? she wanted to ask. Instead, she replied, “Um, Mrs. Klosterman told me your name?” But then she realized that in replying, she had indeed asked him something, because she had voiced her declaration not in the declarative tense, but in the inquisitive tense. In fact, so rattled was she at this point by Mr. Miller that she found herself suddenly unable to speak in anything but the inquisitive tense. “Mrs. Klosterman was just telling me about you?” she said…asked…whatever. “She said you moved in this week? Downstairs from me? And I just wanted to introduce myself to you, too? I’m Natalie? Natalie Dorset? I live on the third floor? And I should warn you? I have a cat? Named Mojo? He likes to roll a golf ball around on the hardwood floors sometimes? So if it bothers you? Let me know? And I’ll make him stop?”
And speaking of stopping, Natalie wished she could stop herself before she began to sound as if she were becoming hysterical. And then she realized it was probably too late for that. Because now Mr. Miller was looking at her as if the overhead light in the kitchen had just sputtered and gone dim.
Although, on second thought, maybe it wasn’t the overhead light in the kitchen that had sputtered and gone dim, Natalie couldn’t help thinking further.
Oh, boy…
“Mr. Miller,” Mrs. Klosterman said politely amid all the hubbub, as if her kitchen hadn’t just been turned into a badly conceptualized sitcom where a newly relocated former mobster moves in with a befuddled schoolteacher and then zany antics ensue, “this is my other tenant, Ms. Natalie Dorset. As she told you, she lives on the third floor. But Mojo is perfectly well-mannered, I assure you, and would never bother anyone. Natalie,” she added in the same courteous voice, as if she were Emily Post herself, “this is Mr. John Miller, your new neighbor.”
“Jack,” he automatically corrected, his voice softer now, more solicitous. “Call me Jack. Everybody does.” He sounded as if he were vaguely distracted when he said it, yet at the same time, he looked as if he were surprised to have heard himself respond.
For one long moment, still gripping her wrists—though with an infinitely gentler grasp now, Natalie couldn’t help noticing—he fixed his gaze on her face, studying her with much interest. She couldn’t imagine why he’d bother. Even at her best, she was an average-looking woman. Dressed in her pajamas, with her hair pulled back and her glasses on, she must look…Well, she must look silly, she couldn’t help thinking. After all, the moons and stars on her pajamas were belting out the chorus of “Moon River,” even if it was only on flannel.
But Mr. Miller didn’t even seem to notice her pajamas, because he kept his gaze trained unflinchingly on her face. For what felt like a full minute, he only studied her in silence, his dark eyes unreadable, his handsome face inscrutable. And then, as quickly and completely as his watchfulness had begun, it suddenly ended, and he released her wrists and dropped his attention to his shirt, brushing halfheartedly at what Natalie could tell now were nonexistent stains of tea.
“’Yo,” he finally said by way of a greeting, still not looking at her. But then he did glance over at Mrs. Klosterman, seeming as if he just now remembered she was present, too. “How youse doin’?” he further inquired, looking up briefly to include them both in the question before glancing nervously back down at his shirt again.
Okay, so he wasn’t a native Southerner, Natalie deduced keenly. Even though she had grown up in Louisville, she’d traveled extensively around the country, and she had picked up bits and pieces of dialects in her travels. Therefore, she had little difficulty translating what he had said in what she was pretty sure was a Brooklyn accent into its Southern version, which would have been “Hey, how y’all doin’?”
“Hi,” she replied lamely. But for the life of her, she couldn’t think of a single other thing to say. Except maybe “You have the dreamiest eyes I’ve ever seen in my life, even if they are what I would expect a Mob informant in the Witness Protection Program to have,” and she didn’t think it would be a good idea to say that, even if she could punctuate it with a period instead of a question mark. After all, the two of them had just met.
“‘Yo, Mrs. Klosterman,” Jack Miller said, turning his body physically toward the landlady now, thereby indicating quite clearly that he was through with Natalie, but thanks so much for playing. “I couldn’t find a key to the back door up in my apartment, and I think it would probably be a good idea for me to have one, you know?”
Mrs. Klosterman exchanged a meaningful look with Natalie, and she knew her landlady was thinking the same thing she was—that Mr. Miller was already scoping out potential escape routes, should the Mob, in fact, come busting through the door with tommy guns blazing.
No, no, no, no, no, she immediately told herself. She would not buy into Mrs. Klosterman’s ridiculous suspicions and play “What’s My Crime?” Mr. Miller wanted the key to his back door for the simple reason that his back door, as Natalie’s did, opened onto the fire escape, and—let’s face it—old buildings were known to go up in flames occasionally, so of course he’d want access to that door.
“I forgot,” Mrs. Klosterman told him now. “I had a new lock put on that door after the last tenant moved out because the other one was getting so old. I have the new key in my office. I’ll get it for you.”
And without so much as a by-your-leave—whatever the hell that meant—her landlady left the kitchen, thereby leaving Natalie alone with her new mobster. Neighbor, she quickly corrected herself. Her new neighbor. Boy, could that have been embarrassing, if she got those two confused.
The silence that descended on the room after Mrs. Klosterman’s departure was thick enough to hack with a meat cleaver. Although, all things considered, maybe that wasn’t the best analogy to use. In an effort to alleviate some of the tension, Natalie braved a slight smile and asked, “You’re not from around here originally, are you?”
He, too, braved a slight smile—really slight, much slighter than her slight smile had been—in return. “You figured that out all by yourself, huh?”
“It’s the accent,” she confessed.
“Yeah, it always gives me away,” he told her. “The minute I open my mouth, everybody knows I’m French.”
She smiled again, the gesture feeling more genuine now. “So what part of France do you hail from?”
His smile seemed more genuine now, too. “The northern part.”
Of course.
She was about to ask if it was Nouvelle York or Nouveau Jersey when he deftly turned the tables on her. “You from around here?”
She nodded, telling herself he was not making a conscious effort to divert attention from himself, but was just being polite. Somehow, though, she didn’t quite believe herself. “Born and bred,” she told him.
“Yeah, you have that look about you,” he said.
“What look?” she asked.
He grinned again, this time seeming honestly delighted by something, and the change that came over him when he did that nearly took her breath away. Before, he had been broodingly handsome. But when he smiled like that he was…She bit back an involuntary sigh as, somewhere in the dark recesses of her brain, an accordion kicked up the opening bars from La Vie en Rose.
“Wholesome,” he told her then. “You look wholesome.”
Oh, and wasn’t that the word every woman wanted to have a handsome man applying to her? Natalie thought. The accordion in her brain suddenly went crashingly silent. “Wholesome,” she repeated blandly.
His smile grew broader. “Yeah. Wholesome.”
Swell.
Oh, well, she thought. It wasn’t like she should be consorting with her new mobster—ah, neighbor—anyway. He really wasn’t her type at all. She preferred men who didn’t use the word “whacked,” even in relation to cockroaches. Men who didn’t dress in black from head to toe. Men who weren’t likely to be packing heat.
Oh, stop it, she commanded herself. You’re being silly.
“Sorry about the tea,” she said for a third time.
He shrugged off her concern. “No problem. I like tea.”
Really.
“And don’t worry about your cat,” he added. “I like cats, too.”
Imagine.
Mrs. Klosterman returned then, jingling a set of keys merrily in her fingers. “Here’s the new key to your back door,” she said as she handed one key to him. “And here’s an extra set of both keys, because you might want to give a set to someone in case of an emergency.”
Natalie narrowed her eyes at her landlady, who seemed to be sending a not-so-subtle signal to her new tenant, because when she mentioned the part about giving the extra set of keys to someone in case of an emergency, she tilted her head directly toward Natalie.
Jack Miller, thankfully, didn’t seem to notice. Or, if he did, he wrote it off as just another one of his landlady’s little quirks. He better sharpen his mental pencil, Natalie thought. Because he was going to have a long list of those by the end of his first month of residence.
“Thanks, Mrs. K,” he said.
Mrs. K?
Mrs. Klosterman tittered prettily at the nickname, and Natalie gaped at her. Not just because she had never in her life, until that moment, actually heard someone titter, but barely five minutes ago, the woman tittering had been worrying about waking up in the morning with her throat slit, and now she was batting her eyelashes at the very man who she’d been sure would be wielding the knife. Honestly, Natalie thought. Sometimes she was embarrassed by members of her own gender. Women could be so easily influenced by a handsome face and a tantalizingly expansive chest, and temptingly solid biceps, and deliciously hard forearms, and a delectably flat torso, and a very savory—
“Now if you ladies will excuse me,” Jack Miller said, interrupting what could have been a very nice preoccupation, “I got some things to arrange upstairs.”
Yeah, like trunks full of body parts, she thought.
No, no, no, no, no. She was not going to submit to Mrs. Klosterman’s ridiculous suggestions. Especially since Mrs. Klosterman herself was apparently falling under the spell of her new mobster. Neighbor, Natalie quickly corrected herself again. Falling under the spell of her new neighbor.
With one final smile that included them both, Jack Miller said, “Have a nice day,” and then turned to take his leave. Almost as an afterthought, he spun around once more and looked at Natalie. “Natalie, right?” he asked, having evidently not been paying attention when Mrs. Klosterman had introduced the two of them. And, oh, didn’t that just boost a woman’s ego into the stratosphere?
Mutely, she nodded.
But instead of replying, Jack Miller only smiled some more—and somehow, Natalie got the impression it was in approval, of all things—then turned a final time and exited the kitchen.
For a long, long time, neither Natalie nor her landlady said a word, as though each was trying to figure out if the last five minutes had even happened. Then Natalie recalled the broken tea cup and spilled tea, and she hastily cleaned up the mess. And then she and Mrs. Klosterman both returned to their seats at the kitchen table, where Natalie poured herself a new cup. In silent accord, the two women lifted their cups of tea, as if, in fact, the last five minutes hadn’t happened.
Finally, though, Natalie leaned across the table, scrunching her body low, just as Mrs. Klosterman had only moments earlier, before Jack Miller had entered the room, when they had been discussing him so freely. And, naturally, she went back to discussing him again.
But of all the troubling thoughts that were tumbling through her brain in that moment, the only thing she could think to remark was, “You said he wore normal clothes.”
“He does wear normal clothes,” Mrs. Klosterman replied. “He just wears them in black, that’s all.”
At least he hadn’t reeked of pesto and Aqua Velva, Natalie thought. Though she did sort of detect the lingering scent of garlic. Then again, that could have just been left over from whatever Mrs. Klosterman had cooked for last night’s dinner.
Or it could have just been the fact that she was reacting like an idiot to her landlady’s earlier suspicions.
“You heard him talk,” Mrs. Klosterman whispered back. “Now you know. He’s a mobster.”
“Or he grew up in Brooklyn,” Natalie shot back. “Or some other part of New York. Or New Jersey. Or Philadelphia. Or any of those other places where people have an accent like that.”
“He’s not a John Miller, though,” Mrs. Klosterman insisted.
And Natalie had to admit she couldn’t argue with that. Just who her new neighbor was, though…
Well. That was a mystery.
JACK MILLER MADE it all the way back to his apartment before he let himself think about the cute little brunette in his landlady’s kitchen. It had never occurred to him that there would be someone else living in the building who might pose a problem. Bad enough he was going to have to keep an eye on the old lady, but this new one…
Oh, jeez, he had behaved like such a jerk. But what the hell was he supposed to do? The way Natalie Dorset had been looking at him, he’d been able to tell she found him…interesting. And the last thing he needed was for her to find him interesting. Never mind that he found her kind of interesting, too. Hey, what could he say? He’d never met a woman who wore singing pajamas. That was definitely interesting. Hell, he’d never met a woman who wore pajamas, period. The women he normally associated with slept in a smile. A smile he himself had put on their faces. And he tried not to feel too smug about that. Really. He did. Honest.
Then he thought about what it would be like to maybe put a smile on Natalie Dorset’s face. And that surprised him, since she wasn’t exactly the type of woman he normally wanted to make smile, especially after just meeting her. What surprised him even more was that the thought of putting a smile on her face didn’t make him feel smug at all. No, what Jack felt when he thought about that was the same thing he’d felt in junior high school at St. Athanasius when he’d wondered if Angela DeFlorio would laugh at him if he asked her to go to the eighth grade mixer—all nerves and knots and nausea.
Ah, hell. He hated feeling that way again. He wasn’t a thirteen-year-old, ninety-pound weakling anymore. Nobody, but nobody, from the old neighborhood messed with Jack these days. They didn’t dare.
Damn. This was not good, having a cute brunette living upstairs. This wasn’t part of the plan at all.
So he was just going to have to remember the plan, he reminded himself. Think about the plan. Focus on the plan. Be the plan. He’d come here to do a job, and he would do it. Coolly, calmly, collectedly, the way he always did the job.
There was, after all, a whacking in the works. And Jack was right in the thick of it. He had come to this town to make sure everything went down exactly the way it was supposed to go down. No way could he afford to be sidetracked by an interesting, big-eyed, singing-pajama-wearing, tea-spilling Natalie Dorset. So he was just going to have to do what he always did when he was trying to keep a low profile—which, of course, was ninety-nine percent of the time.
He’d just have to make sure he stayed out of her way.
2
“WELL, HELLO AGAIN.” The words came out sounding far more casual than Natalie felt. After all, the last person she had expected to run into at the Speed Art Museum was her new downstairs neighbor, Jack “The Alleged” Miller. But there he was, in all his…darkness…standing right behind her when she turned away from the Raphael to enjoy the Titian.
But she enjoyed seeing Jack even more. And not just because of the way his black jeans so lovingly outlined his sturdy thighs and taut tushe, either. Or because of the way his black leather motorcycle jacket hung open over a black T-shirt stretched tight across his expansive chest. Or because his overly long black hair was once again pushed back from his face in a way that made Natalie itch to run her fingers through it. Or because of the odd frisson of heat that exploded in her belly and shot out to every extremity, electrifying her, dizzying her, making her feel breathless and reckless, as if she were on the verge of an extremely satisfying—
Ah…never mind. She just enjoyed seeing him because…because…Well, just because, that was all. And it was an excellent reason, too, by golly.
Despite both her and Mrs. Klosterman’s misgivings about the man’s name, in the week that had passed since her new neighbor had moved in, Natalie had come to think of him as Jack. She had been able to do this because over the course of the week, she’d run into him a few times and whenever she’d greeted him as “Mr. Miller,” he’d always insisted she call him “Jack, please. Mr. Miller is my pop’s name.”
At first, it hadn’t felt right to call him that, and not just because, in spite of telling herself she was silly for doubting him, she really did find herself doubting it was his real name. But, too, he just didn’t seem like the sort of man with whom one would share such intimacies like first names. If anything, he seemed the sort of man who would prefer to go by his last name, if any name at all. But “Miller” didn’t suit him, either. Had his last name been something like Devlin or Steed or Deacon—or even Mancuso—that would have worked. Miller just seemed too…normal. Too common. Too bland. Not that Jack seemed appropriate either, but she had to call him something. Something other than “The Mobster Who Lives on the Second Floor” at any rate, which was how Mrs. Klosterman continued to refer to him.
Natalie, however, still wasn’t convinced of Jack’s, ah, connections. For lack of a better word. Even if she had heard faint strains of Don Giovanni coming up through the floor a few times—it wasn’t like it was the theme from The Godfather. And even if the faint scent of garlic always did linger around his door—lots of people cooked with garlic, Natalie included, and it wasn’t like he reeked of pesto and Aqua Velva. And even if she had seen him toting a bottle of Chianti up the stairs one day when he was bringing in his groceries—maybe he was just planning to make one of those interesting candles out of it. None of that proved anything. Except that he liked Italian food and opera music and that he maybe had a hobby that included hot wax.
He hardly ever used the word whacked as far as Natalie could tell. And not once had she seen him dragging suspiciously heavy black plastic garbage bags out to the Dumpster under cover of darkness. So that was a definite plus. And he’d worn a suit once or twice, too, she’d noticed. Boring, bland suits, too, and they weren’t always black. And he wore them with neckties that were tasteful. Silk, even. And the toes of his shoes weren’t quite as pointy as she’d first thought, and they might have been made someplace other than Italy, possibly even with man-made uppers. So there. Take that, Mrs. “I-know-a-mobster-when-I-see-one” Klosterman.
And now here he was, viewing a visiting art exhibit at the Speed Museum. Totally, totally non-Mob activity, that. Even if he did seem to be preoccupied by the Italian masters.
He appeared to be as surprised to see her as she was to see him, and suddenly, Natalie wished she’d worn something other than the flowing, flowered skirt in shades of fall, and the oversized amber sweater that came down over her fanny. She had thought the outfit feminine and comfortable when she purchased it. Now, though, it just felt frumpy. Jack Miller seemed like the kind of man who went for tight and sleek and bright, and, quite possibly, latex. Not that Natalie cared, mind you. But she did wish she had worn something different. The hiking boots, especially, seemed inappropriate somehow.
“Well, hello to you, too, neighbor,” Jack said in a deep, rough baritone that belied the Mr. Rogers sentiment. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
Natalie looked first left, then right, then back at Jack. “It’s an art museum,” she pointed out. “It’s a nice place.”
He smiled at that. “So it is,” he agreed. “I stand corrected.”
She wasn’t sure what he meant by that, so she pressed onward. “So you’re an art lover, are you?”
He nodded, and fiddled with the program he’d already twisted into a misshapen lump of paper. Vaguely, she wondered what had made him do such a thing. It was as if he were anxious about something. But what was there to feel anxious about in an art museum? This was where people came to escape the pressures of the day.
“Yeah, I like art okay,” he said.
But something in his voice suggested just the opposite. He seemed uncomfortable here somehow. Or maybe he was uncomfortable because he’d seen Natalie here. Maybe he was trying to keep a low profile—that was what people did when they were in the Witness Protection Program, right?—and now he was scared that if Natalie had fingered him, the Mob might, too.
Because, hey, it was common knowledge that mobsters hung out in art museums, she told herself wryly, wanting to smack herself upside the head for her Mrs. Klosterman-like thoughts. If Jack was uncomfortable, it was more likely because she’d made him feel uncomfortable by asking him what she just had. Maybe he was here because he wanted to learn more about art, and he was embarrassed to let her know how unschooled he was on the topic.
She opened her mouth to change the subject—she did, after all, completely sympathize with that whole being-out-of-one’s element thing, since she’d felt out of her element since the day she was born—but he started to talk again before she had a chance.
“Yeah, I especially like the Italian masters,” he said.
But again, he seemed uneasy when he spoke, and instead of looking at Natalie, he was looking at something over her shoulder, as if he couldn’t quite meet her gaze. Oh, jeez, she really had caught him out with her question and embarrassed him, she realized. The male ego, she thought. It was such a fragile thing.
He was probably only saying the Italian masters were his favorite because he’d glanced down at his hastily rear-ranged program, where it read, in part, The Italian Masters. She told herself to just let the matter drop there. But there was something in his voice when he spoke, something kind of tense, something kind of apprehensive—something kind of suspicious, quite frankly—that gave her pause. And still he was looking over her shoulder, not meeting her eyes, as if he were wishing he was anywhere but here.
To alleviate his distress, Natalie decided to step in and take the lead, thereby preventing him from having to say anything that might get him in deeper than he could afford. “I like them, too,” she said. “Especially Michelangelo, but we don’t have any originals by him here, which is a real shame.”
Jack lifted his shoulder and dropped it again in a gesture she supposed was meant to be a shrug. Somehow, though, it came off looking like strong-arming. “I like all of ’em,” he told her.
Of course he did. Poor guy. He was still trying to make her think he was knowledgeable about the subject, clearly trying to preserve his male pride. Next he’d be telling her he didn’t know much about art, but he knew what he liked, since that was the cliché everyone uttered in a situation like this.
“It’s kind of funny, really,” he said. “I know a lot about art, but I’m just not sure what I like.”
Man. He couldn’t even get the clichés right.
“Michelangelo is arguably the master of the masters,” he said. “I mean, I wouldn’t argue it, but some people might. Like you, he’s a favorite for a lot of people.”
Natalie wondered just how deeply he was going to wade into this stuff, and prepared herself to throw him a line if that became necessary by tossing out a few other names to him. Raphael, perhaps, or, Titian, since she’d just been looking at that one herself.
“Raphael, too,” he continued, making her think maybe he’d read his program a little better than she’d first suspected. “Even if he did borrow nearly all of the Big M’s repertory gestures and poses,” he continued, rattling Natalie just the tiniest bit. “He was still a better portraitist. Me, though, I’m more of a Titian kind of guy, I think. He was just so great at that whole opposing the virtuosity of pigments to the intellectual sophistication thing, you know? And the distinction between High Renaissance—all that formalized and classic balance of elements—and Late Renaissance—the more subjective, emotional stuff, not to mention all those bright colors—wasn’t as sharply divided in Venice as it was in the rest of Italy.” He nodded. “Yeah, I like the Venetians, I think. And Uccello. You don’t hear much about him, but you gotta admire the way he tried to jibe the Gothic and the Renaissance stuff. Plus, he had a really great beard. Piero della Francesca’s okay, too, but his portraits have kind of a pedantry without compassion, knowwuddamean?”
Natalie blinked a few times, as if a too-bright flash had gone off right in her face. Wow. He really did know a lot about art. And he really didn’t know what he liked. She was intrigued.
“I, um, I actually prefer the Flemish painters myself,” she said lamely.
Jack swept a hand carelessly in front of himself. “Yeah, well, they were all profoundly influenced by the Italians, you know.”
She did know. But not nearly as well as he did. “So,” she began again, “you come here often?”
That something over her shoulder seemed to catch his eye again, because he suddenly glanced to the left and frowned. As Natalie began to turn around to see what was going on, Jack quickly shifted his body into that direction, taking a few steps forward, as if he wanted to block whatever she was attempting to see. Then he said, “This is my first visit to the museum. What else do you recommend I see?”
So Natalie stopped turning. But it wasn’t his question that halted her. It was the way he extended his hand and curled his fingers around her upper arm and pulled her toward the right, as if he were trying to physically regain her attention, too. And boy, did he. Regain her attention, she meant. Physically, she meant. Because the minute his fingers curled around her arm, another shiver of electricity shimmied through her, right to her fingertips, and another wash of heat splashed through her belly with all the force of white-water rapids.
Jack seemed to feel it, too, because he stopped looking over her shoulder and fixed his gaze on her face, and his eyes went wide in astonishment. Or maybe alarm. Or panic. Natalie couldn’t be sure, because she was too busy feeling all those things herself. And more. Desire. Need. Wanting. Hunger. Yes, she thought she could safely say now what it was like to hunger for something. Someone. Because that was how Jack Miller made her feel when he touched her the way he did.
“I, ah…” she began eloquently.
“Um, I…” he chorused at the same time.
“Gotta go,” they both said as one.
And, just like that, they turned around and sped off in opposite directions.
And as she fled, all Natalie could think was that, for a mobster, he had a very gentle touch. Not to mention exceptionally good taste in art.
JACK WAS KEEPING a close eye on his objective when he ran into Natalie in the art museum a second time. Or, rather, almost ran into her a second time. Fortunately, he saw her before she saw him, so he was able to duck behind a sculpture before any damage had been done.
Damn. So much for staying out of her way.
This was just great, he thought as he pressed his body against the cool stone statue. Now there were two people he had to keep an eye on in this crowd. What was bad was that he would have much rather kept his eye on Natalie than on his objective. What was worse was that his eye wasn’t the only body part he was thinking about when it came to keeping something on Natalie.
But he was obligated, even honor bound, to make the man in the trench coat who was studying the Matisse his priority. Because he was the person Jack had been assigned to take care of—so to speak. Not that there was any real care in what Jack was supposed to do to the man in the trench coat who was studying the Matisse. But he did have a job to do—and there was sort of an art to that job, he reflected—and until he could complete that job, he had to stay focused on it. Even if it was a job he didn’t particularly relish completing. Especially now that Natalie Dorset was lurking around.
Lurking, he echoed to himself. Yeah, right. If there was anyone lurking these days, it was Jack. When had he been reduced to such a thing? he asked himself irritably. And why, suddenly, did his job seem kind of sordid and tawdry? He’d always taken pride in his work before. Before Natalie Dorset had come along looking all squeaky-clean and dewy and wholesome. Ever since meeting her, Jack had felt sinister in the extreme. Which made no sense, because what he did for a living was a highly regarded tradition in his family. His father, his father’s father, his father’s father’s father back in the old country, all of them had been in the same line of work. Jack respected his heritage, and had always taken pride in his birthright. Since meeting Natalie, though, his heritage seemed almost tarnished somehow.
Which really made no sense at all, because he barely knew the woman. Yeah, sure, he’d run into her a few times this week, so he knew her a little. Like, he knew she left for work everyday at 7:30 a.m. on the dot, which meant she was punctual. And he knew she often ate breakfast and dinner with their landlady, Mrs. Klosterman, which made him think she was one of those women who felt obligated to take care of other people. And he knew she drove an old Volkswagen, to which she seemed totally suited, because it was kind of funky, and so was she. Not just because of the singing pajamas she’d been wearing that first morning he met her, but because of the way she dressed at other times, too. Like, for instance, oh, he didn’t know…today. She was sort of a combination of Ralph Lauren and Fishin’ with Orlando. And somehow, on Natalie, it worked.
And Jack knew she taught high school, because he’d seen her downstairs grading papers one evening and asked her about it. A high school teacher, he reflected again. She didn’t seem the type. Hell, where he’d gone to high school in Brooklyn, a teacher who looked like her wouldn’t have lasted through lunch. Jeez, she would have been lunch for some of the guys he’d run around with. But she’d claimed to actually enjoy teaching English to teenagers. She’d assigned James Fenimore Cooper on purpose.
And Jack knew she liked old movies, because he’d come in a couple of nights to find her and Mrs. Klosterman watching movies on TV, black-and-white jobs from the forties. Cary Grant, he’d heard them talking about as he’d climbed the stairs to his apartment. The suave, debonair, tuxedoed type. The leading man type. The type Jack most certainly was not. He preferred to think of himself as more of an antihero. Okay, so maybe he was more anti- than he was hero sometimes. That was beside the point. The point was…
What was the point again?
Oh, yeah. The point was he had no business hiding behind a sculpture sneaking peeks at a woman when he had a job to do. Especially a woman like Natalie Dorset, with whom he had absolutely nothing in common. Maybe if she’d been a combination of Frederick’s of Hollywood and Fishin’ with Orlando, then maybe his attraction to her would have made sense. Or if she’d taught exotic dancing classes instead of high school, and assigned bumps and grinds instead of Natty Bumppo. Or if she’d left for work around ten o’clock every night to serve drinks in some smoky bar. Or if she’d had breakfast and dinner with her bookie. Or if she’d driven a sporty little red number on the verge of being repo’d. Then, maybe his attraction to her wouldn’t have been such a shock. Because women like Natalie Dorset normally didn’t even make it onto Jack’s radar.
She sure was cute, though.
Still, even if Jack did have something in common with her, he still had no business sneaking peeks at her. Or talking to her. Or being preoccupied by her. Or wondering what she looked like naked. But he’d only done that last thing once…okay, maybe twice…okay, five, or at most fifty times, and only because he’d had too much Chianti. Except for all those times when he’d done it while he was sober. But that was only because he’d accidentally come across Body Heat on cable that night. But then there was that time when he’d done it while watching the Weather Channel, too…
Ah, hell.
The point was he was only here to do a job, and that job did not include Natalie Dorset, clothed or unclothed, in or out of his bed. Or on the sofa. Or in the shower. Or atop the kitchen table. The kitchen counter. The kitchen pantry. The kitchen floor…
Um, what was the question again?
Oh, yeah. It wasn’t a question. It was a fact. He could not allow himself to be sidetracked while doing this job. He would just have to avoid Natalie Dorset from here on out, and keep his focus on his target. Who…oh, dammit…seemed to have disappeared.
Jack scanned the crowded museum, starting with the last place he’d seen the man in the trench coat, invariably finding Natalie instead, then forcing his gaze away again, over everyone else in the room. There. He found him. Two paintings down from the one he’d just finished looking at. Jack groaned inwardly. Just how much longer could the guy look at paintings? Jack was ready to go for pizza. And a beer. And a naked high school English teacher.
He threw back his head in disgust with himself, only to have it smack against hard stone. He turned and realized he’d been leaning all this time against a reproduction of Rodin’s The Kiss, and that he’d just bonked his head on a naked breast hard enough to make himself see stars.
Man, oh, man, he thought as he rubbed at the lump that was already beginning to form. This job was going to shorten his life for sure.
AS NATALIE WAS climbing the stairs to her apartment that evening, juggling two bags of groceries she’d picked up on the way home from the museum, she came to a halt in the second floor landing to adjust the strap on her purse. It had nothing to do with the fact that she heard someone inside Jack Miller’s apartment talking. And she only hesitated a moment after completing that adjustment because she needed to rest. It wasn’t because she thought she heard him use the word whacked. Because he might not have said whacked. He might have said fact. Or quacked. Or shellacked. And those were all totally harmless words.
Then again, maybe he’d said hacked, she thought as a teensy little feeling of paranoia wedged its way under her skin. Or smacked. Or even hijacked. Which weren’t so harmless words.
Or maybe he’d said cracked, she thought wryly, since he could have been talking to someone about the mental state of his new upstairs neighbor.
She really had been spending too much time listening to Mrs. Klosterman this week. And she knew better than to take seriously someone who thought The X-Files was a series of documentaries by Ken Burns. Sighing to herself, Natalie finished adjusting her purse strap and shifted her grocery bags to a more manageable position, then settled her foot on the next step.
And then stopped dead in her tracks—and she really wished she’d come up with a better way to think about that than dead in her tracks—because she heard Jack’s voice say, clear as day, “I’ll kill ’im.”
Telling herself she was just imagining things, Natalie turned her ear toward the door, if for no other reason than to reassure herself that she was just imagining things. But instead of being reassured, she heard Jack’s voice again, louder and more emphatic this time, saying, “No, Manny, I mean it. I’m gonna kill the guy. No way will I let ’im get away with that.”
And then Natalie’s world went a little fuzzy, and she had to sit down. Which—hey, whattaya know—gave her a really great seat for eavesdropping on the rest of Jack’s conversation. But when she realized she was hearing only his side, she concluded he must be on the telephone with someone. Still, only his side told her plenty.
There was a long pause after that second avowal of his intent to murder someone, then, “Look, I had him in my sights all day,” she heard Jack continue, “but there was always a crowd around, so an opportunity never presented itself.”
There was more silence for a moment, wherein Natalie assumed the other person was speaking again, then she heard Jack’s voice once more. “Yeah, I know. But it’s not going to be easy. The guy’s so edgy. I never know what he’s gonna do next, where he’s gonna go. What?” More silence, then, “Hey, I know what I’m being paid to do, and I’ll do it. It just might not go down the way we planned, that’s all.”
Holy moly, Natalie thought. He wasn’t a Mob hit man turned Mob informant. He was a Mob hit man period!
No, no, no, no, no, she immediately told herself. There was a perfectly good explanation for what she was hearing. Hey, she herself had wanted to kill more than a few people in her time, including several of her students just this past week, because a lot of them had neglected to do their assigned reading. So just because someone said, “I’ll kill ’im,” didn’t mean that they were going to, you know, kill ’im. And that business about the crowd being around someone, that could have meant anything. And the part about being paid to do something? Well, now, that could be anything, too. He could have been paid to deliver phone books for all Natalie knew.
Yeah, that was it. He was the new phone book delivery guy. That explained all those nice muscles. A person had to be built to haul around those White Pages.
“Don’t worry, Manny,” Jack said angrily on the other side of his door, bringing Natalie’s attention back to the matter at hand. “I came here to do a job, and I’m not leaving until it’s done. You just better hope it doesn’t get any messier than it already has.”
Okay, so maybe he dropped some of the phone books in a puddle and they got dirty, she thought. She could see that. They’d had a lot of rain lately. And those phone books got unwieldy when you tried to carry too many at one time. And those plastic bags they put them in were cheap as hell. It could have happened to anyone.
When Natalie stood up, she still felt a little muzzy-headed, though whether that was because of her initial fright or the profound lameness of her excuses for Jack’s words, she couldn’t have said. In any event, she was totally unprepared for the opening of his door, and even less prepared for when he came barreling out of it, shrugging on his leather motorcycle jacket. And he was obviously un-prepared to find her lurking outside his door, because he kept on coming, nearly knocking her down the steps before he saw her.
Hastily, he grabbed her to steady her before she could go tumbling back down to the living room in a heap. But she overcompensated and hurled her body forward, an action that thrust her right into that muscular phone book-delivering body of his. And that made her drop both bags of groceries, which did spill out and go tumbling back down to the living room.
“Whoa,” Jack said as he balanced her, curling his fingers over her upper arms to do so. “Where’s the fire?”
Gosh, she should probably just keep that information to herself, Natalie thought as heat began seeping through her belly and spreading up into her breasts and down into her…
And that was when she remembered that, among the groceries she’d bought today, was a box of tampons. Oh, damn.
“I am so sorry to run into you,” she said.
And then she could think of not one more thing to utter. Because Jack’s hands on her arms just felt too yummy for words, strong and gentle at the same time. Hands like his would be equally comfortable sledgehammering solid rock or stroking a woman’s naked flesh, she thought. And speaking for herself, she would have been equally happy watching him do either.
“No, I’m the one who ran into you, so I’m the one who’s sorry,” he told her, his fingers still curving gently over her arms.
In fact, his thumbs on the insides of her arms moved gently up and down, as if he were trying to calm her. Which was pretty ironic, seeing as how the action only incited her to commit mayhem. Preferably on his person. ASAP. That fire he’d asked about leaped higher inside her, threatening to burn out of control.
“I wasn’t watching where I was going,” he added. “You okay?”
She nodded, even though okay was pretty much the last thing she felt at the moment. “Yeah,” she said a little breathlessly. “I’m okay. You just, um, startled me, that’s all.”
For a moment, neither of them said anything more. Natalie only continued to stand staring up at Jack, marveling at how handsome he was, and Jack gazed back down at her, thinking she knew not what. But she wished she did. She wished she could read his mind at that moment and know what his impression of her was. Because he was making an awfully big impression on her.
Finally, softly, “Let me help you pick this stuff up,” he offered.
And before Natalie could decline, he was stooping to collect the nearly empty grocery bags and scooping up the few items that hadn’t gone down the stairs. Like, for instance—of course—the tampons. Amazingly, though, he didn’t bat an eye, didn’t even hesitate as he picked them up and tossed them back into the paper sack. He only glanced up at her and smiled and said, “I got sisters,” and his casualness about it went a long way toward endearing him to Natalie. It also convinced her she had misunderstood whatever he’d been talking about on the phone. Because no Mob hit man could possibly handle a box of tampons that comfortably. It was odd logic, to be sure, but it comforted her nonetheless.
She bent, too, then, to collect her things, wincing at the scattered strawberries. “Oh, damn,” she said when she saw them.
By now, Jack was at the foot of the steps, gathering the items that had made their way down there, placing them into the sack he’d carried with him. “What’s wrong?” he called up.
“My strawberries,” she said. “I love them. And they’re so hard to find this time of year. Not to mention so expensive when I do find them.” She blew out an exasperated breath as she carefully gathered them up and placed them back into their plastic basket. “Maybe I can salvage a few of them,” she said morosely.
Jack made his way back up the steps just as she was dropping the last of her groceries back into her own sack. “I’ll help you get these upstairs,” he told her.
“That’s okay,” she said. “I can manage.”
“It’s the least I can do,” he insisted.
She relented then. “Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
As he followed her the rest of the way up, Natalie was acutely aware of him behind her. She knew he couldn’t be watching her—with the way she was dressed, what was there to see?—but somehow, she felt the heat of his gaze boring into her. It only added to her already frazzled state, jacking up the fire that was already blazing away in her midsection. But that was nothing compared to the inferno that fairly exploded when they reached her front door.
Thanks to her nervousness, when Natalie went to unlock it, she dropped her keys, which then skittered off the top step and threatened to go tumbling down the way her groceries had. But Jack deftly caught them before they could go too far, then stepped up behind her on the third floor landing, which she’d never, until that moment, considered especially small.
But with Jack crowding her from behind, it was very small indeed. Small enough that he had to press his front lightly to her back when he stood behind her, so that she could smell the clean, soapy, non-Aqua Velva scent of him and feel the heat of his body mingling with the heat of her own. Especially when he leaned forward and snaked his arm around her to unlock her front door himself. But he had a little trouble managing the gesture, and had to take yet another step forward, bumping his body even more intimately against hers, working the key into the slot until it turned and the door opened. And every time he shifted his body to accommodate his efforts, he rubbed against Natalie, creating a delicious sort of friction unlike anything she’d ever experienced before.
Strangely, even after he’d managed to get the door open, he didn’t move away from her. Instead, he continued to hold his body close to hers, as if he were reluctant to put any distance between the two of them. Which was just fine with Natalie, since she could stand here like this all night. It was, after all, the closest thing she’d had to a sexual encounter for some time. Now if she could just think of some acceptable excuse for why she had to suddenly remove her clothing…
“You, uh, you wanna go inside?” Jack asked as she pondered her dilemma.
And then Natalie realized the reason he hadn’t moved away from her was simply because he was waiting for her to move first. And because she’d only stood there like an imbecile, he was probably thinking she was, well, an imbecile. Either that, or he was thinking she’d been enjoying the feel of his body next to hers too much to want to end it, and might possibly be grappling for some acceptable excuse for why she had to suddenly remove her clothing, and how embarrassing was that? Especially since he was right.
“Oh, yeah,” she said, forcing her feet forward. “Sorry. I was just thinking about something.”
Like how nice it would be to have her door opened this way every night. And how nice it would be if Jack followed her into her apartment every night. And how nice it would be if they spent the rest of the night rubbing their bodies together every night.
Oh, dear.
Hastily, she strode to her minuscule galley kitchen and set her bag of groceries on what little available counter space was there. Jack followed and did likewise, making the kitchen feel more like a closet. He was just so big. So overwhelming. So incredibly potent. She’d never met a man like him before, let alone have one rub up against her the way he had, however involuntary the action had been on his part.
The moment he settled his bag of groceries on the counter, he turned and took a few steps in the opposite direction, and Natalie told herself he was not trying to escape. As she quickly emptied the bags and put things in their proper places, he prowled around her small living room, and she got the feeling it was because he wasn’t quite ready to leave. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on her part. In any event, however, he made no further move to escape. Uh, leave.
“You got a nice place here,” he said as he looked around.
And why did he sound as if he made the observation grudgingly? she wondered. She, too, looked around her apartment, trying to see it the way someone would for the first time. Five years of residence and a very small space added up to a lot of clutter, she realized. But he was right—it was nice clutter. Natalie wasn’t the type to go for finery, but she did like beautiful things. After she’d graduated from college and found this apartment, she’d haunted the antique shops and boutiques along Third Street and Bards-town Road and Frankfort Avenue, looking for interesting pieces to furnish her very first place. Her college dorm had been stark and bland and uninteresting, so she’d deliberately purchased things of bold color and intrepid design, striving more for chimerical than practical, fun instead of functional.
Her large, overstuffed, Victorian velvet sofa, the color of good merlot, had been her one splurge. The coffee table had started life as an old steamer trunk, and the end tables were marble-topped, carved wooden lyres. An old glass cocktail shaker on one held dried flowers, a crystal bowl overflowing with potpourri took up most of the other. Her lamps were Art Deco bronzes, and ancient Oriental rugs covered much of the hardwood floor. Dozens of houseplants spilled from wide window ledges, while other, larger ones sprung up from terra-cotta pots. Brightly colored majolica—something she’d collected since she was a teenager—filled every available space leftover.
All in all, she thought whimsically, not for the first time, the place looked like the home of an aging, eccentric Hollywood actress who’d never quite made it to the B-List. It was the sort of place she’d always wanted to have, and she was comfortable here.
Nevertheless, she shrugged off Jack’s compliment almost literally. “Thanks. I like it.” And she did.
“Yeah, I do, too,” he told her. “It’s…homey,” he added, again seeming somewhat reluctant to say so. “Interesting. Different from my place.”
His place, she knew, was a furnished apartment, but it was much like the rest of Mrs. Klosterman’s house, filled with old, but comfortable things. Still, it lacked anything that might add a personal touch, whereas Natalie’s apartment was overflowing with the personal. And that did indeed make a big difference.
She had expected him to leave after offering those few requisite niceties, but he began to wander around her living room, instead, looking at…Well, he seemed to be looking at everything, she thought. Evidently, he’d been telling the truth when he said he found the place interesting, because he shoved his hands into the back pockets of his black jeans and made his way to her overcrowded bookcase, scanning the titles he found there.
“Oh, yeah,” he said as he read over them. “I can tell you’re an English teacher. Hawthorne, Wharton, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Twain, James.” He turned around to look at her. “You like American literature, huh?”
She nodded. “Especially the nineteenth century. Though I like the early twentieth century, too.”
He turned back to the bookcases again. “I like the guys who came later,” he told her. “Faulkner. Fitzgerald. Kerouac. Hemingway. I think The Sun Also Rises is the greatest book ever written.”
Natalie silently chided herself for being surprised. How often had she herself been stereotyped as the conservative, prudish, easily overrun sort, simply because of the way she dressed and talked, and because of her job? How often had she been treated like a pushover? A doormat? A woman who was more likely to be abducted by a gang of leisure suit-wearing circus freaks than to find a husband after the age of thirty-five? Too many times for her to recall. So she shouldn’t think Jack Miller was a brainless thug, simply because of the way he dressed and talked. Of course, she didn’t think he was a brainless thug, she realized. She thought he was…
Well. She thought of him in ways she probably shouldn’t.
“I’d have to argue with you,” she told him as she folded up the paper sacks and stowed them under her kitchen sink. “I think The Scarlet Letter is the greatest book ever written.”
He turned again to look at her. “I can see that,” he said. “You don’t seem the type to suffer hypocrites.”
She wondered what other type she seemed—or didn’t seem—to him. And she wondered why she hoped so much that whatever he thought of her, it was good. Then she surprised herself by asking him, “Have you had dinner yet?”
He seemed surprised by the question, too, because he straightened and dropped his hands to his sides, suddenly looking kind of uncomfortable. “No, I was just on my way out to grab something when I…when you…when we…Uh…I was just gonna go out and grab something.”
She hoped she sounded nonchalant when she said, “You’re welcome to join me for dinner here. I wasn’t planning anything fancy. But if you’re not doing anything else…?”
For one brief, euphoric moment, she thought he was going to accept her offer. The look that came over his face just made her think he wanted very much to say yes. But he shook his head slowly instead.
“I can’t,” he told her. “I have to meet a guy.” And then, as if it were an afterthought, he added, “Maybe another time.”
Natalie nodded, but she didn’t believe him, mostly because of the afterthought thing. And she didn’t take his declining of her invitation personally. Well, not too personally. It was just as well, really. She didn’t need to be sharing her table with a hit man anyway. There wouldn’t be any room for his gun.
“Some other time,” she echoed in spite of that.
And later, after Jack was gone and she and Mojo were home alone, she tried not to think about how her apartment seemed quieter and emptier than it ever had before. And she tried not to hope that Jack’s some other time had been sincere.
3
TWO SATURDAYS AFTER Natalie first met Jack in Mrs. Klosterman’s kitchen under less than ideal circumstances, she met him there a second time. Under less than ideal circumstances.
Since his arrival two weeks earlier, she had made it a practice to get dressed and put in her contact lenses before leaving her apartment, but, hey, it was Saturday—and she hadn’t seen him around the place on the weekends—so she hadn’t dressed particularly well today. Her blue jeans were a bit too raggedy for public consumption, and her oatmeal-colored sweater was a bit too stretched out to look like anything other than a cable knit pup tent. Nevertheless, she was comfortable. And, hey, it was Saturday.
On the upside, Jack hadn’t dressed any better than she had. And he hadn’t dressed in black, either—well, not entirely. In fact, his blue jeans were even more tattered than hers were, slashed clear across both knees from seam to seam, faded and frayed and smudged here and there with what she assured herself couldn’t possibly be blood. And the black shirt he’d paired them with was faded, too, untucked and half-unbuttoned. On the downside, he had a better reason for being dressed that way than her lame hey, it is Saturday. Because he was lying prone beneath Mrs. Klosterman’s sink, banging away on the pipes with something metallic-sounding that she really hoped wasn’t a handgun.
Oh, stop it, she told herself. After all, not even mobsters fixed their kitchen sinks with handguns. They could blow their drains out.
Mrs. Klosterman, however, was nowhere in sight, which was strange, because she usually arrived for their Saturday morning breakfasts together before Natalie did. Ah, well. Maybe she was sleeping late for a change. It was a good morning for it, rainy and gray and cold. Natalie would have slept late herself, if her dear—and soon to be dearly departed, if he didn’t stop waking her up so friggin’ early on Saturdays—Mojo would have let her.
“Good morning,” she said to Jack as she placed her teapot carefully on the table. The last thing she needed to do was spill something on him again, after that disastrous episode the first time she met him.
But her greeting must have surprised him, because the metallic banging immediately stopped, only to be replaced by the dull thump of what sounded very much like a forehead coming into contact with a drain pipe. And then that was replaced by a muffled “Ow, dammit!” And then that was replaced by a less-muffled word that Natalie normally only saw Magic Markered on the stall doors in the bathroom at school.
Okay, so maybe he would have preferred she spill something on him again. Because he sure hadn’t used that word two weeks ago.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
The legs that had been protruding from beneath the sink bent at the knee, punctuated by the scrape of motorcycle boots on linoleum. Then Jack’s torso appeared more completely—and my, but what a delectable torso it was, too—followed by the appearance of his face. And my, but what a delectable face it was, too. Natalie wasn’t sure she would ever get used to how handsome he was, his face all planes and angles and hard, masculine lines. It was as if whatever Roman god had sculpted him had used Adonis—or maybe a young Marlon Brando—as a model.
Of course, she reminded herself, she wouldn’t have an opportunity to get used to how handsome he was. They ran into each other only occasionally, and he’d made clear his lack of interest in seeing any more of her. Oh, he was friendly enough, but she could tell that was all it was—friendliness. Common courtesy. She hadn’t invited him to join her for dinner again after his initial rebuff, however polite it had been. But he hadn’t brought up the “another time” thing, either. There was no point in trying to pursue something that wasn’t going to happen.
Which was just as well, anyway, because she still wasn’t entirely sure about who or what he was, or why he was even here. She still recalled his half of the phone conversation she had overheard a week ago, and even if it didn’t prove he was up to something illegal, it did suggest he was up to something temporary. He’d told whomever he was talking to that he’d come here to do a job, and that he wasn’t leaving until he’d done it. Which indicated he would be leaving eventually. So it would have been stupid for Natalie to pursue any sort of romantic entanglement with him. Had he even offered some indication that he was open to entangling with her romantically.
“No problem,” he said as he sat up. But he was rubbing the center of his forehead, which sort of suggested maybe there was a bit of a problem. Like a minor concussion, for instance.
She winced inwardly. “I really am sorry,” she apologized again.
“Really, it’s fine,” he told her. “I have a hard head.”
Which had to come in handy when one made one’s living by knocking heads together, she thought before she could stop herself.
“You’re up early for a Saturday,” he continued, dropping his hand to prop his forearm on one knee.
His shirt gaped open when he did, and Natalie saw that the chest beneath was matted with dark hair, and was as ruggedly and sharply sculpted as his facial features were. Nestled at the center, dangling from a gold chain, was a plain gold cross, and she found the accessory curious for him. And not just because he seemed like the sort of man who would normally shun jewelry, either. But also because he seemed too irreverent for such a thing.
“I’m always up by now,” she said. “Mrs. Klosterman and I have our tea together on Saturday mornings. In fact, she usually gets here before I do.”
“Mrs. K was here when I came down,” Jack said. “She was having problems with the sink, and I told her I could fix it for her, if she had the right tools. I found them in the basement, but by the time I got back up here, she had her coat on and said she had to go out for a little while.”
Now that was really strange, Natalie thought. Mrs. Klosterman never went anywhere on Saturday before noon. And sometimes she never left the house at all on the weekends.
“Did she say where she was going?” she asked.
Jack shook his head. “No. Should she have?” Natalie shrugged, but still felt anxious. “Not necessarily. Did you notice if she’d painted on jet-black eyebrows, and mascaraed her lashes into scary jet-black daddy longlegs?”
Now Jack narrowed his eyes at Natalie, as if he were worried about her. “No…” he said, drawing the word out over several time zones. “I don’t think she did. I didn’t really notice anything especially arachnid about her appearance.”
Wow, that wasn’t like Mrs. Klosterman, either, to go out without her eyebrows and daddy longlegs. “Gee, I hope everything’s okay,” Natalie said absently.
“She seemed fine to me,” Jack said. “But that’s interesting, now that I think about it, that stuff about the mascara and eyebrows. My great-aunt Gina does the same thing.”
Aunt Gina, Natalie echoed to herself, nudging her concern for Mrs. Klosterman to the side. Hmm. Wasn’t Gina an Italian name?
And what if it was? she immediately asked herself. Lots of people were Italian. And few of them fixed kitchen sinks with handguns. Inescapably, she glanced at Jack’s hands, only to find the left one empty, and the right one wielding not a weapon, but a wrench.
See? she taunted herself. Don’t you feel silly now?
Well, she did about that. But she couldn’t quite shake her worry about her landlady. Why hadn’t Mrs. Klosterman mentioned her need to go out this morning? Not that Natalie was kept apprised of all of her landlady’s comings and goings, and you could just never really tell with Mrs. Klosterman. But the two of them did sort of have a standing agreement to have breakfast together on Saturdays, and if one of them couldn’t make it, she let the other know in advance.
“What’s the matter?” Jack asked. “You look worried. Like maybe you think Mrs. K is sleeping with the fishes or something.”
Natalie arched her own eyebrows at that. Now, of all the things he could have said, why that? Why the reference to sleeping with the fishes? Why hadn’t he said something like, You look worried. Like maybe you think she’s in trouble. Or Like maybe you think she’s lying dead in a ditch somewhere. Or even Like maybe you think she’s been abducted by aliens who’ve dropped her in the Bermuda Triangle along with Elvis and Amelia Earhart and that World War II squadron they never found. Anything would have made more sense than that sleeping with the fishes reference.
Unless, of course, he was connected.
No, Natalie told herself firmly. That wasn’t it at all. He was just making a joke. A little Mob humor? she wondered. No, just a joke, she immediately assured herself.
“No, it’s not that,” she said. “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. She and I usually have breakfast together, that’s all, and it’s odd that she didn’t tell me she needed to go out this morning. But you know, you can just never really tell with Mrs. Klosterman.”
Jack nodded. “Well then, since she’s not here to have breakfast with you, how about I take her place?”
This time it was Natalie’s turn to be surprised. Not just because of his offer, but because of the natural way he made it. Like he thought she wouldn’t be surprised that he would want to have breakfast with her. So what could she do but pretend she wasn’t surprised at all?
“Sure,” she said, hoping that wasn’t a squeak she heard in her voice. “Fine,” she added, thinking that might be a squeak she heard in her voice. “Tea?” she asked, noting a definite squeak in her voice.
Jack grinned. “Actually, I’m more of a coffee drinker. But that’s okay. Mrs. K put a pot on for me before she left.”
Natalie nodded dumbly, just now noticing the aroma of coffee in the air. Probably she hadn’t noticed it before because she’d been too busy noticing, you know, how handsome Jack was, and the way his shirt was only halfway buttoned, and how the chest beneath was matted with dark hair, and—
Well. Suffice it to say she probably hadn’t noticed it before now because she’d had her mind on other things.
She watched as Jack heaved himself up to standing, tossed the wrench into the sink with a clatter, then crossed the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee. And why each of those actions, which should have been totally uninteresting, should fascinate her so much was something Natalie decided not to ponder. But the way the man moved…Mmm, mmm, mmm. There was a smoothness and poetry to his manner that belied the ruggedness of his appearance, as if he were utterly confident in and thoroughly comfortable with himself. Natalie couldn’t imagine what that must be like. She constantly second-guessed herself and she never moved smoothly.
Probably she put too much thought into just about everything, but she didn’t know any other way to be. Jack Miller, on the other hand, didn’t seem the type to waste time wondering if what he was doing was the right thing. Or the smart thing. Or the graceful thing. Or the anything else thing. He just did what came naturally, obviously convinced it was the right, smart, graceful or anything else thing to do. And from where Natalie was sitting, he did his thing very, very well. There was something extremely sexy about a man who was confident in and content with himself and who didn’t feel obligated to make an impression on anyone.
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