On Thin Ice (4 page)

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Authors: Susan Andersen

BOOK: On Thin Ice
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Which was why the expression currently gracing Connie's face piqued Sasha's curiosity. For it held her usual humor as well as the edge of cynicism that Sasha was accustomed to seeing. But there was something else there also. Attraction, perhaps, but if so, it was one that appeared to repel almost as much as it enticed.
“Whew.” Sasha propped her chin on her hand, finished chewing the last of her sandwich, and with unabashed interest observed her friend across the table. “I wish you could see your face,” she said. “I don't think I've ever seen you look quite this way.” She studied her a few moments longer. “No fooling, Connie,” she finally said thoughtfully. “If he can pull this sort of response out of you, I most definitely look forward to meeting this guy.”
T
HREE
Sasha missed out on having that particular opportunity granted by no more than fifteen seconds. Her introduction to the new manager, had he been just a heartbeat or two slower, would have taken place in her very own hotel room, where Mick was in the midst of installing a tap on her phone.
Utilizing an extensive if particularly vicious vocabulary to steadily berate himself under his breath, he hastily screwed the receiver back together and slipped from her room, fading from sight around a bend in the corridor just seconds—
seconds,
damnit!—before Miller and Nakamura stepped off the elevator. Leaning back against the wall, he shoveled his fingers through his hair and blew out a deep breath.
Christ, that was too damn close for comfort. He couldn't believe he'd nearly let himself get caught in the act like some goddamn neophyte. You'd thick he'd just fallen off the proverbial truck.
The close shave made his eyes narrow. Wouldn't it have been just too slick for words to have gotten trapped in her room like some rank amateur? Sighing, he pushed away from the wall and walked slowly back to his room. The mockery he perceived was most likely only in his own overworked imagination, but the sound of feminine chatter seemed to snigger as it followed him like a pointing finger down the hallway.
He must be losing his touch. If he hadn't left the door ajar, he wouldn't have heard the elevator reach the floor and Nakamura conveniently call Miller by name as the doors were opening. In which case, the game would have been over before it had even begun. Sheer blind luck had saved his butt, and depending on that in this business could buy an agent a quick and painful death.
So, okay, bugging had never been his forte, and ordinarily he left it to the techs. But that was no excuse. He had damn well better
make
it one of his strong points, because they hadn't bothered to apply for a Title 3 intercept. In other words they were foregoing the court order in this case and winging it.
That gave him a laugh, albeit a somewhat weary one. What they, Vinicor? Is there anybody here but us chickens?
He
was winging it, and no one else. Out in left field, all alone. Flying solo.
Again.
The point was, with a gig that moved around as much as this one did, he was going to have to go through this again and again in every damn city they moved to. Not that it should present a particular problem from this point forward. As the manager he'd be in control of room assignments and could therefore get to Miller's room before she even checked in. Theoretically.
The real problem here was his state of mind regarding this assignment: his attitude was in serious need of adjustment. He'd only been on the job two stinking hours and already he was mishandling it left and right.
Fuck up number one was . . . using language like that in public. He was so accustomed to scamming dealers and the big-money men who supplied them, so used to associating with other lowlifes of their ilk, that he forgot not everyone in the world peppered their language with casual obscenities.
On the other hand, neither had he realized there were still people in the world as tight-assed as that Corselli woman. Hell, even his mother had been known to utter the infamous “F” word once in awhile. Well, once anyhow.
Okay, okay. Mom would have snatched him by the ear and dragged him to the nearest rest room to wash his mouth out with soap if she could've heard him this afternoon.
“Face it,” he decided in self-disgust, “first day out and you screwed up big-time.” Usually
A Closed Mouth Gathers No Feet
was his anthem, a credo to live by, and he just naturally kept his lips zipped in a new situation until he knew damn good and well what the lay of the land was. Once that was established, he blended seamlessly into his environment.
Instead he'd arrived at this assignment with a ready-made attitude, as if he didn't have to try as hard because these were only skaters that he was dealing with and—face it—how tough could they be?
He had always taken a great deal of pride in knowing that he was giving his very best to each and every assignment. But it was going to be a little tough maintaining his sterling record or even honestly calling himself a professional if he continued to coast on this one. Particularly in view of the fact that he'd be doing so simply because this was a case that didn't strike him as being as crucial as the jobs he was accustomed to handling.
Besides, ole Henry Chambers would be ashamed of him.
He'd waylaid Chambers in his hotel room on the last night of the Follies run in San Francisco. Pulling out his shield and ID, he'd held it up for the man to see the minute he'd opened the door. “Henry Chambers?”
“Yes?” The man had looked from Mick's face to the San Francisco operative who was with him, and then stared at the DEA credentials presented to him. After a painstaking study of each identification card, he'd handed them back, looked up, and met Mick's eyes once again, clearly perplexed.
“I'm Special Agent Mick Vinicor of the Drug Enforcement Administration. This is Special Agent Erik Bell.” Mick had been at his most authoritative, knowing that it tended to intimidate people into doing what he wanted them to do. “We'd like to come in for a moment and speak to you.”
He had to hand it to the man; Chambers hadn't been a pushover. He'd let them in, and he'd listened to their abbreviated summary of the situation—with the suspect's name deleted—and the reasons therein why Mick needed to take over his position with the Follies. But he hadn't for one moment been placated when Special Agent Bell had tersely suggested that he, “Just think of it as a vacation for yourself with full pay.”
It wasn't until Mick finally lost patience and snapped, “Listen, if you want to do this the hard way just say the word and I'll shut down the whole damn operation until I can finish conducting my investigation,” that Chambers had caved in . . . and even then it had been with a few conditions of his own.
He had earned Mick's respect.
He'd also made it quite clear, when giving Mick a crash course in his job, that he had a particular soft spot for Sasha Miller. Mick knew Chambers wouldn't reciprocate the esteem in which he was held if he knew Mick was failing to extend Miller the respect that Chambers seemed to think she was due. But Mick could rectify that, and he would. From this moment on, he'd extend respect like it was going out of style.
Mick Vinicor was going to show her the same regard he would offer to any other quarry he was planning to bring down.
 
 
Sasha got her first good look at the much-lauded new manager that night. She ran into him at the arena just before her first evening performance and understood immediately what Connie had been trying to tell her about the man. His impact ranked right up there with being slugged in the solar plexus by a giant unseen fist.
She should have been clued in by all the talk that had spread like wildfire throughout the line women's dressing room. With time to kill before she was due on the ice for her first number, she had as usual been hanging out with the line skaters in their locker room.
As an Olympic medalist she was entitled to a private or semiprivate dressing room, but it was a perk she'd passed on her very first week with the show and she'd never seen a reason to go back on her refusal. She simply wasn't comfortable copping a star attitude, and besides, it could get very lonely being set apart from all the other skaters.
Since everyone paid their own room tabs, a few of the show's stars did elect to stay at more expensive hotels than the rest of the cast could afford. Not Sasha. On the contrary, the first year she had skated with the Follies she'd actually roomed with several other women. The lack of privacy had quickly palled and she had given that up, but still she preferred the closeness to be found sharing travel and accommodations with the rest of the cast and crew.
That night the locker room was abuzz. In retrospect Sasha realized Vinicor was the hot topic of the evening, but it hadn't sunk in immediately for she had barely walked into the room when she caught her costume on the sharp edge of an open locker door. A seam ripped, beadwork scattered, and her whispered impieties momentarily overshadowed the snatches of conversation that she heard but didn't actually assimilate until much later.
Connie went to get the wardrobe mistress while Sasha got gingerly down on her hands and knees to retrieve the tiny sequins, rhinestones, and small crystal beads that had bounced their widely separate ways across the grimy floor. Eventually the costumer arrived, declared the damage too extensive for a quickie repair, ordered Sasha out of the outfit, and trotted off to fetch an alternate costume.
The locker room had cleared out, the line skaters out in the arena for the opening production number, by the time Sasha had pulled everything together for the second time. Whispering a curse when she saw the time, she snatched up her skates in one hand, and dashed from the room.
And ran smack-dab into a solid wall.
She heard it say “Oof” as she bounced off its hard surface. Clutching the skates to her stomach before they could slide out of her grasp, she reached out her free hand not only to steady herself but as a characteristically tactile way of apology. It grabbed onto warm, hard flesh.
“I'm sorry,” she gasped to the T-shirt-covered collarbone a scant inch from her eyes. “I should have been looking where I was going.” Her hand squeezed the forearm beneath her fingers as her eyes began to rise. “Forgive me. I swear I'm normally not this rude but it's been the craziest damn night. My costume tore, I'm running late, and I . . .”
Her eyes reached his face and she felt as if someone had stomped the wind right out of her. Struggling to catch a breath, she stared.
This had to be Mick Vinicor and Connie was right, he wasn't handsome. He wasn't a frog or anything, but his features certainly were nothing to write home about. They were just sort of run of the mill . . . except for his teeth, which were orthodontia perfect and toothpaste-ad white, like something out of the glossies. She backed up a step in order to view him more clearly, her mind racing as she attempted to figure out exactly where his appeal lay.
Weathered and muscular—masculine wasn't such an inept description after all, she decided dazedly. He was a presence to be reckoned with, exuding something that was nearly . . . animalistic, even if she couldn't quite pin down its origin. His hair was brown, his eyes were blue, nothing spectacular about the shade of either. But there was an intensity about him that was palpable as a force field, and it radiated from his eyes, was hinted at by his posture, giving him a vitality that made him seem almost . . . dangerous. But that, of course, was patently absurd.
Wasn't it?
Well, whether it was or it wasn't, she couldn't quite see this guy as a business major, but then again the good Lord knew she wasn't always the most astute judge of character. Just look at her blind defense of Lonnie. She hadn't been able to see him as a drug dealer, either, and she would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that she'd known his character as well as she knew her own.
It felt as though she had stood there for an age just gaping at the new manager, but in actuality her assessment was made quite speedily. She noted his height, which was average, perhaps five eleven, maybe six feet. Then she noted his build, and it nearly stopped her heart for an instant. A ridiculous reaction, undoubtedly, but there it was; in spite of the multitude of athletic builds she had seen in her many years on the circuit, she'd never before come across anyone who'd made quite this sort of impact on her. He was wearing a plain old white T-shirt and a pair of charcoal Dockers, and while she wondered in a distracted corner of her mind how he kept from freezing to death in this drafty back hallway, his clothing was certainly nothing she hadn't seen a dozen times before on a dozen different guys.
Yet on him they somehow managed to look extraordinary. No two ways about it, the man was built. Wide shoulders, solid chest, well-developed biceps, muscular forearms. Her eyes skimmed past the expensive-looking watch on his wrist to his large hands.
Her gaze snapped back to the watch. She grabbed him by the wrist and turned it until she could see the face of the timepiece. “Oh, damn!” Dropping his arm she turned to sprint away. “Sorry again about barging into you,” she called back over her shoulder and then laughed when it hit her how demented she must appear to him. First she'd practically bowled him over and then she'd just stood there like a dufus with her tongue all but hanging out while she stared at him. Wasn't chemistry a grand thing? Skates clattering against her hip, she raced down the concrete passage.
Mick stood in the middle of the corridor and watched her until she disappeared. Then he slowly followed her down the hallway.
She wasn't at all what he had prepared himself for. He'd known she'd be pretty from her picture, but he had expected there to be a hardness about her in real life. Instead it turned out that the black and white photograph hadn't even done her justice.
In the flesh she was a warm golden color with touches of rose. Her eyes were pale gray rimmed with darker gray and they contained tiny flecks of gold near the pupils. Her hair was abundant, a black curly cloud that looked wild and soft.

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