One Hit Wonderful (26 page)

She rose from her desk and walked out to poke her head out into the reception area. “Jason?”

The day clerk looked up from his inorganic chemistry book, a guilty flush staining his cheeks as he slammed it closed and shoved it under the counter. “I’m sorry, Ms. Michaels,” he stammered, but she waved him off.

“It’s okay, Jason. It’s slow today, and I know you’ve got a test coming up.”

He sighed with relief. “Thanks.”

She smiled briefly. “No problem. Listen, will you do me a favor? If you see Mr. Keller come in, would you let me know? I need to speak with him about something.”

“Oh, he just came in a few minutes ago,” Jason said.

Lily had been turning to go back into the office but spun back around at that. “He did?”

Jason nodded. “I saw him go into the restaurant,” he said.

“Thanks, Jason.” She patted him on the shoulder. “I’m going to see if I can track him down. I have my mobile with me if you need to reach me.”

She skirted the reception desk and walked into the restaurant, scanning the room for a glimpse of Jonah’s golden head. She frowned when she didn’t see him, and snagged a passing waitress.

“Caroline, have you seen Mr. Keller?”

“He went out onto the patio with that other guy,” Caroline said, indicating the French doors with a jerk of her head.

“Oh. Thanks,” she said absently, and chewed on her bottom lip as Caroline walked off. If he was meeting with another client, she didn’t want to interrupt him. She’d wait for a few minutes, she decided, and went to get a cup of tea from the kitchen to keep her company while she did.

* * * * *

Out on the patio, Jonah sipped a plain cup of black coffee while Nate looked over the report he’d prepared on Max’s financials. “You sure you want to do this here? She could step out here at any time.”

Nate shook his head without looking up. “I’ll just say you’re investigation some real estate I’m thinking of investing in. You do that kind of thing, right?”

Jonah snorted. “Yeah, but she’s not going to buy it. You don’t have much of a poker face.”

“Says you. Okay,” Nate said as he picked up his head. “I give up. Tell me what I’m reading.”

Jonah leaned forward and tapped the page. “See this, where the monthly income from his flower shop is listed?”

Nate looked at the number. “Yeah. That’s pretty good income for a flower shop.”

“That’s ridiculous income for a flower shop,” Jonah corrected. “Even if you’re marking up the posies by about a thousand percent, you wouldn’t see that kind of profit margin on this kind of business. And if you look here,” he flipped to the next page of the report, “you’ll see the supplies he’s ordered for the shop are way below what they should be for that volume of business.”

It was all Greek to Nate, but he nodded anyway. “So you’re saying…”

“It doesn’t match. It’s not definitive evidence of anything, and you couldn’t prove it by this alone, but my gut tells me he’s into something shady. Either laundering money, or he’s not selling flowers out of that shop.”

“I’m not sure which option is worse,” Nate muttered.

Jonah shrugged. “Hard to say. If he’s selling drugs out of the shop, then I’d say that’s a bigger direct threat than if he’s laundering money. Drug dealers and their clients aren’t usually known for their logical thinking.”

Nate nodded. “And if he’s laundering money?”

“Could be for anybody, really, but chances are if something’s gone wrong they’ll look to Max, not to Lily or Bridget. They’ll expect him to handle the problem, whatever it is, and he’ll be the one to accept the consequences if it falls apart. Unfortunately, that’ll just make him desperate to get his hands on whatever it is he thinks Lily has, and desperation often breeds ruthlessness.”

“Fuck.” Nate scrubbed his hands across his face then dropped them to look Jonah in the eye. “Okay, tell me what we do now.”

* * * * *

Lily sipped her tea and chatted amiably with the kitchen staff and tried not to look at her watch every five seconds. She really didn’t want to bother Jonah if he was with a client, after all, he had to make a living, and she knew all the work he was having to do on his house couldn’t be cheap.

But patience had never been her strong suit, and after ten minutes of sipping tepid tea and nibbling on a banana nut muffin, she wandered back into the dining room. Not wanting to intrude but wanting to gauge whether she should keep waiting or go back to work, she sidled up to the French doors and peeked out.

She spotted Jonah’s blond head almost immediately, and noted with frustration that he was still with someone. She couldn’t quite see who, as his back was turned to her, only that it was another man.

A client, she thought, or maybe a friend. Either way, she was going to have to wait for them to finish before approaching. She sighed and nibbled her muffin. “Patience is a virtue,” she reminded herself, and was turning to go back to her office when a sudden movement out on the patio caught her attention.

Thinking Jonah might be starting to bid his guest goodbye, she turned back to the window to check. Jonah hadn’t moved, but his companion had gotten out of his chair and circled the table to stand next to Jonah, head bent as he looked at something on the table.

She frowned, something nagging at the corners of her mind. He looked familiar, she realized. Something in the body language as he bent over the table, the set of his shoulders and the fall of tawny hair across his forehead. Then he lifted a hand to plow through his hair in a gesture of helpless frustration that was very familiar to her, and everything clicked into place.

“Nate,” she realized, and set her teacup down on a nearby table with a clatter. No longer concerned with interrupting, she pushed open the patio door and strode across the flagstones.

Both men looked up at her approach, one with an expression of amused resignation, the other with a look of startled panic that was quickly covered by a bright smile.

She focused on Nate. “Hi there.”

The smile brightened suspiciously. “Hi, baby.”

She steeled herself against the flash of dimples. “Did we have lunch plans today or something?”

He shook his head. “No, I needed to meet Jonah to go over some things.”

“Really? What kind of things?”

“Some business papers. I asked him to look into an investment property I’m considering.”

“Oh yeah? I know something about investment properties.” Lily nodded at the papers on the table. “Do you mind if I take a look?”

Nate laid a hand on the papers, casually, as though he were just resting his hand there, and his voice when he spoke was breezy and cool. “What do you know about investment properties?”

She tilted her head and smiled. “My father’s a real estate developer. So I sort of grew up around that kind of thing.” She put her fingertips on the corner of the papers and tugged, raising her eyebrows when he held fast. “Nate? Is there any reason why I shouldn’t look?”

He held her gaze for a moment, his eyes fierce and shuttered, before lifting his hand from the papers.

“Thanks,” she said sweetly, and scooped up the pages. The first thing that jumped out at her was the name Max Carelli, and her head shot up to stare at Nate. He didn’t say anything, just crossed his arms over his chest and watched her. With a feeling of growing dread, she returned her gaze to the page and started to read.

She read every word of the five-page report, and when she was finished, she gently laid the pages face down on the table.

“Jonah,” she said quietly, her voice barely carrying beyond their little corner of the patio, “could you excuse Nate and me? I think we have a few things to talk about.”

“Ah…sure,” he said, pushing to his feet. He shot Nate a sympathetic look before disappearing back into the dining room.

“Lily…” Nate began, and her hand shot up to stop him.

“Wait. I just want to know one thing.” She looked him dead in the eye. “Did you hire Jonah to gather all this information?”

She saw him hesitate, just for the briefest of moments, before he nodded. “When did you hire him?”

“A week and a half ago,” he admitted.

Unable to speak, her temper on simmer and fast approaching rolling boil, Lily turned away. Immediately Nate’s hand shot out to grasp her upper arm.

“Don’t turn away from me,” he said when she looked back, incredulous. “Stay and fight, yell if you have to, but don’t walk away.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” she assured him. “We’re so in a fight, and you’ve never seen the kind of yelling I’ve got right now for you. But I refuse to do it at my place of business where everyone and their sister can hear us. I’m going to sign out for lunch, and I will meet you at your house in fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll wait and drive you,” he told her, and she let out a bark of laughter.

“No. I’m driving myself there, like a grown woman capable of looking after herself and making her own decisions. Besides, I don’t want to sit that close to you right now.” She turned and walked away, dismissing him as easily as she would a waiter. “Fifteen minutes,” she said without turning back, and stalked back into the dining room.

She held on to her temper through sheer force of will as she gathered her purse and informed Jason that she was taking an hour for lunch. She was out the door and striding across the parking lot toward her car when she saw the man leaning up against the trunk.

She stopped. “Jonah, it’s not a great time.”

He straightened from his slouch against the car, hands out to the sides. “Hey, I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Well, let’s see. The man I’m sleeping with has been going around behind my back, hiring a private detective to dig into my business, and then lying to me about it. For the record, that makes me pretty far from okay.”

“If it makes you feel any better, he only did it because he’s worried about you.”

“It doesn’t,” she told him, and moved past him to open the driver’s door. She tossed her purse on the passenger seat and was sliding behind the wheel when she felt a hand on her arm. She looked up to find Jonah watching her with serious eyes.

“Look,” he said, “it turns out Max has some financial skeletons in his closet, and he may well be a credible threat to your safety. Try to remember that when you’re skinning Nate.”

“I’ll remember that. But he’s going to have to remember that I’m a grown woman, and I can handle my own life. And since I’d already decided on my own to have who I thought was a reputable private investigator look into things for me, it’s information I would have found out for myself.”

She looked pointedly at his hand on her arm until he released her and stepped back. She slammed the door and started the car, doing her level best not to peel out of the parking lot like a joy-riding kid.

Even driving at a sedate and deliberate pace, it only took ten minutes to get home. She pulled into the drive and parked at the main house by the kitchen door. She threw the transmission into park and switched off the engine then simply sat for a moment and tried to get her temper under control.

Her fingers drummed on the steering wheel as she concentrated on breathing. He’d lied to her. No, more than lied—he’d gone behind her back and over her head, taking over, assuming she couldn’t handle herself, couldn’t be counted on to make smart choices and logical decisions, and she was so mad, so unbelievably pissed off, the breathing wasn’t working—

Her mental tirade was interrupted when her car door was suddenly pulled open. Nate stared at her, his mouth set and his face grim. “Are you going to sit out here all afternoon, or are we going to talk about this?”

Okay, so calming down wasn’t going to be in the cards. She released her seat belt with a snap and heaved herself out of the car. “You wanna talk?” She stalked into the kitchen with him hot on her heels. “Fine, let’s talk. Why don’t you start by telling me what the hell you thought you were doing by going behind my back to hire a private investigator?”

He kicked the door shut and planted himself in front of it like a sentinel. “Protecting you.”

“What the hell makes you think I need you to protect me?”

“You didn’t even want an alarm system,” he told her, and she threw up her hands.

“So what?” she fairly yelled. “So fucking what? There are plenty of people who go through life without fucking motion detectors in their houses, and most of them manage not to be murdered in their beds.”

“But if you can be just a little safer, isn’t it worth it?”

“No. No, it’s not worth it, because I feel like I’m sleeping in fucking Alcatraz or something. I’m locked up like Fort Knox, and I can’t even open the windows and let the fresh air in because the windows are all alarmed.”

She drew a shaky breath. “And that’s not even the point. You went behind my back and hired a private investigator.”

“Would you have agreed to it if I’d told you about it?”

Lily felt as though her head might explode. “No!”

“And that’s why I didn’t tell you about it. Because I knew you’d throw a fit—”

“Whoa!” Her hands flew up as if to ward off an attack. “A fit?”