Staying On Top (Whitman University) (15 page)

“Why are you being so cold to Mari when she’s helping us?”

“I’m not.”

“Blair, you are. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were jealous. But you’ve made it very clear that you have only limited interest in me, and she’s my friend. She’s doing us a favor. Stop treating her like she’s some kind of insect buzzing around your face.”

The quiet force of his request hit me square in the chest. It swelled the shame and guilt I’d acquired over the past week so big that it was hard to swallow. He was right. There was no reason to be bitter with Marija just because she’d come unwittingly into the landscape of my con. It happened all the time. I had to roll with it or risk making Sam more suspicious than he already was. 

“I’m sorry. You’re right. I’ll be nicer to her.” I swallowed, finally, and managed to choke down enough of my pride to say what needed to be said. “I guess I’ve been getting used to having you to myself, that’s all. It felt strange having someone else around.”

“But you’re not jealous.” He glanced over at me, eyes holding mine. 

“Why would I be jealous? Are you guys a thing?”

He shook his head. “Not for a long time, and never seriously. She’s a good girl. Lots of fun, super loyal. Great instincts. Doesn’t trust you, though.”

There it was—the bomb I’d been waiting for since he’d stopped driving. Marija had voiced her suspicions to him while they were on their own. The part of me that knew how special it was to have caring, protective friends respected her. The rest of me, which was trying to accomplish something specific, wanted to tear her hair out for making my job even harder.

“She said as much. Very protective of you, for a never-serious fling.”

He shrugged again. “The tour’s an interesting place, Blair. Its own kind of life.”

When more seconds ticked past without him stepping on the gas, my palms started to sweat. It felt like some kind of crossroads, here, as though he was waiting on me to say something, to share something, to defend myself against Marija’s accusations. If he started to trust her instead of me, I might as well go home and wait for whatever retribution my father had planned.

I took a deep breath and found a truth stuck to the side of my heart. Peeling it away cost me, but it would be worth it if it made Sam feel better. “I know about living inside a bubble, Sam. Inside a life that people think they understand. I grew up that way. My neighbors, my teachers, the kids at school . . . they saw Blair Paddington in her Upper East Side penthouse, with her big-time accountant father and full-time staff and thought that, despite the lack of a mother, my life must be better than the average. They had no idea that my nights and weekends were spent swindling people out of their fortunes with my toothless fourth-grade smile. That my dad looked at my innocent little-girl face and only saw what he could gain by using it.”

His hand snuck over and covered mine, fingers squeezing. I fought the urge to pull away and, after a moment, comfort and warmth started seeping through my skin. The breath I took shuddered and my throat burned—the confession had turned out to be something I needed to say as badly as Sam needed to hear it. “Be thankful that other people live inside your strange world, Sam. It may not be normal, but at least you’re not alone.”

“I’m sorry, Blair.”

I laughed, trying to dispel the emotion built up in my chest. “For what? It’s not your fault.”

“That you’ve been alone for so long. For saying you’re fucked up.” He tipped my chin up so I had to look at him. “I mean, you are. But you’ve earned it.”

“So we’re good?” I asked, the hopeful tone in my voice catching me off guard.

It freaked me the fuck out that I couldn’t tell fantasy from reality anymore. I’d been with Sam a little over a week, only eight days, and everything I felt sure of had started to slip away. The harder I dug my fingers into it, the faster it poured through them.

“We’re good, Blair. I trust Mari’s instincts, but you’re a special case. I’ve spent every hour with you for a week solid, plus those few days last spring, and you’re probably the hardest person to read that I’ve ever met.”

Little did he know that he read me better than anyone. He just didn’t want to believe I’d rip him off. Yet.

My phone finally uploaded a map and the electronic voice startled us both with directions out of Mari’s neighborhood. It was a short ten-minute drive across the older part of Belgrade to the rivers. I’d never been to the house here, but the addresses were stored in my phone and my dad had a particular taste and style when it came to real estate—opulent and modern, lots of glass, set high on a hill if possible, where the commoners could look on and genuflect before his superiority.

There were a few e-mails from my professors, which I returned, and a text from Audra making sure everything was okay—I replied to that, too. Sam had taken a couple of calls from his management team on the train yesterday, but we’d started to ignore our phones. It felt as though we were living inside a film, or a book, or some kind of alternate reality that would dissolve if too many people peeked behind the curtain. By some unspoken agreement, we’d delayed the inevitable crash and burn by separating ourselves from the world. Our respective worlds, because we didn’t share one. Could never share one.

Sam had to move his hand from mine to pilot the standard transmission. My fingers twitched more than once, suggesting that I reach over and lay a hand on his leg, begging to touch him, but I didn’t listen. Being with Sam confused me. I needed some time, some silence, to try to figure out exactly how to proceed.

It didn’t help that, more than once in my mostly sleepless night, I entertained the idea of helping him find my dad for real. Stop pretending. Get his money back.

I couldn’t do that. Sacrifice my future, end up with nothing in exchange for the childhood my father had stolen from me . . . not for a guy I barely knew.

Except it didn’t seem as though I barely knew Sam. Not anymore. Maybe not ever again.

The electronic voice said we’d turned on the right street, which made sense because there was nothing but a
No Trespassing
sign to greet us. No other houses dotted either side of the lengthy drive, which opened up to a gorgeous view of the Danube a few thousand yards in.

The house at the top of a steep cliff had Neil Paddington written all over it, from the manicured grounds to its ostentatious appearance. The entire glass-covered front, which overlooked the water and houses down below, glittered. The rest of the house appeared to be modeled after a Manhattan high-rise as opposed to the turn-of-the-century Gothic influence prevalent in the historic areas of Belgrade. It stood out, didn’t fit. It made people look, if only to comment on how ugly it was.

I hated it.

If the day ever came when I was setting up a home, either for myself or—though I didn’t believe it would come to be—a family, it would be the complete opposite. Cozy. Smaller. Maybe old and drafty—different from the houses in the area, but the same, too. 

“Maybe park here,” I suggested. We were still a couple hundred yards from the house’s driveway, and there were trees on the left side of the road that could hide our approach.

There shouldn’t be anyone here. As far as I knew, my father hadn’t used this house in years. He’d never brought me here on an impromptu visit, and even though Belgrade had surprised me with its beauty and sophistication, it wasn’t my father’s kind of place. He’d probably bought the house here because of the country’s nonextradition status with plans to spend no time here unless it became necessary.

As far as I knew, with the exception of my mother’s unexpected passing, nothing bad ever happened to my father. Not even close calls. All the millions of dollars he’d conned, all of the Interpol and FBI files opened and maintained, hadn’t led to a single arrest. He’d never spent a minute behind bars or in an interrogation room.  I had my doubts that he ever would.

Sam parked the car on the soft earth, then took the keys out of the ignition and peered up ahead. “Doesn’t look like anyone is here.”

The place did have a deserted air about it. There were no other cars in the driveway, but there wouldn’t be even if Dad were here. “Well, he’s good at making it look like that. We’re here. Let’s go check it out.”

We got out of the car and trekked up the road. Halfway there he took my hand and, again, I didn’t stop him. For a hundred yards I pretended the two of us were lovers on fall break, enjoying Belgrade, visiting Sam’s friend from the tennis world, maybe going to visit my dad—who in this pretend version of life was normal and loving. The kind of dad who wanted to meet the guy his daughter was interested in, who might even puff out his chest in an attempt to intimidate the young man into good behavior.

The vision collapsed as we snuck around the back of the house to the garage door. They always had keypads and they always had the same code—my parents’ wedding anniversary.

I punched it in and waited for the door to rise. We entered the house, which bore an eerie similarity to the one we’d explored in Jesenice. The windows let in too much sun, making us squint in the high-ceilinged living room. Everything was white—the walls, the hard-looking furniture, the tiled floors. Like Marija’s bathroom only bigger, more cavernous, and it left me with a strangely exposed feeling that planted a seed of worry.

“I don’t think he’s here, but let’s take a look around. Quickly.”

Sam shot me a look. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I have a bad feeling. You don’t?”

“Not really,” he answered after a quick self-assessment. “I mean, it’s not like I feel great about anything that’s happened since I got ripped off, though, so my meter is a bit off.”

“Let’s just hurry, okay? I’ll take the front of the house, you take the back.”

He nodded and we split up. I hustled through the kitchen, dining room, den, office, laundry room, and parlor before heading back to the living room. Sam strode back in a few minutes later, a piece of paper clutched between his fingers. 

“What’s that?” I asked at the same moment the strange peal of European police sirens split open the peaceful morning air.

We both froze, our eyes locked on each other, and listened. They were definitely moving closer.

My eyes swept the room automatically, doing the thing my father had taught me to do first in every single home I entered. Conning was best done in public, or on the person’s porch or on a walk around their property—inside there were too many potential land mines. Hidden cameras; microphones; people that could be tucked away in other rooms, too far to see but close enough to hear. It had seemed like paranoia ten years ago, but with the kind of technology the average person owned these days it had become more and more likely.

Blinking red lights inside the vents caught my eye. I put a finger to my lips and turned, moving through the rooms I’d already checked. There were blinking red lights in those vents, too.

I didn’t know if my father had seen us, heard us, or if we had done nothing but trip an alarm system, but now wasn’t the time to sit around and figure it out.

Chapter 11

Sam

I’d followed Blair’s eyes to the vents. The blinking red lights were innocuous to me, but they seemed to mean something to her—nothing good. They had to be cameras, or some kind of alarm. The sirens grew louder, inched closer, and the muscles in my legs tightened, aching to move.

When she came back into the living room, the snapping tension in her eyes made everything real. The control with which she moved, the calm flowing from her, helped me breathe.

She was a constant contradiction. A bundle of nerves in situations I considered normal, chill when we were about to get arrested for trespassing.

“What do we do?”

“We need to get out of here, obviously,” she whispered.

“There’s not another road, so there’s no way back to the car.” 

Blair gave me a look that said
duh
, so I decided to stop thinking out loud. Instead I worried silently about Mari’s car and how she was going to explain why it was abandoned out there.

“What did you see in the bedrooms? Is there a balcony? What’s behind the house?”

The low volume of her voice and the pounding of my heart in my ears made it hard to decipher her questions. It finally made sense and I closed my eyes, trying to remember.

“We’re a little short on time, here.”

“Your impatience isn’t helping,” I murmured. “Okay. There’s a balcony that overlooks the river off the master bedroom. The rest of it is woods. Undeveloped.”

She walked off without answering me. I followed in silence as she poked her head into a couple of rooms before finding the master. We both went in and she closed the door, then yanked open the French doors leading to the balcony. 

We peered together over the railing, cold morning air freezing the nervous sweat on my skin. Blair shivered and it crossed my mind to offer her my jacket. My mind, my autopilot, had been derailed by the sound of those police sirens, though. And the idea that they were coming here for us.

She turned to me, dark eyes stoic. “We have to jump.”

“Jump? Are you crazy?”

“It’s not too far to the river—sixty feet at the most. It’s the only way we’re not going to get caught.”

“So what if we get caught?” I hadn’t thought too much about this whole trip until I stood facing a sixty-foot jump into a freezing cold river, but Leo would kill me for running around trying to find Neil on my own. My trainer would kill me if I got injured. If the fall didn’t. “You’re his daughter, right? Don’t you have some kind of right to be here?”

“That’s not really the point, is it? We get caught, they contact my dad to check out my story and verify that we’re not trespassing, and your jig is up. If we don’t surprise my dad, it’s over. He knows we’re looking, he disappears.” She crossed her arms, her expression almost lazy. “It’s up to you, Bradford. What do you want to do?”

“How do you know the river is deep enough to handle us from this height? What if someone drove a car into the water and we smash into it? I mean, I want my money back, Blair, but I don’t want to die.”