The Devil You Know (25 page)

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What could that possibly matter? This was out of her league. Rothstein w-as enjoying himself now. Flexing his muscles.

‘Over a hundred million. They had a project manager, but he reported to me.’

Rose was quiet for a few seconds. She hated herself for this, but she was getting turned on. Jake Rothstein was handsome, in an obvious sort of way. And he was looking at her like he was a pasha, and she was the latest addition to his harem.

‘You were in charge of a nine-figure budget?’

Her hostility tickled him. ‘Sugar, I’ve been running projects since I was sixteen. I supervise architects and contractors. I deal with the unions. I pay off the Mafia.’

‘And how do your projects come out?’

He leaned across towards her, so Rose could feel the warmth of his body, see the muscles under his shirt. A pulse of animal lust flooded her belly. She looked down, but she could still sense him in her space, breathe in the masculine tang of him.

‘On time. Under budget. And making money,’ he said.

Her head was down. Her lips were parted. He thought he could feel the desire rising up out of her skin.

Another guy would have grabbed her head, kissed her.

Jake moved his mouth closer to hers, half an inch, so their lips were almost touching. But not quite.

Her mouth widened just a fraction more.

He had her. He pulled back.

‘If you’re interested in learning the business, I can get you an internship.’

Rose sat up, confused and embarrassed. Had he been going to kiss her? God, she’d nearly kissed him.

Her body was a traitor. Little tendrils of desire crawled over her skin, hooking into her belly and breasts.

Jake was still talking. ‘To be honest, though, I don’t know that you’d want it. We get hundreds of applicants. I wouldn’t apply that standard to you. But once you were in, you’d have to behave like all the other interns. Otherwise it really wouldn’t be fair to them. At work, I have to be professional.’

‘I can be professional,’ Rose said shortly.

‘You’d have to report to my department. You’d work for somebody that works for me.’

‘Fine by me,’ Rose insisted.

Jacob said, ‘You’d have to call me “sir”.’

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He thought he saw a muscle twitch in her face. Yeah, she wouldn’t like that. Arrogant, stuck-up beauty that she was. But he’d enjoy it.

Jake made plans to have Rose work near him. He wanted her to see his power, the extent of his slice of the empire. He wanted to make her pant for him.

‘I can do that.’ Rose dropped her head. ‘I - I really would like to

learn the business. I’d appreciate it.’

It cost her to have to ask him.

‘No problem,’ Jake said. ‘Give me a number where you can be reached.’

She wrote it down and handed it to him. ‘Thank you, Jake.’ ‘No problem, honey,’ he said.

Rose seethed all the way back to Tribeca.

She had bought herself a great apartment. A foreclosure in an old industrial building, it wasn’t considered the best area. Rose had picked it up for a mere hundred and fifty.

Her place had everything. First, she liked the location. Manhattan prices were rising everywhere. In a few years, she was confident there would be nowhere on the island that was ‘unfashionable’. lve it a decade, and even Harlem would be through the roof. Restaurants and diners had started to open up down here, and th&e were film-makers and models moving into nearby places. This was going nowhere but up.

Second, the old warehouse had space. Lots of it, in a town where a broom cupboard could be let for more than most people could afford. Rose had a loft, with huge industrial windows. The place had an elevator; old and creaky, but it worked. She was on the secondto-top floor, with great views of the Financial District.

Clusters of skyscrapers. She loved it. It made her want to own them all.

Rose had hired the contractors that worked on her house. There was no mystery about renovations, and nobody ever ripped her o.. She had sanded the old floors, painted the walls a soft cream, dismantled the fluorescent lights and put in sconces, and added an upper level, where she kept her Queen-size bed and Moroccan rug. The kitchen she spent money on, but a good kitchen and bathroom added value to a place. The look of the place was sleek, modern, very luxurious, lose decorated everything in soft shades of white, with just a few splashes ofcolour to break things up: a crystal vase of

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yellow roses, the red tones of” her rug, a candy-striped cushion in royal blue.

It was her haven.

Like everything else, it was an investment too. If she sold it today, she’d clear at least double what she paid for it. Rose had got over the need to nickel-and-dime herself.

She was going to be a real estate mogul. It was time she started treating herself like one.

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‘Wanna room? We’re all-suite here.’

Rose looked at the receptionist. The girl was about her age. Young, cracking bubble-gum as she talked. She had too much make-up on and smoker’s fingernails.

At least she was wearing a uniform. It was an ugly green-striped vest over an olive-coloured shirt. Rose noticed wrinkles and smudges.

She felt contemptuous. Being poor was no excuse for being a slob. Rose had been poor, her mother had been poor. But they had both

dressed neatly at all times.

:

‘How much?’ she said.

“

Today she was wearing a pair of old jeans and a clean white tip T-shirt. No need to call attention to herself. The pearls and the gotd watch were in her mini-safe in the apartment.

‘Forty dollars. If you’d waited till tomorrow, you could have

gotten the weekend special.’

‘How much is that?’

‘Thirty-five.’ The girl blew a pink bubble and popped it. ‘Yeah, well. I need a place to stay tonight.’ ‘Smoking or nonsmoking?’ ‘Non,’ said Rose.

‘How you gonna pay? If it’s cash you can’t have a key to the

minibar or connect the phone. For that we need a card, OK?’ ‘Sure,’ said Rose. She handed one over..

‘Awright,’ said the girl. ‘Here’s the minibar key, sign here.’ She pushed over two keys. ‘This one is for your room, number sixty eight on the sixth floor, elevators is over there. Need help with your bags?’

Rose glanced at the leering doorman. ‘Um, no thanks.’

‘Enjoy your stay,’ the girl said automatically, turning back to her magazine.

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‘Oh,’ said l,ose, ‘I will.’

She took her overnight case to the elevators. There were three of them. The lobby was quite small and somewhat gloomy; it had a bad case of Seventies carpeting. Why had people ever thought orange and brown was a good colour combination? Rose wondered. The walls were white, but covered with that ugly textured paint. Very depressing.

It excited Rose. The windows were large. She imagined the place repainted, smooth-white, with a plain beige carpet, some plants and statuary. Maybe a water feature. They were cheap to run, easy to maintain, and looked fantastic. She glanced at the elevator when it arrived. It was brass.

The sixth floor was more of the same. Hallways were a little narrow; well, you couldn’t have everything. She walked to the end of hers and looked out of the grimy window. Residential area, lots of traffic. Not a problem for what she wanted to do. There was a parking lot, that was very important, and some browning grass at the front. It was never going to be Park Avenue.

The key was figuring out what people needed in the price bracket. Clean and safe would sell here. It wouldn’t cost a lot to fence the place in with ten-foot-high industrial fencing, and put a guardhouse at the gate.

New York was a dangerous city. Security would sell.

Rose opened up her room and shut the door behind her. The doors were heavy, with double locks, chains, and fish-eye peepholes. They could stay.

Breathless with anticipation, she glanced around.

Oh, man. This was perfect.

A Queen-size bed was perched on a raised area, about two feet up from the living room. There was a large living area with a kitchenette. Of course, it was filthy; peeling paint, debris in the kitchen, probably infested with roaches. A bluebottle fly was buzzing lazily and hopelessly around the windows, and the bedside table was dusty.

But the fundamentals were there. Seven-fifty in the square footage. A decent-sized bathroom. Big built-in closets, and light from large windows.

Rose picked up the phone by her bed and punched zero. ‘Veah?’

‘This room is kind of dusty,’ Rose said. ‘Got any other ones?’ She heard the receptionist bristle. ‘It was cleaned this morning.’

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‘I think I’d like another room,’ Rose said.

‘I don’t know if I got any.’ The girl was hostile now.

‘You didn’t look all that busy to me. Plus I’d like something bigger.’

‘All the rooms are exactly the same size. Exactl},’ the receptionist snapped. ‘Except on the top floor, they’re bigger, but they’re the honeymoon suites and they cost, like, hundreds of dollars. You can

have one if you want. Do you want one for hundreds of dollars?’ ‘No, that’s OK,’ said Rose.

‘Thank you,’ said the girl, with a long-suffering air.

Rose checked the place out. She ran the shower, noted the water pressure. There wasn’t much to do.

She had an instinct about property. This was the one. This would make her.

Five minutes later, Rose picked up her overnight case and rode the elevator back downstairs.

‘Here.’ She handed both keys to the receptionist.

‘You can’t just change your mind,’ the girl said defensively. She glanced at the doorman to see if he was blaming her for this.

‘Your service is dire, your rooms are filthy,’ Rose told her’ She looked at her name-tag. ‘Tracy. Nobody cleaned the kitchen gr changed the sheets on my bed. Do you want to be a receptionist fr

ever?’

‘

Tracy stared at her. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Because if you don’t, you could always go to your boss with some ideas. You know, like cleaning the place up. Or wearing a fresh uniform. That way you might not be going out of business. And you could get a promotion.’

‘I’m gonna charge your credit card. You didn’t give me any notice.’

‘That’s fine with me.’ Rose gave her a wink. ‘It was worth it.’

She turned and walked out, and the receptionist stared after her.

‘Weirdo,’ she called.

Rose grinned.

lose called George Benham the next day.

‘Have you thought more about the hotel? The hospitality industry is up and coming-‘

‘I’m not interested in the hospitality industry. Can you set up a meeting with the owners?’

There was silence at the end of the phone.

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‘Maybe you should just make an offer.’

Rose blinked. Since when did George Benham go against anything she said?

‘I want to do it in person, George.’

‘But … but, Miss Fiorello …’

She got annoyed. ‘I don’t pay you to ask questions, George. Just set it up.’

He called back fifteen minutes later. ‘You got an appointment in Park Slope in Brooklyn in half an hour.’

‘Half an hour! I can’t get myself together that fast. It will have to

b

e —’

‘That’s the only time he has to see you. If I were you, I’d take it. And Miss Fiorello, make sure to be very, very polite.’

She pulled up outside a nondescript brownstone with barely two minutes to spare. The neighbourhood was rough; broken window panes in some of the houses, trash littering the gutters. The address Benham had given her was an island in the street. Its windows were intact, its step was swept clean, and the car parked right in front was a gleaming Cadillac.

There was a restaurant on the lower level, a trattoria. Rose looked around for the door that led up to the rest of the building, but couldn’t see it.

Benham had been so mysterious; she didn’t want to be late. Rose pushed open the door to the restaurant. A little bell rang. The place was very clean, but somewhat gloomy; all dark wood panelling. It had tables with red chequerboard cloths and candles in empty Chianti bottles shrouded in straw.

It was half past four. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner. But there were a few men sitting at some of the tables, drinking wine and coffee.

She felt conspicuous.

‘Excuse me.’ Rose walked up to the barman. ‘I’m meant to meet someone in this building, but I can’t find the way upstairs …’

He didn’t look up from the glass he was polishing. ‘Who you meeting?’

‘Vincent Salerni,’ P,.ose said.

The man’s head snapped up. He looked her over, curiously. ‘Wait there a second,’ he said.

Rose stood at the bar while he lifted the partition and went over

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to the group of men sitting at the tables. He bent down deferentially and whispered in the ear of one of the men.

They all looked over towards her. P,.ose heard laughter. Then one of the smaller men shrugged.

The barman straightened up and beckoned her over.

Pose walked across the restaurant. She felt herself straighten and

shook out her hair as she went.

‘This is Mr Salerni,’ he said.

Rose suddenly understood. Adrenaline flushed through her body, prickling on the palms of her hands. She felt herself dew with

perspiration. She thanked God it was dark in here.

‘You’re Rose Fiorello?’

The man’s eyes were intense. He was small and wiry, and very frightening. The huge-chested men who sat around him didn’t scare her half as much as Vincent Salerni did.

Salerni’s eyes swept her slim, young frame, with the usual male interest. In fact all the men were staring at her body in a way that made Rose incredibly self-conscious.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Piacere, Don Salerni.’

‘You know me?’

Rose tried to control her racing heart. She forced herself to app.ar calm.