Blush(59)
Lemon and Muncie? Good, but not as good as he was. Not by half. And the attempt had been botched. The two men weren’t Rhodes scholars, but their marksmanship had always been impressive.
Which made him question the integrity of his client, especially if he wasn’t their first choice. Had they started cheap and worked their way up the ladder to the top and to Cruz Barcelona?
“It was after ten at night. Other than the cleaning crews, I was the only one still in the building.”
He reached over, took her glass, and picked up the wine bottle. “Who knew you’d be working late?” he asked, pouring.
“Everyone. Thanks.” She took back the filled glass, then pulled her bare legs up under her. “I’m habitually always the last one there, unless I have a function to attend, in which case I usually end up back at the office before I go home. Or I just sleep downtown. I have a pied-à-terre on the next floor up.”
“Jesus, Mia. Didn’t your security people instruct you to mix up your routines? Being consistent and predictable is an assassin’s dream.”
She frowned, her finger rubbing over the rim of her wineglass. “Well, it’s freaking inconvenient to try to mix things up all the time.” She sounded testy. “I’m a from-point-A-to-point-C kind of girl, with no time-consuming detours.”
“That stupid habit almost got you killed. What else?”
“What else?” she said, finally sounding annoyed, and set her empty glass on the table beside her. “Wasn’t being shot at enough?”
“More than,” he said dryly. “Were there other attempts? Before or after that?”
Chapter Eleven
Three weeks before the shooting incident, my limo driver had an accident,” Mia told him, sounding remarkably cool for a woman who had a hit man after her. Or several hit men. Cruz was getting more and more pissed the more he heard. What the fuck was going on? He had to do some investigation of his own. See how deep, how far-reaching, the threat was.
Well, for fucksake. This job was supposed to be easy. Quick. Right now he should be in his sunny oceanfront studio in Brazil. Painting, eating moqueca de camarão, and drinking Skol beer. But something about this whole situation wasn’t right, and now he was in too deep to let it go.
“Something manipulated in the engine, they said.” Mia held out her glass for more wine. Cruz poured, and she leaned back in her chair, cradling the glass between her breasts. Lucky glass.
“My assistant went to the event in my place while I was incapacitated with the flu. By some kind of miracle, neither Kevin nor Stephanie was badly hurt, thank God. But the car was totaled.”
“Nothing suspicious there. Accidents happen.” In this case, Cruz could certainly have engineered such an accident.
“Yes, they do. And we wouldn’t have thought anything about it if the executive elevator hadn’t dropped several floors three days later. Immediately followed that night with everyone at my table at a charity event getting serious food poisoning. It was so bad, nine people ended up in the ICU at the hospital. I was barely recovering from the flu and wasn’t hungry, so I just moved my food around and sipped water all night, otherwise I would’ve been there with them.”
“You were damn fortunate.” Fucking with food was Clive Benzie’s MO. He was good, damn good. A master at his art form, in fact. He would’ve calculated her weight and metabolism to a tee. Benzie didn’t make mistakes. He made sure a dozen or so other diners with the same meal were affected, but the person he wanted dead always ended up dead. Unless his target was too damned sick to eat.
Tampering with anything mechanical—car, elevator, train, or plane—was Joel Shram’s specialty. Anyone could’ve dicked with the car, but Cruz’s gut told him the car and elevator were Shram.
Cruz was starting to see a pattern here he didn’t like.
Was it possible that whoever had hired him had three people on the job simultaneously? Did they want Amelia/Mia dead so badly that they’d hired, at great cost, three professional hit men?
Talk about overkill . . . and irony, since she was still very much alive.
“How did you end up in Bayou Cheniere?”
“My head of security, and my VP of marketing, advised me to disappear while they figure out the who and why.”
“Did they also tell you how to disappear?”
She moved the almost empty glass onto the armrest of her chair. If he didn’t know her so well, Cruz would’ve thought she was completely relaxed. But he did know her, and he was shocked to realize how well he knew her tells.
“Miles did,” she said, absently swirling the last inch of wine in her glass, her index finger tapping the glass, a nervous habit he’d observed before.