Thin, but serviceable gray carpet muffled his steps while he slipped over to the stairwell. While yanking thong floss out of his ass, he stuck his head through the doorway. The stairs were concrete and descended out of view of the floor above. Bullets whizzing up or down in a firefight would have a harder time finding their targets. Not that he was planning on getting in a shootout, especially since he was unarmed. But it was an automatic observation that had become a bleak reality in his line of work.
A window in the stairwell showed night was approaching. Nate typically preferred to collar skips late, in the middle of the night. Fugitive brains were fuzzy with sleep and reaction times were slower then, except for tweakers who considered three a.m. their personal noontime. Occasionally, daytime retrievals were best, however, and a stripper service sure as hell wouldn’t be delivering balloons and ball sacs in the wee hours. Valerie’s requested delivery time had been eight o’clock, and Nate stepped out of the elevator at six-thirty to make sure he would avoid bumping into the real deal. If everything went to plan, Lydia would be on her way back to Colorado by the time her real birthday present showed up.
He closed the stairwell door and stopped in front of the door marked 314. As always, he paused and listened for a moment, trying to get a feel for the place and what he might find inside. He heard nothing, not even the dull drone of a television. Hopefully, Lydia hadn’t taken off, but it was possible. Maybe she didn’t want to spend her birthday hiding out alone. If Valerie hadn’t called her to make sure she would be around for her “special gift”, Lydia wouldn’t have any reason to stick around besides the sheer common sense of being a fugitive. Well, he’d find out soon enough whether the balloons and thong had been for nothing.
He rehearsed his mental script one final time before he knocked on the door. The sharp rap sounded a little more like his typical I’ve-come-to-collar-you knock than he would have liked, and he winced at the sound. Normally he’d be shouting her name through the door. Instead, he stayed quiet and obeyed the instinctive urge to step aside from the door for a moment in case a bullet whizzed through in reply. When nothing splintered the wood, he moved back in place. No doubt stripper services didn’t lurk out of peephole range like creepy stalkers.
The silence after his knock lasted almost long enough for him to think she had either gone out or decided not to answer. He was pondering the next move when he heard a woman’s voice from close behind the door.
“Yes?” she asked cautiously.
Big mistake, lady, he thought to himself. In another incarnation, that would have been enough to put his foot through the door.
“Lydia Franklin?” he called in what he hoped was a friendly, nonthreatening tone.
Another pause.
“Who are you and what do you want?”
Maybe he was kidding himself, thinking he could play himself off as an innocent stripper boy. But then, any bail skip with half an ounce of brains would act paranoid at an unexpected visitor, no matter who was doing the knocking.
“I’m Antoine from Hot and Ready Exotic. Valerie sent me to deliver a very special birthday present to Lydia.”
Nate had no idea how a real stripper would handle a nervous Nellie at the door, and the long delay made him wonder if he’d blown it. There was a quick—very quick—shadow across the peephole, and he pasted on his best I’m-a-hot-guy-you-want-to-let-in smile.
In his head, old tapes played that featured him training a gun at the doorway while it was kicked or battered in. Shouts and commands and chaos would all feed the adrenaline surge that would accompany his forcible entry. The adrenaline surge was definitely on board, but the rest faded into memory while he waited, silent and smiling while she gave him the once-over through the peephole.
“Wait,” she commanded sternly, and he heard her move away.
It had to be her. He knew it. Patience began to waver with his target acquired, but he stood by and waited. He heard her talking soon after, quietly at first. He stiffened, wondering who else was in the apartment. Then came a cry of surprise that startled him into even higher alert, followed by an easy laugh. Suddenly, he heard her flipping door locks, and the door yanked open. It was Lydia all right, all five-foot-seven-inches of sexy blonde. She had a cell phone pressed to her ear and a seductive, welcoming grin on her face that was the exact opposite of the expression bond jumpers normally wore upon seeing him.
Mother of God, but the mug shot he’d thought was fairly decent hadn’t done the woman a single bit of justice. The California Beach Girl version of Lydia Franklin took every male chromosome in his body to DEFCON 1. Her feathery blonde hair fell in careless layers to spill over her shoulders, and the silken strands were the only thing obscuring the view of a baby-blue bikini and long-legged, pinup-worthy body that a Sports Illustrated model would have envied. Round, high tits strained against the shimmery fabric, and his cock promptly began twitching most inconveniently in its stripper pouch. To make matters worse, her aquamarine eyes were studying him every bit as greedily as he was eyeing her. In any other place—any other place—he would have been on her in a hot minute. That included the post office, the supermarket or a coat closet during Sunday School.