She hurried away toward baggage claim, her cheeks red and cracked wide with a grin. Sam’s smile widened when he saw the look on my face, which I imagined was somewhere between incredulous and disgusted.
“What? Jealous?”
“Hardly. I’d just forgotten what a shameless flirt you are.” I would never admit it, but I did feel the slightest twinge of . . . not jealousy. But something. Irritation?
“It goes with the territory.”
I snorted. “Right. Because you can’t be good at tennis and be an asshole to fans. No one has ever done that.”
The smile slipped from his face, not disappearing, just shrinking. Even asleep on the plane, his lips had curled up at the corners. Not that I’d been staring.
“I know you want to think the worst of me, and I suppose you must have your reasons for that, but I’m not an asshole. A bit of a whore, if you want to be judgy about it, but never an asshole.”
A funny feeling, shame or maybe guilt, took root in my stomach. It was foreign—a virus that my father had long ago vaccinated me against, and my body attacked it now. How Sam Bradford lived his life was none of my business. There had been good people in my path before and it had never stopped me. It wouldn’t now. I was almost out.
“I don’t care who you flirt with or where you stick your penis, but I do care about how long this whole endeavor keeps me away from school. So, if you could try to focus.”
“Okay. Fine. No funny business.” He reached out and tugged on the hairs that had fallen out of my bun, loosening the whole thing until it flopped low on my neck. “With anyone but you.”
I groaned and trailed after him as he wound his way toward the ground transportation. My neck tingled where his fingers had landed and my own lips tried to twitch into an unused smile. Once outside he turned to me, eyebrows raised, but I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take us to a restaurant in a quiet, cheap neighborhood in the city.
Twenty minutes later we stood on an uneven street. The sun’s rays reached fingers over the horizon, scrabbling for purchase against the night. Austria in late November meant freezing cold. Sam looked refreshed, his cheeks a healthy pink and the chilly wind ruffling his wavy brown hair. I felt disgusting after thirty-five hours of travel, but he may as well have stepped out of a shampoo commercial. That fact boosted my level of grumpiness, which helped me ignore the twinge of desire in my stomach, at least for the moment.
I could not be attracted to him and rip him off. One of them had to go, and thanks to my dad, it had to be the former.
My eyes adjusted to the lightening dawn. We were alone on the street, at least at the moment, and I could feel Sam’s silent questions pummeling me. Instead of having a conversation about it—which would mean protests—I moved, expecting him to follow. My tennis shoes made little noise on the old streets. The first car on the street had a blinking red alarm light, the second was too nice to not be missed. The third and fourth had locked doors, but the fifth was the jackpot.
The doors on the beat-up, dark blue Volkswagen Jetta were unlocked and the keys fell into my lap when I tugged on the sun visor. The standard transmission didn’t trip me up, though it had been a while since I’d driven one in Europe. Shifting with the left hand never felt natural.
The passenger door opened and Sam’s face appeared. “Um, what exactly do you think you’re fucking doing?”
“Borrowing a car, like I said.” The more clandestine and illegal the trip became, the faster Sam would lose interest. I crossed mental fingers that stealing a car would be the place he balked.
“We’re not stealing a car, Blair. People know who I am. Between the two of us, we have access to millions of dollars.”
“Look, you don’t know my dad like I do. He has security and IT people on twenty-four-hour payroll, monitoring me and all of his clients. If either of us uses our ID to rent a car, we’re screwed. If you’re not down with doing this my way, then give me the information I need to do it myself and go back to Melbourne. Otherwise, get your ass in the car before we get caught.”
The truth was, my dad’s con business was a two-man enterprise—me being man number two. He used a few shady individuals, like the PI and the occasional property manager, on a contract basis but, with one exception, they didn’t know shit about his real business.
I could find my dad if I really wanted to, at least I thought I could, and he probably wasn’t monitoring Sam’s movements. He’d worked contacts to verify whether or not Sam had reported the theft to Interpol and the FBI, but that was as far as it went.
He had reported it—or his manager, Leo, had. Law enforcement dutifully added Sam’s name to the list of victims swindled by Neil Saunders, a.k.a. Neil Paddington, a.k.a. a few other names that had been compromised over the years, but they didn’t have a clue where to start. Or finish.