Wild Dirty Secret(21)

“Well, you don’t have to do that. Neither of us does.” I tried to infuse an optimism I didn’t quite feel into my voice. “We’re his guests.”

She looked doubtful.

“Philip and I will take care of Henri,” I said with more false assurance. “So you just stay put. Let me know if you need anything. I’m sure we can order you some clothes so you’re not stuck wearing my hand-me-downs. Right, Adrian?”

“Right,” came the muffled answer from the hallway.

“Um…” Ella’s gaze darted to the closed kitchen door.

“Adrian’s a terrible gossip,” I explained.

Muttering drifted through the thick, knotted oak.

“We love him anyway,” I said. “Couldn’t live without him.”

“Damn straight.” Adrian bustled back into the kitchen, armed with a laptop. “As if I needed to eavesdrop. You can be sure, I have more advanced surveillance methods if I were even interested in what you were saying.”

He flipped the laptop open on the table and pulled up the Web site for Nordstrom. Ella’s wardrobe would probably be better than mine, as retribution.

I suppressed my smile. “You two have fun.”

Philip was a bit of a Luddite. I used to call him a sixty-year-old man trapped in a thirty-year-old body. He retaliated by fucking me silly. But there were laptops and tablets sprinkled throughout the house if you knew where to look. I found one in one of the cozier sitting rooms. In my mind, I had dubbed it the library for its cushy chairs and dark paneling, even though there weren’t any books.

I pulled up my cell phone’s Web site to check my call logs.

Shortly after we left the party, I had received the first call from Henri. A series of calls from him after that, where I guessed he was trying to figure out what had happened. And then nothing, which I supposed was when he’d ordered the hit on the men in the hotel suite, and thus on me and Ella by proxy. If those men had spilled their story, Henri’s elite escort business would have suffered. Normally he would have compensated them with girls, but considering Ella’s complete unsuitability, maybe he was low on them too.

Henri wouldn’t have been happy about our desertion, and even less so once he found out we’d taken some of their money on the way out. But what had happened after, the murder and our framing, had been both brutal and quick. The message was clear. Return to him or be hunted down. Assassination by cop. It was one of his finer ideas, really.

In the minutes after we had left his apartment, Luke had called. Then again, ten more times. Well, sure, he had just promised to produce the lead suspect in a murder investigation. Naturally he would be concerned after finding us gone.

I should delete the handful of messages from him without listening. I couldn’t.

The first one was frantic, out of breath: “Damn it, Shelly, where did you go? Come back.”

The second was more thoughtful, pleading: “I know you saw the news. It looks bad, but we can fix this. Whatever happened at the hotel, we can fix it. Just come back. Call me.”

By the third, he had realized his error: “Did you hear me on the phone? Is that why you left? I had to keep them from sending guys out. They’re going crazy at the station, trying to find you, but they haven’t yet. They’re keeping me out of the search after…but I know that much. I’m not going to help them. You know that, don’t you? I wouldn’t. You know me. Right?”

Then the last:

“I don’t—you don’t have to come back. I just want to know you got somewhere safe. If you can, let me know you’re safe.”

The message clicked off, and I closed my eyes, letting the silence and the sorrow envelop me. I couldn’t trust Luke, but I still wanted to throw myself at his feet. The pendulum of my indecision was never ending where he was concerned, but Ella was my new and trusty lodestone. Her safety trumped my quasi-suicidal desire for malachite eyes and gold-spun hair.

A commotion erupted outside, and with selfish relief, I heard my best friend’s voice demanding, “Where is she? I swear, if you’ve hurt her…”

I slipped into the hallway, only to be caught in a crushing hug. I sagged against her for a brief minute, basking in the ache of contact, until she reluctantly released me.

“There you are. Damn it!” Allie swiped at her eyes. “What happened? I’ll kill him.”

I laughed, surprised to find myself a little watery as well. “Kill who?”

“The guy who hurt you. God, I know you’ve already taken care of him, but I don’t care. I’ll kill him again.”

First Philip believed I’d committed murder in retaliation for some imagined offense, now Allie. Did I really come across so bloodthirsty? “I didn’t kill anyone, sweetie. And no one hurt me.”