“It’s what I do,” he said. “So you’re going to have to trust me.”
Like he trusted her not to be involved in a drug scheme that was hurting her friends? “Do as I say and not as I do, huh?”
“Don’t take it personally.” Carlos took the key out of the ignition and reached for the door.
“Are you kidding me?” How could she not? Everything about this was personal. Her friends were getting hurt. Her apartment had been broken into and trashed. She’d been attacked. The police had accused her of being a drug mule. She nearly vibrated in her seat with barely repressed frustration and red-hot anger. “Don’t take it personally?”
He flushed. “Look, last night—”
“Didn’t mean anything.” She forced a coldness into her tone to cover the hurt piercing her chest and pulled down the visor mirror to check her hair and give herself an excuse not to look at him. “Look, there’s an attraction. So what? I’m comfortable with my sexuality. We’re grown-ups here. It’s just fucking. We had an impulse and we went with it. We know better than to think it’s anything more than that.” She flipped the visor closed. “So what’s your plan?”
He winced, but the twisted expression was gone almost as soon as it appeared. “You distract them so they don’t notice when I slip away that I’ve been gone for a while.”
“Got it.” She opened the passenger door and stepped out into the fall sunshine, glad for a simple pleasure in a day that had gone straight to shit.
Carlos looked at her over the top of his car. “Just be careful.”
“Don’t worry.” Pulling on her best tough-chick persona, the one she relied on as the Silver Queen during battles in Central Square Park, she leveled an ice-cold bitch glare at him. “I’m not a girl who lets herself get hurt.”
There hadn’t been time to fix what he’d said to piss her off, even if Carlos had known how to do that. Truth was, he had a damn good reason for why he went from one warm bed to another without bothering to learn last names or much of anything besides what made the nearly anonymous women come—until he’d woken up with a note from Mika on his pillow. She brought it all back, everything he’d spent the past year trying to forget.
Being around her was like having an itch between your shoulder blades far enough down that there wasn’t any way to reach it on your own.
The door buzzed and Mika shot him a narrow glare as she wrapped her delicate fingers around the handle. “Be nice.”
“Aren’t I always?”
She didn’t bother to respond, just yanked open the door and walked into the lobby. The receptionist informed them that the elder Durning wasn’t in today, but the son was on his way out to see them. A set of double doors swished open, and a man who must be Roger walked out. It took about two seconds to peg the son in his artfully aged jeans, white dress shirt, loosened tie, and tight-fitting baby blue sport coat as being of the douchetastic variety—especially with the six-hundred-dollar haircut of a young politician in the making.
Roger strode across the lobby and took both of Mika’s hands in his, kissing her palms like a man who had a fucking prayer of a chance. Carlos hated him on sight. Mika giggled at something the guy had whispered, and he hated the guy even more.
A good two inches taller than Carlos, Roger towered over Mika as they stood together off to the side in the sandstone and wood lobby and exchanged air kisses. She curled her delicate hand into the other guy’s maw and led him over to where Carlos stood, silently planning how to accidentally dropkick the dude.
“Roger,” Mika said, smiling up at him. “I want to introduce you to my friend, Carlos Castillo.”
“Hola, my hermano.” He slapped a hand on Carlos’s back. It was a friendly gesture, but the excessive force said otherwise, and his smile was wide and full of malice. “How’s it going?”
At least they were on the same page here, even if Mika was blissfully unaware of the pissing match going on right in front of her.
Ignoring the butchered Spanish accent and the pat meant to knock him off his feet, Carlos smiled without any warmth and took his proffered hand for a handshake. “Great, man.” He squeezed, hard.
Roger’s eyes widened. Carlos winked at him before releasing the other man’s hand. The logical side of him sent a cease-and-desist order, but the caveman inside him who’d spent the past two nights losing himself between Mika’s sweet legs wouldn’t listen. Carlos might not get to keep Mika, but for as long as they were together during this case, no one else was getting close.
“So what brings you down here?” Roger flexed his hand and pivoted his body so he effectively cut Carlos out of the conversation. “You didn’t use up the whole bolt we gave you a few weeks ago already, did you?”
“Nah, I’ve got close to half of it left, but I wanted to bounce some ideas about a textile that a client wants and hoped you’d have some samples I could look at for inspiration.” She looked up at him with just enough interest to make Carlos’s pulse thrum against his temple.
She was distracting Roger, just like they’d talked about, but it turned him all growly. If he didn’t watch it, he’d be puffing out his chest next. Not exactly the reaction he wanted to have about a client who could well be up to her pretty neck in drug dealers. He doubted it, but he couldn’t discount it completely. Not yet.
“Excellent.” Roger practically preened. “Let me take you in the back and show you what we’ve got and you can tell me all about your new digs. I hear you’re not having to work out of your living room anymore.”
“No, thank God.” She slipped her hand into the crook of Roger’s arm before turning to Carlos. “I know you’ll be bored out of your mind with all of our shop talk. Do you want to hang out up here? I promise we won’t be long.”
They disappeared behind the inner doors. Pushing back his knee-jerk need to follow, he focused on the point of this whole exercise: getting a peek at Durning Imports’ records and leaving behind a few tiny presents. The wireless listening devices in his pocket were top of the line, remote controlled and motion activated. A little addition he’d added was the ability to feed the overheard conversations to Maltese Security, where they could be recorded and analyzed. He just needed to figure out how to get inside the Durning inner sanctum.
“Stupid computer,” the receptionist grumbled.
He gritted his teeth to stop from grinning at the piece of luck. There was a God, and He was looking out for Carlos today. “Something I can help with?”