He was certainly “high-profile,” especially right now.
She already had access to some “new and unusual” facts about him.
As an interview subject, he could prove to be a lot more intriguing than the pope or the president.
She studied his solemn smile as he held out both hands to Leigh and said, “I’ve been worried about you.”
His voice gave Courtney a jolt. He had an amazing voice, deep and distinctive. If he hadn’t chosen to be a criminal, he could have used that voice to great advantage on the radio or television.
She stepped out of O’Hara’s way, her gaze shifting to the large flat white box that Valente had handed him when he walked in. Tucked under O’Hara’s arm was a brown bag, twisted at the top, which Courtney assumed contained a bottle of something with an alcohol content.
“You still here?” Joe asked her in surprise.
“I’m leaving, but I wanted to get a look at Valente in person,” she replied, following him into the kitchen. “What’s in the box?”
“I don’t know,” he said, putting it on the island. “But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a pizza.”
“He brought her a pizza?” Courtney exclaimed with a muffled laugh. “A pizza? He owns a helicopter and entire blocks of buildings in New York City—I’d have figured him for a seven-course take-out meal from Le Cirque, with maybe a gaudy diamond bracelet as a napkin ring.”
“Really? I guess you know more about him than I do.”
“I don’t know much of anything about him, but I’m going to do some research.” She lifted the cover of the flat white box and shuddered with revulsion. “Oh, yuk!”
In the midst of trying to figure out how to turn one of the ovens on, O’Hara looked over his shoulder to see what her exclamation was about.
“It’s an uncooked pizza,” she said, pointing accusingly at the item, “covered with huge shrimp.” She shuddered again. “How Italian is that?”
“I dunno. Me, I like pepperoni.”
“I hate shrimp in all its disguises.” She opened the brown paper bag, extracted the bottle of red wine inside it, and scrutinized the label. “This guy is really twisted. He drinks three-hundred-dollars-a-bottle red wine with shrimp pizza.”
O’Hara’s mind was on the task at hand. “Valente told me to put that in the oven. Normally, I’d tell him to mind his own business, but Mrs. Manning hasn’t eaten a cup of food in days. Do you know how to turn this oven on?”
“How hard can it be?” Courtney replied, changing places with O’Hara, who began uncorking the wine at the center island. For a brief moment, she studied the array of dials and buttons above the four stainless steel ovens built into the brick wall, her agile mind quickly calculating probabilities. “This one,” she said emphatically. And changed the time on the clock.
Chapter 27
* * *
“I don’t know where Logan keeps anything in here,” Leigh explained to Michael Valente as she switched on the lights in Logan’s office. She walked over to his desk and sat down on his leather chair. Logan’s office was so uniquely, poignantly, his that it felt all wrong for her to be sitting at his eighteenth-century carved desk.
Trying not to dwell on that, she reached for the handle on the center drawer. The drawer was locked. She tried the drawers on the right side. They were locked. So were the drawers on the left. Embarrassed, she looked up. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t know they’d be locked.” Leigh nodded toward a wall of built-in, oak-fronted file cabinets and got up. “Maybe the file you’re looking for is in one of these.”
“Take your time; I’m in no hurry,” he said politely, but she could feel him watching her as she crossed the room, and it made her distinctly uneasy. His voice made Leigh uneasy. Or maybe what made her uneasy was having him there when she realized, for the first time, that her husband had started keeping everything under lock and key, in his own home.
The file cabinets were all locked, too.
“I think Brenna—my secretary—may know where Logan keeps a key.” She sat back down at Logan’s desk and called Brenna from his phone. Brenna was home, and she knew Logan kept his desk and files locked, but she had no idea where Leigh might find a key.
“I’m very embarrassed that you have to leave here empty-handed a second time,” Leigh said, pausing to turn off the office lights.
“Don’t be. I can wait for the documents I need until you find the keys.”
Leigh walked back into the living room and paused at the sofas, intending to either invite him to sit down for a few minutes or show him to the door if he was ready to leave. “I don’t remember if I ever thanked you for letting me use your helicopter last week, and for carrying me back and forth through the snow.”
Brushing back the sides of his sport jacket, he shoved his hands into his pants pockets. “Actually, there’s a way you can thank me for all that. When is the last time you ate?”
“I haven’t been very hungry.”
“I had a feeling that might be the case. As a way of thanking me, I’d like you to have dinner with me tonight.”
“No, I—”
“I haven’t eaten since breakfast,” he interrupted. “I brought dinner with me. Which way is the kitchen?”
Leigh gaped at him, amazed and annoyed at his highhandedness. His expensive haircut, tailor-made jacket, and three-hundred-dollar tie gave him a veneer of prosperous, well-bred elegance, but nothing could offset the granite strength in his features, the harsh defiance in his tough jaw, or the cold, predatory gleam she’d glimpsed in his amber eyes when Harwell insulted him. Logan had mistaken Michael Valente for a tame, predictable businessman, but he wasn’t that. He wasn’t that at all.
On the other hand, he had gone to a great deal of trouble for her last week, so she led the way into the kitchen.
The big room was empty, but all four of the ovens were glowing, and there were two glasses of wine on the island next to plates, napkins, and a large knife. Valente shrugged off his jacket and draped it over the back of a chair; then he handed her one of the wineglasses. “Drink some,” he ordered when she shook her head and started to put it down. “It will help things.”
Leigh wasn’t certain what things he thought it would help, but she took a swallow because she was simply too worn down to put up much opposition to anything, particularly something inconsequential. She felt the effect of the potent wine within moments.
“Have a little more. Do it for me.”
She took another sip. “Mr. Valente, this is very nice of you, but I’m not very hungry or thirsty.”
He gazed at her in speculative silence, a glass of wine in his right hand, his left hand shoved deep into his trouser pocket. “Under the circumstances, I think it would be more suitable if you called me by my first name.”
A knot of nervous tension tightened Leigh’s stomach. His voice . . . his eyes . . . his attitude. “I’m actually a rather formal person.”
Instead of responding, he turned and walked over to the ovens. Bending down slightly, he studied whatever was in there through the glass in one oven door. “I’m curious about something,” he said with his back to her.
“What’s that?”
“I sent you a basket of pears in the hospital. Did you get them?”
Shocked and embarrassed, Leigh stared at his back. “Yes, I did, only there was no card with them. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was you who sent them.”
“That explains it,” he said.
“I love pears—” Leigh began, intending to thank him for them now.
“I know you do.”
Her uneasiness began to escalate. “How do you know that?”
“I know a lot of things about you. Have some more wine, Leigh.”
Alarm bells began screaming in Leigh’s brain. That voice. She knew that voice! She replayed his clipped commands along with others like them: Wear this for me . . . Drink this . . . Love Me . . . Have a little more . . . Do it for me . . .
“I know you
like pears, you love shrimp pizza, and you hate most vegetables,” he continued, his back still to her. “I know you sunburn easily, and you dislike any soap with a strong scent. I also know you aren’t ‘a rather formal’ person.” He paused to pick up two pot holders lying beside the ovens.
Behind him, Leigh picked up the big knife lying on the island, her heart pounding with fear and rage. She could hear faint sounds of a television set—the stock car races—coming from O’Hara’s room down the hall and around a corner. She didn’t think Joe would hear her if she screamed.
“The truth is,” Valente continued as he removed the pizza and juggled it onto the granite countertop, “you are innately kind and unaffected. You will take time to talk to anyone who you think is lonely or in need of cheering up, you can’t stand to hurt anyone’s feelings, and you will go out of your way to find something to like in almost anyone. Including me.”
He turned around and saw the knife in her hand.
“Get out of here!” Leigh whispered savagely. “Get out of my house before I scream for help and call the police.”
“Put that knife down! What the hell is wrong?”
“You’ve been stalking me! It was you! I know your voice. You’re the one who sends the flowers, and the presents—”
“I am not your stalker—”
Leigh began backing toward the telephone on the wall near the hallway, and he moved forward, matching her step for step. “Pears,” she ranted accusingly. “Pears and pizza and soap!”
“Groceries—I used to watch you buy them.”