Читать книгу First Class Seduction - Anita Bunkley - Страница 12

Twin rock waterfalls on either side of the entry to Brightwood Estates welcomed Lori home. As she drove up the cedar-lined road that wound its way toward her house, she admired the meticulous landscaping of her subdivision. Passing blooming oleanders, vibrant crepe myrtles and colorful hibiscus as large as dinner plates, she congratulated herself once again on buying her house when she did, because real estate prices had soared in the past four years. Five minutes from Bush Intercontinental Airport, her neighborhood was convenient, quiet and strategically located near one of north Houston’s largest shopping malls.

Lori swung into the driveway of her two-story, Tuscan-style home and beeped her horn at Brittany Adams, her next-door neighbor, who was outside clipping roses from the bright pink bushes blossoming in front of her mini-French chateau.

Brittany had become Lori’s friend as soon as the two women met and discovered that they were sorority sisters. Brittany was a former teenage TV celebrity who had starred in a black family sitcom similar to the Cosby show. Cast as a sassy, smart, but devious teenager, she had helped push the sitcom to number one in the ratings with her crazy antics, near-potty-mouth one-liners, and troublemaking schemes. However, the show ran its course, and was canceled, throwing sixteen-year-old Brittany into a tailspin that left her confused, drug-addicted and broke. A six-month stint in rehab ended her dependence on prescription painkillers. After winning a nasty lawsuit against her stepfather/ manager, she left Hollywood for Houston with a hefty bank account, determined to live a “normal” life.

Now, at thirty, Brittany was no longer the gawky teenager with braces and corkscrew curls who had exploded on the small screen with an angelic brown face and a tongue as tart as acid. Leaving Hollywood, she had gone to great lengths to transform her looks so that no one would ever recognize her as the child star gone wild, and she loved the anonymity that came with her new life. Now she was a stylishly slim, mature young woman who sported a chic short hairstyle, designer jeans and beaded T-shirts, even to do her gardening. She lived very well off her syndication royalties, shopped at high-end stores, drove a silver Jag and insisted that her California rat-race lifestyle was behind her, even though she was writing the pilot for a show about a female detective—a series in which she hoped to star.

“Hey, how’s it going, Brit?” Lori called over after lowering her window. “Your roses are beautiful, as always. My mother would be so envious. Her roses aren’t doing that well this year.”

Brittany clipped one more bud, waved it at Lori, and then approached her car. “Tell her to hang in there. Dallas is gonna get its share of rain this week.” She cocked her head at Lori in a questioning pose. “So you’re back already?” Brittany remarked while pulling off her gardening gloves to examine her fancy manicure for chips. Today, her ever-changing nail design was an intricate, multihued Indian pattern in various shades of blue.

“It was a short run. No stop in Mexico City this time. Came straight through from Acapulco.”

“How’d it go?” Brittany asked, now focusing on her neighbor instead of her nails.

“Really kinda strange.”

“Strange? How?” Brittany asked.

“Well, there was this guy on the plane…I danced with him at a club in Acapulco the night before and this morning, there he was…on my flight! And he started coming on to me like crazy.”

“You call that strange?” Brittany quipped. “Please. Call it good luck…that is if he’s got it goin’ on.”

Lori grinned. “He had it goin’ on all right.”

“Good. So what happened? You gonna see him?”

“I dunno. I’ve gotta think this one through. I can’t jump in too fast and have another situation, you know?”

“Uh-hmm,” Brittany murmured in agreement. “After Devan…I do understand.”

“Anyway, we left it at a handshake at the airport, but I do have his card,” Lori replied, not quite ready to share her true feelings about her encounter with Ramón. Besides, she wasn’t sure how she felt about him. She only knew that his kiss had shaken her up and awakened feelings she wanted to explore. The man’s image was taking up residence in her head, and Lori was sure they’d meet again one day. She stretched her neck, tilted her head to one side and gave Brittany a choppy wave. “Gotta go…I’m exhausted.”

“After you get some rest, come over for dinner. You remember Janice and Tom Evans—the newlyweds who just moved in over on Willow Trails?”

“Yeah, nice couple.”

“Well, I invited them over for dinner yesterday. We barbecued. I’ve got plenty of leftover chicken and ribs.”

“Umm, sounds great. Think I will take you up on that,” Lori decided, pressing the remote to raise her garage door.

After parking her car, Lori grabbed her luggage and entered her house through the connecting door that led into the kitchen. Leaving her rolling bag by the entryway, she went to the back window and opened the plantation blinds to let some light into the room. Turning around, she reached for her bag, but stopped dead in her tracks, unable to believe her eyes.

“My God. What happened here?” she hissed under her breath, though a scream was rising fast in her throat. The sight that greeted Lori was shocking, terrifying. Her heart thumped in fear as she eyed the scene in terror.

Swirls of bright blue paint were splattered over every surface of the room. The glass tabletop was smeared with a childish finger-paint scrawl, as were the granite kitchen countertops, the stainless-steel refrigerator and the center butcher-block island. Even the imported Italian wall tiles that Lori had paid entirely too much for, were emblazoned with jagged symbols and lines that made no sense at all. Thinking that the vandals might still be in the house, she quickly stepped back, eager to get out of the house before she became their next victim.

On her way out, Lori brushed her arm against the paint-splattered doorjamb, but saw nothing on her skin. Turning around, she stepped deeper into the room and slid a trembling finger over the blue graffiti on the front of the refrigerator, realizing that the vandals must have done their thing some time ago because all their trashy artwork was bone dry. Because of that, she doubted that anyone was still there.

More angry than frightened, she ran toward the front of the house, stuck her head into her champagne-and-sage-hued bedroom and gaped at the bright yellow stripes painted down the middle of her satin, queen-size bedspread. Lumps of the same color paint had dripped onto the carpet and dried into lumpy pools that looked like ugly egg yolks. Stepping around the mess, she peeked into her master bath and cursed out loud. “Damn, damn, damn!” The glass in her antique oval mirror had been shattered. Shards of glass littered the vanity and the floor.

From the bedroom, Lori hurried to inspect the rest of the house, including closets and jewelry boxes and found that, luckily, there was no more damage and no valuables missing. Infuriated, she punched 911 into her cell phone and screamed at the operator who answered.

“I need the police! Right away! My home has been vandalized!” she shouted, unable to control the adrenalin pushing her emotions into overdrive.

“My address?” Lori gulped down her fear and centered her thoughts, forcing herself to focus. “Fifty-two-seventy-one Falls Trail Drive.”

“The police are on the way. Are you hurt?” the operator wanted to know.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Are you still inside the house?”

“Yes.”

“Get out now.”

“I’ve looked through the house. No one is here.”

“Leave anyway. Go outside and wait for the police,” the take-charge operator ordered. “Did you walk in on the vandals?”

“No, I just returned from a three-day trip to Mexico,” Lori explained, exiting the bedroom. “I’m a flight attendant…I’m away a lot. Never had any trouble. I can’t believe this…” She stopped abruptly, glanced back at her ruined kitchen, and then yanked the front door open and hurried across her driveway toward Brittany, who was still outside preening her rose bushes.

“What’s the matter?” Brittany asked, seeing the terror on Lori’s face. “Trouble at Globus? Who’s on the phone?”

“The police.”

“What?”

“Right. You won’t believe this, Brit. Somebody vandalized my house. Everything…is covered…with…graffiti,” Lori sputtered as she described the scene.

“Shit! You gotta be kidding,” Brittany snapped. She threw her clippers to the ground and grabbed hold of Lori’s arm. “Nobody’s inside, right?”

“No, but it’s a mess in there. Did you hear anything last night? See any suspicious-looking people hanging around?” Lori wanted to know.

“No. Nothing. As I said, Janice and Tom came over for dinner. We had the outdoor speakers turned up pretty loud while we were on the patio. They left about ten. Must have happened after I went inside. I didn’t hear anything unusual.” Brittany glanced back at Lori’s house. “Did they kick in the back door? Break a window?”

“I don’t know…I didn’t look to see…” Lori stopped, turning around to focus on the black and white patrol car with whirling red and blue lights that swept up to the curb and jolted to a stop.

Pushing her cell phone into her uniform pocket, she approached the tall black man who unfolded his towering uniformed body from the squad car and hooked his thumbs into his holster belt. “Officer. Thanks for coming so quickly.” Lori rushed to welcome the policeman.

“Detective Clint Washington,” he told Lori, without extending his hand. He surveyed her house with inquisitive eyes, seemingly already on the case and primed for action. “What happened here?” he asked, listening as Lori described what she’d discovered on her return home.

“Let’s check it out,” he stated with calm authority, striding off. His long legs devoured Lori’s brick-paved walkway in five giant steps, leaving Lori and Brittany to tag along behind.

Once inside, they went into the bedroom, and then checked the master bath. “We do have a few good fingerprints, here on the edge of the basin,” he told Lori. “That’s encouraging. I’ll get the crime scene investigation team out here right away. You can go ahead and sweep up the broken glass, but don’t touch the paint smears, okay?”

Lori nodded in relief, hoping the prints might help the police catch whoever did this.

“Are you sure nothing of value was stolen?” Washington asked after he’d inspected the rest of the damage and determined that the vandals had cut the wires to Lori’s alarm box and broken a window in the dining room to get into the house.

“Certain. Nothing is missing, I checked everywhere I could think of,” Lori assured him. She watched him open a pad of forms and begin to fill one out.

“So this was for kicks?” Brittany snapped in disgust. “I can’t believe some damn sicko would do this just for fun.” Brittany directed her anger toward Detective Washington, whose shoulders leveled off at the top of the petite woman’s head. “That is some crazy shit, you know?” she blurted out.

Lori cut her eyes at her friend, warning her about her language. Back in the day, Brittany’s startling potty mouth might have been a ratings winner when she was playing a rebellious teenager on a television sitcom, but that kind of language was definitely out of place when dealing with the police.

“Oh, excuse my language, detective,” Brittany muttered. “But I’m sure you know what I mean.”

“Unfortunately, I do,” the policeman agreed, turning intensely serious eyes on Brittany. “This kind of vandalism happens all the time. It’s June. School just let out. Kids with too much time and too little to do wind up pulling stunts like this for kicks. Just last week, two streets over, we had the same kind of thing—only red paint that time.”

“So what are the police doing about it?” Lori demanded, fear now shifting into outrage. “Can’t you catch the punks who are ruining the subdivision before they strike again?”

“You’re just one of many on my watch. The kids will slip up, and we’ll catch ‘em, but in the meantime, keep your eyes open for any suspicious activity. Might want to get a dog. A barking dog does a good job of scaring prowlers off.”

“A dog?” Lori rolled her eyes and pressed a finger to the company name embroidered on her blouse. “As you can see, I’m employed by Globus-Americas. I travel all the time. No way can I take on the responsibility of a dog.”

“Well, then, a more effective alarm system might help,” the detective suggested, handing Lori the police report to sign.

With a sigh, Lori signed the paper, took her copy and then escorted the officer out. As she watched him drive away, she felt discouraged and very uneasy. “I doubt the police will ever catch the punks who wrecked my house,” she said to Brittany as they turned and walked up the driveway.

“He sure was fine,” Brittany murmured, ignoring Lori’s comment.

“Fine?” Lori’s head whipped around. “What are you talking about?”

“Detective Washington. Big feet, long legs. A killer smile. Umm, he’s got it all going on.”

Lori punched Brittany on the shoulder. “Get outta here! You’re checking out the brother when we need to be pushing him to do his job? Brittany Adams, you need to quit.”

“Hey, my radar is always on, and he was one good-looking black dot on my screen. He’s obviously well employed and wasn’t wearing any rings.”

“Girl, please,” Lori sighed in frustration. “The last time you got involved with a policeman, you wound up chasing the guy out of your house with a pot of hot coffee in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other.”

“Nat Chavis was FBI, not local,” Brittany defended. “And it was a mug of hot coffee, not a pot.”

“Whatever,” Lori quipped. “All I remember is that he treated you like a suspect and you snapped when you found out he’d bugged your cell phone.”

“Nat was a fool…he underestimated my intelligence,” Brittany said calmly, chin raised. “But this Detective Washington, now, he looks like a man with good sense.”

Lori paused at her front door and pinned her neighbor with a warning expression. “Let’s just hope he uses his good sense to get the fools who trashed my house.”

Brittany came up beside Lori, nodding. “But…as the handsome, intelligent, hopefully single detective said, one police car can’t be everywhere all the time. If thieves and vandals want to get in, they’ll find a way.”

“Yeah.” Lori grimaced in agreement. “I get the impression that we’re kinda on our own.”

Brittany grunted. “Well, I’m not gonna put bars on my windows and doors to keep some punk-ass kids from spray painting my living room, and I refuse like hell to buy a gun. Just my luck I’d wind up shooting the mail carrier in the ass.”

“Unfortunately, it all comes down to making it hard for someone to get in,” Lori observed, her mind turning back to what the officer had said. What you need is a better alarm system.

“Brit, I gotta go,” Lori quipped, giving her neighbor a quick wave goodbye.

“Need any help cleaning up?”

“Naw. I’ll sweep up the glass, but I’ll have to leave everything else until the crime scene investigators are finished. I’ll be over later. Save me some ribs.”

Inside her house, Lori reached into her skirt pocket, removed Ramón’s business card and stared at it, her heart lurching in her chest at the thought of hearing his voice and seeing him again. She picked up the phone, pressed in two numbers, but then stopped.

“I’ll call first thing in the morning,” she decided, not yet ready to trust her voice. Not ready to betray her feelings for a man who was quickly winding his way into her heart.