Читать книгу Mouth To Mouth - Erin McCarthy - Страница 7

Trevor Dean watched Laurel Wilkins leave the coffee shop and stepped out of his car. Laurel had hung around longer than he’d expected, which was a good sign—meant she was eager to meet him. Or Russ Evans.

Trevor chuckled to himself. That still made him laugh, using cops’ names to pick up women. He had a whole laundry list of detectives whose names he used on a rotating basis, and they had no idea. It wasn’t identity theft—he wasn’t using anything more than their names—but it was a good private joke. Flipping the bird at those screwups, who let him walk around and get away with stealing left and right. Plus, it was an easy system for him to keep track of who he was supposed to be from day to day.

Jill was waiting for him in the coffee shop, probably wondering what was keeping him, so he picked up the pace, tossing his cigarette butt down onto the sidewalk. It was colder than a wart on a witch in Alaska, and his leather coat didn’t do squat to protect him. Maybe he should have headed south this year, worked his way down to the Florida Keys.

But that would mean starting over from scratch.

He had a system going in Cleveland, been working it for over five years, and the cops were none the wiser. Three women, at all times. One at the starting gate, one in the race, and one crossing the finish line.

Worked like a charm.

Jill spilled her coffee when he walked in, then mumbled to herself as she mopped it up. She gathered up the wet napkins and pushed them aside, wiping her fingers on her blue sweatshirt.

“Hi, sweetheart.” Trevor kissed Jill’s forehead and sat down across from her. “Spill your coffee?”

“Yes, I’m such an idiot.”

“But a cute one.” He winked at her, knowing she’d blush. She did. Jill was easy to figure out. The minute he’d seen her struggling to get her gas cap off at the gas station, her nose red, her hair flat under a knit hat, he’d known she was the next one.

Trevor liked unattractive women. He liked the way they were so damn eager to please, so desperate for touches, so sure he was going to bolt at any minute. He even liked the sex. It made him feel powerful to know he was giving them something no one else would, and the control always rested with him, just as firmly in the bedroom as out of it. He could do whatever he wanted, because in the end, in the dark, it was all about him.

“I was starting to worry about you. I thought you were going to be here sooner.” Jill brushed her mud-brown hair back. “I mean, it’s not a big deal or anything, I’m not nagging, I was just picturing you in a coma.”

That nervous laugh she gave, that worry, made him smile. He had her.

He’d been living in a hotel since he’d skipped out on Rachel on Saturday, so the timing was perfect. “Sorry, babe, I should have called you to tell you I was running late. But I was having a hell of a time with my landlord, trying to reason with him. He raised my rent two hundred bucks a month.”

“What? Oh, Pete, that’s awful!”

“I don’t know how I’m going to afford it.” Trevor sank back, let his shoulders slump, a sigh of defeat emerge.

And waited for Jill to pull out of the starting gate.

“And they just cut your hours at the office, too,” Jill said, hating the way Pete looked so worried, the corners of his cute blue eyes crinkling up. He was always such an upbeat person, it was difficult to see him like this.

It still amazed her that a man as good-looking as Pete Trevor had looked twice at her, a woman about as exciting as day-old oatmeal. She had plain hair, a plain face, and a plain body, except for overly large breasts that had earned her the high school nickname Charmin. Don’t squeeze the Charmin…

But Pete was so sweet, so good to her. She was pretty sure she was falling in love with him.

“It will be okay. I’ll figure something out. I have a little savings.” His eyes darted off to the left, and his fingers went into his hair.

He was lying to reassure her, Jill realized with a start. He didn’t want her to worry. Her heart swelled, and she spoke before she could think, doubt, talk herself out of it.

“Why don’t we move in together?” Jill blushed at her presumptuousness, but forged ahead despite Pete’s look of surprise. “I mean, you spend the night with me a couple of times a week anyway, and why should we both waste all this money on rent? If we moved in together it would save us about four hundred dollars a month each.”

She held her breath, waited for his response.

“I thought about it,” he admitted. “But I didn’t want you to think I was freeloading.”

“Of course not! We’ll be splitting the rent.”

Pete gave her a smile, the one that made her insides tumble and burn. “What if living together reveals all my flaws? I don’t want to lose you.”

It was love. It was definitely love. “You won’t lose me. You have me as long as you want me.”

He picked up her hand, kissed the back of it. “I’m counting on that.”

Russ zipped up his jacket when he stepped outside. He could feel the tension actually lifting and rising into his chest and head, squeezing him, pissing him off, and making him want to grab Laurel and lock her in a room with crime scene photos.

Take care of herself. Ha. Laurel was a bunny in a city full of foxes. Some day she was going to be just hopping along, all soft and sweet, looking for clover, then wham…in for the kill.

He had a job to do, and it wasn’t protecting naive women from themselves. Laurel was walking west down the street, head down, not the least bit aware of her surroundings. Shit, someone could step right out of that hedge and just grab her and she wouldn’t even realize until it was too late, because she wouldn’t hear a damn thing.

Take care of herself? Please. She screamed rich, vulnerable woman alone, take advantage of me. She was so damn appealing, Russ wanted to take advantage of her himself.

Watching her hit the button to unlock a white Lexus SUV, Russ swore. He jogged the last ten feet to the bookstore and got in the passenger seat of Anders’s black truck, keeping Laurel in his view. “Follow that Lexus SUV.”

Jerry shifted the truck into gear, but tossed him a petulant look. “Where the hell have you been? You’ve been gone for thirty minutes. You cheating on me? Got another detective on the side you’re hooking up with?”

Russ laughed. He liked working with Anders, who kept the laughs rolling even when they were knee-deep in scumbags—or worse, paperwork. “Come on, Jerry, you know I’d never do that to you. But a good relationship needs to be based on trust, you know.”

“You’re gone all the time, you don’t talk to me anymore, what am I supposed to think?” Jerry stopped at the light behind Laurel’s Lexus and shot Russ a grin. “You come home late, smelling like cigarettes and coffee, which I know you don’t drink. I think we either need counseling or it’s over, man, it’s just over.”

“Shut up, Anders. You know you’re the only partner for me.”

“Be still my heart.” Jerry glanced around as he followed Laurel down Lake Avenue and onto Edgewater Drive, past stately brick and stone homes built in the twenties as suburban getaways for the rich. “The blonde lives well, huh?”

“Her house, but she lives with her mother. Inheritance, I guess.” Russ kept one eye on the taillights of Laurel’s car while checking out the neighborhood. “She didn’t know who Dean was, never heard of him. Get this. She thought she was chatting online with Russ Evans, her friend Michelle’s old high school classmate.”

Jerry whistled. “Dean’s a smart-ass.”

“Who knows more than we thought.” He watched Laurel pull into the driveway of a massive brick three-story house, the front flat, its architectural focus the two dozen windows reflecting crisp moonlight back at him. “Jesus, what do you call this kind of house?”

“Expensive.”

And more than a family of twelve could ever use. “My whole house would fit in one room.”

Jerry idled at the curb, his eyebrow lifted. “Got the lake in her backyard and the world at her feet. Must be nice to be rich.”

Laurel’s car had retreated into the garage around the back of the house, and now lights were flicking on all over the first floor. There were no blinds at the windows, and even though the house sat back from the street behind a stately yard covered under six inches of snow, Russ could see the outlines of furniture, lamps. Then Laurel, as her blond head popped past a sofa.

He thought about her suggestion that they have sex. It may have been a dig, a way to prove her point, but his body had heard that suggestion and run with it. Worse, he kept imagining her saying that to someone else—and him ripping the guy’s face off.

“Wait here a minute.” Russ opened the car door.

“Oh, here we go again. Wait here, Jerry, while I flirt with a suspect.”

“She’s not a suspect, I told you that.” He got out of the car. “Call Pam on your cell phone if you’re feeling left out. Try and make her remember why she ever thought dating you was a good idea.”

Anders called after him, “And while you’re hitting on Blondie, why don’t you try doing your job and seeing if she’ll act as bait to help pull in Dean.”

Russ stopped closing the door, catching it with his foot. He knew Anders was right, but the idea of enlisting Laurel’s help went against everything he was trying to accomplish. He wanted her out of this. Now. And to stay in her pretty house, protected and innocent, untouched by ugly reality.

“Not this woman, Anders. We put her up as bait, and more than likely she’s going to get eaten.”

“By Dean or by you?” Jerry gave him a smarmy grin.

“Pig.” Russ slammed the door in his face, cutting off a wave of laughter.

As he headed up the driveway, hands stuck in his pockets, Russ wondered what the hell he was doing. There was no reason to be strolling up to Laurel’s front door, except that he wanted to make sure she was all right. That she had locked up the house nice and tight, checked all her windows, thrown the dead bolts.

The intensity of his concern bothered him, sent his nerves vibrating, made him edgy. For a man who thought remembering to bring condoms was the height of consideration, he was making too much out of this. He’d met plenty of people over the years on the job—especially women and children—whose eyes had cried for help, understanding, compassion, and he’d felt that pull, that draw deep down in his gut to do something. But he’d always managed to maintain distance, keep a cool head, do his job with sensitivity, yes, but with the hard-ass detachment needed to not go insane or slide into cynicism.

Ringing Laurel’s front doorbell couldn’t be classified as keeping his distance. And if he was going to breech that boundary, hell, he might as well go all the way.

The landscaping along the front yard was shrouded with burlap to protect it from the January temperatures and icy snow. Discreet lighting illuminated the brick walk as he walked quickly. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to say, but he was thinking somewhere along the lines of offering himself up as a sexual sacrifice.

If she was serious about having an affair, why the hell couldn’t she just have it with him? That way he would know she would be safe.

And if he enjoyed himself, well, that was only a side benefit. The real important issue was protecting Laurel.

Wasn’t he just a Good Samaritan? With an erection.

The front door flew open when he was still five feet from the stoop. “What are you doing?” Laurel stood in the doorway, wearing those hip-hugging black pants, slippers, her white sweater, and that damn pink scarf still draped around her neck. She had pulled her hair up into a ponytail, shaving a few years off her appearance, as if she didn’t look young enough already.

“I’m just checking to make sure you got in the house okay.”

“What?” She leaned forward, strained her eyes. “I can’t see your mouth, the walk is too dark.”

Russ stepped forward and onto the stoop, under the blazing lights framing either side of the door. He repeated himself clearly, then capped it off with a charming smile designed to have her melting.

It didn’t work. Laurel’s lips pursed. “As you can see, I’m in the house, safe and sound.” She stared at him, expectantly, waiting for him to leave.

Russ’s smile began to feel maniacal. But something kept him lingering on her doorstep. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

Her eyes went wide, with an innocence that looked insincere, to say the least. “A total stranger? That wouldn’t be very smart, would it?”

A grin split his face. Damn, she was sexy. “Good answer.”

“Good night, Russ.” Rolling her eyes, Laurel stepped back and closed the door.

Russ stood there, listening for the click of the dead bolt. There wasn’t one. He waited. And waited. The door jerked open again.

“What?” Laurel shot him a look of impatience.

“You didn’t lock the door. I was waiting to hear it click.”

“Ahh,” she said, and slammed the door with enough force to rattle the brass door knocker.

But he heard the distinct sound of the lock sliding shut.

He smiled at the door, accepting the inevitable.

Distance be damned. He couldn’t stay out of this. If Laurel wanted an affair, it was going to have to be with him. He’d keep her safe and satisfied.

He’d decided, and that’s all there was to it.

Laurel was not an angry person. She never lost her temper, very rarely got mad at anyone, and spent a good portion of her time making excuses for other people’s lousy behavior. But right now, she was not particularly happy with Russ Evans. Not that she’d go so far as to say that she was furious, but she was feeling a distinct irritation with the man. The real Russ Evans. The fake one was much nicer, even if he was a lying con artist. At least he treated her like an adult.

But Russ had stood there on her doorstep, looking like her every scruffy fantasy come to life. Oozing sex appeal out his jeans, and he had treated her like a slightly dim twelve-year-old. He’d done everything short of patting her on the head.

Of course, she had pretty much acted like an imbecile in the coffee shop, running on and on about wanting to be wild. At the time, she had been trying to make a point. In retrospect, it sounded pathetic.

She was embarrassed, confused, disappointed, and beneath all those lousy layers, attracted to Russ. Maybe her mother was right—dating was too dangerous. How ironic that both her mother and the man she’d like to date agreed that she should lock herself up in the house and petrify.

After taking care of the urgent biological needs three mocha lattes had brought on, Laurel grabbed a muffin in the kitchen and stomped up the two flights of stairs to her suite of rooms on the third floor. When she spotted the array of sweaters tossed across her bed, evidence of her earlier indecision over what to wear, she almost laughed.

She could have been wearing a paper bag for all Russ had noticed. He looked at her and saw nothing but a naive, trusting, undersexed kid. While he was right on the undersexed part, the rest was all wrong. Completely and totally wrong. She knew there were bad people in the world. She wasn’t an idiot.

What he failed to realize is that she had thought she was meeting a man her friend Michelle had known for fifteen years or more. It had been a safe assumption that it was all right to meet a cop your friend knew in a public coffee shop. There was only so much you could do to protect yourself without sealing your house off in plastic and breathing through a mask. She wanted to be smart. But she also wanted to live.

Laurel had spent twenty-five years safely enclosed in a bubble-wrapped life, partially because of her mother’s protectiveness, partially from her own shyness and fears. But she didn’t want to exist like that anymore.

When her father had been alive, he had understood the importance of pushing her to be independent. He had supported her decision to attend a deaf university in Rochester, and he was the one who had encouraged her to communicate both orally and with ASL, American Sign Language. But her father had died of a heart attack at the tail end of her freshman year in college and after she had come home to her grieving mother, she had never gone back to Rochester.

It had seemed just too cruel to leave her mother and return to a school she had never wanted Laurel to attend in the first place. Laurel had taken a temporary job at Sweet Stuff candy store and somehow, without her even being quite sure how, five years had slid by. Cut off from the deaf community she had reveled in at college and isolated from the hearing by her own circumstances.

When Aunt Susan had called requesting help, Laurel had felt seized by the opportunity to get out there in the real world, meet people, enjoy herself. And she was still going to do that, Russ Evans and his ominous warnings or not.

Wiggling the computer mouse on her desk, she watched her kittens-in-a-basket screen saver disappear. Pinching off a piece of the muffin she’d set on a paper napkin, Laurel popped it in her mouth and opened her e-mail.

She had a message from Michelle, and interestingly enough, one from Trevor Dean as Russ Evans. It surprised her to see it there, boldly sitting in her e-mail box with the subject heading, I’M SORRY. Somehow she had thought she wouldn’t hear from him again, that his amusement with her would be over now that he had stood her up.

Clicking the message, it opened as her cat, Ferris, leaped onto her lap and settled his considerable orange bulk. Laurel finger-spelled HELLO onto his back, digging into his rich fur and feeling the vibration of his purr. By herself, she never spoke out loud, but relaxed in the silence, mind drifting, lazy, the way she never could when she was communicating with other people. That required intense concentration, to understand and to be understood.

Dean’s e-mail had been sent at 6:47 P.M., when she had already been on the way to the coffee shop.

Hi Laurel, I hope I catch you before you leave. Something’s come up with work, a case I’ve got a lead on, and I’m going to have to cancel our plans. I’m really looking forward to meeting you, but can we make it another time? Please, please, forgive me?

—Russ

If she had read that without meeting Russ Evans, she would have been satisfied with Dean’s excuse. She would have appreciated the pleading, wondering about the excitement of being with the police department. She would have thought he was cute, sweet, a good guy.

Now she knew he was a thief and a liar, and somehow next to the real Russ Evans, this e-mail sounded weak and feminine, and nothing like a cop would really sound.

There was nothing left to do but feel like a total schmuck. And while she lamented her schmuckishness, her determination to bust out of the bubble of her narrow existence grew. She liked who she was, enjoyed helping people, but she felt that stuck the way she was in the confines of her sugarcoated life, everything was completely meaningless. Laurel wanted to do something important, make a difference, matter.

Like protect other women from Trevor Dean.

She was lucky. Her heart and her finances were intact. Her pride and her confidence were a little dented, but she’d recover. How must it feel to lose everything you had to a man who’d sworn to love you and didn’t?

She was thinking it would feel like crap, and then some.

Russ wouldn’t be in the office, she didn’t think, so she wouldn’t call him there. And she couldn’t call his home number because she wouldn’t know when the answering machine picked up. She’d call the PD number in the morning, let him know what she’d done. Because for the first time in her almost twenty-six years of unexciting vanilla-pudding existence, Laurel was going to take decisive action.

Hi Russ,

I’m sorry we missed each other! I hope everything went well with your case—I think it’s just amazing how the police can solve crimes. I’d love to make new plans to meet you. Just say when and where.

Ttys

Laurel

She clicked SEND and stroked Ferris’s fur in satisfaction, wondering if the rush she felt was from excitement or the excess of caffeine in all those mocha lattes. Either way, this felt pretty dang good. She was lying, and doing it well. Her mother would be so proud.

Of course, e-mail worked to her advantage. Face-to-face, she was likely to blurt out the whole truth, then cap it off by suggesting to Dean he get help through counseling.

Laurel clicked on Michelle’s e-mail, which was short and to the point.

well??? how was russ? did you bag him? <g>

Laurel rolled her eyes. Michelle hadn’t been witness to that look of sheer terror on Russ’s face when she’d brought up the whole “Let’s you and me have sex” thing. Laurel remembered it all too clearly and was pretty sure she was permanently scarred. Or Russ was.

Though Michelle lived an hour and a half away in Erie, Pennsylvania, they e-mailed daily and were probably closer now than they’d been in college. Michelle was married now, but she liked to participate in chats and loops with people she’d gone to high school with in Cleveland, which is how she’d seen Russ’s name.

He no-showed,

Laurel typed quickly. Then added,

But the REAL Russ Evans showed up an hour later, the one from your yearbook. Turns out I was chatting with a fake, a con artist…YUCK, huh?

Laurel sent the message, leaned back in her chair, and finally unwound her scarf from around her neck. She tossed it on the bed with the discarded sweaters. Ferris’s green eyes looked up at her in rebuke as her movements jostled him.

“Sorry.” Stroking his fur, not wanting to toss Ferris to the floor, Laurel just sat there and brooded. It wasn’t like her to give in to self-pity, but when faced with a lifetime of celibacy and the realization that you’d spent your twenties sorting Jelly Bellies, it was a little hard to put on a happy face.

And it was all her fault. She couldn’t blame her mother for everything. She hadn’t been locked in, à la Cinderella, and her room was a far cry from a dreary tower. It surrounded her, pretty and light, full of white furniture, dried flowers, and framed pictures of friends and family. This had been her suite—the trio of bedroom, bathroom, and sitting room—since she was sixteen, yet Laurel was always aware that this was her mother’s house, no matter what it said in her father’s will. This was her childhood home, not her own. Not a home she’d built herself, decorated and labored over, and gasped when the first mortgage bill arrived.

She was stuck in adolescence, like a female Peter Pan without the green tights.

An INSTANT MESSAGE box from Michelle popped up.

what??? a con artist? that’s crazy!!! what does he con?

Needy women like her, apparently.

He steals money from women, women who trust him, think they’re dating him. :-/

disgusting bastard…have they caught him??

Nope, but the real Russ Evans really is a cop, and he was there hoping this Dean guy would show up. I’m glad he didn’t, so I didn’t have to see him. I feel violated or something, Michelle, I mean I told him personal stuff…

Laurel didn’t know what she was so bothered by. She hadn’t told him anything important, any deep dark secrets like the fact that she still ate SpaghettiOs, or had a Britney Spears CD.

did you ever have an orgasm while chatting with him?

Eeew. She sat up so fast, she almost dumped Ferris.

What? NO! ::blushing::

then he hasn’t violated you. ;-) just forget about him, let the cops deal with him. But tell me bout the real russ…is he still hot? I had it bad for him in high school, but he only dated blondes.

Was he hot? Is the equator hot? Is boiling oil hot?

He’s still hot,

Laurel typed against her better judgment.

YOU’RE blonde. LOL.

And puppies were cute, but neither point was relevant. Laurel bit a big hunk of the muffin.

Hot, but insufferable. Sort of like the good-looking English teacher everyone has a crush on, but he’s oblivious to it because he sees you as kids…Russ spent the whole time telling me how stupid and naive I was for making plans to meet a man I don’t know.

And there lay her irritation with Russ Evans, besides the fact that his face had drained of blood when she brought up sex between them. His concern showed her that he was a decent, caring guy who took his job seriously. But she didn’t want him to lead her through a preschool Safety Town lesson on the dangers of the big, bad world.

She wanted him to look at her and want her. Want her like a woman. Want to drag her off into a corner and rip her clothes off. She’d come up a little short on that one.

well, screw him,

Michelle wrote.

Laurel licked a crumb off the tip of her finger and groaned. That was the problem. She wanted to do just that.

Shifting Ferris off her lap—she didn’t need any more heat down there—Laurel stood up, ripping her ponytail holder out in agitation. Wild. She was supposed to be wild.

It was time to take charge of her own life, her future. Have fun before she needed prosthetic parts.

So what would a wild woman do? Make Russ see her as a woman.

Maybe I will.

She IM’d Michelle. Then added a little devil emoticon at the end for good measure.

Being sweet was overrated. All it had gotten her was a boring wardrobe and a possible place in heaven.

Time to shake things up a little.