Sex, Lies and Midnight. Tawny Weber

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СКАЧАТЬ a quick smile. “Merry merry to you, too,” she said.

      Whew. She bypassed the dance floor to find the ladies’ room instead. She needed cold water. Or better yet, an ice bath.

      “IT WAS A GREAT EVENING, Dave, thanks so much for going to the party with me,” Maya said.

      “We don’t have to end the fun yet,” he said, rubbing his hands up and down her arms in a gentle caress. “I’m still in the party mood.”

      To prove his point, he zoomed in with an enthusiastic kiss. Maya sighed, leaning in to enjoy herself. This was nice, she realized. But—she pulled away with a sigh—not exciting.

      What was wrong with her?

      “I’d invite you in, but my roommate is waiting up,” she excused.

      With that, and a quick little finger wave, she slipped through her front door, threw the lock and leaned back against it with a heavy sigh. “I hate dating.”

      “It is a necessary evil,” Tiffany declared, looking all comfy in her Snuggie on the couch. Her engagement ring flashed bright in the light of the TV, declaring that while she respected the dating evil, it wasn’t a game she had to play any longer.

      Which was just one of the many reasons Maya had chosen her as a roommate. She was sweet and fun and tidy. She was totally involved in her own life, so didn’t have a lot of spare time to poke into Maya’s. And best of all, she was temporary, without that being an apparent requirement.

      She was also Maya’s fifth roommate in the three years she’d owned the sweet Victorian here in San Francisco. The few people at Braverment who knew her well enough to be aware of her living arrangements teased her about her bad luck with roommate turnover. Maya always played up her faux despair, secretly thrilled at how well it all worked in her favor. After all, she hated living alone, but knew that a real long-term roommate would mean an element of intimacy she couldn’t handle.

      So, like everything else in her life, she kept her shared-living arrangements short and sweet. And more importantly, totally superficial.

      “How was your night?” Maya asked as she shrugged out of her black velvet opera coat and hung it in the hall armoire. “TV, ice cream and a stack of bridal magazines? It looks like a good time to me.”

      “Throw in a honey-oatmeal facial and call me a wild woman,” Tiffany joked.

      Maya grinned, bending down to pry her darling strappy sandals off her dance-swollen feet. “You are one crazy gal.”

      “You had a phone call.”

      Maya’s brows shot up. How weird. Usually, if someone wanted to reach her they called her cell. The only reason she even had a landline was for internet and to give pesky telemarketers someplace to call.

      “A sexy sounding guy, said his name was Caleb and that he’d get a hold of you later.”

      Missing a step, Maya stumbled over her bare feet, her precious Jimmy Choos flying into the wall. She reached out to keep herself from following and took a mandatory deep breath to try and gather her thoughts.

      By any standard, Maya had had an unconventional upbringing. Motherless by a year old, she’d never been a sweet little girl in the traditional sense. Instead, she’d learned the art of the three-card monte before she’d learned to read. By four, she’d learned to call up crocodile tears on command, the first time to keep her father from being arrested. She had amassed enough through computer hacking to pay her own tuition to Yale before she’d graduated high school.

      So it was rare for her to be shocked.

      “Caleb called?” she repeated faintly.

      “You okay?” Tiffany asked, swinging her feet off the couch, concern clear on her face. “What’s wrong? Is he an ex-boyfriend? A bad guy? Should I call Mark?”

      That made Maya smile. Mark was Tiffany’s fiancé—a bespeckled orthodontist who bowled on weekends—and she definitely saw him through the eyes of love. The idea of his sweet self coming up against the likes of six-foot-two, muscle-bound Caleb Black, the baddest of the bad Black boys, was a little funny.

      Scary funny, but still enough to make her want to giggle.

      “No,” she said, gathering her scattered composure. “No, that’s okay. Caleb isn’t any kind of threat.”

      At least, not unless he mistakenly suspected her of suddenly having a yen to deal drugs. Her big brother was a badass DEA agent, usually so far undercover he probably didn’t even remember her existence. So why was he calling her? And on the house phone? The house, like the phone and everything else she had here in California, was under the name of Maya DeLongue. So how had he tracked her down?

      And why? Panic shot through her, making her heart race and her ears ring. Worried sick, her mind spun from one horrible scenario to the next. In the half-dozen times she’d heard from her brother since she’d left home seven years previous, he’d always called her cell. Why would he call the house?

      Was he hurt? Had something happened to Dad? To their brother, Gabriel?

      “Did he say when he’d be calling back?” she asked, trying not to sound like she was going to cry. Her dad was indestructible. Superman. He had to be okay. He just had to.

      “No,” Tiffany said, pushing a strand of toast-brown hair off her worry-creased forehead.

      “Caller ID?”

      “Unknown caller.”

      Maya cursed softly. Tiffany’s frown deepened and she started chewing on her thumbnail. “I’m sorry. Should I have pushed him for more information? I didn’t want to give him your cell number, you know, just in case he was a crazy or something.”

      That made her laugh. Caleb, crazy? Oh, yeah, definitely. Maya took a deep breath and shoved both hands through her heavy curls. This was ridiculous. She was overreacting. Christmas was in two weeks. He was probably just calling to wish her a happy holiday, or to see if she’d heard any news of their father.

      Everyone was okay.

      They had to be.

      Because while she might have cut her family so far out of her life that she denied their very existence, didn’t use their name and hadn’t seen any of them in six years, they were still the most important thing in her entire world.

      And, she vowed, if everybody was okay, she was going to kick Caleb’s ass for giving her such a scare.

       2

      MAYA SHOT STRAIGHT UP OFF her pillow, her vision obscured by a tangle of hair as she tried to figure out what had woke her.

      The chirping phone answered her question.

      “Hello?” she asked in a sleep-roughened tone. She’d gone to bed in the wee hours after midnight, then tossed and turned while worrying until almost five. She squinted through the dim light, noting that it was now eight. Yuck.

      “Morning, Maya. How was the party?”

      Her СКАЧАТЬ