Risking It All. Beverly Bird

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “Shut up!”

      Yeah, he thought, he rattled her. He really rattled her and he didn’t understand why. All this mystery was going to make for one very long night.

      The elevator finally came and Grace all but leaped inside. It was crowded but that offered her no hope. Everyone spilled out into the lobby and left her alone with McKenna. She pressed herself into a corner as the doors slid shut again.

      If he got out of line now, she could kill him without risking witnesses. And she wouldn’t give a damn about her credit card bill, either, when she fled the scene.

      He stood in the middle, his back to her, silent. The elevator was quiet as a breath and moved like an underwater dream, and still he said nothing. The car reached their floor with a delicate chiming sound. The doors parted again soundlessly. Grace waited for him to move first since he was closest to them. He didn’t.

      After all that nonsense downstairs, now he was mute, she thought. Deaf and blind, too. She stepped around him. The doors began closing again. She shot a hand out to hold them open. “Can we just do this now? Please?”

      One corner of his mouth crooked up. Now what had she said? Grace felt her skin heat and she was reasonably sure that she hadn’t blushed since the age of fifteen.

      Let him stand here, then, she decided. He could ride the elevator up and down all night. She had a job to do. She left the car and was four strides down the hall before she remembered that she couldn’t do the job without him. By then he was behind her. She went to their room and shot the key card into the lock.

      The room staggered her. Her first thought was that Lutz really liked whomever he had been planning to bring here. Her second thought was that maybe he just really liked to pamper himself. She had never set foot in a place such as this in her life.

      There were no visible beds and she blessed fate for that. God only knows what McKenna might pull with a bed in evidence. But there were doors on either end of the room and she figured that there was a bedroom beyond one, if not both, of them. Separating them was a sea of rich cream-colored carpet. Grace stared down at it almost dumbly. In a hotel? Weren’t hotel rooms supposed to be serviceable, built to withstand the masses? Then again, how many people could afford a place like this? In the Hyatt’s defense, there wasn’t a stain or a smudge to be found, not that she could see. And the decorator had had the good sense to place a forest-green and gold Persian rug beneath the cherrywood dining table, a table that could quite possibly be the size of her bedroom.

      The chairs bracketing the table were done in the same elegant deep green as the rug. So were both of the sofas that formed a wedge at the far wall. There was a bar sided in smoky bronzed reflecting glass. Grace figured that, given the tab for this place, they’d probably already charged her for every bottle of liquor there. Opposite that was an armoire so huge she had to wonder how much clothing people generally brought to a place like this.

      McKenna went to it and grabbed one of the brass handles to open the center doors. Of course, the people who stayed here would not want to store their clothes in the center room, Grace thought. It held a television the size of the country she’d escaped from as a teenager.

      “We’re not here to watch TV,” she said a little hoarsely when he found a remote and stepped back to turn it on and play with the channels.

      Flick, flick, flick. Channels flashed and vanished again as Grace watched.

      “Of course not,” he said. “We’re here to—how did you put it?—just do this.”

      She’d known that comment would come back to haunt her. Grace took her laptop to the table. “I’m not paying for premium channels.”

      “No need. They’re free up here in heaven.”

      “Are you serious?” She turned back to him, surprised.

      McKenna switched to a skin flick and stepped back so she could see it. “That’s premium,” he observed.

      “That’s—oh, my God!” Grace jerked around again fast and put her back to the television.

      “Ah, come on. A savvy attorney like you, caught short on cab fare, must have more than enough aplomb to deal with a little skin-to-skin action like this.”

      “That’s not skin-to-skin. It’s liver to pancreas.”

      His laugh was rich, rumbling, genuinely amused. It made something kick inside her and Grace almost turned around again in surprise. She wondered if a man could manufacture a laugh like that just to make a woman move when she really didn’t want to.

      She focused on plugging in her computer. “If the…ah, action on the television gets to be too much for you, you can simply grunt in response to my questions.”

      “Will do.”

      She would not look around at him. Her laptop purred to life and Grace seated herself at the table. “Let’s start at the beginning. You mentioned earlier that this is payback. I need to know exactly what you did to warrant payback of any sort.”

      “I—whoa.”

      “Whoa what?”

      “Can women actually move like that?”

      She would not look. “Stop it!”

      “Well, you know, it’s bound to make a guy curious.”

      “You’re paying four hundred dollars an hour to be curious?”

      “Good point.”

      Blessedly, there was another click and then the television went silent. Grace let out a careful breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. He wouldn’t back off that easily. She knew the whole business with the skin flick had only been to get a rise out of her.

      “Want a drink?” he asked. “It says here that the booze is complimentary.”

      “The hell it is. I already paid for it. This room would have been three hundred dollars without it.”

      “Well, we’re going highbrow tonight. So what do you think?”

      “I think I just want to get your statement.”

      “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll help myself to a little of this Jameson’s. The better to dredge up nasty memories with.”

      “By all means,” she said shortly. “As I said, it’s paid for.”

      “That credit card receipt really knocked your socks off, didn’t it?”

      “I’m wearing hose.”

      “Oh, I noticed.”

      Grace bit down hard on her tongue. “Exactly what did you do to warrant payback?” she tried again.

      “I told you that already. At the restaurant.”

      “Tell me again and give me the details.”

      She heard ice tinkle into a glass. Something splashed delicately, then there was the suction-hissing sound of a bottle СКАЧАТЬ