Ace Is Wild (9 page)

It didn’t really matter what she wore, or what her bra size was. If not for Pierce she wouldn’t be here, exposing herself to a bunch of beer-soaked walking libidos. And was Daniel grateful? No. He was distrustful and mean, not to mention stupidly overconfident. She’d saved his life once already, and what did he do? He sent her packing. Again. She ought to go, she thought, just walk away and let the arrogant, pig-headed, walking suspicion of a man deal with whatever the evening had in store for him.

The back of her neck prickled, and a ball of urgency formed in the pit of her stomach, making her nauseous at the idea of leaving Daniel to his fate.

She turned back to the window, muttering, “Give it a rest already, I’m staying,” and cupping her hands around her face to cut the sunset glare.

Daniel was still sitting there across from the redhead who’d been bidding on him at the auction. Vivi didn’t like it. She wasn’t too happy about being chased out of the place by the old bat at the front door, either, but she really didn’t care for Daniel being out in public like . . . this.

He ought to be at home, keeping a low profile, not sitting in a South Boston mobbed-up pub surrounded by armed waiters and facing a man-eating redhead who did him favors and looked at him like she was expecting repayment. Horizontally. Several times.

“Oy, Cupcake, how ’bout I buy you . . . dinner?”

Vivi glanced over and got a face full of beer breath, and a way too up-close look at a man about her height with fuzzy orange eyebrows and fuzzy orange muttonchop side-burns. That was the extent of his hair growth, except for a fuzzy red fringe around his bald pate. “Dipping into your pot of gold?”

“Wha’?”

“I think they’re running out of beer.”

His bleary eyes went wide, he drained the mug in his hand, and hustled back inside. Head down, leading with his beer glass, burrowing through the crowd spilling out of Cohan’s front door.

Vivi watched him disappear, thinking maybe she shouldn’t be so picky. Her love life was the closest thing to a practical incarnation of speed dating there was. Okay, the dates lasted more than eight minutes, but not much. Just until the guy she was dating discovered her . . . avocation. Not that she blamed them. The second a man suspected she knew what was going on inside him, especially when he wasn’t quite sure himself, he ran in the other direction. True, most men didn’t believe in her “abilities,” but feelings were nothing to mess with.

She looked in the window again. Nothing had changed, except Daniel decided to turn around and scope out the place, including the front window and who might be peering through it. Vivi managed to fade back into the crowd, at least enough to keep Daniel from seeing her before she came up against something that wasn’t moving and smelled like beer. The fuzzy-faced drunk, she discovered when she turned around.

“Why haven’t you passed out yet?” she grumbled. “You look like you’ve drunk enough beer to fill Boston Harbor.”

“There’s plenty more where this came from.” And in case she wasn’t sure what “this” referred to he lifted his mug to show her, and beer sloshed onto his shoes. He peered down, brow furrowing all the way back to the nape of his neck.

“There’s plenty more where that came from,” she reminded him before he made an attempt at beer retrieval, “right in there.”

He got that lightbulb-over-the-head look and started for Cohan’s, turning back before he’d taken more than a step. “Hey, that’s how you got rid of me last time.”

“Really? Just by mentioning beer?”

He gazed down at his glass again, saw that it was below the halfway mark, and mumbled something about being right back.

Vivi watched him go, no second thoughts this time. First, she liked her men a bit taller—and less fuzzy. Second, he didn’t have what it took to be a stalker. For starters, he needed to be able to concentrate longer than ten seconds. Probably his skills of concentration would improve as his beer intake went down, but that was a different problem. That was a problem she wasn’t qualified to deal with. Another day or two of following Daniel Pierce around, and she could probably give lessons on how to be a stalker, but alcoholism would still be outside of her skill set.

She went back to her surveillance, just in time to see Daniel turn around again. She ducked out of sight, and when she eased back to peek in the window he wasn’t sitting at the table anymore. But someone was breathing down her neck.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake.” She whipped around and came face to chest with Daniel.

Her breath wheezed out, and parts of her that should have been completely buzz-free were singing like electric wires in a thunderstorm. She’d never understood the fascination with toes as a sexual body part, but hers were definitely curling. And when she managed to get past her own reaction, she could tell he wasn’t unaffected, either. “Changed your mind about dinner?” she asked him.
Or anything else?

“What the hell are you still doing here?”

“Increasing my stalker skills so I can get a gig at the Learning Annex.”

“What?”

“It’s a long story. What are you doing out here?”

“That should be self-explanatory.”

“It’s a free country. I can eat wherever I want.”

“You’re not eating, you’re staring in the window and freaking out the people who are eating.”

She pressed her nose to the glass. “They don’t look freaked out to me.” They didn’t look like alien spaceships erupting from the bedrock would freak them out. Bostonians were tougher than that, no matter what heinous slander Steven Spielberg tried to perpetrate on a gullible populace.

“The voices in your head sounding off again?” Daniel wanted to know.

“Something like that.” She turned back, and there, behind Daniel, was the leprechaun. She went with impulse, slipping her arm around Daniel’s waist and plastering herself to his side, and okay, there were other advantages, but mainly she was really tired of fending this guy off and nothing else had worked.

She didn’t expect Daniel to play along, especially not by slapping a hand on her ass. Not that she was complaining, she was just surprised. And aroused. She slid him a sideways glance. He was looking down at her, half-smiling, a challenge in his gaze.

She might have taken him up on it— Correction, she wanted to take him up on it, with every nerve ending in her body. But she could see he knew that, and his ego was doing cartwheels. And since the drunk had taken himself off, there was no way to salvage her self-respect but to reach back and pluck Daniel’s hand off her butt. Much as she regretted it. “Way to step up, Ace.”

“You saved my life. I’m saving your virtue.”

She popped up an eyebrow.

“It’s the thought that counts.” He turned to go back inside.

Vivi still had hold of his wrist, and she didn’t let go. “Please don’t,” she said.

For once he didn’t look harassed or irritated. He looked puzzled. “I don’t understand why my life is so important to you.”

“It . . . just is.”

“This is ridiculous,” he said, shaking her off.

“If you go back inside there’ll be another attack—”

“Right, and I’m going to die.”

“No”—Vivi hooked a thumb over her shoulder, in the general direction of Cohan’s dining room—“your girlfriend is.”

“Her name is Patrice Hanlon. And she’s not my girlfriend.”

“Your choice, not hers.”

He raised one eyebrow and flattened his mouth, back to irritated.

She couldn’t help but laugh a little. “It’s not mind reading. It’s not even feminine intuition. It’s the way she’s looking at me.”

Daniel peered over the top of Vivi’s head. Sure enough, Patrice was staring at them, and if looks could kill . . . And how the hell could Vivi see Patrice’s expression when she had her back turned to the window? “Annoying,” he said, although it went beyond annoying, wandering somewhere into the Twilight Zone. “And stop showing up in my life.”

“Okay.”

He halted, mid-stride and mid-argument. “Just okay?” he said, turning back to her.

“My grandmother always said you could lead a jackass to water.”

“You mean horse.”

“Not in your case.”

“Cute. Good-bye.”

She crossed her arms.

“Suit yourself,” Daniel said, and went back inside.

Vivi had to give him credit. He crossed the room and sat down, never so much as glancing over his shoulder. From the looks of things he wasn’t telling Patrice about her, and Patrice didn’t like it. She put on a polite face, but her eyes, before she shuttered them, weren’t so polite. Vivi hadn’t enjoyed it the first time she’d been on the receiving end of one of those looks. She didn’t like it this time, either. It made her feel like retaliating, and since the retaliation she had in mind furthered the rest of her agenda, she didn’t see any reason to hold back.

She ducked inside, slipping past the dragon at the door by hiding behind someone taller than her—not hard to do since three-quarters of the adults in America were taller than her. She found what she was looking for right next to the kitchen doorway, no ESP necessary. Where else would they put the fire alarm, she asked herself, pulling the little red handle and slipping into the crowd before she could think of any one of the hundreds of reasons why it was a bad idea.

There was a moment of stunned disbelief, composed of sudden silence and people looking at each other while they connected the
whoop-whoop-whoop
sound with potential mortal danger. Then there was chaos. Diners shot from chairs, knocking them over, drinkers milled around at the bar, torn between abandoning their source of alcohol and saving their lives. Most of them chose some combination of the two, carting pint glasses and beer mugs with them as they headed for the door, where the exodus hit a bottleneck and, compliments of liquid refreshment, took on more of a party atmosphere than a panic.

Except Daniel. Daniel wasn’t partying or panicking. Daniel was standing beside his table at the back of the room. He had his arm around Patrice’s shoulders, but he wasn’t shepherding her to the door. He was studying the melee. Noticing the absence of smoke. And looking for Vivi.

His height might allow him to see over the crowd, but hers allowed her to blend in and sneak out. She only went as far as the opposite side of the street, and when Daniel finally came outside, she kept her eyes on him. It wasn’t easy. Pedestrians and people from the neighborhood had joined the crowd from Cohan’s. The Boston Fire Department had already arrived and blocked the street so traffic was at a standstill, and the Boston P.D. had cordoned off the area to keep the onlookers back, all of which compressed the crowd to the point where it would be difficult to move, let alone get a clear shot at anyone.

Again, except Daniel. Being that he was a U.S. attorney, the cops had allowed him and the redhead inside the danger zone where he was surrounded by a nice, big clear space. Making himself a nice, big target.

To give him his due, he wasn’t standing out in the open like a complete idiot. He’d deposited Patrice by the fire truck, and he was keeping the bulk of it between him and the crowd. On the other end of the street, a line of cops was holding people back. Daniel should have been safe.

But something shivered over Vivi’s skin, raising goose bumps before it settled in at the nape of her neck. She resisted the urge to hunch her shoulders against it. It was all she had to guide her and she used it like the announcer in a game of hot/cold tag, working her way methodically through the crowd until she saw two guys doing the same, all three of them heading toward Daniel’s position.

“Daniel,” she shouted.

The volume of the crowd was set at dull roar, and he was deep in conversation with the fire chief, but Patrice turned around. With death bearing down on him, Vivi couldn’t be picky. She pointed at the two men closing in on the police line and mimed a gun with her thumb and forefinger, a universal sign that any four-year-old would have understood.

Patrice, however, decided to stare blankly at the gunmen. Vivi panicked, throwing herself at the tape line, screaming Daniel’s name and looking like a threat. Or a distraction. The cops converged on her position, leaving a gap in the line, which the hit men headed straight for. And if she hadn’t completely lost her ability to read body language, they were both reaching for guns.

Patrice, genius that she was, decided that instead of telling Daniel he was about to be shot, it would be better for her to drag him to the ground. Except he outweighed her by about seventy-five pounds. She managed to pull him off balance, thanks to his bad leg, so the shots went wild, at least one of them ricocheting off the fire truck.