Domino (The Domino Trilogy) (25 page)

“As in, not you.”

“Exactly.”

I polished off the last of the croissant and gulped down the water. Neither did much for me, it was like feeding a gnat to a lion. “Where’s that menu?”

He opened a cabinet across from the bed and produced it. “Order anything you want. And if there’s something you want that isn’t listed, they can usually pull a few strings and get it for you anyway. Though you might be out of luck if they’ve run out of Beluga. I’m told they only get it delivered once a day.”

“No thanks. I hate caviar.”

“It’s an acquired taste. Rather like bondage sex.”

“Funny, it didn’t take me long to acquire a taste for that.” I pored over the menu and settled on a simple club sandwich with a side of French fries and cottage cheese. And a Diet Coke---I had a feeling I’d need the caffeine. “Shall I place the order, or will you?”

“I’ll do it. A gentleman always orders for his lady. Besides, the kitchen won’t know you from Eve. At this hour, they’ll hang up on anyone who isn’t either me or the Ritz-Carlton CEO.”

“You’re very sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

“In my position, you have to be.”

I thought about pressing further about what he meant by “my position,” but I let it go. My deadline was running short, it was true, but now I had the advantage of afterglow on my side. I’d gotten him to bare all to me---literally---and I him. He owed me
some dirt, dammit. Tit for tat.

I dictated my order to him
and then headed for the bathroom. I left the door partway open so I could eavesdrop while I did my business. I wasn’t sure what possessed me to do that---maybe on the off chance what he ordered might reveal something about his character tha I could write about later.

But Peter
was ever the enigma. If anything, he was a cliché. He picked up the courtesy phone and ordered for me like an English gentleman, then requested a bowl of oatmeal and eggs Benedict with a side of steamed asparagus for himself. “And a pitcher of freshly squeezed orange juice, with two chilled glasses,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “Along with a bottle of Möet, just in case we feel like making mimosas. Yes, the Rostovich suite. Thank you very much.” He hung up just as I came out of the bathroom, wearing the Ritz-Carlton robe I’d retrieved from the floor. “Our refreshments will be here within twenty minutes.”

“You’re very efficient.”

Still feeling exhausted and plenty woozy, I tucked myself back into bed, and he sat down beside me. “So are you. I’m surprised you can walk at all.”

“
I’ve always been a quick study. But I could still use about thirty hours’ sleep, I think.” But I wasn’t tired in the traditional sense---my body was spent, but adrenaline was coursing through my veins at such a clip I knew it would be impossible for me to fall asleep. “I feel like I’ve run a marathon.”

“I don’t doubt it.
I’ve never seen any woman come so quickly and easily, let alone a virgin. Come to think of it, I haven’t slept with a virgin since I was a virgin myself. I was seventeen, and so was she. Her name was Svetlana and she lived next door to me in Brighton Beach.”

I smiled and settled back into the feather pillows. This was more than he’d ever revealed about himself in one sentence before. Maybe I’d finally tapped the gold mine. My thoughts went to my reporter’s notebook and recorder, which I assumed were still sitting on the dining room table, but I didn’t get up to retrieve them. It would spoil the moment.
“So you were an early bloomer then,” I remarked. “Unlike me. I’m about as late to the party as people get. I’m twenty-two.”

“I greatly admire you for waiting so long,” he said, taking my hand in his. “It shows great maturity and discipline. Both of which are required if you want to live this kind of lifestyle.
And I think that you do, and always have.”

That rattled me. How did this man always manage to bring the topic
of conversation back to me? Good journalists never lost control of interviews, but I’d lost control long ago. I pulled away from him abruptly. “What do you mean,
this
kind of lifestyle? Are you talking about luxury hotel suites, and jet-setting, and being all mysterious and cryptic and toying with people?” I gestured around the room. “
This?
Or do you mean tying people up and slapping them around?” I was a bit shocked at how casually I put the latter part. During the actual act, it had all seemed so elegant, beautiful, sublime. Now I might as well have been talking about a cheap street pimp forcing his lead hooker back into line.

Peter looked wounded.
“Both. Though I wouldn’t use your terminology when it comes to our intimate relationship. I don’t slap women around. I arouse women who seek satisfaction, and I do it only with their consent. And as far as I knew, I
had
your consent.”

“Yes, you did.”
“Then why are you so angry?”

I looked away. “I don’t know. This is all just so new and strange.
” And I still wasn’t getting what I needed to write my articles, the whole reason we’d connected in the first place. Every time I thought I had him in my grasp, he pivoted away. It was like trying to trap an eel. “And I feel like you’re using me.”

“What makes you say that?”

I scoffed. “Everything. You bring me here like some kind of kept woman. You lead me to believe that you’re going to reveal some great juicy secret that I can use to break a story on you wide open, when you all you’ve done with the media in the past is toy with them. Instead of revealing those secrets, we end up fucking. And then, you want me to solve some sort of murder mystery for you. Does that sum things up?”
“I thought investigative reporters liked solving mysteries.”

I pressed my palms against my
eyesockets. He was impossible. “Yes, we do! I mean, no! I mean, we generally like to seek out our own story angles, rather than having them thrust upon us.”

Angles. Thrusts
. I couldn’t help but pick up on the double entendre in that sentence. It amused me, I hated to admit. If anything, it just made me want to fuck him again, upside down this time. “It’s just not how I thought things would turn out, is all,” I said.

“Do you regret what happened, then?”

“No.” And it was true, I didn’t. If I had to do the past three days over again, I would still do them the exact same way. It made no sense, of course. But there it was.

Peter got up and began to pace the room. “Do you understand now why I told you not to get mixed up with me, Miss Delaney? I warned you to stay away. Nothing good ever comes from getting close to me, which is why I generally don’t do it. This sort of thing always seems to happen.”

“So you always lure young women into your lair with promises of hot press tips and then drop them like a hot potato the next morning, then?”

He stopped short. “No. Absolutely not. I’ve never done anything like
this”
----he gestured towards me---“before. It’s uncharted territory for me. But I still seem to have managed to screw it up. I’m good at screwing things up with women, and with people in general, which is why I prefer to be alone most of the time.”

“I thought all artists were like that to some extent.” If anything, I saw a bit of myself in him. I’d always been a bit of a loner
too, mostly preferring books to the company of people. My circle of friends had always been small, and you could pretty much forget about the dating department. Count on me to pick a dysfunctional international man of intrigue when I did finally fall in love.

Fall in love.

Wait a minute. Oh no. Oh,
nonono. That’s not what this was. Was it? I wanted to grab myself by the nape of the neck and shake that ridiculous notion right out of my head.

The suite door buzzed, bringing me back to reality. Peter went down the hall to answer it, then returned a moment later pushing a food cart laden with silver covered serving dishes and a linen tablecloth. “The bellman wanted to bring this in himself, but I didn’t figure you were up for an outside guest.” He rolled the cart to a stop beside my bed and removed the silver covers with a flourish. My club sandwich was there, and the French fries, served skin-on with a salver of sea salt
on the side. Plus there was ice-cold Pellegrino, orange juice, and the Moet in a sweating pewter ice bucket, the cork already popped and suds dangling over the lips of the bottle, dripping down onto the linen below. Peter’s eggs Benedict were on the lower shelf, but he took the time to serve me first, retrieving a foldable bed tray from inside the armoire, which he opened and set over my lap.

“Club sandwich, eh? I would have figured you more for the late-night cheeseburger type.”

“And yet you strike me as exactly the kind of man who would order an eggs Benedict with a side of asparagus at four in the morning. Reflects your extravagant tastes.”

“As do you.”

I blinked. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You’re really quite exquisite, Nancy. I thought you would have realized that by now.”

I shrugged and popped a couple of French fries into my mouth. “I’m not exquisite at all. I’m just a regular middle-class girl who likes to read.”

“And write. Exquisitely well, I’m sure.”
“How would you know? You’ve never read a single thing I’ve written.”

“I don’t have to. There are certain things I can tell about a person right away. It’s a big reason I’ve been so successful, both as an artist and in business.”

“About that. We’re still sort of fuzzy on what exactly your business is.”

“As I’ve already told you, I’m an investor.”
“Yeah, but where do you get the money to invest? Or rather, where
did
you get the money? When you first started?”

“I
mostly acted as a broker for the first couple of years, then began investing my own profits later on. I did also do a couple of my early transactions entirely on credit, and repaid what I borrowed in full out of my profits. I did my first deal that way, in fact. I was sixteen at the time.”

“What was the value of that
first deal, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Two million dollars, if memory serves.”

I almost choked on a mouthful of French fries.
“What?”

“What’s the matter? Does that seem strange to you?”

I chewed, swallowed, took a few sips of Pellegrino in an attempt to regain my composure. “Yes, it sounds
plenty
fucking strange.”

“Why?”

“Because sane people don’t just give sixteen-year-old immigrant street kids two million bucks to manage business deals for them.”

“Plenty of perfectly sane people did that for me. So there goes your theory.”

I sighed. “What you’re saying just doesn’t make any sense. Even if it is true, my editors will never print it without a shitload of substantiation. Which so far, you haven’t exactly been willing to share. I need names and contact information of sources who could go on the record to corroborate your story. I’d need copies of documents. I’d need
something
---not just your word. Otherwise I’ve got no story.”

“What about your boss? You’ve already talked to him, and he corroborated what I’m telling you, didn’t he?”

“Only in a very small way. Plus I know him personally, which kind of disqualifies him as a source for anything I write professionally. Ethics, and all that.”
“How inconvenient.”

I rolled my eyes. “You really aren’t helping.”

He sighed. “Sorry, but I don’t reveal who my clients are.”

“But you’re going to have to give me some
thing to work with. You at least need to give me more information on yourself, and you’re going to have to be on the record about it.”

“And what if I don’t?”

“Then I won’t solve your little murder mystery for you, that’s what. And maybe we’d have to nip this”---I gestured to the bed---“in the bud, too.” I wasn’t really serious about the last part, but I didn’t want to reveal that just yet.

This got his attention. “You play hardball, Miss Delaney.”

“Hey, I gotta eat. Unlike you, I don’t have millions of questionably gained dollars at my disposal.”

He glared at me, pausing a forkful of eggs Benedict in midair, sending bits of yolk and Hollandaise sauce dribbling down his forearm. “That is uncalled for.”

“Look, if you just come clean about what exactly it is that you do and who your clients are, it wouldn’t be questionable anymore, now would it?”

“Point taken
,” he replied, but he didn’t offer up any new information. Instead he ate in silence for a few minutes. I watched him intently, trying to glean something---anything---from his motions, his manners, even the patterns etched into the crinkled skin around his eyes. I came away with nothing.

“Look, if you want me to fall flat on my face and fail as a journalist before I’ve even had a chance to start, just say so.” My tone was icy and it startled him; he almost choked on a mouthful of
asparagus.

“I’ll
find you a couple of past clients who can talk to you, and convince them that they have to agree to go on the record then,” he offered. “Though it will probably take me a while to do that. Does that help?”