Emily: Sex and Sensibility (2 page)

She tried not to dwell on that, or on what in hell she was doing playing piano anywhere.

Unfortunately, as of late she found herself unable to think of anything else.

What am I doing here?
she’d find herself musing, and always at the damnedest times.

It was a great question if you were studying existentialism. If you were trying to put food in your belly… not so good.

Besides, that kind of thinking changed nothing. Only she could do that, but how?

“How?” she muttered as she moved into her last hour of ruining more of what had once been perfectly acceptable music and now was pluperfect crap.

It was important to remember that the Tune-In was most of the reason she could pay her bills. Without it, without Nola paying half the rent, she’d be in deep trouble.

Another glance at her watch. It was five after one.

Emily launched into a too loud, too fast, too everything rendition of “New York, New York
.
” She played a lot of old Sinatra stuff. Not that she didn’t like Sinatra. She did. Or she had, before this. The problem was that what the Tune-In patrons wanted was strictly Las Vegas Frank. None of the soft ballads, the sophisticated lyrics of Classic Frank.

So what?
she thought, her lips compressing as she segued from pounding out “New York, New York” to a tinkling rendition of Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” “Chicago” would come next. Nothing like ending the night with a tour of the USA and then, mercifully she was finished until next Thursday.

The entry door swung open. Three already lit middle-aged guys entered the Tune-In on a gust of cold, damp wind.

Wonderful.

It was raining. That meant the always late bus would show up even later by the time she headed home. Bad enough to travel at two in the morning, but now she’d have to stand on the corner waiting for who knew how long.

Emily’s jaw tightened as she played a glitzy intro to “Chicago.”

This was not a good night. None were, not really, but this was stacking up to be bad. The rain. The cold. The fact that not one person had put so much as a dime into the open tip jar she kept on top of the piano. The twenty singles that were already inside it were hers, bait money for people to add a bill or two.

Fat chance.

Not good, no, and she knew that her rapidly deteriorating attitude wasn’t helping, but—

“Hey, baby, how you doin’?”

Emily looked up. She saw a stained shirt hanging over a huge belly, and above it, a hand clutching a bottle of beer.

“I’m fine,” she said brightly.
“I got somethin’ I wanna hear. Noo Yawk, Noo Yawk.”

“This is my last set, sir. I don’t take requests during my last set.”

Gus, her boss, was at her end of the bar polishing glasses with a towel that gave new meaning to the color “gray.” He looked at her, eyebrows raised. Emily shrugged and kept playing. Yes, she’d made up the rule on the spot. So what?

“Your last what?”

“My last set. Of tunes. And I’m not accepting request.”

“Thass your job. To play what people wanna hear.”

He was right. It was. The correct response to make was
Yes, of course, I’ll play that next…

“I told you, this is my last set. No requests.”

“Gus?” the drunk said with indignation. “You hear this?”

Gus put down the glass and the towel and folded his arms over his chest.

“Play what the man wants,” he said in a hard voice. “That’s what I pay you to do.”

He was right. Absolutely right.

“Thass right. Gus pays you to play what I wanna hear.”

The drunk grinned. Leered. Pointed his bottle of beer at her for emphasis.

That was when it all went bad.

Maybe somebody jostled his arm. Maybe he was a little unsteady on his feet.

The bottle tilted.

Ice-cold beer poured over Emily’s head and straight down the neckline of her dress, her silk dress, one of the few still-decent things in her closet, stuff she wore only for work.

Gasping, she shot to her feet.

“You,” she sputtered, “you—you stupid jerk—”

The drunk laughed. Gus shrugged, as if what had happened was the kind of thing she’d just have to put up with.

Later, Emily suspected it was that shrug that put things over the top.

She grabbed the bottle from the drunk’s hand. From the weight of it, it was still half-full Good, she thought, and before the idiot had time to stop her, she jammed the neck of the bottle into that big belly, tilted it so that it was pointed down under his belt and into his pants and had the joy of hearing his laughter turn into an almost girlish shriek.

The shriek drew everybody’s attention. People turned, stared, saw the stain spreading over the drunk’s trousers and laughed.

Unfortunately, Gus wasn’t laughing. His face had turned purple. He raised his hand and pointed his finger at Emily.

“OUT!”

The crowd went silent. Emily’s heart leaped into her throat.

“Listen,” she said quickly, “I didn’t mean—”

“Take that ‘I’m too good for this place’ act of yours and get your ass out the door!”

She stood a little straighter. “If you’d let me explain—”

Gus marched around the side of the bar and stood in front of her. He was big and bald; he stank of sweat and beer. Close up, the finger he pointed at her was the size of a cigar.

“You got a problem understanding English?”

“No. I mean, of course not. I’m just trying to tell you that—”

“Get the fuck outta here! Don’t make me say it again.”

Emily began to tremble. “I want what you owe me. My pay for Thursday and Friday and Saturday and for to—”

“OUT!”

Her eyes filled with angry tears. Dammit, she would not let anybody in this awful place see her cry! Max could handle the money thing. That was part of his job. Quickly, she bent to the little cubby under the bar where she kept her handbag. When she straightened up, tears were streaming down her face.

“You,” she said, “you are,—you are not a nice man!”

Seconds later, she was on the street, in the rain, in the cold, alone in what that stupid song the drunk had requested referred to as the City That Never Sleeps except it was really the City That Had No Heart.

Anger could only last just so long, especially when you walked straight into a moonless, starless, wind-driven rain.

It took Emily less than half a block before reality hit.

What had she done?

Her rent was due Monday. Her half of $1,950 dollars. You could rent a house with a backyard in Wilde’s Crossing for that kind of money. Here, what you got was what Realtors called a cozy apartment with charm and potential, meaning it was a fourth-floor walkup the size of a shoe box.

Yes, but it was
her
shoe box. She couldn’t afford to lose it.

Her knees went week.

A sob rose in her throat as she reached for a lamppost, wrapped her hand around it and clung to the wet metal for support. How could she have done what she’d just done? Lost her job, especially over something so foolish? She endured far worse things at the Tune-In. Drunks who wanted to warble songs she’d never heard of. Others who figured she was there to be hit on. At least one a night who wanted her to play something that made him sit down and sob.

She’d learned to grit her teeth and survive.

How come she hadn’t managed tonight?

The rain was coming down hard. She was beyond wet already; soon, she’d be soaked to the bone. And her jacket was in the bar’s back room. How could she have forgotten it?
Emily bit back a groan.

The same way she’d forgotten her tip jar and what a laugh to call it that when what she’d left behind was her own hard-earned money.

She had to go back.

But she couldn’t. Pneumonia was a better option. Or hypothermia. Or—or—

A car was coming.

A second’s worth of relief morphed directly into panic. A car turning up at this hour back home would have been good news but this wasn’t back home. It was a long, deserted street in a very tired part of Manhattan.

The car slowed.

Its headlights flashed over her.

“Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop,” Emily whispered.

It didn’t. A couple of seconds later, it picked up speed and vanished into the night.

Now what?

She had to stay calm. Calm at all costs. She was a Wilde and maybe she didn’t have the Wilde gene for planning and organization and success, but she’d grown up watching her three brother’s deal with adversity.

Surely she’d learned something. Yes, she had. Step one? The staying-calm thing. Step two? Be logical.

The cold rain was relentless. Her teeth began to chatter.

It was too late for logic. Logic would have kept her from doing what she’d done to the drunk. It would have meant retrieving her coat and that damned tip jar before walking out.

The only logic now was the realization that she was going to freeze to death unless she drowned first—or got attacked by a local version of Jack the Ripper.

Hell.

That was the thing about not being much of a planner. You ended up with an imagination that worked overtime. Not good. The point was to concentrate on positive things, and there were some.

She had her purse. There were a few dollars in it. Not many. She never carried much cash when she worked at the Tune-In; the neighborhood was too iffy for that. She did have bus fare.

OK.

She gave up her stranglehold on the lamppost and started toward the bus stop sign on the next block. She walked as quickly as she could, considering the height of her go-with-the-silk-dress heels, but there wasn’t any rush. The next bus wasn’t due for almost half an hour.

Plenty of time to freeze to death.

Plenty of time to try to figure out how to get through the situation.

Would Nola be home tonight? Nola had an active social life. She came and went like a butterfly. How would she take the news that Emily wouldn’t be able to meet her half of the rent on Monday?

Dammit.

They’d met a year ago when they were both waitressing at a diner on Tenth Avenue. Nola was a dancer in search of fame on Broadway. They got along well enough and one of the reasons was their unspoken rule about never borrowing money from each other.

Maybe the landlady would agree to extending the date the rent was due.

Right.

Their landlady was a woman of such warmth, charm and all-around graciousness that Nola had dubbed her Miss Hannigan, after the head of the orphanage in
Annie
.

Miracles could happen. Of course they could. Like the miracle of Max’s having another job to make up for the one she’d just lost.

She was chilled to the bone. Her teeth had gone from chattering to dancing the tarantella. She’d probably be blue with cold by the time the bus—

What was that? The sound of another engine. Not a car. A truck, perhaps. Or—

The bus!

A big smile swept across Emily’s face. Here she’d been thinking it would take half an hour until—

But the bus was coming too fast. Much too fast and she was still half a block from where it would stop.

She began to run. Oh God! Not easy when you added a wet, pockmarked sidewalk to the height of her heels—

“Ow!”

One heel slipped. Snapped like a twig. Frantic, she kicked off both shoes, snatched them up as the bus roared by. It reached the corner. She heard the sound of the doors opening, then closing.

“No,” she yelled, “no, come back!”

The taillights gave a merry twinkle just as she reached the sign post. Then they were swallowed up by the rain.

Panting, gasping for breath, she wrapped her arms around the cold, wet post and pressed her forehead to it.

“Emily Madison Wilde,” she whispered, “you are in trouble.”

Deep trouble. It wasn’t just her imagination that was working overtime. Reality was working overtime. Her pounding heart gave a
yes
vote to the possibility of pneumonia. Of hypothermia.

And only a fool would discount the imminent arrival of Jack the Ripper.

Something moved in the shadowed, boarded-up doorway across the street. A person? A dog? A cat? She hoped it wasn’t a dog or a cat; no animal should be outside on a night like this.

On the other hand, she hoped it wasn’t a person, either.

That would not be good.

“Be calm,” she whispered. “Be logical.”

Take a taxi home.

She didn’t have the money to pay for one but so what? She had money at home. A couple of hundred dollars, hard-earned, hard-saved, and tucked away for emergencies. Surely this was an emergency.

All she had to do was hail a taxi, but New York taxis did a disappearing act in bad weather. Besides, no self-respecting cab driver would bother cruising this street at this hour. Wait. She had a cell phone. Hooray for something!

Emily fumbled her tiny purse open, grabbed the phone… and watched in disbelief as it tumbled through her numb fingers and landed on the wet sidewalk.

She bent quickly, picked it up. The screen was blank. She pushed buttons, more buttons, endless buttons. She whispered “Please” and “Don’t do this” and “Goddammit, turn on!”

Nothing happened.

The miserable thing was dead.

“Dead,” she said, and on a rush of fury she tossed it into the deepest puddle in the gutter.

Now what? God, now what…

Emily stiffened.

She’d heard something. A vehicle. A bus? A cab? A car? Let it be a bus or a cab. Not a car. Not a car. Not a car.

It wasn’t.

It was a long, black, limousine moving fast, spewing plumes of rainwater behind it, alongside it…

“Shit,” Emily shrieked, as a wave of icy water finished the job the drenching the rain had started. She wanted to weep. To scream. To run after the damnable limo and pummel it with her fists.

The limo stopped. Its taillights blazed.

Emily blinked and peered into the night.

The thing was absolutely motionless, a street light glinting off its shiny black exterior.

Then, slowly, it began to back up.

All the fear of the past half hour coalesced into one huge knot in Emily’s throat.

She took a quick step back. And another. The limo, still moving backward, fell in alongside.

It was keeping pace with her.

She stood still.

So did it.

Nothing moved except the raindrops, a thin plume of exhaust from the tailpipe… and Emily’s heart, trying to claw its way out of her chest.

Forget Jack the Ripper. What about Ted Bundy? Had he ever collected his victims via limo?

The rear door opened. She glimpsed a big, dimly lighted interior. Dark leather. Dark wood.

She took a quick step back.

“Are you all right?”

The voice was male, slightly accented. Her brain went into creative overdrive. Goodbye, Ted Bundy. Hello, Bela Lugosi.

“
Signorina
? Do you need assistance?”

Scratch Transylvania. The invisible stranger was Italian. Emily fought back a wave of hysterical laughter. Whoa, what a relief.

“Signorina?”

“Yes,” she said in a voice that sounded like rust. “I mean, yes, I’m all right. No, I don’t need assistance. Thank you.”

“Are you alone?”

“No,” she said quickly. “I—I’m not alone. My—my—my husband went to-to get the c-car.”

Great. Chattering teeth added a lot to the illusion of toughness.

“Your husband.”

It was not a question but a statement, delivered in a flat, no-nonsense tone that suggested the man knew the lie for what it was.

“Y-yes.”

“And where is your car parked?”

“What d-does it matter?”

“I will be happy to drive you to it.”

“No!” She swallowed hard. “I m-mean, no th-thank you.”

There was a two-beat pause. “
Signorina, per favore
—there is no car. And no husband. You and I both know that, just as we know that you are not convinced of my good intentions.”

At least he had that right.

“I assure you, I mean you no harm.”

Should she run? The Tune-In was only five minutes away but it was probably closed by now. Besides, she had watched enough Animal Planet to know you never turned your back to a predator.

“That’s v-v-very kind of you but—”

“
Cristo,
why do you argue?”

The voice had turned brisk and impatient. What if he stepped out of the…
Ohmygod!
That was exactly what he was doing. A shiny black shoe emerged from the open door, followed by its shiny black mate. Both shoes landed in a puddle. The man muttered something as he unfolded the rest of himself from what her panicked brain now recognized as a Mercedes.

Emily’s first impression was that he was big.

No. Wrong word. Not big. Tall. Six two, six three, something like that. Long-legged. And, as she worked her way up the length of him, she saw that he was narrow-hipped, broad-shouldered—and dressed in an impeccably tailored black tux. His face was still in shadow.

Her heart was racing.

Ted Bundy, as envisioned by GQ magazine.

At least she’d meet her end at the hands of a killer who was stylishly-dressed

“Signorina,”
he said, exactly the way you’d address a crazy person but, dammit, she wasn’t a crazy person: she was a resourceful woman who had watched enough reality shows to know what to do in a crisis.

“Stay back!” Quickly, she dug into her minuscule shoulder bag, closed her trembling fingers around a tube of lipstick and held it toward him vertically, one finger pressed to the top. “Stay back or I’ll use this pepper spray.”

A bark of laughter greeted her announcement. If she hadn’t been so terrified, she’d have been insulted.

“Forgive me for laughing,” the man said, “and please believe me when I tell you that I can understand your caution. It is, in fact, commendable—but misplaced.”

He took a slow step forward. Emily took one back.

“What will it take to convince you that I am not a madman who rides the streets of Manhattan in search of female victims but am rather a man who would not rest easy if he drove off and abandoned you?”

“But I am h-ha-happy to be ab-ab-ab…”

Another step brought him under the glow of the streetlight.

Now she could see his face, and it told her all she needed to know.

The stranger was definitely bent on something terrible.

Only the devil in disguise could be such a hunk of gorgeous, sexy, heart-stoppingly beautiful male.