Executive Perks (17 page)

She turned to face him. It wasn’t her. The woman smiled. Dressed in funky, garage-sale style clothing, she looked like a student or perhaps an actress. And she could certainly play the part of Virginia Beckett. She looked a lot like her. The same fine white skin and long blonde hair. The eyes just blue, not that queer mix of gray in them. A little shorter, maybe, and her features perhaps not quite so defined and patrician as Virginia’s, but alike enough to be her sister. More alike than even Virginia’s own sisters were.

“No. Not Virginia. Good guess, though,” the woman laughed. “It’s Samantha.” She smiled expectantly at him and he was aware, without at first registering it, that she was smiling at him, flirting with him, in the same way that most women—most women except Virginia Beckett, that is—generally did. For one luscious moment, as she beamed up at him, he imagined that she was Virginia, so relaxed, so inviting, smiling up at him. It was really intoxicating. He realized he was staring. “I’m sorry. It’s just that you look so much like…a friend.”

“Lucky her,” the girl quipped broadly. “To be your friend, I mean.” She was openly flirting now, fingering one sparkly long earring, not breaking eye contact with him. Her tongue flicked against her lower lip and she leaned in a little. “I came in here to get out of the rain.”

“Me too.”

“I couldn’t care less for all this modern art crap. In fact, I can think of a lot of other more enjoyable ways to spend a rainy afternoon. Can’t you?”

He had half a mind to come on to her just because she looked so much like Virginia. Her fingertip wandered up to that lower lip. Detachment on his part was probably not the reaction she was shooting for, but it was all he felt nonetheless. He wondered if she was about to start sucking her finger, as if he didn’t already get the hint.

His BlackBerry buzzed and, distracted, he pulled it out of his suit pocket, glancing down at the sender.

Shit, speak of the devil. He read the message, smiling, and pocketed the BlackBerry.

“Sorry,” he said to the Virginia-lookalike, with a nod, heading for the exit.

Time for the real thing.

* * * * *

Phil was sitting at the Oak Bar, indulging in an apple martini even though it was way too early for it. This new client was driving him crazy, treating him like a fucking errand boy. What was worse, he was paying Phil enough to make him be a fucking errand boy, making him snap pictures at car accidents and sneak around Connecticut estates and start fires. Then there was this most recent task, which had been absolutely ridiculous.

Of course he’d done it anyway.

What was this guy after? Why didn’t he just hire a hit-man and be done with it and forget about all this piddly shit?

The bartender was suddenly there, holding out a portable phone to him. “You Phil Carstairs?”

“What?”

The bartender shook the phone at him. “Are you or aren’t you?”

Christ, more cloak-and-dagger crap. He knew who this had to be. He had no idea why the asshole didn’t just call him on his cell phone. He took the phone from the bartender. “Hello?”

“Have the arrangements been made?” the electronically altered voice asked.

“Yes. It’s all ready for them.”

Click.

And the guy was rude on top of everything else.

* * * * *

Virginia pulled into the parking lot. Winston’s car was there, that sleek little Jaguar that’d been the site of her humiliating drive back with him to Bransport last month. Good. Because otherwise, stock or no, there was no way she was going into an empty funeral home on her own. She’d put Winston out of her mind, more or less. That is, more during the day and less at night. She’d barely seen him in person, of course, with the notable exception of once at the elevators when he had talked to her in the casual standoffish way she had practically begged him to treat her.

She just wished he wasn’t so goddamn attractive that she was actually contemplating breaking her as-long-as-she-can-remember dry spell and actually asking some guy or other out on a date so she could get laid and stop having these ridiculously erotic dreams about a man who probably hated her at this point. The worst part was by the time she’d actually gotten him to stop hitting on her, she’d been just starting to realize he wasn’t quite the monster she was making him out to be.

She got out of the car at the thought. When she managed to work up her nerve to approach the dilapidated front doorway and force herself through it, the darned thing had the temerity to squeak, just like in an old horror movie. Great. Winston better be serious about dealing on his stock or she was going to murder him for dragging her out here.

The front hallway was as shopworn as the unpainted exterior of the funeral home, the carpet faded, the wallpaper peeling off in spots. There were two large rooms off the hallway, one on each side, but a quick scan proved that Winston wasn’t in either of them.

“You’re late.” She looked up toward the voice, jumping a mile. He was peering down at her from the upstairs balcony, but started heading down the stairway toward her. He looked as gorgeous as ever in some Savile Row navy suit that damn near matched his eyes, but he was frowning. “I thought you might be upstairs so I took a look around. This place is creepy.”

“You’re not kidding me. So what’s going on?”

He hesitated. “What do you mean by that? What’s this all about?”

“You’re asking me?”

“You sent the email.”

She got a very bad feeling. “What are you talking about? I got an email from you telling me to meet you here—at this funeral home out in the middle of New Jersey, for God’s sake—alone. Which of course you would think would’ve made me pause.”

He reached in his pocket and took out his BlackBerry, flicking the screen on with his thumb and then frowning. “Actually, I thought it was the other way around, that you sent me an email to meet you here, but I see it’s somehow vanished. “ He held the BlackBerry up for her to see, as if he could prove a negative.

She countered with her own, digging it out and frowning even as she registered that the email from him had mysteriously disappeared. Suspicion compounded by a good dose of fear shot through her. “If this is some kind of a joke, Winston, I’m going to kill you.”

“I know you’re full of yourself, Virginia, but I don’t get off playing practical jokes on former, er, not-quite-lovers. For some reason, someone has played a joke on both of us. The question is why.”

She felt the cold of the late November day seep into what was undoubtedly an unheated structure. “I hate funeral homes.”

He seemed unsurprised. “I’m not exactly wild about them either. Who is?”

“No, I mean, I’m terrified of them.” She couldn’t stop herself from the stark admission.

He watched her carefully. “You look okay. Not frothing at the mouth or having hysterics or anything.”

Even his levity didn’t stop her from pouring out the story for some reason. “No really, ever since my childhood, I can barely go into one. An uncle locked me in the embalming room of a funeral home at my grandfather’s wake. It took them an hour to notice I was gone.” She could still almost feel the terror that had crept into her bones then, the way she couldn’t move she was so scared.

“I guess your family’s not so perfect. Why the hell would he do that?”

“He said it was a test, but my father nearly beat the crap out of him.”

“Good for your father,” Winston muttered, looking around. “And not that I’m not flattered by your sharing, but we’re still clueless as to why someone arranged this. What’s the point here?” He looked her up and down. “A frustrated matchmaker, maybe? If so, I’d say they have an abysmal sense of romance.”

There was a loud bang from the front of the funeral home. She had left the door open when she came in, purposely, and when they rushed into the hallway they saw it was now slammed shut.

“Oh my God.”

Winston approached the front door. “Don’t get all freaked out. It was probably the wind.” But he found he could not open it. “It’s almost like it’s locked on the other side.”

Virginia tried herself, tugging on the doorknob long after she’d verified it wasn’t opening. Virginia sank down on her heels against the door and Winston looked down at her in annoyance. “Oh, please. If someone is doing this to scare you, why would they invite me?”

“I have no idea. Maybe they thought I wouldn’t have come otherwise.”

“Hmm…if you wanted to see me, all you had to do was call, honey,” he said sarcastically. “I didn’t know you cared.”

“The email promised me your stock back.”

“Oh, of course. Silly me. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“I wouldn’t have come in at all if I hadn’t seen your car in the parking lot. I recognized it.”

“Really? So you weren’t completely unconscious during that drive to Bransport. I wondered. I practically had to pick you up to get you in the car.”

“Good times,” she snapped.

“I’m only saying, you’re not as light as you look. I almost put my back out.” A ghost of a smile hovered on those sexy lips.

“Poor you.” She stood up. “So what are we going to do here?”

“We’re going to leave and sort this out later.”

She glanced at the door.

“Not that way. Come on.”

Virginia Beckett did look as though she was freaking. Surprisingly, he felt a wave of sympathy for her. Must just be that it made her more human. Who the hell locked a little kid in an embalming room? That uncle must have been a psycho. He wondered idly if this was the uncle who still treated her as if she were in kindergarten.

The important thing now of course was to get her out of here before she had a serious meltdown. Not that he was exactly happy to be locked in a funeral home either, even if it was with his current wet dream—literally, pathetic as that was, given he was an adult man and not a hormonal teenaged boy.

He led her into one of the large rooms at the back of the funeral home and pulled aside the heavy curtains of one of the discreet windows. Boarded shut from the outside. He hadn’t noticed that when he’d driven up. And not just boarded up the old-fashioned way, with wood. No, these were steel plates. Someone was very serious about not wanting kids to break windows and sneak into this place. And yet the front door had been unlocked for him and Virginia.

He let the curtain fall back. Virginia’s face was as white as one of the former inhabitants of this place. He reached for her hand and she let him take it. The iciness as well as the faint shaking told him he better get them out of here soon or he really would have a hysterical woman on his hands.

“Hey, if you totally lose it, think how fun that’ll be for me… Blackmail material for the end of time. Cool, successful businesswoman Virginia Beckett screaming like a teen queen in a horror movie. It’ll be great.”

She smiled faintly. “You may be about to get your wish.”

He put his arm around her and she didn’t even flinch. “I’m not trying to make a move here. I’m just comforting you.”

“Blackmail material of my own. Unscrupulous corporate raider Aaron Winston has a heart.”

“Don’t get carried away. Anyway, I’m not scared and nothing’s going to happen to us.” He pulled out his BlackBerry. “I’ll just make a call and we’ll be busted out of here in no time.” He held it to his ear, looked at the screen and frowned. “It was working a minute ago when I pulled up.”

“Dead?”

“Was that a pun?”

“No. If I check mine, it’ll be mysteriously dead too, won’t it?”

“I suspect so, but I’m an optimist. Go ahead and give it a try.”

When her phone couldn’t get a signal either, they made a more thorough inventory of all the possible exits on the first floor. All were barred or locked.

“We could try the basement.”

“No way!”

“I’ll go down and take a look around.”

“You’re not leaving me!”

He smiled. This really was getting rather ridiculous. “Okay. We’ll go together.” Hand in hand, they braved the rickety stairs to the basement and explored, to the extent they could in the dark. Feeling around, they found no windows at all in the bottom level of the structure and no doors to the outside either, so they made their way back upstairs.

Aaron began to face the fact that the funeral home was locked up tight with no way to get out. “Look, I’ve got a conference call in an hour.”

“You’re worried about that at a time like this?”

“No. I mean when I don’t call in, my assistant, Mrs. Fields, will start to wonder. She has me on a very tight leash. The longer I go without checking in, the more likely it’ll be that she sends someone after me.”

“Does she know you’re here?”

“No, but my car has a tracking device in case of theft, so it’d be a relatively simple exercise to locate us.”

Eventually.

Assuming something worse didn’t happen to him and Virginia in the meantime. A cautious look his companion’s way suggested that playing it light was his best bet. Virginia looked scared enough already.

“All right. Let’s just gather ourselves for a few minutes.” He led her into one of the rooms on the first floor and they sat down on a sheet-covered couch.

“How do you think whoever sent us those emails made them disappear and made our phones go dead?”

“Tech.” Aaron shrugged. “Not my thing, but it’s probably not very difficult.”

“It’s unnerving.”

“Which, along with the current atmosphere, is apparently supposed to be the point. To unnerve us. But we could always find a way to distract ourselves.” He leered at her comically. “Now I am coming on to you, in case it’s not obvious.”