Her Perfect Gift (17 page)

Lacey wrapped the evidence of her pregnancy in toilet tissue and threw it into the trash before turning on the water. “Sorry, just washing my hands,” she called back.

Nestor glared at her for the rest of her shift, but Lacey couldn’t bring herself to care. Sparkle-now-Jennifer had been giving her the close-to-silent treatment for days now. As far as Lacey was concerned, Nestor was just another name on the list of people who now hated Leslie, the waitress formerly known as Lacey and Tasha.

At that point, she was more concerned about making it through her shift in the hot, pungent diner without throwing up or fainting.

She’d almost made it to the end of her shift, when Maria, a hunched over, much older waitress, came up to her.

“Got a guy at table three says he wants you to be his waitress.”

“I’ve only got five more minutes on my shift. Can you handle it?” she asked.

But Maria shook her head. “Sorry, girlie, but the customer’s always right. I told you when you first started here to cut that friendly shit out. That’s how you end up getting customers outside your section requesting you specifically.”

Immediately, her father’s voice popped into her head, “You too friendly—”

Yes, yes, I know
, she answered, cutting off the ghostly memory before he could finish his chastisement. Despite everything that had happened to her, she still loved to talk to people and had already garnered a contingent of senior citizen customers who put in requests for her. Santa Fe boasted a huge over fifty-five population. People came here from all over the United States to retire, so she got these kinds of requests at least once a day.

As she approached table three, she vowed to keep her answers short and succinct no matter how much the customer wanted to talk. She was on the run again, she reminded herself. It was time to learn how to be a bitch for her own good.

“What can I get you?’ she asked, her eyes resolutely on her order pad, trying to make her voice as uninviting as possible.

“Sit down.”

“Sir, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” She glanced up to pin a firm, no-nonsense gaze on the customer, but instead of the little old man she’d been expecting, she met Suro’s black eyes, his face a study in stone cold fury.

“Sit down,” he repeated.

She swallowed. “I’m not allowed to—”

“
Sit
,” he said again, this time in a tone that promised dire consequences if she kept on trying to argue with him.

Lacey scanned the restaurant to make sure Nestor, who also served as the cook, wasn’t looking. When she saw his back was turned she quickly dropped into the booth across from Suro.

“Unless you buy this place, too, I don’t have much time to talk.” Her voice came out sounding more peevish than she’d intended.

But his eyes just flickered to her badge. “You’re Leslie now.”

She shrugged, “Yeah, I guess I am.”

She eyed him warily. This wasn’t the Suro she’d reluctantly left behind in Chicago. This Suro practically radiated with tightly controlled anger and put her in mind of the bodyguards who used to accompany Hector Jr. to public events, dead-eyed men who would just as soon kill a man as speak to him.

“How did you find me?” she asked him, her curiosity overriding her fear.

He steepled his hands and spoke in a quiet monotone. “I’m not here to make small talk with you.”

“Then why are you here,” she asked. “And again, how did you find me?”

His eyes ran over her, as if he were surveying a bug he wanted to crush beneath his foot. “I never did tell you my specialty, did I? Just that I was in security.”

“That’s okay,” she said, suddenly even more nervous than before. “There was a lot I didn’t tell you either. Maybe we should call it even?”

The look he gave her made her wonder if the smiling version of him had been something she’d made up in her head. This Suro didn’t seem capable of smiling, much less professing his love for her as he had the last time they spoke.

“I’m a hit man,” he said. “I get paid to hunt people down and finish them.”

She couldn’t have stopped her body from trembling, even if she wanted to. “You kill people for a living?”

Suddenly she understood how he managed to radiate so much danger, even when he was sitting still. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked, whispered really, unable to keep the fear out of her voice.

“Because I’ve been contracted by Hector Mendez, Sr. to kill you.”

She gasped, a hand flying up to her throat and her eyes immediately went to the exit. If she ran fast enough, maybe she could—

But his next words interrupted her escape plan. “I put a GPS tracker in the base of your suitcase. That’s how I found you. And I’ve been staking you out for a week now. I know where you live, I’ve been inside your apartment, and you have no idea what I might have stuck a tracker to. If you try to run again with anything but the clothes on your back, I will easily find you.” He slid a business card across the table with heavily embossed writing on it. “Meet me at my hotel after your shift.”

Then he stood and walked out of the restaurant without another word.

She scrambled out of the booth almost as soon as he turned his back, her mind racing. Her first thought was to run anyway, get new papers, do whatever it took. But the stuff he had said about easily being able to track her down had seemed less like a threat and more like a promise.

She picked up the card off the table and fingered the name of the Cliffrose Inn, with her thumb. It was a luxury resort located about halfway between where she worked and her apartment. She passed it everyday on her way to the restaurant. A cold chill shot through her as she wondered if Suro had been watching her walk past every day.

“What’d you say to make that guy leave?”

She looked up to find Nestor now standing behind her, his face drawn into its usual frown.

“Nothing,” she answered. “He just decided he didn’t want to eat here.”

“That’s it,” Nestor said. “I know a dud when I see one. You’re fired.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but Nestor cut her off. “No more excuses. Just get out of my restaurant.” And he turned and walked away.

What was this? Say Something Crazy to Lacey and Then Walk Away Day?

“Screw you, Nestor!” she said to his back.

He turned around and glared at her. “What did you just say to me?”

“You heard me,” she said. “Screw you. You’re mean, you’re greedy, and you’re a small, small man who enjoys taking advantage of people with your low-quality to food and the way you treat your works because you know they don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Everyone in the restaurant, including Maria, was staring at her with their mouths wide open now, but she kept going. “You know what you are? You’re a parasite who don’t nothing but take, take, take,” she told Nestor, her Jersey accent coming back in full effect. “And you don’t have to fire me, because I quit.”

Then she walked out of the restaurant without a backwards glance. She had been playing the soft and meek role for the last twelve years, afraid to ever really stand up for herself for fear of discovery. And what had it gotten her? A stripper she hadn’t wanted to hire in the first place ratting her out and an ex-boyfriend, who was now planning on killing her.

She was done apologizing to people like Nestor, especially now that she didn’t have anything else to lose.

That decided, she snatched her phone out of her purse and called the only person she owed anything to.

“What?” her daughter asked in the hostile tone she’d decided to take with Lacey as of late.

“I have to meet with someone,” Lacey answered. “So I might be late tonight.”

“I don’t care,” Sparkle informed her, even less emotional than usual.

And Lacey had to bite back the urge to go off on her petulant daughter, like she’d just gone off on her former boss. “I know you’re angry at me. But I need you to listen to me carefully now,” she said between clenched teeth.

Silence.

“Jennifer, are you still there?”

“Yes, and for the record, I hate the name Jennifer.”

“I know you do.” Lacey took a deep breath. She had hoped she wouldn’t have to ever have this conversation with Sparkle. She’d hoped she’d be able to send her daughter off to college one day and give her the means to lead a normal life. She cursed herself now for letting down her guard in Montana, even for one night.

But in the end, she gathered up the last of her resolve and said, “In case I can’t get back there, I need you to remember these letters: ISLVM. The easy way to remember it is ‘I love Sparkle very much.’ Check the letters against a telephone pad and you’ll have the combination to the safe under my bed. It has everything you need, including instructions about what to do if you don’t hear from me.”

For the first time in weeks, Sparkle didn’t sound angry when she spoke to her. “What’s going on? Mom, you’re scaring me.”

She thought about the icy look on Suro’s face as he informed her he was a hit man. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to scare you like this. Please believe me. I never wanted any of this for you, but from now on, I need you to be selfish, okay? Don’t worry about me. Worry about you. Do whatever it takes to make sure you don’t turn out like me, okay? I love you, Sparkle,” she told her daughter. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I will always, always love you no matter where I am.”

“Mom, you’re upsetting me,” she could practically hear Sparkle rubbing her thumb between her fingers on the other end of the line.

“I know, and that’s why I’m going to get off the phone now. I don’t want to upset you any more than I have.”

“Mom, no. Stay on the phone.”

“Sparkle, breathe. Remember your exercises. Just breathe until you’re able to take the next step and do I would told you.”

“Mom—”

She hung up on her daughter. It seemed less cruel that way. And when she dropped the burner phone back into her purse, she saw that the Cliffrose Inn, a quaint collection of adobe suites, was standing right in front of her.

CHAPTER 20

A FEW
minutes later, she found herself outside Suro’s stand-alone suite, knocking on a door painted with a Navajo symbol. It felt like knocking on the door to her own death and her heart beat in her throat when Suro answered. He looked her up and down before opening the door wider so she could enter.

More than twelve years of running, and it had all come down to this, she thought.
How would he kill her?
she wondered. He didn’t have a gun in his hand. Would he strangle her, or smother her, slit her throat, or force her to drink poison?

Strange, she would have never guessed he was hit man when they were together, but now it made total sense.

She heard the door click behind her and she gathered up her bravery, before turning around to face him. “Before you kill me, I have a few things I have to say.”

He stood there, hands at his side, lethal in his stillness, but he didn’t interrupt so she took that as an invitation to continue.

“I’m glad you know. I couldn’t tell you myself, but I’m glad you found out.” She looked him in the eye. “Because I wasn’t lying in Chicago. I really do love you, and more than anything I wanted you to know who I really was.”

To her surprise his face morphed from impassive into a storm cloud of rage. “Do not lie to me.”

“I’m not,” she said, and she stood her ground, though her instincts were screaming at her to run, to try to get away from this killer, this mad man, even if he’d easily be able to catch her.

“Do not lie to me,” he said again, angrier than she’d ever seen him.

“I’m not!”

His body crashed into hers like a runaway train. Her back hit an adobe wall and the block of ice that had opened the door became a wall of heat. Suro kissed her everywhere, her neck, her chest, her face all the while demanding, “Stop lying, stop lying, stop lying.”

“I’m not,” she said. And she kissed him back with all the passion she’d been trying to forget in the long weeks since she’d left him unconscious in Ferrari’s apartment.

He lifted her leg up around his waist, hiking up her skirt, so she could feel his rigid hard-on against her womanhood.

“Please believe me,” she said. “I loved you. I still do. So much. I don’t care who are or what you do for a living.”

There came the sound of her panties ripping and he was inside her, no condom, just his long, unforgiving length sheathing itself all the way to the hilt inside her quivering pussy. “Yes!” she cried out, happier than she had any right to be, because they were joined together again, even if it was in anger on his part.

He yanked the front of her waitress uniform open and the cheap buttons went flying everywhere. Then he pulled down her bra so her now swollen breasts came bursting out, and he started moving against her, his chest scraping again her sensitive nipples every time he jerked his cock inside her.

For a long while nothing could be heard in the room except for his harsh breaths and the sound of him slamming into her as he fucked her like a vengeful beast against the wall.

But then she wrapped her arms around him as tight as she could and said, “I love you, Suro. I really do. Leaving you was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and God help me, I’m so happy to see you again. I will never, ever lie to you again I swear.
I swear it
.”

For a few moments he kept fucking her in the rough manner of a man who could care less about the woman he was rutting, but she kept whispering it in his ear, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” and soon he broke.

His strokes went from rough to tender, and his hand wrapped around the nape of her neck as he pulled her face forward. He kissed and kissed her, like a man who had been starved of kisses for a very long time. And if this had been his plan to try to shut her up, it backfired, because she moaned the words against his lips. “I love you, I love you…”

Soon an orgasm began to blossom inside of her, unfolding like a flower as he moved into her, not stopping until she was shuddering against him, unable to continue speaking the words in her heart because she was so overcome.