Secrets of a Shoe Addict (5 page)

“Abigail Generes.”

She turned around.

The second or two that followed were surreal. For an instant, while she was turning, she thought she knew whose the voice was, but her memory of the lean, dark-skinned, handsome bad boy from her past didn’t quite mesh with the stocky pale-faced man in front of her.

So, mercifully, it was a mistake.

“I’m sorry. . . .”She scrutinized the face. Wait.
Could
it be? Could he have changed that much in just twelve years? Where once there
had been the contours of a sharp, square jawline, there was now slightly slack, aging flesh.

“Now, don’t tell me you don’t remember me,” he said, revealing the ghost of a smile that had once left her weak in the knees.

Oh, no . . .

“You must have me confused with someone else.” She turned to leave, but he grabbed her arm, making her drop the small clutch bag she had brought with her. Her license, credit cards, and cell phone spilled out and clattered onto the polished floor.

She dropped immediately to pick the stuff up, but so did he, zeroing in on her wallet like a vulture and standing up slowly as he read her license. “Abigail Generes Walsh, fourteen-eleven Lamplighter Lane”—he raised his eyebrows—“and not a bad neighborhood. If you’re into minivans.” He pulled the cash out and rifled through it before starting to put it in his pocket.

She snatched at it, a cat going for a rat. “I beg your pardon.”

“You used to beg for a lot more than that, as I recall.”

She was unable to move, unable to do anything but gape at the man before her, with the disconcerting thought that a woman who didn’t know him might still think he was attractive.

“I think you have the wrong person,” she tried at last.

“Now, honey, it’s been a long time, but not so long I don’t know that gorgeous bod when I see it.” His breath smelled like alcohol. “Believe me, I had a lot of time to think about it while I was in the pen.”

Oh, God. It
was
him. Of course, she’d known it from the moment she’d heard his voice. “Damon Zucker.”

“That’s better.” He gave a broad smile, the pirate grin that, when she was twenty years old, had practically made her clothes drop off spontaneously.

Her throat tightened at the memory of his tongue in her mouth, along her body . . . She shuddered.

“I can tell you’re thrilled to see me.”

“I thought you were in jail.”

“Yeah.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “Thanks to you.”

It felt like cockroaches were running up and down her spine. “It wasn’t my fault.”

He took a long, thin cigar out of his pocket, bit the end off, and spit it on the floor. “That’s, uh, that’s not true. When the public defender went to find you, you’d split. Nowhere to be found.” He lifted the cigar. “Gimme a light.”

“I don’t have a light,” she said, looking him up and down with disgust.

“Bullshit, you always have a light. Gotta heat the bazooka, am I right?”

She swallowed hard. “I don’t do that anymore.”

He gave a shout of laughter. “Yeah, and I’m the fuckin’ pope.” He stopped a woman passing by. “Pardon me, honey, can I borrow a light?” The woman, clearly seeing something in him that was now practically invisible to Abbey, laughed and handed him her cigarette, which he held to his cigar, puffing like a cartoon villain until it was lit. “Thanks, sugar.” He gave the cigarette back to her, then turned back to Abbey.

“Charming as ever, I see,” Abbey said. “If you hurry, you can catch up to her.”

He gave a laugh. “I can catch up to her even if I don’t hurry.”

She wanted to slap that smug look right off his face. “I see your time in the slammer didn’t change you much.”

“Not so, Abigail. It taught me not to take no shit from nobody.
Including you. Make that—” He puffed his cigar thoughtfully. “—make that
especially
you. I’ve been trying to find you, you know. There we were in the same town and it takes a trip to Vegas to find you. We’ve got business to discuss.”

“We don’t have
any
business in common.”

He took her shoulder and spun her around. “I think we do. And you know damn fucking well what it is.”

Something in Abbey cracked. Actually, it might be more accurate to say something
on
Abbey cracked, because the façade she’d been wearing since meeting Brian—polite, mild-mannered, your basic Clark Kent personality—felt like it was crumbling into rubble at her feet. “We’ve got
no business
, you jackass!”

Damon rose to the occasion immediately. “Look,” he snarled. “You
owe
me.”

“I don’t owe you anything.”

Damon’s eyes, which used to seem like hot, molten chocolate, were now dull black slits. “You’re just lucky I didn’t tell the police how involved you were.”

Panic coursed through her. What was the statute of limitations on being an accomplice to a felony? “You’ve got no proof.”

He laughed. It was an ugly sound. Cruel. “You wish.”

Did he? Could he? Well, of course he could. She wasn’t careful in those days, not about anything. There were probably any number of things she could still be arrested for. “You don’t scare me.”

There was still a smile pasted across his face, like a smudge of pink on a bad painting. “Baby, I spent twelve years in the slammer thinking about you. I know every expression, every movement you have. And the way you’re trying to look down on me? The way your hands are moving in and out of fists? The little shake you hope I
don’t see? You’re fucking terrified.” He chuckled. “And you should be.”

“What do you want, Damon?” But she knew what he was going to say.

And he did. “I want the necklace back.”

“I don’t have it anymore,” Abbey snapped. This was rapidly turning into a nightmare.

Damon snorted a laugh. “Right. You just happened to, what, lose it?
Sell
it?”

“I gave it away.”

For just a fraction of a second he looked shocked. Then skeptical. “Like you’d give away a necklace worth eight grand.” But there was a question in his voice.

She nodded. “I did.” It was true, though she wasn’t above lying to scum like Damon in order to get him off her back. “I gave it to the church.”

His skepticism exploded into outright disbelief. “You . . . church? Right.”

“I did.” She didn’t want to tell him about Brian. She didn’t want him to know anything about her life now. “It seemed like the right thing to do, so I did it.”

“Somehow I can’t picture it.”

Her anger grew disproportionately, and she had a little momentary fantasy about punching him in the face with brass knuckles. “I don’t give a damn if you can picture it or not. We’re finished here.” She turned to walk away.

“Not so fast.” He grabbed her arm, hard, probably leaving a red mark behind.

She whirled to face him, shaking his arm off her. “Do
not
touch me,” she warned.

He rolled his eyes. “Or what? You’ll create a scene and I’ll have to contact your husband at one-four-one-one Lamplighter Lane and tell him about your dirty, dirty past?”

Abbey felt the blood drain from her face, and hated the fact that she couldn’t control such an obvious giveaway.

He saw it, too. “You used to have a better poker face than that, babe. A little better. Not much.”

“You used to be nicer.”

He shrugged, a slight movement that somehow suggested sharp anger. “That was before my girl let me down and sent me to jail.”

The designation of Abbey as “his girl” sickened her, even if it was true once. She wanted to punch him in his doughy gut. “Like I already said, it’s not my fault you went to jail for your crimes.”

“Actually, yeah, it is.” He nodded and looked off into the distance. He might as well have been chewing a piece of straw and contemplating if it was going to be a rough winter for the crops. “And I think the price for that should be nine thousand. Eight thousand for the necklace you won’t give back to me—”

“I don’t have it!”

“—and another thousand we’ll call interest. Maybe we should make it two. A nice even ten grand.”

If she didn’t get away from him quickly, his price was going to rise to include her firstborn, and knowing Damon, he’d find a way to exact it, one way or the other. “Tell me where to find you and I’ll see what I can come up with.” Her voice was hard with anger. “But it should interest you to know, though I doubt it will, that the necklace was valued at five thousand, not eight thousand, and the proceeds went to help HIV-positive children in a foster home in Bethesda.”

“Charity begins at home.” He shook his head, keeping his gaze leveled on her like a shotgun. “And that ain’t my home.”

“Five thousand,” she said, her voice hard. Somewhere deep in her subconscious she must have known this day was coming. The only way to buy herself enough time to figure out how to deal with it was to pretend to play his game, and to play it hard. “Just tell me where to send a cashier’s check.”

“Tell you where the police can find me again, maybe on some trumped-up charge you come up with?” He gave a bark of laughter. “I’ll contact you. Soon. Just get the money together—
ten grand
—and be ready for me.”

Chapter
        
3
   

T
iffany Vanderslice Dreyer had spent enough sleepless nights watching infomercials to know that there were a lot of people out here who spent a
ton
of money on stupid things, particularly expensive clothes, shoes, and beauty products.

She just never thought she’d be one of them.

Her sister, Sandra, was a different story. Sandra spent hundreds of dollars on a single pair of shoes—shoes!—at a time, but on the rare occasion Tiffany would get herself something new, it would be from TJ Maxx or Payless, and even then only when her shoes were totally worn out or she needed a pair for a special occasion.

So the idea that Tiffany might spend her way into trouble was ridiculous.

But, then again, Tiffany had never been much of a drinker either, and tonight, in Vegas, with free drinks and open-all-night shops, bets were off on both counts.

Everything had been just fine until she spotted a clothing shop in the lower level of the hotel, called Finola Pims, named for the British designer. Finola, as Tiffany came to think of her, had classic sensibilities, but with vivid, beautiful fabrics, and a modest-yet-sexy style that spoke to Tiffany.

Everything Tiffany tried on looked amazing on her, even a couple of funky dresses she’d trotted out as a sort of private joke because they were so outrageous, she was sure they’d look silly. But no, they hugged her figure in all the right places while miraculously giving her room to move and bend without showing her privates to everyone within fifty yards. She was tall and blond, with light blue eyes, so she’d gotten her share of attention back when she was dating, but since that time she’d begun to feel like she was in a rut.

Finola Pims lifted her out of that rut.

Within forty-five minutes of walking into the shop, she was sitting in the dressing room with an empty margarita glass and fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of once-in-a-lifetime clothes she had to put back.

The pile wasn’t so big as one might expect.

But quality cost a lot. And before she put the clothes back, she decided to try on a few shoes. She’d never been a shoe person—that was her sister. In fact, she’d always sort of been an
anti
-shoe person
because
of her sister’s weird penchant for them. She couldn’t understand how a person could put four-hundred-dollar shoes on their feet and then walk around in them, ruining them with every step. The cost-to-loss analysis on that sucked.

So Tiffany went to Finola’s shoe collection, hoping to get herself out of spending mode and back under control.

Now, seriously, Tiffany was
not
planning to love the shoes. In fact, with her long history of shoe disdain, she honestly thought it would
shake her out of her shopping spree. If there had been a John Deere dealer in the hotel, it could have served the same purpose, but there wasn’t, so she was stuck with the shoe section.

How was she to know she’d love them?