The Fifth Favor (18 page)

Shelby Reed

attention flickered back to the road. He recognized that limousine, knew the voice and body and scent of the woman being chauffeured in its back seat.

Madeline Cabot, wife of a diplomat.

A frown lowered his brows. He couldn’t go anywhere without being reminded of the choices he’d made in his life. Choices that didn’t suit the decency or vulnerability of the woman sitting beside him.

“Adrian?” Billie leaned to see his face.

He forced himself to smile and reached across the console to squeeze her hand.

She was silent. Then, “How’s the investigation going?”

Wariness immediately corkscrewed in his gut, an end to the sanguine fantasies he’d pinned on this night. He withdrew his fingers from hers. “Why? For the article?”

“For my own curiosity.”

“I’m not under suspicion with you too, am I?” He meant the question to sound flippant, but it came out injured, angry.

“Of course not,” she said, and looked away.

It sounded like a lie. An acid smile twisted his lips and he gripped the steering wheel. “Let’s be truthful tonight, Ms. Cort. Nothing but honesty for the next few hours.

Think we can manage that?”

She turned toward him, and the weight of her gaze warmed his face with self-awareness. She had a magical, disarming way of exposing him with her watchful green eyes.

“I don’t know.” Her tone was bruised. “I asked you about the investigation because you seem so distracted. Something’s not right. I just thought…” She threw her hands up in an impatient gesture. “I don’t know what I thought. It’s none of my business.”

She was hurt, and he’d made such quick work of ruining their night in the brief time they’d been together. He stared at the road, clenching and unclenching his fingers on the steering wheel. “I have nothing to hide. The detectives questioned me again this past week, but I’ve heard nothing from them since.”

Like a pack of wolves retreating when their prey was only half-dead, he wanted to add. A sick kind of blessing. He’d sat in the lobby at Avalon and answered their crude, pointed, insinuating questions as if by rote, never flinching, never allowing a single flicker of emotion to cross his features.

But the questioning left him so flayed, afterward he’d locked himself into his private quarters and spent the next hour with a shot glass and whiskey for company, until his vision swam, the world spun and his stomach lurched in protest. Then he’d sprawled across the massive bed and slept, and suffered a night of phantom visitations from Lucien, whose head was split open and skull exposed, blood glistening like ruby sequins on his fine, bruised features.

The image had burned itself into Adrian’s brain when the detective slipped back the sheet and asked him to identify his friend’s sleeping face. Lucien, lying on the 98

The Fifth Favor

sidewalk with a halo of puddled blood around his head. Still beautiful, even with the trauma and lingering bruises from someone’s fists nights before. Lucien had died as he’d lived—broken on the inside, with a beatific exterior.

Hopelessness expanded within Adrian, knotting the muscles in his shoulders. “I don’t want to talk about the investigation. I don’t want to think about Avalon or Lucien or the detectives. I want to relax tonight, with you, in relative quiet. Is that asking too much, Billie? Because if it is, I’ll turn around and take you home.” His voice wavered, the words stilted. Christ, he was losing control in front of the one person whose opinion truly mattered to him.

“It’s not asking too much,” Billie said, her voice quiet. “I’ve written nothing about the investigation and I only asked because I care. A mistake, obviously.”

“What—asking, or caring?” He glanced in his rearview mirror, changed lanes, his chest inexplicably hollow. “Are you claiming to care about me?”

“What do you think?” He sensed her drawing herself erect, chin lifted, gaze straight ahead and tone imperious. “You’ve had your fingers inside my body,” she said, gently mocking his words from the night at Rock Creek Park. “You’ve tasted me. I’m not one of your clients—I’m allowed to care.”

Adrian was at once surprised and impressed, followed by a gentle, disturbing curl of some warm emotion he couldn’t—
wouldn’t
—identify.

“Says who?” He flashed her a quick, repentant smile meant to soothe the friction between them.

“Says me,” she replied without humor. “Telling me what I can and can’t feel is not a part of our deal, is it?”

“Never.” Another glance at Billie’s face showed the troubled thoughts still darting behind her eyes, and his regret doubled for having fed the tension now emanating from her, for drawing lines of concern and anxiety on her unguarded features.

When Adrian braked at a stoplight, he used the opportunity to reach for her.

Trailing his fingers along the silky skin of her cheek, he drew her to him and pressed his lips against her forehead to erase the frown there.

“Thank you,” he said, dredging up the words from some deep, skittish place inside him. A token statement of contrition, but it seemed to be enough.

The light turned green and they drove on in restored, if fragile, tranquility. Adrian turned the BMW onto a winding neighborhood road and soon pulled into the circular driveway of an attractive, conventional, split-level brick house.

Two other cars were parked in front of his. A child’s baseball bat and brightly colored book were shoved up in the rear window of the Honda Accord directly ahead.

Adrian came around to Billie’s door and opened it for her, reading the astonishment and confusion in her face with a repressed grin.

She stared at him as they started up the flagstone sidewalk.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, knowing full well what she was thinking.

99

Shelby Reed

“This is the dinner party you told me about?”

“This is it.” They stopped before a set of red double doors, which heralded a handmade wreath adorned with silk magnolias. Rosalie had a creative streak a mile wide, the rooms of her home a mismatched collection of crafts rendered by her hands, as well as the children’s.

“One last thing,” Adrian said as he rang the doorbell, “don’t address me as Adrian.

These people don’t know who Adrian is.”

Her green eyes widened. “I can’t call you by your name?”

“You can’t call me by that name.”

“Then what should I call you?”

“Anything but Adrian.” He leaned to kiss the frown from her mouth, his lips clinging, reassuring, before he straightened and folded his hands in front of him.

“You’re not going to tell me who lives here?” she demanded, her voice husky with what he hoped wasn’t just indignation.

“Of course I’m going to tell you.”

The door swung open, and a chubby, dark-haired woman in a bright red T-shirt and Capri pants threw herself into Adrian’s arms.

“Kids!” she hollered. “Zio’s here!”

“This,” he told Billie over the woman’s shoulder, “is my sister, Rosalie.”

* * * * *

“Did Zio tell you this house has been in our family for almost fifty years?” Rosalie asked Billie as she handed her a basket of bread to carry to the kitchen table.

“That’s amazing.” Billie swerved around Rudy the dog and dutifully delivered the bread, then sidled up to Adrian, who was setting flatware by the plates. “No offense,”

she whispered, “but tough luck going through childhood with the name ‘Zio’.”

“Actually, it’s a family nickname that sprang up in my old age,” he explained.

“Compliments of Sophie, my oldest niece. It means ‘uncle’.” He glanced at his sister.

“And no, Rosalie, I haven’t told Billie anything about the house or our family because I can’t get a word in edgewise around here.”

“You should tell her more about you,” Rosalie said firmly. “
Mio dio
…stop being so secretive.” Then to her husband David, “Did you put the beer in the fridge downstairs?

I completely forgot. And grab an extra bottle of wine while you’re down there. The Mahaffey’s are coming over.”

David, a lanky man with thinning sandy hair, a warm grin and a quiet tolerance, saluted his resolute wife and headed off to perform the assigned duties.

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The Fifth Favor

“Does Billie know you grew up in this very house?” Rosalie prompted her brother, as though the conversation had never left off.

Adrian, who had knelt to embrace the well-fed black Labrador after their long separation, offered Billie a dry smile. “Billie, do you know I grew up in this very house?”

She flashed him a look of mock surprise.

“When our parents retired and moved to Miami, they sold it to David and me.”

Rosalie nudged him with her foot and when he rose, promptly set a stack of dinner plates in his hands. “If you had any wits about you, you’d have bought this house and started a family of your own. You’d make such a good father. I don’t understand why you—”

“Rosalie.” Adrian spoke the quiet warning beneath his breath, and instantly a conciliatory grin spread across her expressive face.

“It’s a wonderful home.” Billie glanced wistfully around the mismatched, eighties-style kitchen. Despite its outdated orange-and-lime décor, it was warm and cozy and
lived-in
, the kind of house she used to stare at from her mother’s car window, wondering what kind of family such a home would hold. And now she knew. The big and noisy and loving kind, like the Antolis.

She moved to the big window over the sink and gazed out at Rosalie’s four children, ages six to fourteen, who had barreled outside to romp in the lush, sprawling yard after dutifully greeting Adrian and Billie. All dark-haired and dark-eyed and olive-skinned, like their mother. Like Adrian. “What a great yard. There’s so much room for them to play.”

“We turned that grass to dust when we were kids.” Adrian sounded reflective as he rested a hand at her waist and looked over her shoulder. “This home was a great place to grow up.”

“And we all went to school up the street at the little public elementary,” Rosalie added as she stirred something fragrant and spicy on the stove. “Except the prince, of course. He went to parochial school.”

Adrian brushed his lips against Billie’s ear. “My mother thought my morals would be warped in the public education system.”

Billie bit her lip to keep from laughing.

The doorbell rang, Rudy went barreling and barking toward the foyer, and the Mahaffeys from across the street let themselves in bearing a casserole dish, with blond-headed twin boys in tow.

“Kids are out in the back,” Rosalie said as the boys headed for the kitchen door.

“Tell them thirty minutes until we eat.”

Then she introduced Billie to the couple as “Zio’s girlfriend,” and Adrian didn’t argue, just kept his fingertips resting lightly on Billie’s back, as if in reassurance.

101

Shelby Reed

Billie waited with shallow breath for someone to address him by his given name—

one of Adrian’s secrets she was determined to breach—but no one called him anything but Zio, even David. She couldn’t very well demand Adrian’s real name. They would think she was nuts.

Maybe she was. Her relationship with Adrian definitely was. But God, she couldn’t get enough of his smile and laughter and gentle, solicitous touch. For tonight, she could pretend she was Zio’s girlfriend, that she was as welcome and adored as his dark gaze made her feel every time it strayed to her face.

A humble, solicitous host, David kept the adults’ wineglasses filled, and they stood around the kitchen and chatted while waiting on the food.

Warm alcohol and even warmer contentment soaked through Billie as she basked in the laughter and camaraderie around her. Part of her, though, wanted to step back and observe Adrian in such natural, nurturing circumstances. He seemed so different here, surrounded by people who knew and obviously loved him. The tension that had masked his features in the car had melted away, and his smile was genuine, relaxed, entrancing.

She learned he spoke fluent Italian, that he tolerated his older sister’s henpecking with the patience of an adoring sibling, that Avalon had honed in him the ability to talk about anything and everything, from politics to child rearing to the Washington Redskins’ upcoming season.

Eavesdropping on his conversation with Rosalie’s husband, Billie discovered that Adrian knew something about mechanics, too. David was restoring a 1968 Mustang and had a million questions, all of which Adrian seemed able and eager to answer. Billie lost him for a good ten minutes when the men headed downstairs to the garage to dabble.

When Myra Mahaffey went outside to check on a squalling child, Billie found herself alone with Adrian’s sister.

“So how did you two meet?” Rosalie asked her in a conspiratorial whisper, leaning her elbows on the Formica island in the center of the kitchen. “He hasn’t brought a girlfriend home in years.”

Billie used the excuse of petting Rudy’s velvety ears to avoid the other woman’s shrewd gaze. “Well, it’s funny, really. I’m a reporter for
Illicit
magazine—”

“Oh, my God! I’ve subscribed to that magazine since the beginning of time. I have stacks of it in the garage—I can’t bring myself to throw away a single issue. You meet celebrities in your work, huh?”

“Sometimes.”

Rosalie turned to peek at the bread in the oven. “Thrilling. And how did your path cross my brother’s?”

Think, Billie
. “It’s a strange story. I happened to be reporting on this—this suicide—

a tragedy, really. The man was a friend of your brother’s—”

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The Fifth Favor

“Let me guess. It was Luke. Right?” Rosalie’s tendency to bulldoze the conversation rescued Billie from having to grope for falsities. “You were covering that story, huh?

What would a women’s magazine like
Illicit
want with Luke DeChambeau?”

Billie gave a weak shrug, ashamed at herself for using Lucien’s misfortune as an escape. “He…he moved in certain social circles, from what I understand. Washington elite. I don’t normally cover such a—”

“Drugs and alcohol did him in, I’m sure. Same old story for him. And such a beautiful boy, too. It’s a terrible thing about Luke.” Sadness filled Rosalie’s chocolate eyes as she folded a dishtowel on the counter. “We knew him for years, and he had so many skeletons. I’m just glad he didn’t drag my brother into any of it.”