Page 21 of Bare
“Don’t say it. There’s no need to apologize. Like I said, if anyone should be apologizing, it’s me. I shouldn’t have assumed it was okay to kiss you.”
“Does that mean you owe me?” she asked.
Owe her. That was an intriguing thought. If he said yes, how would she want to collect?
“I guess I do.”
She set her can on a coaster and clapped her hands together like an excited child. “That means I can get you to answer my questions.”
What the hell was she talking about?
“What questions?”
“Remember when I said at the bar that you had to tell me one thing about yourself for every solid I dropped? Since I never got my Aleksei facts, I’m going to get them now.”
He groaned. Partly because he didn’t want to spend the night playing improv and partly because he knew she would think his sour reaction was funny, and he loved the chime-like sound of her laugh.
“I don’t like talking about myself,” he said.
“No one does.”
“Actually, almost everyone does,” he retorted.
She rewarded him with more tinkling laughter and an even deeper flush of the portion of her chest the few open buttons of her blouse exposed. Again, the image of her soft skin, pinkened with arousal, flashed through his mind. The blanket covering his lap was a godsend.
“We’ve been out twice, and I feel like I don’t really know anything about you. I thought you lived in Philly, but you live in DC, and I don’t even know what you do for a living.”
“I never said I lived in Philly.”
She scrunched her pert nose and rolled her eyes, making him laugh. If she kept making him smile, his jaw might actually hurt.
“You never said you didn’t, and that’s a big omission. When you meet someone walking a dog down the street, a normal person would assume they live in the area.”
So, it was going to be improv after all. The more time he spent with her, the harder it was to imagine her being in thick with Moresco, but he still needed to hold his cards close to his vest. If there was accounting fraud, maybe she didn’t realizewhat she was doing was a crime. Or maybe she knew the numbers were phony but felt loyal to Pannetone & Associates and didn’t view fiddling with some numbers for an important client as a big deal. He’d seen how she was about her sister. Her loyalty ran deep.
To him, right was right, and wrong was wrong, but he knew lots of people didn’t view crime that way. Not that the police were always right and criminals were always wrong. He’d known plenty of bad cops. It was just that sometimes people thought certain crimes were victimless. He knew better. Behind the scenes, when crime was involved, people always suffered.
People like his mom.
People like Phillipe.
And for Phillipe, he was going to lead this bright, shining woman through a game of question and answer. He would give her a mix of truth and lies, because her reactions to his quasi-truthful answers would probably reveal more about her than his answers would reveal about him. He would just have to be very careful—she was clever.
And that cleverness showed in her first question.
“So, what exactly is your job? And don’t give me that consultant nonsense. What company do you work for and what, specifically, do you do?”
Shit.This might be harder than he thought.
Chapter Seven
Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
That’s what Nana Thompson used to say. John 8:32 was one of her favorite Bible verses, maybe due to Grandpa Bill’s penchant for stretching the truth. When Aleksei was young, Grandpa Bill told him about the three-foot tiger trout he had caught in the Loyalsock, about the bear who’d rear up on his hind legs and tap on their window, looking for honey biscuits whenever Nana baked them, and about Grandpa and his brothers using a spudzooka—their homemade potato launcher—to scare off a mountain lion.
That was probably why, when Grandpa first told him about his dad talking to his mom through a crack in a boarded-up window, planning her escape, and freeing her and the other princesses from the evil lord who’d captured them and forced them to labor in his castle, he’d thought the story was fiction. He’d thought it was a tall tale to make his dad seem larger than life.
But it wasn’t.
