Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1) Read online

Our breathing synchronized without effort. In and out. Up and down. A respiratory Möbius strip.

  “I could do anything to you.”

  The truth of his statement lived in the brutal reality of his whole, hard person. An inescapable corporeal presence. I pushed back against him, seeing without eyes.

  His ribs with my shoulder blades. His abdominals with my spine. We shared his tattoos where skin met skin.

  “Do you feel this?” His hand slid down my neck. My pulse leaped against his fingers.

  “This is fear.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “You should be.”

  I smelled his anger. Blood and skin in the iron dark. His fingers pressed against my neck just enough to bring my awareness to the life throbbing through my veins. How little it would take to end it. To end me.

  “Why? Because you’re a big bad commando who could end my life with one twist of your hands?”

  “Because fear is an instinct, and instincts keep you safe.”

  A thin laugh bubbled up my constricted throat. “Is that why you think you’re doing this? To keep me safe?”

  “Why else would I be doing it?”

  “My guess? This is the closest you’ve been to a pair of tits in God knows how long, and you’re confusing the urge to bone me with actual feelings. Lucky for you, you don’t actually have feelings for me.”

  Shepard’s breathing quickened, his chest expanding against my back. “Why is that lucky?”

  “Are you kidding me? Bixby got most of his hand shot off, and all he did was follow me out of a bar. Can you imagine the havoc I would wreak in the life of an actual boyfriend?”

  His grip loosened ever so slightly.

  “Dating tip for future reference, though? Herding women into closets is second only to bringing them lilies in terms of almost guaranteeing that you will go unboned.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “So you’re not turned on right now?”

  “Absolutely not.” Part of me wished the knee socks were still in my bra to provide an extra layer of insurance between Shepard’s arm and my nipples, which were approximately hard enough to cut glass at the present moment.

  “And you don’t want me?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  “Liar.”

  We stayed like that for a moment. That word coloring in the darkness between us while Shepard’s heart beat hard as a racehorse’s between my shoulder blades.

  “Jane.” A question. An answer. An accusation.

  “Shepard.” A word. An apology. A prayer.

  His fingers curled into my hips, my head tipping sideways to yield the curve of my neck to his descending mouth.

  Which was how we were when the door swung opened and the light clicked on.

  Did we look guilty?

  I don’t know. Does the sky look blue?

  A nurse stood there, staring at us. Openmouthed. Wide eyed.

  A multitude of prevarications jockeyed for position, tripping over each other in the race from my brain to my tongue.

  So my surprise was understandable when what came out instead was, “What? It’s not like we were banging.”

  Ha! Truth, bitchez.

  I counted this as progress.

  Shepard, not so much.

  “You’ll have to excuse my girlfriend,” he said, taking me by the arm. “She’s been under a lot of stress lately.”

  “It’s the dead bodies,” I said. “Three in the last three days.”

  “Excuse me?” The nurse blinked, looking at me like she might want to speed-dial the psych ward.

  “My silly little wildebeest.” Shepard squeezed my upper arm a shade tighter than affection dictated. “You forget that not everyone gets your jokes.”

  “But I wasn’t—”

  “We’d better be going.” He steered me past the nurse and out into the hall, turning me to face him once we were almost to the elevator. “Could you maybe pick a different time to have an attack of honesty?”

  “It’s your fault, the way I figure it.” I shrugged and smiled, my body all watery and loose.

  “And how is that?”

  “I think full-body contact short-circuits my lying engines.”

  The elevator opened and we stepped into it, alone in the small mirrored booth.

  The change in Shepard’s body language was immediate. Apparently he liked enclosed spaces about as much as he did crowded public ones.

  “So does that mean I’m going to need to do bad things to you anytime I want a straight answer?”

  I gripped the handrail as the question liquefied my already wobbly legs. Knees. Who needed ’em?

  “Now that’s something my therapist never tried.”

  “You don’t strike me as the type.”

  “What type?”

  “The therapy type.” The muscles in his jaw flexed as he flicked a glance at the glowing floor display. Six more to go.

  “Oh, yes. Mom had me logging many an hour on the leather couches of various psychologists. They never were able to break me of the habit, much to her dismay. Of course, it was okay for me to lie when she needed me to.” A small acidic kernel took root in my stomach.

  “That sounds pretty fucked up.”

  “Which is about what the therapists said, more or less.”

  The elevator opened onto the hospital lobby, deserted at this late hour save for a custodian making wide arcs with a chrome floor buffer.

  I followed Shepard down a hall and into a concrete stairwell smelling faintly of motor oil and exhaust. The last leg before the parking garage.

  “I’m holding you to your word.” His declaration sounded ominous in this echoing space.

  “Which word would that be?” I did my best to sound like one of those people who didn’t get winded ascending a couple of flights of stairs.

  “You promised me you’d let me protect you.”

  “Ah, but promises made under force majeure never hold up in court.” I longingly eyed the landing a couple of levels up. Just. A few. More.

  “Force majeure?”

  “Irresistible . . . compulsion,” I puffed, forgetting to care about my deficit of cardiovascular fitness.

  “You know what I think?”

  “That black T-shirts represent a ubiquitous fashion—eep!” I yelped as my legs were scooped out from under me.

  Shepard altered his pace not one whit despite hoisting me in his arms fairy-tale-princess-style.

  Side note for the gentle male reader and/or female readers who long to be dashing: Do this. It is hot.

  “I think you like to argue just for the sake of arguing.”

  “That’s a fascinating conclusion you’ve reached, Captain Obvious.” I tightened my thigh muscles, mostly to fool Shepard into believing I had them.

  He managed to get us through the stairwell door and over to his car, only setting me down to open my door. “You really ought to work on your cardio.”

  “Excuse me? I was doing just fine before—”

  “Seventeen minutes,” he said, glancing at the car’s digital display. “Good to know for next time.”

  “Next time?”

  “Next time I corner you in a closet. I can expect at least seventeen minutes of truth afterward.”

  I tried not to squirm in my seat, knowing that to do so would be to yield precious ground. “There won’t be a next time,” I said.

  Shepard smiled and started the car. “Now you’re just lying to yourself.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  There was screaming in the bedroom later that night.

  Not owing to any extracurricular effort on Shepard’s part, but because I’d shrieked myself awake in the pitch dark, caught in the grips of the kind of nightmare that hadn’t haunted me since I was a child.

  My mother, burning. Screaming in pain. Begging me to help her.

  Subject to the telescopic zoom of a horror movie, the nearer I got to her, the more she receded. She reached
for me; I reached for her. One, last, desperate grasp. Her fingers crumbled to white ash in my hand.

  The kiss of her smoldering hair still lingered on my face from the dream when my nightshift “babysitter”—another of Shepard’s apparently endless supply of ex-army dudes—barreled through the door, weapon in hand. He’d insisted on doing a sweep of the room despite my repeated assurances that I was okay.

  Sleep evaded me for the rest of the night.

  So it was with no small degree of exhaustion that I tapped on Sam Shook’s office door the following morning.

  Even with his dark eyes rimmed by even darker circles, Sam managed to cut a charismatic figure. The kind of man who could wear a tailored purple shirt and coordinating purple tie without looking like pimp cousin to Barney the dinosaur.

  “Jane. You’re here early.”

  “So are you.” I left the floor open to see whether he’d bring up Carla Malfi, whether he had any sources that might’ve made him aware of her untimely end.

  “Yes, well.” Sam took a sip of coffee from his zombie mug, not glancing up from his laptop. “Gary asked me to come in early for one of our chats.”

  “Oh?”

  “Apparently he feels one of the medical malpractice cases I have been working on would be better reassigned to Kristin Flickner.” The look of resignation on Sam’s kind face made me want to relocate Gary Dawes’s saggy ball sack north of his small intestine with the pointy toe of my boot.

  “Perhaps you were right to insist that she be your mentor after all.”

  “Sam, I’m sure he doesn’t—”

  “He does, and it is better that you learn this now.” There was cold fire in the depths of his obsidian eyes. “I should have spent less time studying law and more time studying politics.”

  Having never managed to master the tactful art of reassurance, I opted for its simpler and sexier cousin—distraction. “Listen,” I said, forgoing the chair and perching on the edge of his desk, clutching a warm stack of papers from the copy machine against my bosom. “Are you busy?”

  “Busy having a disagreement with a congregation of imbeciles on the Walking Dead Reddit feed.” His elegant fingers flew over his keyboard with a pianist’s grace and precision. “What was it I heard such people called?” His eyes lifted heavenward as if searching the ceiling for a memory.

  “Knobheads?” I humbly suggested. “Or perhaps wankstains?”

  “Neckbeards!” he said, seeming pleased at having seized upon the correct English slang. “Sooner or later, they must see the value of logic.”

  Oh, sweet, naive Sam. I almost felt guilty for coming to his office with such blatant machinations in mind.

  “I wanted to get your take on what happened to Carla Malfi.”

  “Which part? Her relationship with Valentine, or her being blackmailed by your mother?” He didn’t look at me when he said this, for which I was immeasurably glad.

  No one needed to see my impression of an apoplectic cod. “You knew?” I managed at last.

  “Of course I knew. You are a terrible liar, Jane Avery. One of the worst I have ever seen.”

  “Excuse me, I happen to be a fabulous liar.”

  “You would be a fabulous liar,” he said, thumbs hitting the space bar hard enough to clang, “if you didn’t have an honest heart.”

  “How dare you!” I gasped.

  “So which is it?” he asked, nonplussed.

  “Which is what?”

  “Carla Malfi. Did you want my take on her relationship to Valentine? Or her relationship to your mother?”

  In my ego-fueled fit, I’d almost forgotten why I had sought him out in the first place.

  “Neither. She’s dead, Sam.”

  At last his fingers froze in their ceaseless typing. “Dead? But we just spoke with her yesterday afternoon. How is this possible?”

  “She was found at the construction site for Valentine’s building downtown last night.” Nothing like the good old passive voice to keep from complicating this matter with the useless information that I had been the one to find her. “Her body was burned. That’s all I know so far.”

  “She was murdered at Valentine’s construction site?”

  “Or she was murdered elsewhere, dumped there, and burned. But it amounts to the same.”

  Sam’s expression bore atomic bomb–level devastation. He was slowly putting together the same pieces my mind had puzzled out during the small sleepless hours of the morning.

  “This is bad,” Sam said, rising from his chair to pace the brief length of his office. “This is very, very bad. Forget a divorce lawyer. Valentine is going to need a criminal defense attorney.”

  “Carla was going to be a character witness for Valentine,” I pointed out. “Wouldn’t that create a serious conflict as far as his motive is concerned?”

  “Not if you consider that anything positive she had to say about him will be offset by the revelation that she was his mistress. Adulterers don’t make convincing character witnesses in my experience. Especially from beyond the grave.”

  “Maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” I said. “Valentine hasn’t been charged with anything.”

  “Yet,” Sam said, peeking over my shoulder. He looked down. “What is this?”

  “This?” I glanced at the thick stack of contraband copies on my lap. The fruits of my having arrived before Judy could shoo me away from the expensive office copier. “This is a report of incorporation on First Security Enterprises. I recently found out my mother’s car is registered to them.”

  “Your mother’s car is registered to First Security Enterprises?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  Sam went to the tall file cabinet behind his desk, withdrawing a manila folder and walking through it with dexterous fingers. “Ahh. Here it is.” He lifted a stapled document and set it atop the papers in my lap.

  I saw, and then I didn’t see, shock making the words crawl across the crisp white paper like ants.

  Valentine’s list of assets.

  Sam was kind enough to state the obvious since I seemed to have hemorrhaged IQ points all of a sudden.

  “First Security Enterprises belongs to Delphi Holdings Limited, which belongs to Archard Everett Valentine and Associates.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense. Why would my mother be driving a car that belongs to a company that belongs to a company that belongs to Valentine?”

  “More importantly.” Sam sat next to me on the edge of his desk, a surface clean and clutter-free enough to accommodate the posteriors of at least four attorneys of average size. “Why are you investigating who owns your mother’s car?”

  I couldn’t do it.

  I couldn’t look into those molten-chocolate lava-cake eyes and lie . . . badly.

  The tale summarized pretty handily when I left out the corpses.

  Sam’s dark brows gathered as concern creased his fine, smooth forehead. “Why did you not mention this to me before?”

  “Because you’re my mentor. And this is my job. And Melanie Fucking Beidermeyer’s mother never gets kidnapped or blackmails people.”

  “And you were afraid that I would be just one more person who decided Miss Beidermeyer represents an easier return on investment?”

  I blinked, a little dumbfounded, still not quite certain Sam Shook wasn’t some kind of Jedi mind reader after all.

  “I realize we have much to learn about each other still, but this is not something you need to worry about.” There was that v-w pronunciation thing again, making him all attractive and intriguing. Also, he smelled good. Some ambrosiac mix of shampoo, freshly laundered shirts, and good coffee that had me imagining dropping him into a paper bag and huffing him till my head went swimmy.

  “Like you, my upbringing was . . . unconventional. As was my career path. I understand more than you might think me capable.”

  I gave him a watery smile, which he failed to return.

  “This connection between your mother, Valentine, and a woman who
is now dead, I do not like.”

  If he didn’t like this, he really wouldn’t like the parts of the story I’d left out. Like my having found the dead woman and getting shot at in the process. “I’ve been not liking this for several days now.”

  “This investigator who is your mother’s boyfriend—”

  “P-Ripple.”

  “P-dipple?”

  I’d never be able to keep a straight face at this rate. “Paul.”

  “Paul,” he repeated. “What is he doing to ensure your safety?”

  “That would be where Shepard comes in.”

  “Shepard?”

  “The . . . gentleman who picked me up yesterday evening.”

  “Oh,” Sam said. And then, “Ohhhh. So he was not—”

  “No.”

  “But the kiss—”

  “All for show.”

  Sam’s hooded eyes softened, the corners of his mouth tipping up ever so slightly.

  “A rather convincing show.”

  “What can I say? I’m committed to the cause.”

  “I have an idea,” he said. “It just so happens that my caseload has recently become lighter. Perhaps we could spend some time at the county courthouse this morning.”

  “Oh. That sounds . . . informative.” See: boring as shit. In truth, all I could think about was when and how I could get to one Archard Everett Valentine to confront him about this new discovery. I somehow doubted Shepard would be likely to endorse this idea, despite his grudging agreement to relax security while I was at the office.

  Sam’s smile could blind angels. “What I meant was, perhaps we could do a little digging of our own. I happen to be acquainted with a wildly permissive county clerk who can be bribed with pens.”

  “Pens?” I sincerely hoped he hadn’t left an i out of that word by accident.

  “Do you have any idea the dreadful pens government employees are forced to use? Terrible, scratchy plastic things with fine points and chalky ink.” He shuddered, clearly scarred by a too-recent memory, as he retrieved his suit jacket. “Would you be so kind as to retrieve a box of pens from the supply closet while I gather my things? Black ink. Bold tip.”

  I checked the clock on my phone, resisting the obvious “he said tip” joke. Judy wouldn’t be in for at least another ten minutes. Ample time to raid the supply closet. “You bet.”