Glass Houses Page 8

  Aiden shook his head and gave the steering wheel a punch. “Atta girl.” He looked at her again. Her head was bowed, and she was engrossed in pulling at her skirt. “But the money—”

  “I know, I know.” She frowned. “I shouldn’t have taken the money, but I decided I hadn’t asked for it and I’d find a way to repay it later. I needed a way to buy that ticket without anyone being able—oh, drat—being able to make an excuse to go to the credit card company and find out about my transactions. You didn’t want them to, either. Blast it.”

  The side seam of her skirt had apparently been closed into the seatbelt. She’d managed to pull it free, but at the expense of tearing the seam. While he stole repeated glances, she assessed the damage, then took hold of a trailing thread and wound it around a finger to break it off.

  “What were the other things in the envelope?” he asked, as much to distract her from obvious distress over her clothes as to find out the answer.

  “Not in the same envelope. There was a second one stuck to the one with the money. Two checks, an old ticket to the pictures, and a dry-cleaning receipt. Oh, no.”

  Olivia was definitely not the kind of girl who wore her skirts slit from hem to hip, but she didn’t have a choice—at least not at the moment.

  Of all the dreadful things to happen, Olivia thought. She tried to cover her exposed upper thigh, where pale peach-colored garters held up lace-topped stockings.

  Aiden kept his attention firmly on the road ahead. “This is the Belt Parkway,” he said. “A lot of the areas you see in Brooklyn used to be considered undesirable. Rough. Dangerous, even. Mostly it’s all been cleaned up. There are some great real estate buys here now. The Zanettos—that’s where we’re going—they live in Clinton Hill. They’ve got this wonderful old house. Mama Zanetto and her husband brought up seven children there. Mr. Zanetto passed away some years ago. I never met him. But Pops Zanetto, the grandfather, is still there. Wild old guy.” He was running out of prattle, but she seemed to have grown still now. “Tell me about the checks.”

  She didn’t answer, and he risked another look. Olivia held both of her hands clamped over her left thigh, but she wasn’t doing an efficient job of keeping peach-satin garters and the lacy tops of her stockings covered. So the big question was, did that sexy underwear tell the real story about the lady’s personality? Aiden hoped so.

  He faced resolutely ahead once more. Why did he hope so? What did it matter one way or the other? She wasn’t likely to be planning to seduce him.

  Shucks.

  “I feel ridiculous,” she said in a very small voice. “It’s nice of you to pretend I haven’t ripped my skirt, but we both know I have.”

  “Yeah. Well, maybe you could turn it around so the seam’s at the back.”

  Olivia stared at Sam. “At the back?”

  A faint color rose along his cheekbones. “I guess not. The front, then?”

  She sputtered, and started to laugh; she couldn’t help it. Sam grimaced. He shook his head. “Stupid suggestion. When we get where we’re going, stand close to me until I can maneuver you somewhere to change, okay?”

  “I hope so.” The many hours since she’d slept, and the tension packed into those hours, were beginning to blunt her ability to think at all.

  “The checks, Olivia.”

  She opened her purse and pulled out a crumpled envelope. “I couldn’t take them out on the plane. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea for someone to see me doing that. There’s more money in here, too.” A lot of money. This all got more weird, and being here felt the weirdest part of it all.

  “Who are the checks made out to?” Sam asked.

  Olivia slid them out. and the rest of the money. “This one’s to Moody and Fish Antiques.” She riffled through several more. “They both are, and they’re written on the same account. It doesn’t have a name, just a number, but there’s a New York contact listed underneath, an Alberto Fanelli. Two checks written by one person within a couple of days. Both to Moody and Fish Antiques. Why wouldn’t you write just one check?”

  “You’ve got me. They’re not endorsed, though?”

  She turned them over. “Yes, they are. There’s a stamp. Moody and Fish Antiques, Museum Street, WC1. I think that’s Bloomsbury.”

  “Is that in London?”

  “Yes. A very good area of London.”

  “How much are they for?”

  Olivia looked at the sum on the first check. Chilly prickles shot out on her scalp. The second one didn’t make her feel any better. She found a pad and pen and wrote the two sums down. Several times she added the figures.

  “How much?” Sam prompted her.

  Her gaze drifted to the window and ugly highrises standing shoulder to shoulder, beside the big road and stretching away into the distance. Theo would croak if he had any idea what was happening to her. She wouldn’t allow herself to think about her parents. When she looked ahead again, Sam was steering to the right on a long curve, and she jumped at the sight of a car coming straight toward them.

  An illusion. She’d forgotten they were on the opposite side of the road from England. Tiredness had really got the better of her. “I need to count again. I’m having difficulty concentrating.”

  Once more she added the figures. How hard could it be to add two sums together? Surely she had the decimal point in the wrong place.

  “Got it now?” Sam said.

  Should she involve him in this any further? He braked for a huge lorry with red, white, and yellow plastic strapped over the loads on two beds. The plastic flapped. Too many images to assimilate.

  “Olivia?”

  “Yes.” His legs fascinated her. Long, very long, and when he gave the car more petrol or pressed the brake, muscles in his thigh hardened and stood out beneath his gray suit trousers. When he took his other foot from the clutch, the fabric caught around his calf.

  Yes, Theo, I’m a nutter.

  Aiden turned his head and caught her apparently watching his driving technique. He saw the instant she realized he was looking at her. She went back to the checks she apparently didn’t want to tell him about.

  She’d forgotten the gaping skirt. He narrowed his eyes. The outside of her left leg showed from high-cut peach-satin panties at her bared hip, all the way past matching garters and sleek thighs to her pale, very sheer stockings, to a shapely calf and slim ankle. Too bad about the flat brown shoe, not that there was anything wrong with his imagination. Disposing with the skirt altogether, and getting rid of both shoes, painted the kind of picture in his mind, and resulted in the kind of reaction elsewhere, that made him hope she wasn’t studying him too closely.

  “I must have this wrong,” she told him at last. “If I’ve got eight hundred and ten, then one, two, three zeros, how much does that say?”

  “Where’s the decimal point?”

  “It comes after all that. Then the final two zeros.”

  “Shit,” Aiden said, applying the brake before he realized what he was doing. Rapidly, he accelerated again. “Match your figures to the checks again. Add them. Then give me your total one more time. Slowly.”

  He heard her muttering as she did as she was told. Then she announced exactly the same figure as before. “It can’t be, can it?”

  “Eight hundred and ten thousand? If you haven’t transposed numbers, or added wrong, then that little duo represents over three quarters of a million dollars.”

  “Pounds.”

  “Shit. I forgot. That’s got to be more than a million dollars.” Something big was going down here. No way was there a chance Mr. Moody and Mr. Fish wouldn’t be searching for their million. “I don’t want you carrying that. It’s not safe.”

  Olivia felt even more sick. “He wanted to push me under a tube train,” she said softly. “It was really early in the morning. This morning. Before I left England. He came into a bakery where I was shopping. I’d never seen him before, so I had no idea he was the man who called about the kill fee earlier, but he s
cared me. Then he followed me, and I went into the station because I didn’t want him to follow me home. He pushed someone who looked like me instead.”

  The Cadillac slowed dramatically. Sam leaned forward over the wheel, frowning fiercely as if trying to be sure he’d heard what he thought he’d heard.

  “The other woman had on almost identical clothes and the platform was really crowded. One minute he was feeding rats on tire rails with crisps, the next I heard the screams. He was gone, and that poor woman was on the ground. Someone had saved her, thank goodness.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this the minute you got off the plane?” Sam’s voice sounded different.

  “You didn’t give me a chance—no, that’s not true. I wasn’t sure how to say it, or even if I should.” She was perilously close to tears. “It was in Hampstead. He sickened me. There are rats on the tracks, and he was feeding them crisps. He—”

  “Yeah, so you already said. Sicko.” She wasn’t to know how much it took to impress him. “Then what happened?”

  She told him and added, “So I did all right, didn’t I? I mean, I didn’t completely panic when I realized he was the man at the door later. And I managed to get away without him knowing where I’d gone.”

  Her innocent ability to believe in this scenario was disconcerting. “Possibly,” he said. Treating her like a child wouldn’t help.

  The skin on her thigh was smooth and very white. Her head was bowed, and her dark hair separated to show equally vulnerable-looking skin at the back of her neck. He’d like to kiss her neck first, then make his way to her thigh, the inside of her thigh where his tongue and lips and warm breath would tickle and make her squirm.

  Holy hell, Flynn. Get a life.

  “You did well,” he muttered. And what, he wondered, had the man who fed rats done when he discovered what he’d put through Olivia’s front door? “You think he just went away after leaving your house? Simple as that?”

  Sam sounded so impersonal and tough. But he was an FBI agent, and he had to be tough. “I didn’t see him again.”

  Aiden decided not to push her further on the point. It was perfectly possible this guy had seen her being driven away and followed.

  “I know what to do,” Olivia said, feeling inspired and relieved at the same time. “I’ll mail the checks back to Mr. Moody and Mr. Fish with what money is left, I can put in an IOU for the rest. No, I’ve got it. I’ll write a personal check for the balance and ask him to hold it till I let him know I can cover it.”

  Oh, my, God. “We’ll work it out together, Olivia. I bet beaches and water weren’t what came into your mind when you thought of Brooklyn.”

  “I suppose not. More like gangs and graffiti—only I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it much.” The beach looked more like scrubby marshlands to Olivia. “Why are we going to the— the people you talked about?”

  “The Zanettos.” Who would never let him forget it if he arrived pretending to be Ryan Hill. “They’ve got a big dry-cleaning business. My friend Vanni’s oldest brother runs it for their mother. Several members of the family are involved. We’re getting close. I’ve been told there are similarities to

  London here. The little shops, the people who’ve known each other all their lives exchanging the news of their days. It’s all neighborhoods and families. I don’t think foreigners think about it that way at all. We’re just about there. Don’t worry with the skirt. Hold my arm when we get out of the car. You don’t have a coat? It’s cold, kid. Winter’s coming on. You need more than that jacket.”

  This was appalling. “You’re going to wonder about me, but I didn’t even remember to bring a mac or a brolly.”

  “Yep, well, hold my arm and stand close to my side. I’ll tell ’em you need to freshen up.”

  “What a bother. I’m so—”

  “You said you weren’t going to talk like that again.”

  “No. I mean, yes, I did.”

  “Good. This is it.”

  Sam pulled his boat on wheels into a space undoubtedly intended for at least two cars. The shallow roots of beech trees with big, gnarled old trunks popped up cement along the edge of the wide pavement that separated the road from narrow, steep gardens fronting a long row of terraced brick houses. Each house was three stories high, with basement windows visible beneath black iron steps to the front door.

  “Sit tight,” Sam told Olivia. “I’ll get your luggage out, and we’ll pretend we’re running a three-legged race.”

  She felt hot, then cold. Lace curtains moved in one of the front windows of a house that was bigger than the rest. No face was actually evident. A boy on a skateboard cut off her view. His stiff jeans were wide, as wide at the waist as they were at the hems. She thought it possible that the jeans were actually attached to the board and the boy would have to climb out of them to get off. Several other boys zipped along on roller blades, leaping over the exposed tree roots and dodging baby strollers. Pushed by mums and dads dressed in chic casual and with “established professional” all but embellished on their brows, these strollers might cost as much as some automobiles.

  Sam already had her luggage out of the car, and he opened her door. At the same moment, the front door of the big house opened and a man stood on the top step. Olivia was too preoccupied with her predicament to do more than register his presence.

  Sam planted the wheeled cart in front of them and said, “Okay, Olivia FitzDurham, relax and let me manage this, okay?”

  She nodded and didn’t care that he took her hand to pull her to her feet, then tucked the hand and her forearm under his own arm, tightly against his side. With his left hand, he reached back and slammed the car door.

  “Hey there—”

  “Hey, Vanni!” Sam roared, so loud he startled Olivia. “Traffic was traffic. Same old, same old. What’s for dinner?”

  “I’m not allowed in the kitchen,” Vanni said. “You know that.”

  “I sure do.” Sam shouted each word. He pushed the cart ahead, then lifted it up a step at a time. “Olivia FitzDurham and I are starving. Vanni, meet Olivia, Olivia, meet Vanni Zanetto.”

  Olivia exchanged greetings with Vanni, whom she now saw was another star-quality male, only with very black hair and hazel eyes that were startling against olive skin. He stared down on them, his frown magnificent—and foreboding. Actually he frowned only at Sam.

  “Poor Olivia’s exhausted, Vanni. D’you suppose she could freshen up before she meets the family?” He smiled at her, then at his friend. “I doubt if she’s experienced anything quite like the Zanettos.”

  “No problem,” Vanni said, not taking his attention from Sam. Finally he looked at Olivia. “I’m sorry for your trouble, but my partner here is one of the best. He’ll work something out.”

  She hesitated. “You never mentioned being in another business, Sam.” Not that he owed her his entire life story.

  “Sam?” Vanni said. “That’s what I thought.” He should have known Aiden would make a mess of it with her. The guy was so awkward around women. For someone who was physically coordinated and really strong, the way he was manhandling a little suitcase up the steps like it had rocks in it showed just how uptight he was.

  “Save it, okay, Vanni?” Aiden said.

  Oh, no, this was one time when Aiden Flynn’s partner had to act fast if he was going to avert disaster. Vanni reached down to sweep the cart carrying a green tartan bag that sported a pink neon luggage tag from Aiden and deposited it inside the front door in a single move.

  “We’re glad you can be with us, Olivia,” he said. “My mother loves company. So does my grandfather. He likes to be called Pops. My mother will tell you she’s Mama to everyone. Comes of having seven kids—she’s always been Mama.” Both Olivia and Aiden had stopped climbing the steps. Vanni narrowed his eyes at Aiden and said, “You knew what you needed to do.”

  “Yeah. And I’ll do this my way, okay?”

  “Not okay. You dragged me into this, buddy.” Olivia’s sk
irt was torn. Aiden had her plastered on his side like a coat of paint, but something was peeling. She was no fashion plate to begin with, but flashes of pale orange underwear made an interesting statement against Aiden’s dark-gray-clad thigh.

  “Just point us in the direction of Olivia’s room, Vanni.”

  Olivia looked up at Sam, then at Vanni. They were furious with each other, and she couldn’t think of any way to extricate herself from a very uncomfortable situation.

  “I’m going to take a step up with my right leg,” Sam murmured. “On the count of three, use your left leg. One, two, three.” He stepped up slowly, and so did Olivia, but her leg was much shorter than his and she had to roll slightly toward him to avoid Vanni getting a view she couldn’t bear thinking of him getting.

  Sam shrugged her camera bag higher on his left shoulder and put his right arm around her, holding her waist. She clung to him.

  “Once more and we’ve made it.”

  “You haven’t made anything,” Vanni said. “I don’t believe this. How did that happen, miss? Did he—hell, no, he wouldn’t touch you. He doesn’t have it in him.”

  Aiden made a note to knock the crap out of Vanni the instant he could get him alone.

  “I caught it in the seatbelt,” Olivia told Vanni.

  “If Mr. True Blue had settled for not having seatbelts—which he doesn’t have to have in that—it wouldn’t have happened. Mama’ll mend it for you. I’ll get one of my sisters down here with something for you to change into. June! Get out here and help.”

  She decided she didn’t like him much. Too full of himself, and as mean as they came. “Sam’s trying to help me. He’s an awfully kind man.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Vanni said. “Awfully kind is what I’d call him. And dumb as a post if he thinks it was a good idea to… For cryin’ out loud, partner, I told you not to come here before you told her the truth. Tell her now.”

  “Your timing stinks,” Sam said. “Let me do this my way.” He spread his fingers over her ribs and rhythmically rubbed her there. Evidently he was too preoccupied to realize he was smoothing the side of her breast with his thumb. She grew so hot all over, she trembled.