“I’ll… uh, let him know to expect your call.”
“Great.” Maybe they were standing too close.
Yeah, he was sure of it, because he was having a little trouble taking his eyes off her, and because suddenly he was remembering the satiny texture of her skin, the way she’d tasted that night in Roxanne, and the way she’d felt in his arms-nubile.
Yeah, she’d pretty much defined the whole erotic concept of being nubile, at least for him. He’d heard the word a few times, and after those few glorious hours in Roxanne, he’d gone and looked it up. The actual definition had been a bit lacking to his way of thinking, but the word…the word itself was fine, extremely accurate. The way it felt in his mouth lined up precisely with the way she’d felt lying up against him, the give of her in his hands, the silky strength of her body-fulsome, curved, resilient, a force to be reckoned with, and yet tender, and so very soft.
And that image pretty much confirmed the excellent condition of his memory. He was running at a perfect one hundred and ten percent, all systems go. Great.
“Yes… well…” she said, her voice trailing off.
Well…yes…He needed to think here, come up with something fast, or she was going to have him back out on the street in no time.
“Thanks… uh, for stopping by,” she said. “We can always use the business.”
Obviously, he thought, but he kept it to himself.
“I’d like to take you to dinner, if you haven’t eaten, or buy you a drink, if you have.” It wasn’t original, and he just kind of blurted it out, but it was solid, something a girl could count on.
“Actually, I have an appointment, and I’m running a little late.” She made a point of checking her watch. “So if you’ll excuse me…”
An appointment? At nine o’clock on a Friday night?
Actually, he was going to have a little trouble excusing that, and if Esme Alden actually turned out to be some kind of high-end call girl, he was going to have to sit down and sort through the unsettling information with Christian Hawkins-Superman, second in command at Steele Street, owner of the beauteous Roxanne, and SDF’s unofficial but widely used therapist. Hawkins knew things about women all the other guys could only surmise. Dylan was certainly useless in that capacity. He and Skeeter had been married for-hell, Johnny didn’t know how long, a few years, and it didn’t look to him like the boss had figured out too much about women, or he might have noticed he’d been holding the reins a little too tight on his girl. If he wasn’t careful, Skeeter was going to flat-out break loose.
Kid was holding on to his wife, too, holding on for the ride, but who could do anything else with Nikki? She was an artist, like quicksilver. Johnny had posed for her completely buck naked, the first time a couple of years ago, and a few times since, and he still wasn’t sure if he’d ever quite recovered from the experience. He liked the paintings she’d done though, most of them dark angel paintings with him looking pretty badass. He liked them a lot. Nikki did, too. She’d picked one of the paintings of him for the poster of her latest exhibit, the Ironheart Angel. It would probably impress the hell out of Esme.
Sure it would-and he just happened to have the announcement Nikki had left for him at Steele Street in his back pocket. She and Kid had left for Los Angeles this morning, and he knew she was hoping he’d stop by the gallery and just sort of be there-getting stared at.
Right-just one of the perks of posing naked for a famous artist, having women show up to check you out. Not that they needed you there. Nikki didn’t leave anything to the imagination, but Johnny had wondered if she kind of added a little something extra here and there. Even with paintings of himself to look at, the verdict was still out on that one.
“Well, maybe after your appointment then,” he jumped back in, reaching around and checking his back pocket. Sure enough, he had the postcard announcement next to his wallet. “You could give me a call.” He pulled out the postcard. He wasn’t really floundering. This was a plan. “A friend of mine has some paintings showing at the Toussi Gallery on Seventeenth. There’s going to be wine and cheese, that kind of stuff, tonight, and these things always go late. So, if you like, we could go and look around, check out the artwork, whenever you were free. It wouldn’t matter what time, not really. I know the owner.” He handed the postcard over to her-and if her answer had even a hint of “I’ll be busy the rest of the night,” he was heading straight back to Steele Street and knocking on Hawkins’s door.
“You know Suzi Toussi?” Her eyebrows went up again, her expression slightly disbelieving.
Okay. More than slightly.
He wasn’t insulted. There was no reason on earth for her to think he’d turned into anything other than the street gangster his guidance counselor had predicted.
“Yeah, I know Suzi, and she’s still involved with the gallery,” he said. “But the woman who owns it now is named Katya.” Katya Hawkins, Superman’s wife and mother of three, with another one on the way. Johnny wasn’t the only one at SDF who was beginning to wonder if Christian and Katya were going for some kind of record.
“Uh, sure…Toussi’s, that sounds like fun,” Esme said, after another few seconds of looking him over. Then her gaze dropped to the postcard.
He didn’t expect her to recognize him, not as the blood-streaked, tragically heroic angel Nikki had made him. For the postcard, Nikki had only used a portion of the painting, zooming in on his jaw and shoulder, with part of one wing showing. The feathers in the wing were broken and torn, and he didn’t know why, but that was the part that disturbed him the most-not what Nikki had done to him, how she’d made him look so brutalized, but what she’d done to his wings. It just looked so fierce, like some maelstrom had gotten ahold of that angel and shaken him to his core-which, if he remembered correctly, and he did, was exactly how he’d felt when Nikki had gotten hold of him.
He guessed she was a pretty good artist. In fact, he knew she was an amazing artist.
“This is good… very good,” Esme murmured, quietly echoing his thoughts. “Um, sure”-she looked up-“why not. Why don’t you give me your number?”
She set the card on the desk and pulled her cell phone out of a pocket on her skirt. He recited the ten digits, watching her punch them into her phone’s memory along with his name-and all the while, he knew she was lying through her teeth.
She wasn’t going to call him, and suddenly it wasn’t just curiosity motivating him, and it wasn’t just his heated memories, or his teenage crush. Suddenly, she was a woman with a gun and something she’d stolen off a man in a hotel room, and she had an appointment she was damned serious about keeping.
Whatever was going on, Johnny had a feeling it had to do with her marketing genius of a father, and it was a bad feeling. He knew her. He’d spent six years in school with her, and he’d been paying attention, probably too much attention-but, man, she’d held it hard. She’d been more than book smart. She’d been able to think her way around things, book things, sure, but people and situations, too. East was a tough school. She shouldn’t have lasted a week in those hallways, not looking the way she had, all cute middle-class white bread. But she’d done three years, and the only time anyone had ever gotten to her had been in that locker bay with Kevin Harrell-and that bastard hadn’t gotten far.
She’d been the valedictorian of their class for a reason, and none of those reasons would have led her here. No way in hell did she work in this dump, and no matter where she worked, she didn’t have pens with naked women on them lying around on her desk.