CHAPTER9
JACK
It wasagainst every instinct I had to tear myself away from the gorgeous twenty-something throwing his naked body at me, but I had to do it. Seeing his pretty face when I’d turned up had been a surprise—a surprise of the unpleasant kind.
Had my Boss sent me to the same guy I’d been chatting up last night as amessage? Or was it just coincidence? If Legshadhad me followed last night, he could have complained to the Boss that I was fooling around on the job. And the Boss might have…
No. The Boss wouldn’t care, and if he did, he’d just eliminate me. Not set up some elaborate scheme like this, sending me straight to the man I’d been flirting with last night.
Not that I wasn’t glad to see the guy—seeallof him, as it had turned out, in the pool house—but that was exactly the problem. I’d already decided that I needed to avoid him in the future, and there he was, pushed into my face.
Somewhere, a devil was laughing at me.
I just hoped Miller Beaumont’s effect on me wasn’t too obvious to the crowd outside. But when I took a look around, no one seemed interested in me at all except for one dark-haired guy bobbing in the water, staring at me with wide eyes. Still, Miller had been right about being overdressed. My outfit would draw attention rather than deflect it, so I took my jacket and hat off, put them down on a nearby seat, and turned my back to the pool. I thought hard about Legs Liggari. I’d found that was a surefire way to douse any sexual response, and it worked perfectly again then.
Miller Beaumont, a.k.a. Trouble, banged open the pool house door a few minutes later, and gave an up-nod to someone behind me. I turned, and the guy bobbing in the water called over, “Okay?”
“Yeah,” Miller called back, and then said to me, “That’s my buddy, Nate.”
I nodded like the information was fascinating, grabbed my jacket, and walked with Miller up the path toward the house. He was still smiling at me, but there was an edge to it, a youthful daring. But he wasn’t as young as I was making him out to be in my own mind, I had to remind myself. Like Anaïs Beaumont, he was twenty-six, and he’d been a child actor, just like her. Early fame made for damaged people, or that had been my experience around town, anyway. Child actors never grew up quite right.
“Are your parents home?” I asked as we hit the manicured lawns just before the house. It was a seething mass of a building, rising out of the ground like it was reaching up to God, a fully modern construction of glass and chrome that I knew had to have been designed by some prize-winning architect.
“My mom’s in France, last time I checked,” Miller said. “Dad’s in London. Why?”
“Are they heading back?”
He ushered me through the indoor-outdoor patio and into the house proper. “Not that I’m aware. Why would they?”
I stopped and looked at him. “Well, because your sister is missing, and your father, at least, was worried enough to have me look into it.”
He gave me a half-smile and a curious up-and-down stare. “Yeah,” he said. “Whyisthat?”
“Why is that? Because he’s worried—”
“No, I mean…” He gestured me through into the next room along, which was enclosed and decorated like a full-fledged English pub, with low Tudor beams overhead and stiff-backed booth seats. It was tacky and bizarre and reminded me of a place I used to go in Vegas on the strip. “Why you?” Miller continued. He wandered behind the bar. “Want a beer?”
I did. Actually, I could have done with a stiff drink. But I shook my head.
“Ice water?”
“Nope.”
“Suit yourself.” He began to pull a beer for himself at the taps. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Why did he askyouto look into it instead of the cops?”
He’d put his finger on something that still bothered me about this whole situation. I sat in one of the little high-backed wooden booths and Miller came over to slide in opposite me when his beer was ready.
His knees bumped up against mine, and I let him press one leg in between mine, just like he had last night. My junk perked up right away, like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
“I didn’t ask,” I told him, while I tried to ignore the effect he had on me, “because it’s not my job to question instructions when they’re given to me. But I assume it’s because your father wants to keep it out of the media.”
Miller let out a bark of laughter that was almost startling, and took a long sip of his beer. He ended up with a foam mustache. “The irony,” he muttered, licking at his upper lip.
I watched his tongue, which flicked down to his full bottom lip once it was done with the foam.
