Her smile is knowing. “I’m here—with my colleague—by special invitation.”
I smile back, as much as my face will let me. “I see.”
She must mean the Bernardis, of course. The Don’s insistence that I attend becomes more comprehensible. He’s trying to back me into a corner.Do business with me, or who knows what information might slip past these old lips.
Don Bernardi has no honor at all, then. I’ve always thought it. Tonight he’s proved it beyond doubt.
My eyes fall on Ms. Anderson’s glass of champagne. “We’re only observers tonight, you see,” she tells me sweetly. “Off-duty.” That’s a lie. The FBI are never off-duty. And there is no lipstick mark on the rim of the glass she holds.
She’s not drinking, just fitting in.
Ms. Anderson gestures around the room with her glass. “Are you thinking of buying anything?”
I glance around the room, as though I really am considering it—there’s no space in Redwood Manor for this sort of modern art, but my own place has a few bare walls—and then I stop dead, staring.
For a moment I think I am hallucinating. It cannot be…
I must be mistaken. But the server turns his face again and my heart stops.
Teddy.
He must feel my burning stare, because he looks around with a little frown, until his eyes meet mine.
If he had any sense, he’d drop that platter and run, before I get my hands on him. All those assurances that he made to me, that he would drop this obsession—with me, with the criminal underworld, that he would shut down that infernal site of his—and now here he is.
Here he is, and making his determined way toward me, ignoring the requests for drinks, the reaching hands; he brushes past, oblivious.
Beside me, I hear Ms. Anderson let out a gasp, but I’m too focused on Teddy to care.
There’s no one else in this room, as far as I’m concerned. Just as there is no one else here for him but me, his eyes bright and joyful as he makes his way to me.
And as outraged as I am to see him here, I’m also glad. I can’t help smiling back, can’t help the leap in my heart.
But just as he reaches me, his eyes dart sideways to Monica Anderson. He freezes, the champagne and wine sloshing around in the glasses on his platter at his abrupt stop. And I see an expression I hoped never to see again in those lovely eyes.
Fear.
“Oh,” he squeaks. “Hi, Mom.”
CHAPTER38
TEDDY
“What are you doing here?”Mom hisses at me. I’m shaking, the glasses on the platter rattling together. “Get out of here!”
But I can’t stop staring at Alessandro. He was smiling just a moment ago. Now his face is like stone.
“I’m working,” I tell Mom, but my voice shakes as uncontrollably as the glasses on my tray. I had no idea she’d be here. Whyisshe here?
Alessandro is still staring straight at me, and the look on his face is like that first night we met. Impenetrable. Unreadable.
Terrifying.
“I’m working,” I say again, my voice barely above a whisper. My mother steps in front of Alessandro, shepherding me away.
“Move.” She pushes me with a hand in my lower back, all the way to the side of the room, where she makes me put down the drinks on a free table. Then she tries tokeeppushing me, but I swerve away and turn to face her.
“Mom,stop it.”
