He locked eyes with Sonya, nodding his head and motioning with two fingers in a gimme gesture. For a split second, she didn’t have a clue what he wanted. Then she remembered the digital radiation monitor Grafton had given her in the car on the way to the café. It was a much more precise device than a Geiger counter, which couldn’t tell the difference between enriched uranium and the small amounts of radiation given off by, say, a bag of cat litter or a sack of Brazil nuts.
Reaching inside her purse, she handed over the gadget and watched curiously as Angel stuffed it inside the bag. His face registered nothing, but after a couple of seconds he nodded, set the bag on the chair to Sonya’s right, and looked over her shoulder at Grafton. “You can transfer the money now.”
Grafton didn’t say a word, simply pulled his cell phone from the breast pocket of his puffy down coat. After punching in a number, he held the device to his ear and modulated his voice so it was unrecognizable when he said, “Make the transfer now.”
He listened for what felt like forever as Sonya’s heart did its best impression of a cat on a hot tin roof. She made sure to face Eyebrows, her fingers fumbling nervously with the button on her blouse until she’d satisfied herself she had everything she needed.
Grafton finished with “Very good” and thumbed off his phone before replacing it in his breast pocket. “It’s done,” he whispered in a purposefully scratchy voice, never turning toward the trio at the table behind him.
A muscle ticked in Eyebrow’s cheek. He stared at the back of Grafton’s hooded head before pulling his cell phone from his hip pocket. Glancing down at the glowing screen, his deep-set eyes crinkled at the corners before he grinned, revealing teeth so yellow there was no doubt in Sonya’s mind his cigarette habit encompassed a minimum of two packs a day.
“Spasiba,” he said before pushing away from the table and disappearing out the back.
Just like that, Grafton had bought himself a canister full of atomic material.
Sonya looked across the table at Angel, her gut twisting into a twenty-pound knot. She took a sip of tea, hoping the heat would help loosen it, but all it managed to do was make her want to puke.
She hadn’t expected Angel to go through with the exchange. Not really. Not the man who had hugged her so sweetly last night. Not the one who had kissed her so passionately. Not the infamous and much-revered Prince of Shadows…
Chapter 10
Rusty Parker looked over at Ace and frowned. Their mark had been inside the café for five minutes, and for five minutes the two of them had done nothing but argue.
Wait. That ain’t right, he thought. For months all we’ve done is argue.
Which, on the one hand, was sort of fun. Trading insults with Ace always felt a bit like verbal foreplay. On the other hand? Well, it reminded Rusty that the only man he’d ever been interested in for more than a one-night stand didn’t want a single thing to do with him.
“The trouble with a fact is it’s true whether you believe it or not,” Ace said, tapping an impatient finger on the steering wheel. The guy had beautiful hands. Broad-palmed and long-fingered. Rusty imagined what it would be like to—
Nope. Not gonna go there.
“It’s not that I believe two people can’t make a relationship work for twenty or thirty or forty years,” Rusty insisted. “I’m saying when marriage was invented, people only lived twenty, or thirty, or forty years. The kids grew up, and then the couple croaked. We weren’t supposed to be with one person for half a century. That’s why the divorce rate is so high.” Rusty turned in his seat to pin a Help me out here, bro stare on Ozzie. “You’re a smart guy. Tell him I’m right.”
“Don’t drag me into this.” Ozzie stared at the screen of the laptop sitting on the edge of his knees as if he was waiting on the winning Power Ball numbers.
“You’re jaded because you’re closeted,” Ace said. “You don’t think you’ll ever find someone to spend a lifetime with.”
“Wow.” Rusty felt the muscles across his shoulders tense. “You forgot to switch on your turn signal for that little segue.”
“It’s not a segue. It’s a logical observation, given the conversation.”
“Somehow we always gotta come back to that, don’t we?” The twin demons of irritation and indignation went to war inside Rusty’s chest. Their battle nicked his heart and sharpened his tongue. “You should get that thing looked at by a doctor.”
“What thing?”
Colby “Ace” Ventura was quintessentially So Cal—tan skin, beachy blond hair, eyes the color of the ocean on a clear spring morning. It was annoying.
“Your holier-than-thou gland,” Rusty told him. “It’s super swollen.”
Ozzie snorted in the back seat, and Ace turned to glare at him.
“Sorry!” Ozzie tossed up his hands. “Pretend I’m not here.”
Ace swung back to Rusty. “Okay. Let’s take a look at your argument from the other side of the coin. If fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, that means fifty percent don’t. Fifty percent of people stay together until death does them part. How does that prove your little evolutionary theory, huh?”
Rusty shrugged. “There are as many exceptions as there are rules.”
