“I’m grateful,” Will said. “I’m super grateful. This is my expression of gratitude, can’t you tell?”
“No.”
“I just don’t understand why she’d want to keep her skills a secret.” He unlocked the back of the van and opened it up. They slid the ladder in together, and Will hopped inside after it to bungee it into place. “She could have more business than she knows what to do with if she advertised it a little.”
“Clearly she prefers quality over quantity,” Cole said. He frowned. “Wrap it again before you fasten it to the hook.”
Will glared at him. “I know how to secure a damn ladder.”
“It’s going to rattle around.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“I’m just saying?—”
He popped out of the back and slammed the doors shut before Cole could finish. “C’mon, let’s get out of here before we’re made.”
Cole plucked at the front of his overalls distastefully. “Isn’t that what your clever disguise is meant to prevent?”
Wow, you fucked a guy one time—all right, twice—okay, maybe more than that at this point but who was counting—and he thought he could act like a little bitch to you. To be fair, Cole had always acted like a little bitch to Will, but he was going all out lately.
And thanks to the unfortunate way the wires in Will’s brain were crossed, he found it to be cute as hell.
“First you call me smart, then you call me clever…be careful, baby, or I’ll start to think you like me.” He pulled the keys out of his pocket and tossed them to Cole. “You’re driving.”
It spoke volumes about Cole’s appraisal of Will’s driving skills that he didn’t even argue, just headed for the front of the van. Under the circumstances, Will didn’t mind. He hated New York traffic. He hated that he had to eventhinkabout New York traffic when this fucking city was the last place they should be right now, given Alders’s efforts to hunt them down and take them apart for the sake of his Puffin.
But Lilith was here, and more to the point Cheyenne was here too. Even worse, she’d refused to work for them without a face-to-face exchange of money for product.
“I only take cash,” she’d said when Cole confronted her about it during their meeting this morning. “And I know fake money when I feel it. If you want a replica Iberian Puffin on short notice, then you’re going to do things my way.”
“Five hundred thousand dollars is a lot of cash,” Cole had pointed out.
“Not too much for a man ofyourmeans, I’m sure.” Cheyenne had simpered for a moment in Will’s direction, a nod to thecharacter she played at Lilith’s gallery. She’d been nothing like that in the middle of her own vast art studio, which took up the entire second story of a warehouse in the Bronx. There, she’d had the bearing of a queen ruling over her domain. “No offense meant, of course.”
“None taken,” he’d replied faintly. It wasn’t even a lie—who kept half a million dollars in cash around?
Cole did. Not even in his apartment, either; he had a locker with the money they needed half a block away from the hotel they were heading for now. He’d left fifty thousand dollars with Cheyenne as the deposit, and she assured him that she’d have a Puffin for them by tomorrow.
“I still have the molds from the first one I did,” she said. “Otherwise this would take a week or more. Where are you staying?”
“Why do you need to know?”
“Because the only person I take work calls from is Lilith, that’s why.Youcan expect a messenger to inform you once I’m done, so don’t leave the hotel for long, gentlemen.”
“I never thought I’d work with a person even more old-fashioned than you,” Cole groused as he turned off Longfellow onto Westchester, away from Cheyenne’s studio. “Cash only, in-person messages…”
Will smirked. “Makes it kind of fun, doesn’t it?”
“Try slow and inconvenient.”
“I happen to know for afactthat you like taking it slow sometimes.”
“Is there anything you can’t turn into a sex joke?” Cole asked as he drove right past the hotel they had told Cheyenne they’d be staying at. They’d gone inside and booked a room there, yes; they’d even set up cameras inside, just in case someone paid the room a visit. But actually staying there?
Absolutely not. They’d learned their lesson in Montreal. They were staying in a discreet brownstone bed and breakfast half a mile away, which wasn’t where they were parking this van, incidentally. That was the parking garage Cole was about to turn into.
“Some things,” Will assured him. “I wouldn’t—” Cole snapped the wheel over, sharpening the turn, and there was a loudthunkfrom the back of the van. “You bastard.”
