Million Dollar Road (36 page)

So who gave a damn besides Roger? Con swallowed a contemptuous snort. “But it's not the way it looks.” And even though it was the way it looked, none of this was Ol Rog's business. Lireinne must have misunderstood his instructions about the reservation, but in any case it had turned out for the best, not having to lie to Roger outright.

“This is all on the up-and-up. I booked us two rooms,” Con said virtuously.

“I should think so. Cain't imagine why you wouldn't.”

Taking a big puff of his cigar, Con paced the balcony. Damn, it was cold out here. “Of course I did. Besides, didn't I just bring this deal back from the dead? Don't worry yourself about a thing, Rog. Please.”

“Still, ol' son, you gotta listen up now . . .” Apparently not reassured, Roger opened his book of homespun admonitions and launched a dogged sermon, chapter and verse.

A bored and unrepentant sinner, Con couldn't hang up in the middle of his boss's harangue so he resigned himself to making noncommittal noises in appropriate places. Amen, pass the plate, let's go already! he fumed. Tuning out the annoying drone in his ear, Con checked his watch. It was nearly eight and Lireinne hadn't emerged from her room yet. She'd been in there for over an hour. How long could it take her to shower and change? The night was turning frigid and Con's impatience burned hotter the longer Roger sermonized.

Still, it was more than ten minutes later before the old sermonizer began to run out of both gas and unsolicited opinions. “So think on what I'm sayin', real hard now. Don't want anybody getting the wrong idear, get me?”

“Right. Got it. Talk to you tomorrow.” Con snapped his cell phone shut before Roger could find his second wind. He'd have to bring his boss around to the real facts once he returned, but for now Con had a beautiful girl to take to dinner. Tossing the butt end of his cigar over the balcony railing into the flower box, he went back inside the warm, well-lit suite.

Finding Lireinne's door still shut, he tapped on it lightly.

“Honey?” he called through the door, pitching his voice low. “You ready?” There was no answer, so Con turned the handle and stepped inside.

The room was mostly dark, but the bedside lamp was on, illuminating the sleeping girl lying on the low bed. Her lips slightly parted, Lireinne lay in exquisite abandon across the pink damask bedspread, fully clothed in a clinging, sea-foam-green silk dress, black stockings, and her black suede pumps. One hand was curled under her cheek, the other loosely wrapped around a hairbrush.

She was so tired she must have fallen asleep in the middle of getting dressed, Con thought. He was filled with a tender wonder at her unconscious perfection, rare as a carved ivory pillow doll. Con stood by the bedside, mesmerized by the slow rise and fall of Lireinne's white breasts under the green silk. Should he try to wake her?

No, he sighed. Lireinne needed her sleep, poor kid. So, with mingled regret and affection, he removed the brush from her hand and put it on the table beside the bed. He slid her pumps off her feet, ignoring the impulse to run his thumb across the high, delicate arches, and drew the duvet up and over her shoulders. Con's mouth was gentle when he kissed her forehead, Lireinne's sleeping innocence filling him with an almost painful sense of protectiveness. Of course she'd passed out after nearly twenty hours of travel and her day wandering the city. There hadn't been anything wrong earlier; there was nothing to worry about. She was just jet-lagged.

“Sleep well, darling,” Con whispered. He couldn't help it, he had to touch her one last time, so with a fingertip he traced the line of her cheek. Deep in slumber, Lireinne sighed, a half-smile on her dreaming face.

“I love you.” Con barely breathed the words, the first time he'd said them out loud.

He turned out the lamp before he tiptoed from her bedroom, shutting the door with a quiet, final
click
that seemed to punctuate the demise of his plans for this evening. The click echoed in his heart and in that moment it was all he could do not to go back in there and slide into bed beside Lireinne, to wake her with kisses, to tumble her into his arms and claim the splendor of her sleep-soft body as his own.

His hand still closed around the brass knob, Con pressed his forehead to the door, breathing hard and fast. Down, boy, he thought with a roughly amused shake of his head. Let her sleep. You've got a date with the rest of the champagne, a couple of Vicodin, and dinner downstairs, alone.

Sleeping Beauty's prince was going to have to be patient just one night longer.

W
here was she? What time was it?

Waking from a deep sleep to the far-off whine of a vacuum cleaner somewhere in the hotel, Lireinne sat bolt upright in her bed, dazed with a confused sense of dislocation. She blinked in the bright sunlight falling on the deep-piled carpet of the room, her hands in her tangled hair. The hotel room. She was at the Plaza Athénée, she was in Paris, and it had to be sometime Friday morning.

Her eyes narrowing, Lireinne ran her hands over the front of the only slightly wrinkled green dress. She must have slept in her clothes, but where were her shoes? They were over there, on the floor in front of the pink silk-upholstered armchair. Frowning, she threw off the goose-down duvet and swung her black-stockinged legs off the edge of the bed. Lireinne rubbed her face, swimming up out of sleep into a spate of questions. What had happened last night? How had she gotten into bed? She recalled showering and dressing to go to dinner, sitting on the bed to brush her hair . . . and then she must have passed right the hell out. But she didn't remember taking her shoes off, and there was something else, she was sure of it. Something, something
bad
.

Oh, God. She remembered now.

Con.

Call me by my name, Lireinne. Please
.

Lireinne shuddered at the searing memory of the night before, how Con had put the big move on her. That had been close, she thought, way too close to that confrontation she'd hoped to avoid forever. The minute he'd put his arm around her, Lireinne's heart had plummeted, knowing she wasn't going to get away with pretending she didn't know what Con wanted anymore. No, that big ol' cat's out of the bag now, she thought grimly as she stalked into the marble-lined bathroom to brush her teeth.

A few minutes later, feeling more like herself now that her teeth didn't feel as though they were wearing sweaters, Lireinne tried to calm her racing pulse. She gazed at her reflection in the mirror. “You can do it,” she whispered. Whether she was ready or not, it was time to face Con. She needed to be strong enough to be honest and tell him what she
really
thought about his crazy thing for her. Lireinne closed her eyes. “Please,” she prayed. “Don't let him take it the wrong way.”

Remembering the embrace, all that
kissing,
though, Con's taking it any other way was a long shot—as unlikely as a cat deciding it wanted to live in the ocean, like a fish. Still, she had to do it, and she had to do it now.

Taking a deep breath, Lireinne cracked open the bedroom door and peeked out into the sunlit sitting room.

“Hello?” She despised the way her voice quavered, but no one answered anyway. The dishes and silverware of a solitary breakfast, a strew of newspaper pages, and the faintest trace of Con's cologne greeted her instead. Somewhere the radio was playing a soft, light jazz but otherwise the big, beautifully appointed room was quiet.

He's gone, she thought, relieved at his absence, although she knew it only prolonged the inevitable. The confrontation would come later, rather than sooner.

But wait—there was a folded piece of hotel stationery on the table next to the arrangement of white roses, ferns, and fragrant stock. Barefoot, Lireinne padded across the room and picked it up, recognizing Con's eccentric, spiky handwriting. A pile of euros was lying underneath the note. As she read it, her pulse leapt again with renewed dread.

Her mouth falling half open, Lireinne looked up from the note to meet her own horrified green gaze in the gilt-framed mirror. “Shit!” she swore. The piece of paper fell out of her hand to the floor, dropped like a discarded murder weapon, as though she were terrified to have her fingerprints on it.

Everything had gotten out of hand, way out of hand. Lireinne had mistakenly thought she could control the situation if she was careful, but now she realized she'd never had the first clue about what was in Con Costello's head. It was bad enough when she'd thought all he wanted was sex, but
love
?

“
So
not going to happen!” Lireinne passionately declared to her reflection. Her reflection agreed, saying that yes, it would not happen.

But what would she say to him after this? Get lost? Leave me alone, you letch? Hell, if Con was so deluded he thought he was . . . in
love
with her, if he was so crazy he thought she felt anything for him beyond gratitude, when she told him the truth he might get so mad he'd fire her. Having to leave Paris would be the least of her worries then.

The loss of her job loomed like the descending blade of a guillotine. What about Wolf and the money she was supposed to be saving so he could go to LSU, what would she do about that? Lireinne thought, her hands shaking with panic. Get a job at the McDonald's in Covington? Oh, God—she'd lose the car, too, so even that would be out. She'd have no way to get to her new executive position cleaning the fry-o-lator.

Lireinne had always been halfway afraid that the rapid change in her circumstances had been too good to be for real, but refused to let herself think on it much. She'd believed the gray days of hosing were behind her because she'd needed to believe it. Now, after reading Con's note, her newfound security was suddenly revealed as a precarious thing, dependent on one man's whim. All Lireinne could see was an inexorable slide: back to hosing, or something worse.

A real job had turned out to be too much to ask of an indifferent world, and Lireinne hadn't wanted much—no more than what everyone wanted. Steady, respectable work, a real paycheck, and, and . . . Lireinne had also wanted the chance to go to Paris. Since that first day when Con had summoned her to the office, she'd been living a fantasy, one too wonderful to examine as closely as she should have done. Hosers didn't become personal assistants; they never got out of the barns. In Paris, the only place for a hoser was in the boss's bed.

Forced to confront her helplessness, Lireinne's panic was gradually giving way to a familiar resentment. Picking the note off the floor, she tore it in two and crushed the halves into a ball. So she'd schemed to get this trip, but only a little. So for days she'd pretended she wasn't aware of Con's real intentions. She didn't deserve to lose her job because she'd done nothing wrong.

Or . . . had she? After Brett's assault, Lireinne still agonized when she thought about it, even though she knew she wasn't supposed to feel that way. She'd often turned it over in her head, reliving every moment of that night up until the rape. What if, somehow, she'd brought it on herself?

“No freaking way!” Lireinne told her reflection stoutly, but there was doubt in her green eyes now. Remembering the subtle power she'd enjoyed the afternoon she met Con, now Lireinne wasn't as sure. Maybe she should have stopped this before everything got out of control. Maybe she was paying the price for being such a dumb-ass.

So if she wanted to keep her job, what if she'd have to go through with . . . sleeping with him?

“No way!” Lireinne vowed again, knowing she could
never
do that. Ever since Brett, the thought of any man touching her had left her feeling sick, on the verge of vomiting with fright . . . and ready to fight. It had been all she could do not to strike Con's hands away last night.

Besides, even if she could find a way to stand it, then everybody would be vindicated in the hateful things they said about her. She really
would
be a slut.

This was one hell of a tangled mess, but Lireinne was positive about one thing in her short life: she was no slut, no matter what people said. She was poor, a high-school dropout, and—thanks to Brett—damaged goods, but she wasn't a whore. She wouldn't sleep with Con Costello for anything, not even if he paid her a million dollars a year and bought her a goddamned Mercedes.

Bud would just
die
.

Lireinne could hardly bear it, imagining the disappointment in his eyes if he knew she'd contemplated such a thing at all. He would never find out, of course, but in that moment she keenly longed for Bud's steady love, the unselfish care he'd always taken of her. Paris was such a long way from home and she couldn't even call him. For one thing, she wasn't sure how to make an overseas call, but if she did figure it out somehow, he'd know right away that something was wrong. Lireinne had never been able to hide how she felt from Bud, not for long. It didn't matter that she hadn't told him when she'd been raped, or after Harlan had grabbed her. With that Bud-radar of his, despite all her protestations that she was
fine,
she'd often looked up to find him watching her, a grave, unspoken concern in his eyes. It had been hell on earth, hiding her misery from him, but Lireinne hadn't had a choice. Lying to him was the only way to make sure her stepfather didn't go to jail.

Her distracted gaze fell to the stack of euros on the table, a bigger pile of money than Con had given her yesterday. Lireinne counted it, unbelieving, and then counted it again. A thousand euros. That had to be nearly eight hundred dollars. Well, Con might be thinking he could buy her with all that money, but he had another think coming, for sure. After last night, after that
note
this morning, she wouldn't spend another dime that wasn't her own.

But Lireinne was hungry. The last meal she'd had was the croissant on the plane. The room service menu lay next to Con's solitary dishes, a leather-bound volume of heavy vellum pages. Lireinne opened it to the breakfast section. Fifty-five euros for
le petit déjeuner Américain
of bacon and eggs, eleven euros for orange juice. Horrified at the prices, she threw the menu down on the coffee table.

Her empty stomach had begun to growl, though, and so eventually Lireinne gave in, picked up the phone, and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu: coffee and a brioche for twenty euros. She really needed the caffeine and she'd never had a brioche before, but it must be like a pastry. When breakfast finally arrived, the brioche turned out to be just a sugar-topped roll of bread, but by then Lireinne didn't care. It was too yummy not to eat it all, especially after she'd smeared it with real butter and strawberry jam: she ate even the crumbs. The milk-laced coffee was strong and hot, too. Trying to fill herself, Lireinne drank the whole pot and the glass of water as well.

Fuel, she reminded herself grimly. It's just fuel. If she found herself on the next flight out of town, Lireinne didn't know if she'd be able to eat again anytime soon. It would be hours before Con came back. She had a long time to wait until she knew how bad her predicament was going to get.

That realization left Lireinne as wired as Wolf's Xbox after a long afternoon of destruction and mayhem. She had to get out of the suddenly claustrophobic suite, out onto the street, before she lost her mind. Moving quickly, Lireinne washed her face, brushed her hair, and put on her shoes. She didn't stop to change out of the dress she'd slept in but only threw her coat on over it, slinging her purse over her shoulder on the way out the door.

While waiting for the elevator, Lireinne checked to make sure that the hundred dollars she'd brought with her was still in her wallet. She did the math rapidly in her head: a hundred dollars was probably worth something like one hundred and thirty euros. She'd change her money downstairs at the reception desk and then she'd take a walk. Walking helped her think sometimes and she had a lot to think about before Con got back. Maybe she'd head to the Louvre today, although she wasn't sure if her mood was equal to looking at art. She could go to Père Lachaise, the famous cemetery, since according to the map it wasn't too far from the hotel. One of Wolf's heroes, Jim Morrison, was supposed to be buried there and this morning a trip to a graveyard would suit her mood down to the ground.

Money changed at the front desk, Lireinne hurried through the lobby to the front of the hotel, summoning a distant, preoccupied nod for the uniformed doorman.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle.”
The doorman touched the brim of his cap with a perfectly polite, respectful smile. He could have been greeting somebody who was a big deal—a diplomat, an OPEC minister, a princess on a state visit—instead of a soon-to-be-unemployed ex-hoser. In the middle of all her turmoil, she'd been almost too distracted to have noticed the doorman's smiling salute altogether, but Lireinne was struck by a new thought.

Acting like somebody too important to be nice was something she'd never tried before, although she'd had plenty of role models. In high school, all the popular kids had always ignored her shy attempts to even say hello. They had this attitude, like they were better than everybody else, too cool to be bothered with unimportant people.

Maybe it was high time to grow some of that attitude, Lireinne decided, as she surveyed the traffic-filled Avenue from the top of the hotel's steps. She'd try it out on her nemesis, the valet. His expression was irritatingly expectant, as though he'd been waiting for her to come out this morning and was ready for her.

And so, “Go to hell,” she said to the valet in passing, her tone as cold as the Seine in winter. Lireinne noted his startled, red face, and was satisfied. She tossed her hair and set out at a brisk walk.

This is your brain on
attitude,
sugar, Lireinne thought. Time to work on that.