Tasting Fear (22 page)

And the way it made his dick feel was a damn inconvenience. He stared down at his stubborn boner. He’d already tried to deal with the problem in the shower. Wild, hot water fantasies. Nell, naked and soaked and soapy, pinned to the shower wall, her legs draped over his arms. Whimpering with each deep, slick thrust. He’d come so hard, he practically knocked himself out, so why he should still have a tent pole in his sweats was beyond him. Had to be the poetry, he guessed.

He’d been at the computer since he’d gotten home. He was too wound up and turned on to sleep, so he’d used the time to research everything he could glean about the D’Onofrio saga that could be found on the Internet. He was champing at the bit to call his NYPD source and get some inside details on the case, but it was too early.

So he’d ranged further to pass the time. Reading articles she’d published in various literary journals, about Sara Teasdale, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sappho. A paper for her graduate seminar. Then there was poetry she’d written and published herself. Guest blog entries on websites that catered to poets, scholars. Online poetry workshops that she critiqued. Outlandish stuff. And they said computer nerds were arcane and weird? Computer nerds had nothing on poets and scholars. This crap was from fucking outer space.

He glanced at his watch. Almost five a.m. Good enough. His friend and ex–comrade in arms was now a detective in the NYPD. Gant owed Duncan his life, from a number of bloody adventures they’d had back in Afghanistan. If he wasn’t awake by now, it meant he was getting soft.

He dialed the number. It rang twelve times before the guy picked up. “Who the fuck is this?” said Gant sleepily.

“I need some info,” he said.

“Oh, Christ. You. Couldn’t it wait till daylight?”

“It’s dawn,” Duncan said, staring out his picture window at the spectacular New York City skyline, silhouetted against the faint glow of breaking day. “I need the details of an ongoing police investigation, in Hempton. It involves an elderly woman named Lucia D’Onofrio. She died during a burglary in her house, of a heart attack. A few weeks ago.”

“Yeah? Why do you want to know?”

He leaned his hot forehead against the cool window glass, and hesitated. “Because I’m interested,” he hedged.

“Interested? You wake me up at this un-fucking-godly hour just because you’re
interested
?” Gant paused for a moment. “This is about a woman, right?”

“None of your goddamn business,” Duncan muttered.

“I knew this would happen,” Gant bitched. “You freak. Acting like a fucking monk, for years at a time. It was just a matter of time till you snapped. So it’s happened, huh? You’re obsessed? You’re awake at this hour because you spent the night Googling her life? Poor girl. She has no idea what she’s in for. So what does this chick have to do with the old broad who had the heart attack?”

“She’s the old broad’s daughter. Stop busting my balls and just get me the info,” Duncan growled.

“You’ll have to wait. I won’t call those guys until it’s a decent hour. That’s called common courtesy. Ever heard of it? Go to bed, Dunc. Or better yet, go jack off, and then go to bed. Later.”

His friend hung up, and Duncan let the phone drop and spun the chair back around to read those poems again.

He was unaccountably fascinated. As if some window were opening in his mind, with a view he’d never seen before. He couldn’t understand what the fuck she was talking about, but so what? Who cared? He liked the way the words resonated inside him, like a big, deep bell. He’d never felt like that before. Everything buzzing, humming.

It felt strangely, dangerously good.

“S
top here,” Nell directed the driver of the car.

The guy screeched to a halt and took the money with a deadpan face. She was spending a fortune on car services, but there was no help for it. At least there were enough people on the streets that she felt safe walking the rest of the way to the Sunset Grill.

She stared at the hair salon as the car accelerated away. She’d been circling this issue all morning, since she’d wound her hair into the usual thick, fuzzy braid and twisted it into a heavy knot. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window, slid her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose, and took another good, long look.

She was hiding behind the glasses, the baggy dresses, the dowdy, frizzy hair. She’d hidden behind the cowardly assertion that looking good was all vanity and nonsense. That she was a lofty scholar who was too intellectual and above it all to care.

What total bullshit. After less than ten lust-charged minutes with Duncan Burke in the stairwell, she cared passionately. She needed every weapon at her disposal to deal with him.

The stray thought made her wince. There it was, beauty as a weapon. The association was programmed into her. She’d chosen plainness because she’d wanted to stay off the battlefield.

But the battle had come to her. There was nothing to do but fight.

She marched into the salon, sniffing nervously at shampoo, perfume, and chemicals. A slight, bald Hispanic man with a pearl-drop earring gave her a toothy smile. “What can I do for you?” he inquired.

Nell stared helplessly. “Do you take walk-ins?”

“When I feel like it. What do you have in mind?”

“I, um, don’t know yet,” Nell confessed.

The man rubbed his hands together. “Hmm. You’re in luck. I just had a cancellation. I’m Riccardo, by the way. Let’s take a look.”

Nell soon found herself in a chair, her body swathed in a plastic cape. Riccardo’s expert fingers pulled the pins from her hair, unraveling it and fluffing it up. He made cooing noises of approval. “May I?” he asked, removing Nell’s glasses. The salon became a glittery blur. “Good material here. You really ought to try contacts,” he counseled.

Nell harrumphed. “Can you do something that’s easy to style?”

“Oh, yes. I’m just going to shape this a bit, and thin out all this weight, and layer this…and lighten it, make it more fluffy. See?”

Of course, Nell didn’t, without her glasses, but this was the beauty salon of destiny, so she nodded and consigned herself to Fate.

Some time later, she retrieved her glasses and gasped at the result. Riccardo had layered and shaped her formless, kinky waist-length mop into a shiny halo of black curls that framed and flattered her face and still hung halfway down her back. Nell kept putting an unbelieving hand up, feeling the soft, springy texture of her ringlets, the way it fluffed up on top, perfumed with various salves and waxes and goops massaged into it. The price was staggering, but she passed over her credit card without protest. The only problem was the glasses. With her new do, they looked even more ridiculous than before.

One step at a time, she told herself.

Her hair caused a sensation when she walked into the restaurant. Monica wolf whistled. Norma spun Nell around, looking at her from every angle. “Oh, honey! You look as gorgeous as I knew you would!” she exclaimed. “I just wish your mama could see how pretty you look!”

Nell’s eyes dampened, and she hugged the other woman tightly.

“Enough of the sentimental stuff,” Monica said briskly. “C’mere, Nell. I wanna put some makeup on you.”

“Aren’t we supposed to be prepping for lunch?” Nell asked plaintively, as Monica dragged her to a chair.

“That’s all right, hon. We can open five minutes late,” Norma said indulgently. “How did that job interview go?”

“Oh. The job interview,” Nell hedged, as Monica tilted her face up and outlined her eyes with black pencil. “It was extremely interesting.”

“Oh? How so?” Norma asked, picking the chairs off the tables.

“You will never, in ten million years, guess who it was who interviewed me,” Nell said.

Norma froze. Monica’s eye pencil stopped moving.

“No way, chica,” breathed Monica.

“You don’t mean to say…You’re putting me on, Nelly. I simply don’t believe it,” Norma said.

“Believe it,” Nell said.

There was an incredulous silence. Nell turned around. Norma and Monica were grinning at each other like fools.

“Did he ask you out?” Monica tilted Nell’s head back and brandished her mascara wand. “Did he come on to you? Did you kiss?”

The whole heated sequence in the stairwell played through her mind in a timeless instant, and her face went beet red. “As if,” she lied. “I’ve barely met the man.”

“Well?” Norma said bracingly. “Take the bull by the horns, honey!”

“It’s not that simple,” she hedged. “He’s my boss now, and I’m meeting with him after my shift here to discuss the—”

“My goodness, you mean he hired you? Mercy! Things move so quickly in this world for an old lady. And just this morning Kendra told me that she has Epstein-Barr syndrome. But all’s fair in love and war.”

“Norma, you don’t understand.” Nell wiggled as Monica brushed powder on her face. “Monica, that tickles!”

“Hold still, chica. You’re making me smear. Lemme put lipstick on you, and you can look at yourself.”

Nell headed to the bathroom afterward. Her reflection made her gasp. Her eyes looked big, luminous. The lipstick was a deep, sexy red. With her hair fluffed into that luxurious mane of black ringlets, she looked…

Just like her mother. She stared at herself. Swallowed.

“What do you say, chica? Are you stunning, or are you stunning?”

Nell forced herself to smile at her coworker. “Yes. You’re an artist, Monica. Thank you.” She pulled her glasses out of her apron.

“Do you have to?” Monica complained. “It ruins the effect!”

“I’m blind as a bat without them,” Nell said regretfully.

“Oh well. You look better anyway. Strip Steak’s going to have a stroke when he gets a look at you.”

“His name is Duncan Burke, and it’s not going to happen,” Nell said resolutely. “He’s my boss. I wouldn’t compromise a paying job.”

“Oh, excellent! Taboo!” Norma stuck her head in the bathroom door. “The lure of the forbidden! Look at you, good enough to eat. Strip Steak’s jaw will hit the floor. Have you thought about contacts, Nelly?”

Nell swept past them, chin high. They giggled like ninnies.

Three-fifteen came and went, with no Duncan Burke, and the afternoon fell flat. Hanging in her garment bag was the oatmeal-cream sweater dress she’d bought for Nancy’s engagement party, the prettiest thing she had in her closet. She pictured herself walking into his office in that subtly clinging dress, and shivered.

Yikes. Problematic, for sure. He was her boss, after all. And he was rude, arrogant, and presumptuous. And he suffered from a profound lack of imagination, judging from his lunch habits. Plus, he had a weird, fetishistic thing for her chubby knees. So nothing doing.

Uh-huh. So why had she spent all that money she could ill afford on her hair? Why was her face painted? Why had she brought that clinging dress? She’d tarted herself up for exactly what? Get real.

She tried to drug herself into enforced calmness by mentally reciting the first sixteen lines of the prologue to Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
, over and over as she worked. The afternoon passed slowly.

At the end of her shift, she sneaked into the back to change. She needn’t have bothered sneaking, as both Monica and Norma were waiting outside the door when she came out. Monica grabbed Nell’s chin and freshened her lipstick by brute force. “Good luck, chica.”

“Be careful, honey,” Norma said, her eyes misty.

“And don’t forget these.” Monica held up a three-pack of condoms, and stuffed them into Nell’s purse. “Got ’em for you on my cigarette break. Be safe, always, you hear me?”

She was mortified. “You guys! It’s a business meeting!”

She grabbed a cab, despite the warm evening, in deference to the promise to her sisters, and took the elevator to the sixteenth floor. She stood in front of his office, gathering nerve, and reached for the door.

It flew open. She looked up, straight into Duncan’s eyes. Her throat clenched.

His eyes flashed down over her body. “It’s you.”

“You were expecting me, weren’t you?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Come on in.”

She regretted the dress. It didn’t cling provocatively, but the way he looked at her made her feel as if she were reclining naked, draped in silk, like Bathsheba in an old painting.
Come and get me. At your peril.
Or hers, rather.

“You changed your hair.” His tone was disapproving.

“Why, yes,” she said, confused.

He studied her hair, eyes narrowed, and was about to speak again when a handsome young man strode out into the room. He flashed her a dazzling smile and shook her hand, continuing to hold on to it. “Wow. Duncan told me you were an excellent writer, but he didn’t say you were so pretty,” he said. “Can I call you Nell?”

“No, you can’t,” Duncan cut in. “Let go of her hand. Ms. D’Onofrio, this is my younger brother, Bruce. Please excuse his unprofessional behavior.” He turned and marched past the goggling Derek into the conference room. “Let’s get started.”

They sat in the conference room. Bruce began. “Ms. D’Onofrio—”

“Nell is really okay,” she broke in.

“I prefer that he use ‘Ms. D’Onofrio,’” Duncan said.

There was an uncomfortable pause. “Ah,” Bruce murmured. “As I was saying, Ms. D’Onofrio, Duncan showed me your writing sample. I was impressed. I take it you’ve looked over our outline?”

“Of course,” she said. She’d been too rattled to think about it last night, after that charged stairwell incident, but she’d glanced over it while drinking her morning coffee, and had been pleasantly impressed.

“So?” Duncan prompted impatiently. “What do you think?”

Nell leafed through the folder. “It’s great. The story is involving, and the graphics are beautiful. It’s just that I think the choices the player needs to make seem too, uh…” She hesitated, reluctant to criticize.

“Too what?” Duncan snapped.

“Too logical,” she gasped nervously.

The two men looked at her blankly.

“If you want to appeal to language-oriented, literary types, I think you should play up the romantic, magical elements,” she went on.

Duncan grunted. His chair creaked in protest as he pushed himself away from the table. Nell pressed on. “It would be interesting to develop some plot twists based on leaps of faith, to deepen the feeling of mystery, create a sense of wonder. The game’s title, for instance. ‘The Dagger and the Thorn’ sounds so, um…”

“Pointy?” Bruce grinned. “Phallic?”

“Um, warlike,” Nell temporized demurely. “Masculine. I would recommend something more evocative, more magical. When I read about the sixth-level forest sequence with the lake and the magical swans, I thought of ‘The Golden Egg.’”

“‘The Golden Egg,’” Bruce mused. “That has possibilities.”

“I like it,” Duncan announced.

Bruce whipped his head around, incredulous. “You do? You’ve never liked anything imaginative or evocative in your whole life!”

“No, not that,” he said impatiently. “I mean her hair.”

A shocked silence followed his announcement.

Duncan frowned. “So? What are you gaping about? I didn’t like it at first, but I’ve decided that I like it. Is that so hard to understand?”

Bruce spoke up gallantly, after another half minute of shocked silence. “Ah, Ms. D’Onofrio, I didn’t have the pleasure of seeing how you wore your hair before, so I can’t offer any comparisons, but I can certainly say that it looks lovely now.”

“Uh, thank you,” Nell said. Her face was on fire.

“And if you’ve gotten the approval of anybody as resistant to change as my brother, believe me, it’s a compliment,” he added.

“Shut up, Bruce,” Duncan snapped.

“You’re acting unprofessional, Dunc,” Bruce murmured.

Nell knotted her hands together. “I’m glad you like my hair, Mr. Burke, but I’d rather talk about what you think of my ideas.”

“I don’t like them,” Duncan said abruptly.

Nell swallowed. “Ah,” she murmured. “I, uh, see.”

“I don’t want an interactive fairy tale. I want a fantasy quest. What you’re proposing would be impossible to reason your way through,” Duncan explained.

“But that’s just it! Reason isn’t the only tool people use when they’re problem solving,” Nell argued. “There’s an enchanted princess to be won! It should be romantic, surprising.”

“He hates surprises,” Bruce muttered.

“Shut up, Bruce,” Duncan snarled.

“Sheathe your claws, Dunc, you’re scaring her,” Bruce warned.

“Not at all,” Nell lied. “I don’t scare easily.”

Duncan got up with an abruptness that shot his chair against the wall with a bang. He stalked out of the room.

Nell watched the door fall shut behind him, alarmed. “Did I say something wrong?”

“Oh, not at all,” Bruce assured her. “He’s just that way. Don’t worry. He likes you. Your ideas are fascinating. It’s all good.”

“Uh, thank you,” she said, confused.

“Don’t mind him. Duncan’s just twitchy because there’s been so much change in his company since we started working on my game. Everything’s all shaken up. He’ll calm down.”

“But if he hates my—”

“Nah, he doesn’t hate anything. He’s just being a dickhead for the pure fun of it. Pay him no attention at all. He can’t help himself. He’s just programmed that way. He used to be a spy, you know that?”

Nell was startled. “Um, no. I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. Intelligence and analysis, for the NSA. Spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, and other nasty hot spots. I’d like to say being a spy was what made him such a tight-assed bastard, but the truth is, he’s been like that since we were kids. So don’t expect it to change.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything of the kind,” she murmured.

“He’s a genius when it comes to algorithms for intelligent database design,” Bruce went on. “His biggest client is the U.S. government. Everything’s always so damn serious. National security. Terrorist threats. Blood and guts. Something as frivolous as a computer game drives the poor guy nuts.” Bruce rolled his eyes. “But he’ll feel better about it when the money starts pouring in. He likes money just fine. You just keep coming up with ideas, and you’ll be golden.”