The Real Mrs. Price (24 page)

“That's it, lovely,” he whispered, holding her. “That's how you take it, baby, all of it. Good … good.”

He held her like that, bucking underneath her, panting, driving into her until he came, too, growling in the space between her neck and shoulder, wrapping those big arms around her so tight that she could hardly breathe, pushing her down onto his pulsing shaft as far as she could go, until finally, he was spent and exhausted and satisfied. The two of them sat there, clinging to each other like this really was the last time they'd be together.

She was getting her life back. Plato likely wouldn't be a part of it. He'd finish what he had to do here and move on. But moments like this were everything. She couldn't deny who she was at the core. Passionate and impulsive, even reckless. She could love him with her whole heart, body, and soul if he let her. She could lay herself out on an altar at his feet and sacrifice herself to him if he asked. But he wouldn't. And she was going to miss him.

 

You Go Hard

P
LATO MADE LOVE TO HER
again when the sun came up, and they spent the whole day in bed, doing what people do when they're in love. But this wasn't love. It was … something else. Marlowe slept naked on top of him. The fallacy of all of this was that she would never have her life back, not the way it was before. He was a firm believer that there was no going back, only forward. But he let her believe what she wanted, what she needed, because it made her happy. It gave her hope and filled those gorgeous eyes of hers with a light he'd guessed had been missing for a long time, even before this craziness with Price.

Bullshit Ed Price. Bullshit O. P. Wells. Both of them were poison to her, but Marlowe had blinders on when it came to men. Obviously. For all her psychic beliefs, she either didn't want to see the truth about the men in her life or she saw the truth and feigned ignorance.

That soft woman stirred on top of him, sighed in her sleep, and pressed even deeper against him. If he could somehow strap her to him and wear her underneath his clothes like this, he would. The thought amused him. She hadn't said it, but she believed him to be her hero on some level, but that's not what he was. It's not what he ever was. He didn't come here for her.

“Did I fall asleep again?” she asked groggily. Marlowe raised her beautiful lips to his and kissed him.

She was far too generous with him, and he was far too undeserving and greedy.

“You did,” he told her.

She threatened to roll off him, but he held her in place. Marlowe relaxed and laid her head back down on his chest.

“What time are we supposed to check out?” she asked.

He laughed. “Two hours ago, I think.”

Marlowe laughed, too. “We should go.”

“No.” He kissed her again. “We shouldn't.”

After a long pause between them, she asked, “So where do you go after you leave Blink?” She'd done a pretty good job of pretending to accept the fact that this relationship was never destined to be anything more than what it was. Marlowe likely wasn't doing this for his benefit, but for hers. “Do you just move on to the next assignment or whatever? Or do you have a regular job?”

“Sometimes I teach,” he said matter-of-factly.

Marlowe raised her head and stared at him, surprised. “Teach? What? Who?”

“Adjunct professor at the University of Illinois. That was my last teaching gig.”

Marlowe stared at him in disbelief. “What do you teach?”

He grinned. “Calculus.”

“Get the fuck out of here!” she exclaimed. “
You
teach calculus?”

Surprisingly, he was a bit offended. “Well, somebody's got to teach it. Might as well be me.”

“Oh my goodness!” Marlowe laughed. “So you have a math degree?”

“Engineering.”

“Why the hell do you chase down the Ed Prices of the world if you have an engineering degree? Wouldn't it be stabler and safer to work as an engineer?”

“It would, but it wouldn't be nearly as interesting.”

“So you go back to teaching until someone calls you?”

“Basically.”

“You are absolutely fascinating,” she said, staring mesmerized into his eyes.

Damn. If he knew that all he had to do to impress this woman was to tell her he was a math geek, he'd have said something back when they had first met.

“Thank you,” he responded.

“Too bad I couldn't have met you first,” she said, raising up on her elbows and lying on him like he was a mattress. “Too bad you couldn't be happy being a teacher.”

“You think we'd have gotten together, settled down, and had a couple of kids?” he teased.

She smiled. “I like the idea. You don't?”

For a second, he actually did. But he'd been there. Done that. And no, it wasn't his idea of the perfect life.

“You couldn't see yourself married to me?”

Now she was the one teasing him.

“Actually,” he said, threatening to be honest, “you deserve so much better than me.”

Marlowe chuckled. “That's one of the few things that you have ever said to me that's actually been nice.”

He frowned. “Oh, come on. I've said a lot of nice things to you.”

“No, you think I'm silly. You might even think I'm crazy.”

“Not crazy.”

“It's okay, though. I know what you're doing.”

“What am I doing?”

“You work real hard to keep women from falling in love with you. You're an ass on purpose as a defense mechanism. I get it.”

“Really, Dr. Phil? You think you've got me figured out?”

“I do.”

“A few days ago, I was the devil, and now I'm—what? A misunderstood devil?”

“Basically. You pull me in when it suits you, then push me away when it doesn't.”

“It's for your own good, Marlowe,” he said sincerely. “And mine.”

Marlowe looked thoughtful for a second. “Sounds like you've given it some thought.”

“I have. You're tempting. I can admit that. But temptation is not reasonable in my life. I wouldn't do that to you, and I especially wouldn't do it to myself.”

She looked disappointed. “So this is a hit-it-and-quit-it deal for you. Just like I thought.”

“You shouldn't even have to ask me that question. Of course that's what it is.”

Disappointment showed in her eyes, and he should've felt bad about what he'd said, but she knew what he was about. Hell, she'd called him on it. Now that he'd admitted it and said it out loud, she had the audacity to be hurt?

“You asked, Marlowe,” he said, staring back at her.

Tears rested on the insides of her eyelids. “I sure did. And I knew what you'd say. I was just hoping that I was wrong.”

She rolled off him this time, onto the bed, and covered that lovely body of hers in the sheet.

He felt obliged to sort of explain. “I need to be invisible in my line of work. My life is about anonymity, and I'm too big to go unnoticed in a town like Blink.”

“Yes, you are,” she said lazily, turning over on her side, her back facing him. “No worries, Plato. We're living in the moment. Right?”

He reached over to her and rolled her onto her back, then spread his body on top of hers. “You don't want me, remember? I'm evil personified. I'm a bad guy. I'm, uh…”

“Lucifer,” she said, filling in the blank.

“Exactly. But I am happy to have known you, to have loved you, tasted you.” He smiled and kissed her. “And it's my loss, sweetheart. Not yours.”

He meant that.

Marlowe smiled. “I agree wholeheartedly.”

*   *   *

Her phone had been vibrating like crazy for hours. Eventually, Marlowe picked it up to see who it was. Quentin Parker had been blowing up her phone all afternoon looking for her for a second round of questioning. She eventually called him back.

“I wasn't feeling well, Quentin,” she lied, staring accusingly at Plato. “No. No, I wasn't home. I was at a friend's. Just a friend's. But I'll be back in the morning. First thing.”

Quentin obviously gave her the blues over the phone, based on Marlowe's expressions, but he eventually accepted that she'd see him in the morning and hung up. Immediately after that, Marlowe dialed Lucy's number but got no answer. Next she dialed Roman's number.

“Has Lucy made it in?” she asked and waited. “What do you mean she missed her flight? Well, when's she coming?” Marlowe looked desperately at Plato. “Tomorrow? What time?” She waited. “Have her call me as soon as she gets in, Roman. I need her to go with me to the police station tomorrow. I have to be there at one. Yes. Thank you.”

She hung up and stared down at her phone. Marlowe pursed her lips together and sighed. “How come I have this sinking feeling that this shit's about to blow up in my face?”

Plato knew the answer to that but decided to keep it to himself.

 

Keeps Me Awake

“T
HAT WAS
M
ARLOWE
?” Lucy asked Roman, sitting across from him at a local bar in Blink.

“She's meeting with the police tomorrow afternoon for more questioning,” he explained. “She really wants you there, Lucy. She needs you there.”

Lucy had been in Blink for most of the day. Roman had lied to Marlowe because Lucy had asked him to. “I'm not ready to talk to the police, Roman. As long as Ed's still out there, the threat is still too real for me.”

“The police would start to look for a living Ed Price, Lucy, which would turn this whole thing around. Ed wouldn't risk coming after you or Marlowe if he knew that they suspected he was on the run.”

“Or they could drive him right to me,” she said, noting the strange look on his face when she said the word
me
and not
us,
meaning her and Marlowe. It wasn't that she didn't care about Marlowe's safety, but from what Roman had told her, Marlowe had someone looking out for her. Lucy wasn't as fortunate. Roman was a detective, not a bodyguard. Lucy needed a pit bull.

“You could help get her off the hook on this murder thing. Or don't you care?”

She didn't like his tone and what it implied. “I barely know the woman, Roman. Marlowe and I aren't friends. We're two women caught up in a fiasco created by the man we married, but that's all we are.”

“I don't believe what I'm hearing. You could help clear this woman's name, but you won't?”

“I didn't say that,” she snapped angrily. “I just think we should wait.”

“For what? Ed to drop out of the sky?”

“There are other ways to help Marlowe, Roman.”

“Enlighten me.”

Did she really have to come out and say it? Lucy's mind had been reeling ever since he'd told her that he knew where those PINs were, and admittedly, some of those thoughts surprised even her. Lucy hadn't committed herself to any one idea, but she was open to entertaining some that she'd never seriously considered before.

“No one knows about the money, Roman,” she cautiously began. “Forty-seven million is a lot.”

“Oh, people know about it, Lucy. The wrong people.”

“But they can't get their hands on it. We can.”

“‘We'?”

“I can,” she responded pensively.

“I know where this is going,” he said, shaking his head.

“Just hear me out.”

“It's not going to work.”

“Listen, Roman. Please,” she said, frustrated. “I know it's going to sound crazy, but think about what we could do with that kind of money. I'm talking about me, you, and even Marlowe.”

Lucy couldn't believe that these words were coming from her, but she'd been coming back to these thoughts time and time again ever since she'd found out about this money-laundering scheme of Ed's, wondering how it could change her life if she could somehow get access to it. At first, it was just a fantasy, but now, knowing that Marlowe had those PINs, it was more than that. It was a possibility, a frightening one, but still, a possibility.

“These people whose money Ed was laundering, I mean, what do they know about me? About her? Do they know?”

He shook his head in dismay. “I guarantee you that they do.”

“Because of that Wells guy?” she asked.

He nodded. “Because of that Wells guy,” he concurred.

“Split three ways, we could each end up with almost sixteen million dollars apiece,” she explained. “If we include him, it's nearly twelve million each. That's tempting to anybody, even him.”

“What good is the money going to do Marlowe if she's in prison?”

“Twelve million could buy her a ticket to anywhere in the world she wanted to go.”

Lucy hated the way he was looking at her, but she had to bring this up. They at least had to talk about it, and if it was a harebrained idea, too risky, too ridiculous, then fine. She would let it go. But the more she thought about it, the more she believed that the possibility was there to change all their lives forever.

“Tell me that you couldn't use twelve million dollars, Roman.”

Lucy waited until she saw it, and gradually, it started to reveal itself in his eyes. With that kind of money, a person could bail themselves out of all sorts of situations. They could fix things that they had broken. Twelve million dollars could solve a ton of problems.

“This is why I'm not ready to go to the police yet. On her own, even if she tells them about the money and the accounts, they're not going to believe her because she has nothing, no proof at all. Not account numbers or bank names or anything. It'll just be another lie in a long string of lies that she's told them.”

“You're setting her up, Lucy.”

“I'm not doing anything,” Lucy said sorrowfully. “I'm just not helping her, Roman. Not in the way that she thinks.”