“No matter how tired we are,” she said as my tongue found her neck, “we don’t stop this time until we both pass out.”
“Agreed,” I murmured.
Somewhere around four in the morning, we finally did pass out.
She fell asleep curled on my chest as my own eyelids fluttered. And I found myself wondering, just before I lost consciousness, how I could have thought—even for a second—that Desiree was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
I looked down at Angie sleeping naked on my chest, at the scratches and swollen flesh on her face, and I knew that only now, at this exact moment and for the first time in my life, did I understand anything about beauty.
31
“Hi.”
I opened one eye and looked into the face of Desiree Stone.
“Hi,” she said again, her voice a whisper.
“Hi,” I said.
“You want coffee?” she said.
“Sure.”
“Sssh.” She put a finger to her lips.
I turned, saw Angie sleeping deeply beside me.
“It’s in the next room,” Desiree said and left.
I sat up in bed and took my watch off the dresser. Ten in the morning. I’d had six hours’ sleep, but it felt like about six minutes. The last time I’d slept before last night had been at least forty hours previous. But I guess I couldn’t sleep through the day.
Angie seemed to be giving it a good bid, though.
She was curled into the tight fetal ball I’d become accustomed to during her months on my living room floor. The sheet had risen up to her waist, and I reached over and pulled it back over her legs, tucked it in at the corner of the mattress.
She didn’t stir or so much as groan when I got off the bed. I put on jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt as quietly as possible and headed toward the door adjoining the suites, then stopped. I came back around to her side of the bed and knelt by her, touched her warm face with the palm of my hand, and kissed her lips lightly, breathed in her smell.
In the last thirty-two hours, I’d been shot at, been thrown from a speeding vehicle, had cracked my shoulder blade, had taken innumerable shards of glass into my flesh, had shot a man dead, had lost about a pint of blood, and had been subjected to twelve hours of hostile questioning in a sweltering cinder block box. Somehow, though, with Angie’s face warming my palm, I’d never felt better.
I found my sling on the floor by the bathroom, slipped my dead arm into it, and went next door.
The heavy dark curtains were drawn against the sun and only a small light on the nightstand provided any illumination. Desiree sat in an armchair by the nightstand, sipping coffee, and appeared to be naked.
“Miss Stone?”
“Come in. Call me Desiree.”
I squinted into the near darkness as she stood up, and that’s when I saw that she wore a French-cut bikini the color of roasted honeycomb, about a shade lighter than her flesh. Her hair was slicked back off her head as she came to me and placed a cup of coffee in my hand.
“I don’t know how you like it,” she said. “There’s cream and sugar on the counter.”
I flicked on another light, went to the kitchenette counter, found the cream and sugar beside the coffee maker.
“Went for a swim?” I came back over by her.
“Just to clear my head. It’s better than coffee really.”
It might have cleared her head, but it was making mine awful fuzzy.
She sat back in the chair, which, I noticed now, was protected from the dampness of her skin and bikini by the bathrobe she’d removed at some point while sitting in it.
She said, “Should I put this back on?”
“Whatever makes you most comfortable.” I sat on the side of the bed. “So, what’s up?”
“Hmm?” She glanced at her robe, but didn’t put it back on. She bent her knees, placed the soles of her feet on the edge of the bed.
“What’s up? You woke me for a reason, I assume.”
“I’m leaving in two hours.”
“For where?” I said.
“Boston.”
“I don’t think that makes a whole lot of sense.”
“I know.” She wiped at some perspiration on her upper lip. “But tomorrow night my father will be out of the house, and I have to get in there.”
“Why?”
She leaned forward, her breasts pressing against her knees. “I have things in that house.”
“Things worth dying over?” I sipped my coffee, if only so the inside of the cup would give me something to look at.
“Things my mother gave me. Sentimental things.”
“And when he dies,” I said, “I’m sure they’ll still be there. Get them then.”
She shook her head. “By the time he dies, what I’m going to get might not be there anymore. One quick trip into the house on a night I know he’ll be away, and I’m free.”
“How do you know he’ll be away?”
“Tomorrow is the night of the annual stockholders’ meeting of his biggest company, Consolidated Petroleum. They hold it every year at the Harvard Club Room at One Federal. Same date, same time, rain or shine.”
“Why would he go? He’s not going to be able to make it next year.”
She leaned back, placed her coffee cup on the nightstand. “You don’t understand my father yet, do you?”
“No, Miss Stone, I guess I don’t.”
She nodded, used an index finger to absently wipe at a bead of water sliding down her left calf. “My father doesn’t honestly think he’s going to die. And if he does, he’s going to use every resource he has left to buy himself immortality. He’s the chief stockholder in over twenty corporations. The hard copy of his diversified portfolio for his United States interests alone is thicker than the phone book for Mexico City.”
“That’s some serious thick,” I said.
Something flashed through her jade eyes for a moment, something incensed. Then it was gone.
“Yes,” she said with a soft smile. “It is. His final months will be spent making sure each and every corporation allocates funds for something in his name—a library, a research lab, a public park, what have you.”
“And if he dies, how’s he going to make sure all this immortality-making gets done?”
“Danny,” she said.
“Danny?” I said.
Her lips parted slightly and she reached for her coffee cup. “Daniel Griffin, my father’s personal attorney.”