Bait & Switch (21 page)

“You, too, Sam,” Leeza said, then turned back to Cary and smiled. The world immediately seemed like a brighter place.

She’s only smiling because she thinks you’re the Boy Scout
, his conscience taunted.
You were trying to fool yourself that she was more your type than his. But now that you know her secret, can’t you see she’s perfect for him?
 

Cary pressed his fingers to his temples, trying to shut out the thoughts. He and Leeza were consenting adults. He hadn’t done anything wrong.

Except take her virginity under false pretenses. You also pretended to believe she hadn’t been a virgin when you knew damn well that wasn’t the case.

What was he supposed to do? Ask why she was putting on an act? Tell her he wasn’t Mitch?

Yes
, the voice said.

No
, a louder voice inside his head screamed. He couldn’t do it. Not when she wanted loyal and dependable and he was faithless and irresponsible.

“Are you okay, Grant?” Leeza looked sweetly concerned. He felt like an idiot for carrying on an imaginary conversation with his damned conscience.

“Couldn’t be better,” he said. “Say, why don’t you come with us? One of the player’s dads owns I Scream for Ice Cream. Kid says his dad has a scream machine by the cash register. You buy an ice cream, he records your scream and plays it back for you.”

He thought it was a clever sales gimmick. He was pretty sure Leeza did too, but she gave one of her elegant shrugs. As though a place with a scream machine wasn’t sophisticated enough for her.

“You go along without me,” she said. “I only stopped by the field to see if you were available for dinner.”

She made the statement as though she were used to issuing men invitations. Cary noticed the way her jaw clenched and wasn’t fooled. Leeza was as nervous as a teenager on her first date. Before he could agree, she forged ahead.

“Did you know that the average person eats about sixty thousand pounds of food in their lifetime?”

“Sixty thousand pounds,” he repeated and couldn’t help smiling at her. Damn, she was cute. “You don’t say.”

“I do say,” she added pertly. “Did you know that sixty thousand pounds is about the weight of six elephants?”

“Sounds appetizing,” he said with a laugh.

“Hey, Dumbledore,” Little Bit yelled from across the field. “Are you coming or not?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Cary called back. “I’m coming.”

“You should go,” Leeza said, and he saw her swallow. For courage, he figured. “But how about dinner? It’ll be my treat.”

Her mention of money made Cary remember he had very little of it left, which is why he’d agreed to transport another load of crates to Miami for Captain Turk.

“I can’t tonight, Leeza.” He hadn’t intended to offer an explanation but her crestfallen expression changed his mind. “I have to go back to Miami on that business I was telling you about.”

“You mean on the business you
haven’t
told me about?”

“I can’t. It’s, um, complicated,” he said, although it was really quite simple. She thought she was hanging out with his brother the cop. She wouldn’t want to fraternize with a gambler who had a hunch he was transporting illegal goods.

“And you have to do this business at night?” she asked.

“Afraid so.” Captain Turk had insisted that the nighttime hours were safer. Cary hadn’t asked safer for what.

“Dumbledore!” Little Bit yelled again.

Cary looked over his shoulder. The team members had packed up their equipment and appeared more impatient than four-year-olds waiting in line to see Santa.

“How about I call you tomorrow?” he asked Leeza.

When Leeza nodded, he bent down and gave her a lingering kiss on the lips before he turned and jogged over to the team.

She thinks your brother is going to call her tomorrow.

He sighed. He’d heard the murmuring of his conscience before, of course, but never in a voice so loud and clear.

How, he wondered, did a man go about getting rid of the voice of reason?

He should have listened to the voice of reason instead of letting his brother rope him into this impossible scheme, Mitch thought as he watched the little man dance in front of him with his fists raised.

If he remembered correctly, the voice — his very own deep, sensible voice — had originally said no.

“Come on, put ’em up,” Stu Funderburk cried. He was a diminutive man who could juke and jive, a Muhammad Ali wanna-be in the body of a jockey. “I can take you.”

Mitch glanced around the shabby trailer park, which looked depressing in the gathering gloom of twilight. A light rain had begun to fall, keeping whoever else was home inside. He had no way of knowing if anyone was watching from their windows.

Or if the man in the green sedan, who had followed him on the drive from Charleston to this community on the outskirts of Summerville, was somewhere in the shadows spying on him.

Mitch had changed his mind about confronting his tail earlier that day when he’d gotten a look at the sedan’s license plate. A cop friend in Atlanta was going to run the plate when he had the time. Then, when Mitch knew who he was dealing with, he’d decide on a course of action.

“You afraid of me?” the jockey-sized Ali asked, bouncing on the soles of his miniature feet. “You afraid I’m gonna get a piece of you?”

Ah, geez. One punch from Mitch would probably break Stu Funderburk
into
pieces. Which was pretty much what Gaston Gibbs wanted him to do.

“I’m not gonna hit you,” Mitch said in a soft voice, hoping nobody — especially the guy tailing him — overheard.

Funderburk stopped dancing but didn’t drop his fists. “What do you mean you’re not gonna hit me? You’re a debt collector, aren’t you?”

“I’m a different kind of debt collector.” Mitch nodded toward Funderburk’s trailer, in front of which he’d surprised the small man five minutes ago. “Let’s go inside and talk about this like gentlemen.”

“You expect me to invite the enemy in? Unh unh, no way. You think I don’t know what’ll happen in there? I might not come out alive.”

Mitch let out a breath. This guy was really starting to get on his nerves. “Use your head. If I kill you, Flash doesn’t get his money.”

“Flash isn’t getting his money anyway because I don’t have it.”

That came as no surprise. Mitch ran into cases like this all the time. Down-on-their-luck guys like Stu Funderburk who thought they could get something for nothing through theft or gambling.

“We’ll work something out,” Mitch said. “I’m authorized to accept a down payment.”

Funderburk’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not supposed to tell me that until you’ve thrashed me.”

“I told you I wouldn’t thrash you.” Mitch took a few angry steps toward the other man. He had to make it look good if his tail was watching. “Now let me in.”

Five minutes later, he was sitting on a worn sofa in a cramped, dark living room counting out the money Funderburk had given him. It was barely a third of what he owed.

Mitch rubbed his jaw. “Flash won’t be happy about this.”

“I knew it,” Funderburk shrieked, leaping to his feet and into the Ali stance. “I knew you were going to beat me up.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Mitch detected a movement outside Funderburk’s window. It was probably Gibbs’s flunky, making sure he did the job on Funderburk. Good thing the thick coat of grime on the windows would prevent him from getting a good view of what was going on inside.

“How’s your scream?” he asked Funderburk.

“You can’t make me scream,” Funderburk said. “I’m little, but I’m tough.”

Mitch stood up, nearly banging the top of his head on the ceiling of the trailer. He loomed over the smaller man, making his eyes mean and his voice rough. “If you don’t scream in the next three seconds, I’m gonna come over there and make you.”

Funderburk screamed, long, loud and so shrilly Mitch had to cover his ears. When Funderburk was through, he waited, looking as though he expected Mitch to punish him for eardrum damage.

“What you gonna do now?” Funderburk asked.

“What
I’m
gonna do isn’t the issue,” Mitch said. “Do you have a pair of crutches and some plaster you can put on one of your legs?”

AT ABOUT THE TIME MITCH determined the green sedan wasn’t following him back to Charleston after his meeting with Funderburk, his cell phone rang. He picked it up from the seat beside him and checked the display.

It was Peyton, who now had Mitch’s cell number. Of course, she thought it was Cary’s new number. Mitch got angry at his brother all over again. Except he was uncomfortably aware that Cary now had ample reason to be livid with him.

Keeping his eyes on the road, Mitch clicked on the phone. “Hey, Peyton.”

“Oh, good, I got you the first time.” Peyton’s voice reminded him of all the intimate things they’d done to each other when they made love in the waves. His body temperature shot up ten degrees. Yep, he was a goner over her, all right. Even if she wasn’t rightfully his. “I hope this isn’t a bad time.”

The top was up now, the rain drizzling on the vinyl.

 
“Not at all,” Mitch said. It had been a bad time thirty minutes ago. Stu Funderburk had crutches but they’d called a half-dozen medical supply stores, on Mitch’s cell phone no less, before they located something that would approximate a cast. “What’s up?”

“I have a carriage tour in a few minutes so I don’t have a lot of time, but I need to tell you I can’t meet you for dinner tonight.”

Relief hit him as hard as the disappointment. He hadn’t been able to get the words out the night before, but he’d promised himself he was going to tell her tonight that he wasn’t Cary.

The reprieve was only temporary, but it gave him a few more hours to pretend she’d forgive him.

“I want to meet you,” she continued in a silky, sexy voice. “So much. But I can’t. Can you come over later?”

“I better not,” Mitch said reluctantly. “I have to bartend tonight. I won’t get off until after two a.m. and neither of us got much sleep last night.”

“You’re probably right.” Her voice was thick with disappointment. “I’m spending tomorrow afternoon with my parents but I should be able to get away by five or six. Maybe we can do something after that.”

“I’ll call you,” he said.

“Great,” she said and he heard somebody calling her from a distance. “Listen, I’ve got to go. I’m sorry about canceling but it’s important I meet Gaston tonight to talk about his plans for renovating those buildings.”

Alarm skittered through him at the mention of Flash Gordon’s more common name. “But—”

He didn’t get to finish the sentence. “Hold the horses. I’m coming,” she yelled. “Sorry, Mitch, but I really do have to go.”

The line went dead. Dread reached out its cold fingers and touched every inch of him.

He was probably being unreasonable. Gibbs was so protective of his public face that Peyton wasn’t in any danger from him.

On the other hand, Peyton didn’t know who Gibbs was or what he was capable of doing. She thought of him as a heroic family friend who out of the goodness of his heart rescued her beloved historic properties from demolition.

Renovating those buildings had nothing to do with goodness because Gibbs didn’t possess any. If he were involved in a project, something was in it for him. A substantial profit, most likely.

Mitch squelched the urge to call the carriage company and leave a message that Peyton should not meet G. Gaston Gibbs III tonight or any night.

He’d sound like a jealous lover and he couldn’t risk that. He couldn’t do anything to make Gibbs seem like the more reasonable man.

Because the last place he wanted Peyton to head for comfort after he confessed his deception was Gibbs’s arms.

“THE BOXX WANTS TO SEE YOU in the back,” Millie Bellini of the towering hair and the Kilamanjaro breasts told Mitch later that night. She smiled lasciviously at him over the bar with her orange lips, smacking them together.

“
I
want to see you, too,” she added. “Much
more
of you.”

Oh, brother
, Mitch thought as he finished washing a glass.
Here she goes again
. Millie rested her elbows on the counter and leaned forward. Mitch bent backward.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” Millie said.

So what else was new? She’d propositioned him in one way or another every night since he’d started working at Epidermis. Because he suspected his brother enjoyed being a sex object, he made himself keep smiling.

“I’m thinking ’bout having a ladies night at Epidermis one night a month with guys up on stage. You interested?”

“In stripping?” Mitch asked.

“You’re cute, honey buns, but nobody’s gonna pay to see you unless you take off your clothes.”

Mitch’s immediate impulse was to refuse but then he had a thought. “When would this be?”

“Not for another three or four weeks,” Millie said. “I can’t get the acts lined up till then.”

By necessity, this masquerade would be long over by them. Mitch had only taken two weeks off from work and one of them was already gone. Three or four weeks from now, he’d be back in Atlanta patrolling the streets. Cary, hopefully, would have resumed his life in Charleston.

“Pencil me in,” Mitch said. “I’d love to strip for the ladies.”

“Really?” Millie’s mascara-encrusted eyes widened.

“Really. But I want you to promise me one thing. If I’m not working here anymore, hunt me down and remind me I said I’d strip.”

“I will.” Millie rubbed her hands together. Mitch thought she might be salivating. “I can help you pick out your music. I bet you can do a stand-up number to
You Sexy Thing
.”

“Talk to me about it in a couple of weeks.” Mitch moved around the counter and away from the bar. “I won’t be able to focus on it until then.”

“You mean it?” Millie’s voice followed him through the music and the smoke.

“Sure do,” he called back absently. He only wished he could be there to see the look on Cary’s face when Millie told him he’d agreed to a striptease.

Cary was so unpredictable, though, that he might take off all his clothes and boogie. After what Mitch had discovered about his brother in the past week, he wouldn’t put anything past him. None of the things he’d learned, however, had made him any less determined to extract Cary from his latest jam.