Confidence Tricks (33 page)

Poppy’s eyes met his, and there was still a strange dearth of emotion to them. “Thank you.”

Asprey nodded once.

“Can you two speed things up, please?” Graff’s bark caused both of them to jump. “Todd’s starting to come to, and I don’t want to have to hit him again. Asprey—you grab his legs. Poppy, start grabbing boxes. We’ll load him in your car, the stuff in mine. And be careful with Louis.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to argue in that, so Asprey left Poppy to make what she could out of his shirt and leaned down to take Todd’s feet. Graff took the helm, hoisting Todd’s arms and shoulders.

Moving a body was a lot harder than it looked. They shuffled him through the kitchen as quickly as they could, but the dead weight multiplied the strain of Todd’s already solid form. They dropped him twice in the parking lot, and it took several attempts to swing him up before they finally got him inside the trunk.

“Are we sure he’s going to be okay in there?” Asprey asked, adjusting Todd’s head so that it rested on a slightly dirty picnic blanket rather than the jack.

Poppy materialized behind him, a few boxes in her hand. She set them down to study Todd, and the way she looked down on the body in the trunk, without so much as a blink, filled Asprey with a strange sensation. The sensation wasn’t fear, and it wasn’t judgment—both of which seemed reasonable, given this situation. He mostly wanted to give her a hug.

“Always give it back if it turns out they need it more than you do, Todd. Always.” She slammed the trunk down. The shirt he’d worn hit her just at the top of her thighs, and she’d rolled the sleeves up, looking sexy as hell in all the wrong ways. It wasn’t a good time to admire the view. They had a half-dead man on their hands and Asprey was the only one who seemed to have a problem with it.

“I should never have involved you in all this,” she added, her quiet voice offset by a desperate kind of urgency. Her eyes flicked down as she took in Asprey’s bare chest, propelling his body backward in time, to the safety of the bat-room and the passion of two people who were just people—not thieves or con women or millionaires or ex-felons. “We need to get the rest of the boxes and go.”

It only took a few trips to clear most of the stuff out, since they decided no one would care if they left the television set or other large items. The hardest task was cleaning up the blood, but Asprey stood firm and wouldn’t budge until Graff got down on his hands and knees and sopped it up with a load of greasy kitchen towels. This was
his
mess, after all.

On their way out, Asprey paused a beat. “You’ll have to give me just a second,” he said. He ignored their protests as he ran into the kitchen. Graff might be able to run a backroom poker game and nonchalantly shove men into trunks, but he wasn’t about to desert that green pepper so it continued bobbing in the Brunswick stew.

He wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Not anymore.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Someone needs to give Asprey a shirt.

The scene spread out before them, a perfect tableau taken from a crime scene drama. Todd slumped in an inert heap underneath the docks, the moon barely a glimmer through the clouds. No sound other than the lapping of waves on crusty shores filled the night air, and the unmistakable scent of rotting seaweed surrounded them.

Graff had chosen an isolated spot near a collection of industrial warehouses, so there was no one about—and anyone who might have chanced by would have kept going, head bent, no questions asked.

Farther off, closer to the receding water’s edge, crumpled what remained of Poppy’s white dress, soaked with blood and with a hole clearly ripped open on the chest. One high heel lay spike up; the other bobbed in the waves. As a final touch, Graff tucked the gun—Todd’s own—into the bastard’s hand, so that the first thing he would see when he came to was evidence of his crime.

And yet, with all those touches, almost cinematic in their execution, Poppy couldn’t stop looking at Asprey and his stupid bare chest. He was eerily beautiful in the moonlight, his torso seeming to extend for miles to where it trailed into the waistband of his slacks, each movement an education in masculine grace.

“What?” Asprey asked, kicking some sand around to cover their footprints. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“It’s cold,” was all she said. No need to let him know how that young, ripped Abe Lincoln look was working on her. She crossed her arms over her chest. “And late. Graff? Are we ready?”

“You guys take your car and head back to the hangar.” Graff jogged up, looking flushed and, dare she say it—happy? The sense of criminal purpose suited him. “I’m going to hide out down by the pier and watch. I want to make sure he understands the full severity of what he’s done when he wakes up.”

“I think you covered it.” Poppy didn’t harbor any illusions about Todd Kennick’s sense of right and wrong. He wouldn’t make a push to see if Natalie was okay, wouldn’t try to contact the gangsters to issue a formal apology. He’d run—fast, and as far as his legs would take him.

And there it was, all cleaned up in a tidy bow. Natalie would no longer be showing up to work at In the Buff. The backroom poker game was cleared and gone. The three of them would disappear, all of Todd’s money in hand—well beyond the eighty grand she’d set out to recover.

The question was
why
?

Looking over at Graff, pride and maliciousness warring for supremacy in his face—that face so like Asprey’s but without a tenth of his humanity—she was almost afraid to ask. The half million? Simply because he could? Or was it that maybe, just maybe, he wanted to return the money to its rightful owners?

Either way, he was far too secretive about it.

“Don’t you think you’ve done enough for one night?” she asked Graff coldly. “We should all head back to the hangar to debrief. I’m very interested in what the hell that was all about.”

“Just take Asprey home, will you? I think he might try to strangle me if he stays here any longer.” The look Graff settled on Asprey was almost gentle. “I’m sorry things had to turn out this way.”

He tossed her the keys, but Asprey intercepted, catching them easily. “I can drive,” he muttered. “But before we go, I want you to give me your gun.”

“Excuse me?”

Asprey extended his hand. “You heard me. I’m not leaving you here with Todd and a gun. Is it loaded this time?”

Asprey still sucked at having a staring contest, blinking several times as he met his brother’s eyes and refused to back down, but Poppy couldn’t help a tick of pride from beating in her chest. Graff needed taking down a notch. Or twelve.

“Jesus, Asp. I’m not a murderer.”

Asprey’s hand didn’t move.

“Fine.” Graff reached into his waistband and handed the gun to Asprey, but not before pressing the magazine catch and pulling back the slide. “See? There were never even any bullets.”

For some reason, that fact only served to make Asprey angrier. She’d never seen him like that, the finely chiseled angles of his face hard and resolute, the laugh lines all but disappeared. He snatched the gun out of his brother’s hand and tossed it into the trunk of Poppy’s car, the dark stain of blood a testament to the night’s activities.

“Come on, Poppy.” Asprey moved his hand on her lower back as he helped her into the car. Always the gentleman, even in the face of spiraling criminal intent. “There’s not much more we can do here.”

She slid into the passenger’s seat, careful to keep her shirt-slash-dress from riding too high up her legs. The last thing either one of them needed was to be reminded of their current state of undress.

Not that it would have mattered. Asprey stabbed the keys into the ignition and forced the stick into reverse, his foot heavy on the pedal as he spun the car out of the empty parking lot. His eyes didn’t once stray from the road. She could have been sitting there naked and he probably would have remained at ten and two, fury rising from the surface of his skin in a smoldering combination of hot and cold.

“You probably shouldn’t drive so fast,” she murmured after a few minutes. They took the freeway onramp at a good eighty miles per hour, traffic being almost a negligible entity this time of the night. Or morning, depending on which way you looked at it.

“This isn’t fast.” He passed a car with a sharp turn. “This is efficient. The less time I spend on the road, the more time I have to devote to plotting Graff’s demise.”

Grumpy Asprey sounded so much like his brother she had to laugh. “Try explaining that to the cop who’s bound to pull you over. You don’t think that driving a car with a large amount of blood and a gun in the trunk might call for a little more moderation?”

He let out an irritated growl and lifted his foot from the pedal. Instead of slowing to a more reasonable speed, as she expected, Asprey took the nearest exit and pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned gas station.

“I don’t think loitering in this part of town is very smart either.” She peered out the window. Darkness enveloped the fifties-style building, the ancient pumps standing like stone relics to a simpler era. “Even in this crappy old car.”

“A carjacking is the least of my worries right now.”

“Oh yeah. I’m always forgetting—money is like a toy to you. Lose a car, buy a new one. Run out of funds, take a man’s briefcase full of blood money.”

“Why are you taking this out on me?”

Irritation slammed into her. “He’s your brother! You’re the untouchable thieves, rolling in trust funds and only out for—what? Fun? Is that what this is supposed to be?”

“That was
not
my idea of fun.” His voice was very near a growl—the good, protective kind. His hand gripped the back of her neck with intensity, forcing her to meet his gaze. “You could have been seriously hurt back there at the poker game. I swear to you, if I’d had any idea he was going to pull something like that… It’s not okay with me, Poppy, endangering your life.”

“Well, Graff seemed to be enjoying himself.” She tried not to notice how his sudden burst into heroics affected her, like she wanted to curl up in a ball and let him ameliorate every problem she’d ever had. First tackling Todd, then demanding the gun from Graff, now this smoldering, protective anger. She wasn’t the type of woman who needed rescuing, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate a man who wanted to try—especially when he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“Graff is a sociopath.”

“And yet you take all your orders from him,” she countered. “How comforting.”

Asprey gave a reluctant laugh and lowered his hand from her neck, letting his fingers fall softly through her hair. “He’s a sociopath with an innate sense of right and wrong—he always has been. He was the type of kid who saw a bully knock someone down on the playground and fought back, no matter how much smaller in size he was. I never knew if it was because he loved to beat the crap out of people, or because his moral compass was just that rigid. These days, I think it’s a little of both. If what he said is true—that Todd’s been cheating people across several states—then this is exactly the kind of vigilante justice he’d go for.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “What about you?”

“What about me?” Asprey’s voice was hoarse—raw and resigned. “I was the kid on the playground who stood near the monkey bars to watch the girls swing upside down in their dresses.”

“You never helped him fight?”

Asprey smiled tightly, etchings of sadness along his eyes. “He wouldn’t let me. But I always helped him get home afterward. Which is why—”

She didn’t wait to hear anything more. Leaning in, a hand flat on that gloriously bare, hair-smattered chest, she kissed him.

Asprey was hesitant at first, as though he wasn’t finished with their conversation and planned on fighting the baser urges that held her in their fiery grip. But her persistence won out, and his lips parted to allow her entry.

The victory of it was short-lived.

“I never thought I’d say this, but maybe we should save the kissing for a later date.” His mouth pressed gently against hers as he spoke. “We need to talk.”

She pulled away just enough to see his face, but not so much that the connection between them was lost. She’d almost
died
, and the need to feel connected to something, to someone, was stronger than any presumption at common sense. Especially since the morning was likely to bring with it the realization that she had officially ruined her chances of getting out of this unscathed. “I don’t want to talk, Asprey. I don’t want to think about Graff or Todd or jail or Bea or even what I’m going to have for breakfast in the morning. I just want you.”

Snagging his lower lip with her teeth, Poppy resumed their kiss, refusing to hold anything back as she climbed out of her seat and into his lap, reaching down to push the driver’s seat back as far as it could go. It wasn’t far, but by that time, she had either leg straddling his lap, their bodies a jumble of half-clothed limbs, so it didn’t really matter.

“We should get you home.” Asprey’s words carried no meaning, as he’d completely fallen into the kiss, his mouth hot and searing where it landed—on her lips, along her jaw, at the open collar of her shirt—causing her body to respond with shivers of pleasure.

“Absolutely,” she agreed, arching her back as his lips slid even further under the collar. “But if you’re going to sit there all night without a shirt on, I refuse to be responsible for my actions.”