Hearts in Vegas (Harlequin Superromance) (26 page)

She stood outside 3B and gazed down at the clay pots...five of
them, different sizes, filled with dirt, but nothing was growing. Stuck in one
pot was a small flag with a picture of a pink bear wearing some kind of boa, a
red star in the corner, with the words DEADHEAD REPUBLIC.

Deadhead? Seventies disco music? How old was this woman?
Seventy-five?

The music stopped abruptly, the silence filling with the
clatter of dry fronds in the breezes...and the grating slide of a latch.

A jolt of adrenaline slammed through her.

Shit!

Frances thought about running, about walking, even about
throwing herself over the metal handrail into that palm tree.

But she didn’t do any of those things.

Instead she ran in place, the rubber soles of her Keds smacking
softly against the concrete, too freaked to think about a direction, having the
crazy thought that when that door opened maybe she’d run right past them into N.
Davidovitch’s apartment....

The knob rattled.

As though woken from her trance by the snap of a hypnotist’s
fingers, Frances’s entire body relaxed. And with a cooler-than-Bacall swivel,
she walked away.

Behind her, the door creaked open.

“Brax, you’re gonna be fine, man,” said a male voice. “Just
remember to do the heel spin
after
the second
‘dancing yeah’ part, and practice your moonwalk. Like, a lot.”

“I don’t know if I can do this, Li’l Bit.”

Li’l Bit was giving dance lessons to
Braxton?
Frances slowed her pace, her ears perked up.

“Dude, stay with the flow and you’ll be fine. I didn’t know if
I could do those leg squats you showed me, but learned I could. By the way, man,
I really appreciate your helping me out at the gym. Meeting me there at
different times this week ’n all.”

“No problem.”

“Val said she’s almost done with your costume. It’s gonna be
righteous, dude...gonna help you win that Shelby.”

Costume? Win a Shelby?

“We’ll see,” Braxton said. “Anyway, we’re helping Grams’s
cause. That’s what matters.”

Frances had leaned against the handrail to look up at the sky,
far enough away to not look like a lurker but close enough to still hear their
conversation.
So this dance thing is some kind of
fund-raiser connected to his grandmother.

“Glenda, man, she’s the bomb. Makes me feel like I’m one of the
family. Which brings me to somethin’ I’ve been wanting to say to you, Brax.” He
cleared his throat. “Sometimes the truth comes down to a moment...and this
moment is it for you and me.”

“It’s been a long day, maybe we can talk later—”

“Brax, you’re my brother, man. I mean it.
My brother.
I’d kill for you.”

“Okay, I’m going now—”

“But I could never really kill.”

“Good to know. See you tomorr—”

“But I’d go right up to that line, man, because you’re
my brother.
I know, you already have a twin, which is
way groovy in a random universe, but if I could have one wish—” he sniffed
loudly “—I’d ask to be—” his voice broke “—your triplet, man.”

After a drawn-out silence, Braxton said, “This brother thing.
Like you said, I already have one, so how about you and I just be friends. Not
brothers. Not triplets. Deal?”

Pause. “Sure, Brax.”

“Have I upset you?”

“Yes. But I’ll get over it. Like Celine Dion said, life goes
on.”

“You mean ‘My Heart Will Go On.’”

“Yeah, man, that too. See you tomorrow night. I hope you
win.”

The door clicked shut.

She continued looking up at the sky, listening to Braxton’s
footsteps as he walked down the walkway, passed behind her, his steps fading as
he headed down the stairs.

Frances looked at the half moon, thinking how she came here
tonight to learn if Braxton was toying with her heart, and then to see whose
heart he preferred.

But what she really learned was that it took courage to give
love.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
HE
COFFEEMAKER BUBBLED
and hissed as the dark brew
dripped into the glass pot, the aroma filling the kitchen. Frances, her cell
phone wedged between her ear and shoulder, dropped a piece of wheat bread into
the toaster, pushed down the lever.

“That’s right, Charlie, both feeds go to my phone.” She opened
the refrigerator and peered into it. “A motion detector at each end of the
airstrip, yes.”

She pushed aside a jar of pickles that had taken up permanent
residency in the fridge, wondered why they had three jars of strawberry jam but
no butter.

“I don’t know where he set the other motion detector....” Was
that a Tupperware container? “Maybe he scooped out a chunk of cactus and put it
in there.”

She took the container out of the fridge and peeled back a
corner of the lid, which opened with a soft pop. Inside were several thick
slices of meat loaf with cut potatoes and carrots. She smiled.

“It’s just a hunch, Charlie,” she said, reclosing the container
and placing it back in the fridge. “Doesn’t hurt to keep an eye on that
airstrip, just in case.”

She smelled the bread toasting, made a mental note to pick up
butter on the way home tonight.

“I mentioned my uncle collected rare coins....” She poured
steaming coffee into the mug. “No, Dmitri said nothing...looked
disinterested...Oleg? Hard to say. Made a comment to me about meeting his wife
in Saratov two years ago, so he probably wouldn’t have been in New York when
they were stolen, but...right...a computer whiz can work from anywhere in the
world.”

She picked up her mug, blew on the steaming coffee. “Yes, he’s
there every day by five...uh-huh...giving Dmitri reports on what I say and do,
all of it inconsequential of course...yes, absolutely I trust Braxton.”

After ending the call, she felt a little guilty about
why
she now absolutely trusted Braxton. Skulking about
the Willow Creek Apartments, tracking him like some kind of stalker, wasn’t one
of her finer moments.

But it had sure made her happier. Now she knew there wasn’t
some mysterious other woman, just a deadhead process server with a big heart who
obviously wanted Braxton’s approval so much, he was almost begging for him to
call him brother. But Brax had pushed him away. She wondered what that was
about.

She glanced at the wall clock. A few minutes past eight. Her
dad must have come home late last night because she still hadn’t heard a sound
from him. Not that he’d ever been a morning person. At best, he’d stagger out of
bed, make coffee and plunk himself down in his chair to watch TV. But he usually
got up in time to at least say goodbye before she left for work.

She hadn’t heard him come in last night, hadn’t heard the
hallway floorboards squeak as he made his way to bed, but such noises would’ve
been drowned out by the screams and ominous music from the film she’d been
watching in her room. Scary movies weren’t her thing, but after reading that a
1944 noir classic,
The Uninvited,
was starting at
nine p.m., and that a curmudgeon film critic had enthusiastically called it
“riveting,” how could she not try it?

It had been riveting, all right. She should’ve turned it off,
but she couldn’t make herself. Had to follow the couple as they investigated the
deep, dark secrets of a haunted house, which made her think her of hers and
Braxton’s investigations at Russian Confections...although, hopefully, their
case didn’t have a heart-pounding, sinister twist at the end.

After finishing her coffee and toast, Frances grabbed her
jacket, stuffed her keys and phone into its pockets, grabbed her purse, which
she’d lock in the trunk of her car, and headed for work.

As she closed the front door behind her, something on the porch
caught her eye. A small pile of cigarette ashes, as though someone had stood
here, smoking. She looked around for a cigarette butt, didn’t see one. So this
person had stood here, smoking...long enough to take several puffs at least,
then left?

She and her dad didn’t smoke, and their only recent visitor had
been Braxton, who didn’t either.

Could be the groundskeeper, an old guy named Jay, who
maintained the trees and shrubs around the compound and almost always had a
cigarette dangling from his mouth. Sometimes he’d stand up here to clip the top
branches of her sissoo tree that crowded the porch. She looked at its leathery
green leaves, trying to assess if it had been recently trimmed, but what did she
know? Gardening ranked right up there with cooking in her life skills.

Frances shifted her gaze back to the ashes on the concrete,
just beside the round welcome mat on which she stood. An old wives’ tale flitted
through her mind, something about evil spirits being unable to harm a person
standing within a circle.

Silly stuff. Just as it’d been silly to stay up late, scaring
herself half to death watching that movie.

As she stepped off it the mat, a gust of chilly air swept past,
rattling the leaves of the sissoo tree.

* * *

“A
ND
NOW
,” V
AL SAID,
reaching into a
cardboard box lying on the marble floor, “the cutlass!”

Braxton reared back as his sister-in-law held up a small sword.
“Is that thing real?”

“No, it’s plastic, but sure as heck looks convincing, doesn’t
it?”

He and Val stood behind a large potted palm, which served as a
barrier of sorts, in the tent acting as the backstage area for the Magic Dream
Date Auction in the massive lobby at Sensuelle.

The inside of the tent was buzzing with activity. People
carrying clothes, clips of music as guys practiced their moves, hangers-on
laughing and drinking cocktails. A popcorn machine sat in the corner, offering a
sideshow of popping kernels that filled the air with their buttery scent.

“Avast, ye varmint!” Val swished the play sword in the air a
few times, its blade silvery bright under the lights. “Handy for slashing,
hacking and stabbing.” She handed it to Braxton. “Slip it in your scabbard.”

“My what?”

“Your sword holster.”

“Oh.” He slipped it into the plastic sheath hanging off his
belt.

“I bought these boots, too.” She held up a pair of high-heeled,
calf-high boots. “I called Dorothy to double-check your shoe size. Didn’t want
to assume you and Drake had
exactly
the same size
feet, but guess what? You really do! Try them on, see what you think.”

Braxton put them on and walked a few steps, thinking about how
he and his brother had exactly opposite attitudes on some things, though. Like
Frances. Since he and Drake had exchanged words on Tuesday, they hadn’t
discussed Frances again. He figured his brother just needed some time. Maybe
after he got to know Frances, saw she wasn’t some kind of threat, he’d accept
her.

“Boots are comfortable,” he said.

“Good, ’cause they look
freaking
awesome
with that outfit.” She pawed through the
cardboard box. “Pirates were quite the clothes horses, Brax, which reminds me of
you. Except they stole theirs off their victims.”

“Yeah, I prefer shopping.” He frowned. “Peacock feather?”

Val lightly waved the brilliant blue-and-green feather.
“Thought we’d stick it in your hat. I’ve written a little introduction the
announcer will read before your dance. He’ll say this exotic peacock feather was
in the treasure chest you pillaged from the Isle of Kasbah, and you’re giving it
to the first lady who bids one hundred dollars.”

He and Val had clashed when they first met last August. Braxton
and his brother had swapped identities so that Drake, pretending to be Brax,
could gain access to Yuri’s office. Things were moving so quickly that day,
there hadn’t been time for Drake to inform Val of the swap, so the first time
she met Braxton, she’d thought he was Drake.

And as the twin brothers’ six-year rift had only started to
mend that same day, Brax didn’t know Val was involved with his brother, so his
first words to her were some of his less artful pick-up lines.

Which had instantly clued Val in that this guy had to be
Drake’s identical twin because Drake had more class than that. The kind of class
Braxton now emulated as he’d put his bad-boy days behind him for good.

These days, he and Val got along fine. She was one of those
people who loved to help others, so she’d volunteered to help Grams with this
Magic Dream Date Auction. One of her tasks was to prep Braxton for his first and
only dance performance. When Grams suggested that he’d have a better chance to
win the Shelby if he were dressed like a pirate, Val was all over it.

“Let me slip this into the fold of your hat,” she said, sliding
in the feather. “Perfect! Just reach up, pull it out and hand it to the first
lady who bids a hundred.” She picked up a large oval hand mirror and handed it
to him. “Check yourself out, Captain Brax Sparrow.”

He gave her a look. “Let me guess...Captain Jack Sparrow’s
brother?”

She nodded. “Long-lost brother. Last seen, you were sinking
into the murky depths of the Roppongi Ocean, cutlass in hand, frantically
hacking at the iron-weighted rope pulling you under.”

Had to be the hormones. Val had a creative streak, but this and
the private dick story she told at the dinner table the other night were going
beyond the yellow brick road.

But the baby would be here soon, and things would settle down
to normal. Or as normal as they ever could be in the land of the Morgans.

“Drake said something about the two of you starting a
childbirth class tonight,” Braxton said.

“That’s right. We’ll have to leave around seven-thirty to get
there on time, so we’ll probably sneak out after you do your thing.”

He held up the mirror, checked out the three-cornered hat with
the peacock feather, his jaw darkened with five o’clock shadow. The only body
part over which they’d had a “creative difference”—Val’s words—were his eyes
when she tried to apply eyeliner and he refused.

Vehemently.

Then she mentioned how Johnny Depp had worn kohl around his
eyes as Captain Jack Sparrow in the movies, and to this day, women all over the
world swooned over his smoky eyes.

Braxton had agreed to a dash of kohl.

Angling the mirror, he looked at his bare chest. When Val had
suggested he shave it, he responded over his dead body, which ended that
creative difference. Below were the low-cut, tight-fitting red velvet breeches
Val had found at a secondhand store, the scabbard and calf-high boots she’d
purchased at a costume store.

“What do you think?” Val asked.

“I have a sudden urge to swill rum, weigh anchor and hoist the
mizzen! I think you should be Johnny Depp’s stylist in his next pirate
movie.”

Val didn’t just smile, she glowed.

“It’s six-forty, people!” bellowed a middle-aged guy with a
cookie-duster moustache. “Auction starts in twenty minutes! Manwiches, I’m
handing out numbers in the order you’ll be performing. Don’t swap numbers or
we’ll get more confused than we already are.”

“Are they really calling us
Manwiches?
” Braxton muttered.

“Okay,” Cookie Duster continued, looking down at his clipboard,
“where’s Michael Benning?”

“Over here!” A shirtless twentysomething guy, his ridged abs
visible from thirty feet away, waved. He wore tight blue jeans, a bulging thigh
muscle trying to escape through a rip in the denim.

Braxton looked around, noticed other buffed twentysomethings
were dressed similarly, most also absurdly tan for February with no qualms about
shaving their chests.

Apparently, nobody had told them wearing costumes gave them an
edge.

Yo ho ho. Looked like the joke was on him.

He felt dumber than the year he’d dressed as a spider for
Halloween. After reading how to make a spider costume, his eight-year-old self
decided to tackle the project solo, refusing any adult help. After stuffing
nylon stockings with black tissue paper, he attached them to a black sweat suit,
smeared black makeup on his face, and voilà. A spider.

As he, Drake and some of their pals were trick-or-treating
around the ’hood, one of the boys asked if Braxton was an insect ’cause he only
had six legs. Or were they wings? Another kid said Braxton’s favorite comic hero
wasn’t Spider-Man, but Spider-Insect, and the jokes just kept rolling, all night
long.

Tonight, he had all his pirate parts in order, but Captain Brax
Sparrow looked as though he’d crashed a private Chippendale party.

“Just got a text from your mom,” Val said, “Grams is sitting
with the Keep ’Em Rollin’ board members, and your mom and Drake are taking their
seats now. She wants to know if she should save one for Frances.” Val paused.
“Oh, bad idea. We can’t have her anywhere near Drake.”

“Tell me about it. Not an issue, though, as I didn’t tell
Frances about this.”

“I’m sorry about Drake being so...” She gave her head a shake.
“That man can be fierce sometimes, but he has a good heart. Like those camera
feeds he helped you set up at that airstrip—told me he ran a feed to his phone
too, as a backup, in case you need help on the case.”

“Great.”

“Back to Frances, though. It’s probably good she isn’t here,
seeing a bunch of drunken women shoving bills down your breeches.”

Women could donate money to the Wheels auction in several ways.
Pay electronically through the website, bid at the auction or stuff cash into a
hunk’s clothes. It was the last one that unnerved him. Which also made him feel
like a hypocrite as he’d managed a strip club for years. Guess he would learn
tonight how it felt to be on the receiving end.

“I hope no one really
shoves
money,” he murmured.

“All that free booze, estrogen and too few men in one room?
Money-shoving might be the least of your worries. This place is just beggin’ for
one helluva hissy fit.” She looked approvingly at his costume. “I expect you to
take in lots of pieces of eight tonight, Captain Brax. Word to the wise, you
should tell Frances about this soon ’cause you’ll be going on a date soon with
your highest bidder.”