Plum Girl (Romance) (15 page)

She braced herself for a response instructing her not to pay him any never mind, but instead, he just nodded back and agreed. "It's a real great party." He appeared antsy, despite his light conversation—as if he wanted to say something but didn't know how to spit it out. But she did barely know the man; maybe he always acted this way in public. "Soooo—" he started clumsily.

"There you are!" Macey exclaimed, approaching Lonnie quickly. She swept up beside them in a heartbeat, blocking Lunther's access to the group.
Where did she come from?

"Hi, Macey," Lonnie said, with a
genuine
smile. "Are you having a good time?"

She smiled. "Everything is wonderful so far. You have obviously done an incredible job."

Her face flushed with pride. "Oh... thank you. Meijing's cooking takes a lot of the credit, I think. Oh, Macey, I want you to meet my friend Dominick." She felt strange calling Dominick her "friend," when he was more than that, but what could she say?
A friend whose cock I'd like to sample?
No, that would hardly be a viable alternative.

While Dominick and Macey exchanged pleasantries, Lunther fidgeted about where he stood. He shifted his leg weight several times, and wiped sweat from his pudgy upper lip. Macey didn't even glance in his direction. Finally, he did an about-face, and abruptly left.

"Will you excuse me?" Macey said suddenly. "I want to go thank Meijing for the terrific job she's done with the catering. Pardon me." She skirted away.

"Isn't Macey cool?" Lonnie said, turning back to her extremely fetching
friend.
"Don't you think she's beautiful?"

Dominick shrugged. "I don't know. I didn't really notice."

"Oh." She felt a pang of foolishness as she realized that she'd just made a point of directing her date's attention to another woman's desirability. Boy, she really was rusty.

He put his hand on his stomach. "Wanna get something to eat?"

"Sure," she agreed. They approached the buffet table, and Lonnie smiled hello to Bette Linsey who was explaining to another woman why au pairs were truly "divine inventions."

Lonnie had just begun surveying the long expanse of delicious-looking Chinese dishes when, all of a sudden, Delia—literally—
got in her face.

Shoving her body right in front of Lonnie's, she blocked her access to the dim sum. Her dangling earrings were unencumbered by her hair, which was efficiently plastered into a half-teased upsweep. A gust of hard alcohol breath hit Lonnie's nose, and she tried to back away, but Delia just leaned in closer. Their faces were mere inches apart when Delia sneered with disgust.

"You know something?" she said seethingly. "You don't know a damn thing about nothing."
Seems reasonable.
"You don't have a
fucking
clue." Then she stomped off.

Lonnie's face scrunched in confusion. "What the hell—?"

Dominick shook his head, equally confused, and put his hand on the back of her neck. He massaged it lightly, grinned, and said, "I thought the people I worked with were weird."

She was about to agree and make a joke about it, but his fingers were working the back of her neck unbelievably. Was it possible to climax from a neck massage? She felt heat pulsing between her legs. She turned to look up at him.

Unconsciously, her lips parted more and her pupils dilated. He noticed.

For a moment, he had the same intensity in his own face. His fingers strummed beneath her hair, and an irrational part of her wished he would tighten them, pull her to him, and kiss her passionately right there. Instead, his hand kneaded her skin even more deeply, and she thought she'd start moaning if she didn't put a stop to this.

Luckily—sort of—he got himself in check. If they were going to take it slow, then they'd better not tear off their clothes and do it on the buffet table, no matter how logical that option seemed. His hand dropped, and they averted their gazes just long enough to get back to reality.

"So...," she said a little breathlessly, "hungry?" She meant the food.

He didn't. "God, yeah."

* * *

The rest of the night moved along briskly, but it still seemed too long to Lonnie. Her glittery heels were starting to hurt and her stockings were starting to chafe. She was glad Peach finally met the Twit & Bell staff she'd been hearing about for the past six months. Matt had turned on the charm most of the night, making his interest in Peach clear.

Lyn Tang had showed up at 9:30, and Beauregard had done nothing to conceal his joy. The minute she walked in, his mouth dropped into an awed O and he rudely abandoned the conversation he'd been having with Bette and Lonnie about Bette's new yacht. Without even excusing himself, Twit abruptly walked away, sidled up to Lyn Tang, and began what would become a long night of obsequious fawning. From what Lonnie could see, Lyn had been more than gracious, but hadn't given any indications about joining the firm.

Now Lonnie looked at the clock. 11:44 p.m. She was sitting alone at a table because Dominick had just excused himself to go to the bathroom. As she sat there, she watched people mingling and saying goodbye, and she couldn't help thinking that while the party was a success, the whole night had seemed
off.
More than once, Lonnie had spotted B.J. trying to talk to Bette. She always either coldly dismissed him, or just dodged him altogether. Earlier, Lonnie had tried to introduce Peach to Macey, but Macey had acted perceptibly distant and distracted. Suffice it to say, Peach hadn't been all that impressed.

Suddenly Lonnie felt a hot, enticing breath on her ear. "You want to get out of here any time soon?"
Hell, yes.
Dominick's voice was low and sexy, and practically impossible for her to resist at the moment. He was standing behind her chair, crouched down, and she leaned into him a little. She could smell Dominick's cologne; it was subtle, but it was still having an arousing effect on her.

"Mmm... that sounds great. But Peach looks like she's having fun. Let's wait a little longer." It looked like her little sister was charming Judge Stephens, his wife, and Matt across the room.

"Okay," he murmured, and lightly nuzzled her hair with his forehead.

Lonnie sighed dreamily and leaned in to him a little more. He groaned softly. "Lonnie, you're making me crazy. I know we're taking it slow, but how about one kiss? C'mon, one kiss.
Now. "
She opened her mouth to protest, but she couldn't. She was desperate to kiss him. Peach was still immersed in conversation so she figured it would be okay.

He took her hand and they hurried out of the ballroom and down the hall. "Where are we going?" she called after him, but he didn't answer. He just steered her around the corner to a room with an open archway. A gold-plated sign that read coats was screwed to the adjacent wall. The second they entered the room, Dominick grabbed Lonnie's waist and pulled her to him. Their kiss started breathy and passionate, but within seconds, became white-hot and wet. Lonnie clung to Dominick's shoulders, as he backed them both into a rack of coats and against the wall for support. Except it didn't feel like the wall....

It felt like a person.

Aah!
Lonnie jumped forward, startled, her heart suddenly racing. Was someone there? Before she could say anything, she heard a sweeping noise, and then a loud thud. She and Dominick looked down and saw Lunther Bell's head and torso sticking out from under the coats. There was a smeared crimson line running down his neck and over his Adam's apple.

"Aah!" Lonnie screamed, and buried her face in Dominick's shoulder, willing away the image of Lunther lying on the floor with his eyes wide open. "Omigod, Omigod...," she was muttering to no one, and shaking. Dominick put both his arms around her and held tightly.

"Holy shit," he muttered soberly.

"Is there any way he's not dead?" Lonnie mumbled into his shoulder. "You know... maybe he's just... catatonic?" She was grasping at straws and she knew it. She had no experience with corpses, and even she could tell that Lunther was dead. His face was stark pale, his eyes were wide and blank, and his mouth hung open lifelessly. He couldn't have been dead long since Lonnie had just seen him in the ballroom...
Wait.
When was the last time she'd seen him at the party? She couldn't remember.

"He's dead, baby," Dominick said softly. "We've got to get someone. Come on." They started back down the hall, but hotel security stopped them in their tracks.

"Ma'am, what happened?" a security guard asked. He was dressed in a dark blue suit, with a prominent yellow badge on the lapel, and a mother-of-a-walkie-talkie hanging on the front of his pants. "We heard screams," he added, and motioned his head to the other security guard, who was a foot behind him.

Lonnie was near frantic. None of it seemed real, yet she'd never felt a more visceral fear or revulsion. She thought she was going to throw up. She felt like crying. She didn't even like Lunther, but it wasn't that kind of crying. It was a shook-up, horrified, for-whom-the-bell-tolls kind of crying. Tears burned the corners of her eyes, and vomit stayed clogged at the top of her throat.

"There's a man in the coatroom. He's... he's dead." The security men pushed past her and Dominick, and headed to the coatroom. Thank goodness she'd worn a black wool coat that night and not her beloved ice-blue one, because she was absolutely never going in that coatroom again, and planned
never
to retrieve what she'd left there.

Lonnie squeezed her eyes shut and tears started to fall. Silently, they streamed down her face, taking some of her black mascara with them, and sliding into the corners of her mouth. She swallowed, pressing the salty taste to the roof of her mouth, and shook her head. She couldn't believe it. Lunther Bell was dead.

Chapter 11

"Let's start from the beginning."

Lonnie managed a nod, and Detective Joe Montgomery flipped another page in his pad. She'd already told him twice exactly how she'd found Lunther's body. How, when, and why. The why was what she'd been dreading most.
What was I doing in the coatroom? Making out with my date. Hi, I'm twenty-seven.
She'd briefly toyed with a more explanatory approach.
Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Suffice it to say, Detective, I haven't been "getting any" for quite some time.
But ultimately, there had been no need. She'd flushed when she'd told him that she and Dominick had sneaked off, and he hadn't seemed too interested in that anyway. He was far more concerned with the details of Lunther's evening prior to discovering his body. And, unfortunately, she came up three-quarters empty on that subject.

After the security guards alerted the police, it had been a matter of minutes before the whirring blasts of sirens intruded upon the party. Everyone had bolted out of the ballroom to see what was going on. Lonnie had heard some talk in the lobby about a heart attack, but she remembered seeing blood on his neck, and with the way the police were questioning people, she wasn't so sure. It had taken almost an hour for the commotion to settle. Now, it appeared that most everyone had left. Lonnie and Dominick remained, each reiterating what happened to a separate cop, while Peach waited for them on a lobby sofa.

Lonnie couldn't help wondering exactly how the police had divvied up the interviews. The cop questioning Dominick was a small-framed rookie in uniform, with an oversize police hat that kept slipping down the side of his head and over his ears. Meanwhile, Lonnie was answering to a big, hulking plainclothes detective who was gruff, abrupt, and one helluva close talker. Her nerves were already frayed, so Joe Montgomery's guilty-until-proven-even-guiltier demeanor did nothing to help her state of mind.

"You've worked at Twit & Bell for what, six months?" he asked without looking up.

"Yeah, a little over six months, I guess."

"So you knew Mr. Bell pretty well, then?"

"No!"

Montgomery's head shot up at her strong reaction. Now he stared hard. She labored to gulp before qualifying, "Uh, what I mean is just... I mean, I barely even knew him. That's all."

His eyes continued to bore through her. Great, once the guy started looking, he overdid
that,
too.

"Twit and Bell's a pretty small firm, isn't it?"

Lonnie didn't need two master's degrees to figure out where this was going. "Yes, but... well, of course I
knew
Lunther. Technically. But I just meant that I... We hardly ever interacted, that's all."

"Uh-huh," he said, and wrote something else down on his pad. She tried to release a sigh without sounding guilty. This was ridiculous! Why was she getting so worked up? She hadn't done anything wrong, and certainly she had an alibi since she'd spent the whole night with Dominick. It wasn't as if Detective Montgomery had said anything accusatory, anyway. It was Lonnie. Her conscience was inherently guilty by default.

While Montgomery flipped back a few pages and scrunched his eyebrows, pondering something he undoubtedly didn't care to confide, Lonnie surveyed him. If she had to guess, she'd say he was in his early forties. His bulky stature indicated that he was one of those very developed guys who stayed intimidatingly strong no matter how old they got. Hard lines were etched along his mouth and around his eyes to give him a look that was somewhere between craggy and sexy. His hair couldn't decide if it was brown or gray, but his eyes were very clearly green.

"So let's see here. You didn't really know Bell, but you exchanged a little small talk earlier in the evening," he read from his pad. "Only for a few minutes."

"Right. Lunther left after Macey came over."

"Macey Green," Montgomery said.

"Mmm-hmm."

"Did Bell say where he was going when he left?"

"No. He didn't say anything, really. He just stood there for a second sort of awkwardly, and then he walked off." Montgomery nodded and jotted something down.

"And you and your boyfriend stayed there talking to Macey?"

"Yeah, well, no. I mean, she left, too. She went to talk to the caterer. They're friends."