Too Hot to Handle (9 page)

“Between 1956 and 1957, there were only sixty-seven made,” she said. “Only a handful survive today. This one was number sixty-seven. I didn’t believe it, even when he—even when Logan told me. I had to check the serial number myself. Number sixty-seven. Rumored to be lost sometime in the sixties. That car’s one of a kind. Priceless. Seeing her in a chop shop in West Hollywood was like finding a unicorn in a glue factory.”

Maybe it would take more than the contents of his savings account to buy the car. He might have to raid his trust fund.

“I still find it hard to believe you didn’t drive it.”

“Not even a spin around the block. I returned her to Logan’s house, collected my money, and went home.” Her leg stilled. “I didn’t even talk to Logan when I dropped the car off. He was busy. I left her in the garage and took the money he’d left on the table. Twenty thousand dollars, just like he said, a nice chunk of change for two days’ work. He was so pleased with my efficiency, he threw in a bonus.”

“That doesn’t sound like Logan Burrows.” The man was known to spend hours grinding his opponent down during negotiations on even the most trivial matters. He paid people for the job they’d done and nothing more. Logan wasn’t the kind to give anyone a bonus, and he wouldn’t have paid Honey twenty thousand dollars to find a car, no matter how nice the vehicle was. Not when she’d do the same thing for a cool five hundred dollars and a night on the town.

“Are you sure it was him?”

“Of course I’m sure. I might not know the man close enough to walk up to him at a party, but he gave the graduation speech my year at the academy. Tall guy, steel-gray hair, big ears.”

The description was accurate, if crude.

Jack put a hand to his chest, checking her patchwork. It would do. He pulled his T-shirt back down into place. “Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on. All this fuss over a car. He loved the Super Bee, but he wouldn’t kill someone for it.

“The thief must have set the fires,” he said. “The man who stole the car from Logan originally. He must have been angry when he got back to the chop shop. He didn’t get his money. He didn’t get the car. He got screwed, and he wanted revenge.”

“See, that’s the part I don’t get. I’m not an idiot. It’s not like I handed out business cards. There are a lot of car thieves in Los Angeles, and they’d all like to get their hands on the sixty-seventh Volvo Sport, but this guy didn’t know what he had. He was planning to chop her down for parts.” She frowned. “It was like the thief stole the car just to have it destroyed. It’d be like torching—what’s that famous painting? The one with the woman in the ugly dress.”

“The
Mona Lisa
?”

“No, the other one.”

“
Whistler’s Mother
?” Jack’s mind scrambled, trying to come up with possible paintings. “
Girl with a Pearl Earring
?”

“Marilyn Monroe. With the colors. Who’s it by? Andy Warhol?”

“That’s not a painting. It’s a print.”

For a moment, Jack almost believed the act she was putting on. Just another kid from the inner city who stole cars instead of cracking library books. He caught himself, though. Honey might have shown up to high school with a knack for getting into trouble, but she was smart. More intelligent than most of the trust-fund brats he’d grown up with. And she’d gotten a first-class education at the academy.

“You know you don’t have to do that, right?” He reached out to smooth a lock of strawberry hair back behind her ears. “You don’t have to pretend you don’t know things. I know how smart you are, Honey.”

“I’m not that smart.” Her laughter was a little too loud. “Not smart enough to stay away from Logan Burrows. I knew better.” She smacked her palm on the floor, a little too hard. “I knew he was trouble. They’re all trouble. All those rich, spoiled brats from Black Palm Park who think the rules don’t apply to them. Those trust-fund types think they can get away with whatever they want.”

Rich, spoiled brats. Trust-fund types.
Jack’s entire body stilled. There was a force behind her words—more than annoyance. Real anger. Rage at the system she didn’t quite understand and the people she’d been forced to deal with for so many years.

He was one of those people. Captain of the high school soccer team, dating the head cheerleader, prom king. He knew he’d had certain advantages, but he’d never known how much Honey resented him for it. “You don’t like rich guys?”

“As far as I’m concerned, the world would be a better place if they were all at the bottom of the ocean.”

“I never knew you felt so strongly about it. A lot of your friends have money. You chose to attend Black Palm Park Academy.”

“Those people aren’t my friends. The only reason I went to the academy is because—” She caught herself. “Never mind. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No.” Jack couldn’t let her stop. Not while the force of her words was making her shake with something between anger and despair. “Honey.” An emotion stirred in his chest, something he’d never felt before. Not about Honey.

It was worry. A deep sense of caring. He wanted her to be all right. No matter what else happened, he needed her to be okay. It wasn’t only her physical safety he cared about, either. Her emotional well-being mattered to him. “You can talk to me about anything.”

This wasn’t something that could be patched with antibacterial ointment and gauze. The only thing that would help Honey was to talk this thing out. Even if it made him feel like death warmed over. “Why did you go to the academy?”

“When my father died—” Honey bit her lip. “My father’s death knocked me sideways. I had a hard time dealing with it.” She swallowed a ragged breath. “He wasn’t a criminal. Did you know that? Everyone knows the Moores are rotten to the core. As bad as they come. He was a college professor. He taught English at UCLA. Byron and Shelley. He wrote poetry.”

Poetry. Jack wouldn’t have guessed that. Not in a million years.

The entire time he’d known Honey, she’d always been her grandfather’s little girl. Jack had never thought about the man who’d given Honey the Moore name.

A college professor who wrote poetry.

“Was it any good?”

“He got published in some anthologies. He’d just finished a book when he died.
Orange Blossom Innocence
by Henry Moore.” Honey’s voice shook. “He walked into a liquor store robbery. Freak thing. The thief was some druggie looking to finance his next high. No way that anyone could have known. One moment my dad was there, and the next I’m moving from Brentwood to the Valley.”

“It must have been a hard transition.”

Honey swallowed hard, choking back a sob. “I started acting out, misbehaving and skipping school. I failed eighth grade entirely. They were going to hold me back. Then my grandfather goes out one morning, and when he got back I was enrolled in the academy. Full scholarship.”

“Do you know how he managed that?”

“No, but I know Logan Burrows had something to do with it.”

It made a strange kind of sense. Logan’s name was synonymous with money and power. If anyone could break the rules to get a girl with bad grades and a worse reputation into Black Palm Park Academy, it was Burrows. It would also explain the bonus he’d given Honey for bringing in his car. They had history together.

“You were lucky.”

“Luck didn’t have anything to do with it. Logan did. They forgave my bad grades, found me a tutor, and let me skate through classes until I got my feet back under me. You helped with that.”

Had he? He’d never been able to tell what Honey was thinking—not the week they’d been together, and definitely not afterward. Not when she’d been more interested in making his life a living hell than pouring out her heart.

“I hated it. Everyone in that school—they all knew I didn’t belong. My family didn’t have money, power, or influence. We weren’t from Black Palm Park, and no one ever let me forget it.”

The experience Honey described was completely foreign to Jack. But then, he’d belonged, in every sense of the word. He’d never really thought about what might happen to the kids who didn’t. “I never treated you like an outsider.”

“You were different,” she said. “You were special.”

If he was so special, why had she turned him away after one kiss? It was a question he’d wanted the answer to for years.

Nine days. Three dates. One kiss. Then his entire world had turned upside down.

He’d asked her once why she’d left him, but she’d never answered. The possibilities were endless. Insanity, homosexuality, a vow of celibacy.

Or he was a really bad kisser.

Jack’s cell phone rang, providing the distraction he needed. He leaned sideways to pick it up off the floor, wincing at the pain in his ribs. “Hello?”

The call was from a doctor he knew at St. Anne’s emergency room, where the other car’s driver had been taken after the morning’s crash. The doctor was calling to tell him who the victim was: a low-level thug. Not a name that Jack recognized. Not the kind of person who could orchestrate a villainous plot involving fires on two sides of town. The sort of guy who could be hired on a street corner and trusted to do something bad.

The police weren’t interested in him. With Jack’s encouragement, they’d classified the morning’s crash as an accident. The most they could charge the thug with was reckless driving.

A broken collarbone and a mild concussion meant the driver was one bad guy who wouldn’t be bothering them again for a while, but he could still use the phone. Jack could only imagine the kind of information he would pass on to his compatriots. Detailed descriptions—maybe even a license plate number or a name.

Jack was a police officer, an active member of the community.

He was in the phone book.

“We need to go.”

“Where?”

“Someplace safe. Someplace with security.” His head was pounding. He desperately needed a cup of coffee and an Advil. Or twenty. There was only one place he could think of where he knew they’d be safe.

“You’re not going to like it.”

The pool was beautiful—clear blue water laid out like a blanket, long enough to make an Olympic swimmer happy—but she was more interested in the view. Across the backyard, down a small hill, and over a six-foot fence, Logan Burrows’s castle smoldered ominously.

She’d never realized how close the two men lived before.

She’d never seen Jack’s house from this perspective before, either. Some other time, she might have snooped in his childhood bedroom, looking for any indication that they had similar interests.

But that probably wouldn’t be the polite thing to do. For the moment, she was content playing the guest, enjoying the relative safety of the Ogden mansion, and wondering what the hell she’d gotten herself into.

Retrieving the Volvo for Logan was supposed to have been an easy job. More money than she’d ever seen in one place for a few hours’ work.

Too good to be true.

Her grandfather had always said that if something seemed too good to be true, it was probably a setup. “Run away, baby girl,” he’d chortled. “Something seems too easy, it means the police are around the corner waiting to bust your butt.”

He should know. The old man had been taken down for everything from illegal discharge of a firearm to possession of stolen property. Not the best role model in the world, but the only one she’d had. He’d taught her loyalty to family and friends, a mean right hook, and always to follow her heart, no matter where it led her.

The night Jack drove down to the Valley in the Super Bee for their big movie date, her grandfather had been waiting, preparing to pass judgment on a rich brat who was too big for his britches. He’d just ended up laughing. He’d liked Jack. He’d never understood why Honey had turned the older boy away.

She’d never told him.

That was something else Honey had learned from her grandfather. How to keep secrets from the people she loved. Especially if it was for their own good.

The fire had been out for hours, but police cars and fire engines were ringing the Burrows house in every direction. Police officers walked purposefully around the property. Billionaires in Malibu were more important than retired car thieves in the Valley.

For a brief moment, she considered going down there. Snooping.

With her luck, she’d be caught crossing the yellow line and arrested for obstruction of justice.

She stayed where she was and unzipped her backpack. She dumped the contents out onto the lounge chair’s white webbed seat. Photographs and the jewelry box. Her fingers skimmed across thick paper and thinning velvet.

The envelope had settled near the bottom.

The paper was good quality, heavy. Creamy cotton rag. A red wax stamp with the initials “L.B.” sealed it shut, and a message crossed the back flap in elegant script.