Page 2 of Baby One Last Time
I hadn’t counted on seeing him again. It wasn’t fair to be parked in front of a buffet of mouth-watering delicacies when you’re starving, knowing you can’t touch the goodies. And god help me, I wanted to touchallthe goodies.
I thought about making a run for it, but he’d already closed half the distance between us, and while some of my body parts were on fire, there was barely any feeling in my legs. I focused on pranayama breathing. Deep, even breaths. I slowly put one foot in front of the other until I was actually walking.
But dammit, I was goingtowardhim.
“I wasn’t kidding,” he said. “I need your help.”
We stood a mere foot apart. I clenched my fists at my sides to keep from laying my palms against his chest, which gave the unfortunate appearance of wringing Mrs. Leary’s flamingos’ necks.
“I’m supposed to do a solo, but this target requires a team.”
I shrugged. “So get a team.”
He shook his head. “No one can get here fast enough, and you know how thin we’re stretched over the holidays.”
Adrenaline shot through me and my hands shook for a different reason. What the hell was I thinking? That I was bored stiff, and death at X’s hands was starting to sound better than a life with lawn ornaments. “What’s the play?”
“The Santa Baby.”
Aka the Drunk Deb, aka the Party Favor.
He grinned at me like the wolf to Little Red Riding Hood. “One of your best.”
And one of the easiest. I could do it in my sleep. Hell, I probably had. “All right, but if X finds out, it’s on your head. And I only have a few hours.” I held up the birds still clutched in my left hand. “And we have to stop somewhere to fix the flamingos.”
He raised his eyebrows but didn’t ask. “You and the flamingos get comfortable in my truck. I’ll grab the phone you dropped and make sure no one saw us together.”
Dammit, I’d been ready to leave my phone behind. Distracted. Totally off my game. “OK, but donotshoot any of my co-workers.”
“Would I—”
I quirked an eyebrow at him.
“Yeah, don’t answer that.”
I satin the passenger seat of Derek’s truck, thankful for the tinted windows. I held in my hands a silver bit of material that was approximately the size of a large bandage. How the hell was I going to get into that?
We were parked on another residential street, this one not as nice as Mrs. Leary’s, but still pretty damned swanky. We’d been watching a house without a gate but with a long driveway. Vested valets hung out around the fountain in front, amongst a high-end-car-lot’s worth of stupid-expensive vehicles. I assumed our mark was one of the party guests.
“So, what’s this guy’s crime? Making a movie starring the Rock?” I giggled at my own cleverness.
Derek shot me a less-than-impressed look. “The Rock goes by Dwayne Johnson now, and he has nothing to do with this. Our guy is mobbed up—Russians, nasty ones—and is trying to snake his way into the movie business.”
“How hard can that be? In this town, can’t he just throw out some money and see who bites?”
“Apparently, even Hollywood has standards. There’s been some resistance to becoming his laundromat.”
I nodded. “Dirty money. So that’s where they draw the line.”
“Not everyone, but someone got spooked and called a friend at one of the three-letter agencies. They called X.”
“And here we are.” Great. Mobsters. They tended to be more handsy than ambassadors, and I was about to slip into something indecent to entice one of them. I held up the tiny scrap of cloth. “If I’m going to squeeze into this thing, you’ll have to close your eyes.”
He grinned again.
I didn’t like it. He was grinning way too much.
“Like I haven’t memorized every inch of you. I could pick out your body parts from a line-up.”
