Page 17 of Hard Lessons

Luca grimaced.

“I’m not part of this, please, let me be.” Serena fluttered her lashes. “I’ve only met this man today. He hired me.”

“Hired you?” the policeman at her side asked.

“Yes, I’m an escort, high class obviously.” She jutted her hips to the right, pushed out her breasts and pouted.

The police officer’s gaze drifted down to her toes and back.

“He...” Serena pointed at Luca. “Told me this man, David Watson, was his friend and it was his birthday.” She paused and glanced at Luca.

His mouth was open, he was breathing fast.

Maybe if you’d apologized for using my name in front of a hit and not threatened to spank me I wouldn’t have to do this.

“Yes,” she went on, “he said that his friend had been down on his luck, his marriage in trouble and all that and he needed an afternoon of no-strings fun at The Rook and Tower. And let’s face it, time with me is a good thing for a guy who is... feeling sad. Then just as we got up to the room, this... this Italian thug bursts in and starts throwing threats around like goddamn confetti. To tell the truth I don’t know what they were on about most of the time. Poor old David, he’d just started to perk up too.” She raised her eyebrows, hoping they’d get what she was alluding to.

Luca clamped his mouth closed. The anger radiating off him was palpable. It seemed to fill the air with its fizzing energy.

“Are you trying to tell me you’re innocent, ma’am?” the police officer asked. “That you are a bystander in all of this.”

“Totally. I was doing my job, admittedly with a few bells and whistles.” She tilted her chin. She’d teach Luca to let his jealous streak rule the day. She’d also show him that it wasn’t wise to threaten to redden her ass. She was her father’s daughter after all. She could get out of sticky situations and get even just as quickly. “I was there as an escort, Officer. Nothing illegal about that. We were consenting adults, no money ever exchanged hands. And now it looks like it won’t.”

* * *

Three hours later Serenawas sitting in a grim room with gray brick walls and no windows. She sat on one of two chairs pushed up against a table attached to the floor.

She’d drained the nasty lukewarm coffee from a plastic cup and wished for a chilled glass of wine and a Selfridge’s cheese board with crackers.

The door opened. A plain-clothed officer stepped in accompanied by a uniformed cop.

“When can I go?” she snapped.

He smiled, his thin lips weasel-like. “When you’ve answered my questions.”

“Have I been arrested?”

“No.”

“So let me go.”

“As I said, when you’ve answered my questions.”

She leaned back, crossing her arms. “You had no right to drag me here under armed guard. You scared me half to death.”

“For that I’m sorry, but you keep company with some dangerous men.”

“I’ve only just met them, they’re hardly friends.”

He shuffled a handful of papers then took a pen from his inside pocket and tapped the table. “Can you tell me about your relationship with David Watson?”

“He’s a new friend.”

“Seems you’re making lots of them today.”

“Is there a law against that?”

He wrote something in a notebook.

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