Julie James - Something about You

She trusted him.

And since he now would be the one covering her twenty-four /seven, she knew that trust had to go both ways. Which meant she needed to tell him about everything that had happened three years ago.

Tonight.

WHEN GRANT LET himself into his apartment that night, he paused in the doorway, bracing himself to be shoved up against the wall and handcuffed.

It didn’t happen.

He exhaled, finding comfort in the fact that, at a minimum, Pallas hadn’t yet identified him as the masked man. How long that fact would remain undiscovered, however, was less certain.

To say that the afternoon had not gone as planned would be an understatement.

Grant crept through his apartment with the lights off, checking the view from every window. From his third-story perch, he looked down onto the street below for anything remotely suspicious—strange cars parked out front, a dog walker who just “happened” to be out at that time of night, a homeless person conveniently passed out in the alley behind his building.

He saw nothing.

For the second time in the two weeks since Mandy Robards had tried to blackmail him, he was furious. And now paranoid, too. Not a good combination.

Cameron Lynde wasn’t supposed to have come home from work so early. She also wasn’t supposed to have brought a friend home with her—not that he’d had any trouble getting him out of the picture.

He could’ve handled the police officers in the car out front. He had not, however, been ready for a standoff with Jack Pallas. The rage he’d seen in the federal agent’s eyes as he burst through the glass door was not something he’d expected. Nor had he been expecting the woman—who’d been relatively well-behaved up until that point—to try grabbing the gun out of his hand.

He’d been lucky, he knew, to have escaped when everything had gone so far awry from his plans. Thankfully, however, he didn’t need to count on luck in the future.

Satisfied that his apartment wasn’t under surveillance, Grant headed back to his bedroom and undressed. As he’d done a hundred times already that evening, he ran through the events of the attack and after, looking for the areas where he was most vulnerable.

No one had seen his face. Nor had anyone heard his voice, since he hadn’t so much as coughed during the entire attack. No prints left behind, thanks to the gloves. His getaway had been clean enough—he’d had to outrun those two worthless cops, one of whom had seen leaner days and the other of whom looked barely old enough to drive a squad car. Chicago’s finest. He’d lost them in an alley three blocks from the woman’s house and then high-tailed it a half mile in the opposite direction to the parking lot where he’d stashed his car. He’d swooped up the backpack he had left in a garbage bin along the way. By the time he got to the parking lot he’d shed the mask, the gloves, and the jacket, and was simply a man wearing black nylon pants and a long sleeve T-shirt while carrying his gym bag after a late-afternoon workout. Once he’d gotten back to his car and driven off, he’d pulled into another alley a couple miles away and changed into the suit he’d left in the car. The backpack, with the remainder of the black clothes and with the addition of a couple heavy bricks, was now sitting on the bottom of the Chicago River.

Grant walked naked into his bathroom and turned on the water to the shower. He studied himself in the mirror as steam filled the air.

There was one weakness.

He had no alibi. He wasn’t supposed to have needed one.

Sure, as soon as he’d dumped the backpack in the river he’d driven straight to his evening appointment—he’d met an old friend who worked at the Tribune at a bar in River West. Word had gotten out that a high-priced call girl had been murdered in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels and the unconfirmed rumor was that Senator Hodges’s name had shown up on her client list. The friend, who owed Grant several favors for all the times he’d given him early access to many of the senator’s political dealings, called to give him a heads-up and had asked to meet for drinks. Grant had been curious to know whether the senator’s name was being tossed around as a potential suspect, and how much his friend knew about the FBI’s investigation. As it turned out, his friend knew very little, and Grant got the feeling he was the one being pumped for information.

After drinks, he had returned to the senator’s offices and attended a series of meetings with the higher-level staff members and two of Hodges’s attorneys. The senator originally had planned to be back in D.C. by the following week, but given the FBI’s warning that he not leave the state, alternate plans needed to be discussed. First and foremost on everyone’s mind was how to explain the changes to the senator’s schedule without tipping the press off about his connection to Mandy Robards’s murder.

Secretly, Grant got a kick out of these conversations. The hushed tones, the tension-filled rooms, the worried glances over what the press and—gasp—even the killer might possibly know about the senator’s involvement with Mandy. They had absolutely no idea that the man they were talking about was sitting right at that table.

And he knew everything.

After the meetings finally ended, Grant had driven home, taking a few detours along the way to make sure nobody was following him. All in all, his day would seem like any other to anyone who might ask—except for that one missing hour. He’d have to come up with something to fill the void, just to be ready.

Grant thought back to the moment inside Cameron Lynde’s house when she’d first seen him on the stairs—the way she’d taken a step back and whispered, What do you want?

He wanted to stop looking over his fucking shoulder when he walked into his apartment, that’s what he wanted.

She said she didn’t know who he was. Although he liked to think people tended to tell the truth when feeling the cold steel of a gun barrel pressed against their heads, he wasn’t sure he trusted her. Fortunately, he didn’t have to.

For her sake, he hoped she was telling the truth. Mandy’s murder had been near perfect, almost artfully so. The best FBI agent in the city had been assigned the case, and still they had nothing on him. And they wouldn’t ever have anything on him as long as Cameron Lynde didn’t step out of line.

Of course, he’d taken precautions to know if she did.

They were so stupid. Pallas, the cops, all of them. It was right under their noses, and they didn’t even realize it.

If he’d known it was this much fun getting away with murder, he’d have done it years ago.

SHE AND JACK would be living together.

The practical realities of the situation struck Cameron during the car ride to Jack’s South Loop apartment. He had asked Wilkins to drop them off so he could pick up his car and “a few things.” As they pulled away from the FBI building, he leaned over the seat and asked if she had any questions about how the protective custody was going to work.

She nonchalantly answered that there were none she could think of off the top of her head.

This was not true.

She had lots of questions. For starters, where exactly did Jack plan to sleep? Could she still go to work during the day? Did he expect her to cook meals while he stayed at her house? (Certainly the surest way to kill them both.) Would they do normal, everyday things together, like watch television at night? (Which reminded her—she really needed to delete those episodes of The Bachelor from her TiVo playlist.) And where, exactly, did he plan to sleep? (This particular question consumed such a vastly greater percentage of her musings, it bore repeating.) Was he allowed to leave her alone at all, like when he took a shower? Or, purely from a safety perspective, would it be better for her to join him in such undertakings . . .

“This will only take a few minutes,” Jack said as they rode the elevator to his fourth-floor loft. He looked her over. “Are you okay? You looked like you zoned out for a moment there.”

“I’m still processing everything that happened today,” Cameron said, hoping she didn’t spontaneously combust right there in the elevator at the thought of him naked in her shower.

When they arrived at the fourth floor, Jack led her to the apartment at the end of the hallway. He unlocked and opened the door, inviting her inside.

She didn’t know what she expected Casa Pallas to look like, perhaps something stark and Spartan with minimal furnishings and lots of gray, but that was not what she found when she walked through the doorway. The walls were exposed brick and the ceiling was vaulted. In keeping with the loft style, the main level had an open floor plan, with the living room running into the modern kitchen and what appeared to be a powder room and a small office down the hall to her right. There was a second floor; a floating staircase led to a small balcony. Beyond that were open double doors made of frosted glass through which she could see the master bedroom.

To say the least, the place was warmer and far more welcoming than she had expected. But that wasn’t what surprised her most. What really caught her attention were all the books.

An entire wall of Jack’s living room was filled with books—hundreds of them—organized neatly on dark mahogany shelves. More books rested on the lower shelf of his coffee table.

“Wow,” Cameron said, making her way over to the shelves. “You have some collection here.” It looked like a mixture of everything, fiction and nonfiction, hardcover and paperback. “You must be quite a reader.”