Naughty or Nice? Page 3

  “No,” she said with quiet sincerity. “Never. I mean, yeah, the ‘buy, buy, buy’ thing can be a bit much. But underneath it all, Christmas is a time of heartfelt giving and rebirth. It’s a season of miracles.”

  “Hey, if that’s the way you feel, that’s cool,” Jack said as he repacked the first-aid kit and tidied up. “Different strokes, and all that.”

  “Isn’t there anything you like about Christmas?”

  “You mean, besides fruitcake?”

  “No, seriously.”

  “Seriously. I can’t get enough of the stuff. You know who makes an awesome fruitcake this time of year? Moe.”

  “Moe?” She pointed through the doorway to the kitchen, where Jack’s cousin Moe was banging around and yelling at the help. “That Moe?”

  “Come on—let’s get a booth and I’ll buy you a slice.” Grabbing their outerwear, Jack led her with a hand on her back through the doorway. “I’m telling you, it’ll rock your world.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Oh, my God,” Kat moaned, her head thrown back, her expression rapturous. “Oh, my God.”

  If she didn’t have a fork in her bandaged hand, and a plate of half-eaten fruitcake in front of her, Jack might have taken her for a woman transported by a very different, and more carnal, sort of pleasure. He pictured her writhing against a mountain of satin pillows instead of opposite him in a corner window booth at Moe’s. The Christmas sweater would have to go. She’d be naked. Or maybe wearing that sheer black camisole and thong that Jack was beginning to wish he’d never heard about.

  “This is incredible,” she said dreamily, her head resting against the back of the red vinyl bench, her eyes half-closed, cheeks flushed, sunlight igniting her hair, gilding her skin. “Definitely the best I’ve ever had.”

  Jack’s own plate was empty but for a sprinkling of crumbs. He’d inhaled his fruitcake while Kat had lingered over hers, savoring every bite as if it were the most transcendent sensual experience imaginable. He lifted his coffee cup just to have something to do with his hands, but he couldn’t for the life of him stop staring at her.

  “This redefines fruitcake,” she said as she forked up another mouthful. Her voice was warm, velvety, but with a hint of texture to it, like age-softened corduroy. “All these nuts. It’s like pecan pie meets cherry pie, with a hint of something . . . almost smoky.”

  “That would be the bourbon.”

  “Yeah?” She grinned as she swallowed. “You trying to get me drunk, Jack?”

  He grinned back. “Would it do me any good?”

  She lowered her gaze as she pried a pecan out of the fruitcake with her fingertips. “ ’Fraid not. I’m still, like . . .”

  “Spoken for.”

  She nodded, touched the pecan to the tip of her tongue.

  Coffee sloshed out of Jack’s cup as he set it back down. “Tell me about him.”

  “Preston?”

  “Is that his name?” Jack sopped up the spilled coffee with a paper napkin. “Sounds like some guy in a cartoon, some pompous old rich guy.”

  She hacked off another bite. “I guess he’s rich, by most people’s standards. He’s from this prominent old Connecticut family. But he’s not just living off inherited wealth. He works. He’s a partner in a law firm down on Wall Street—Gardner and Worth.”

  Where he was a rainmaker, Jack knew, luring deep-pocket clients because of his social connections, but billing almost no hours in actual legal work. His most direct contribution to the firm’s revenue, according to Celeste: playing tennis with their clients for the legal fee, double or nothing. His father had bought him a spot at Harvard Law with the expectation that he’d enter politics, but as it turned out, he’d had neither the disposition nor the interest.

  “As for being old,” she said around a bite of fruitcake, “he is older than I am. By about twenty years or so.”

  It would be closer to thirty. Preston Worth was almost twice Kat’s age. Jack assumed she knew that but was trying to make the May-December thing sound more like a May-October thing.

  “I’ve never dated a guy that much older than me,” she said. “I almost refused to go out with him for that reason. I thought it would be . . .” She made an ick face. “But he’s . . .” She chewed thoughtfully. “The maturity is actually refreshing. Guys my age can be so . . . unsure of themselves. Preston doesn’t have that problem.”

  Jack was ambushed by the mental image of Preston lowering Katherine Peale into that mound of satin pillows, pressing his lips to her throat, slipping his hand inside that filmy thong . . .

  He was brought up to take what he wanted when he wanted it . . . The man is utterly ravenous.

  “Mm, that was great,” she sighed, eyeing her empty plate wistfully. “I just wish there was more.”

  Jack signaled the waitress. “One more slice, please.”

  “Jack, no!” Kat protested laughingly. “I’ll explode.”

  “We’ll share it. I’d like some more.”

  She hesitated when the waitress set the plate of fruitcake down between them and topped off their coffee cups.

  “Come on.” He lifted his fork, gestured to her to lift hers. “I’ve got nothing communicable. Dig in.”

  She did. He couldn’t get over the way her eyes grew unfocused with every bite she chewed, the way she closed them as she swallowed, a satisfied little smile curving her lips.

  They were excellent lips, lush and pink. Naturally pink, because she didn’t appear to be wearing lipstick—or makeup of any kind, that he could tell. Her skin had a sunny translucence that couldn’t possibly have come out of a bottle.

  She didn’t seem to be wearing perfume, either, but he was less sure about that. Maybe there was something you could buy that smelled the way she smelled, very sweet and clean, but with a hint of . . . sky? Grass? Earth?

  She smelled like rain, that was it. A soft, drenching spring rain.

  No wonder Preston Worth was wooing her with diamonds and dinners at the Four Seasons. Married or not, it would take a strong man to resist the dewy allure of a Katherine Peale. Preston hadn’t had the backbone for it.

  As for Jack . . .

  He sat up straighter, pressed his back against the bench. If he was feeling a little low on spinal fortitude at the moment, well . . . he’d just have to fake it.

  “So, what do you do, Jack?” Kat asked, leaning forward on her elbows as she twirled the fork slowly. “You said you own your own business?”

  “It’s a security firm,” he said, having decided it would be the height of dumb to let on that he was a PI. “High-tech alarm systems and the like for businesses, mostly. Also state-of-the-art locks, closed-circuit video surveillance . . .”

  “Sounds fascinating.”

  “It is,” he said earnestly. “There are new breakthroughs every day, what with advances in computer technology and all. It’s a great field to be in.” Which was precisely why he was here, so he could afford to be a player in that field. It was why he was feeding her this line of bull, why he’d staged that mugging outside FAO Schwarz, so that he could play the hero by retrieving her purse, whereupon she’d feel obligated to put up with his attentions just long enough for him to get his foot firmly planted in the door.

  Damn, he wished Grady hadn’t gotten carried away and yanked so hard on that purse. Jack knew he hadn’t meant to knock Kat down, and he’d be feeling bad about it for days. Still, Jack had every intention of chewing him out good the next time he saw him.

  Because you want to chew out yourself. In a way, he was glad the purse-snatching had gone awry, thereby ratcheting up his guilt quotient a few abject degrees. If this wasn’t quite the sleaziest job he’d ever been offered, it was certainly the sleaziest he’d ever accepted. Guilt was the trade-off. That was the way these things worked.

  “Were you a computer major in college?” she asked.

  “No. No, I, uh, never went to college. Never even graduated from high school.”

  “Really?”


  Jack mentally kicked himself. He needed to get over with this woman. He should be telling her what she wanted to hear—sure, I graduated cum laude from MIT—not just blurting out the unvarnished and all-too-unimpressive story of his life.

  Although maybe there was a certain wisdom to offering up the truth whenever possible and only doing an end run around it when absolutely necessary. The truth was easier to remember, after all, and would come off as more credible than a series of increasingly muddled fabrications.

  Not that he was averse to lying outright to this woman when necessary. Hadn’t she already committed a whopper of omission by withholding from her description of Preston the little fact that he was married? Jack didn’t—strike that, shouldn’t—feel a moment’s guilt about misleading her.

  “Why didn’t you finish high school?” She kept her gaze trained on him as she questioned him about himself, her expression one of utter absorption. There was something undeniably gratifying—seductive, even—about having a beautiful woman draw him out this way, as if riveted by the banal details of his life. Was it a ploy, part of her temptress’s bag of tricks? Maybe she was actually as interested in him as she appeared to be.

  Yeah, and maybe Jack should start thinking with his brain instead of with unreliable old Mr. Stupid, and then maybe he could execute this job with the necessary detachment, score his fifty grand, and be done with it.

  “Finishing high school would have meant staying in my house, and . . .” He lifted his coffee cup, took a sip. “That wasn’t an option at the time.”

  “Didn’t get along with your parents?”

  “My mother was long gone. And to say I didn’t get along with my father would be a laughable understatement. I enlisted in the army and did a couple of tours as an MP. Came home, got my GED, and went to work for an executive protection agency.”

  “You were a bodyguard?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, foreign businessmen mostly, some political types.”

  “How did you go from that to owning your own security firm?”

  He shrugged, not sure how to fudge the intermediary step of Jack O’Leary, Private Investigations. “I got lucky,” he lied. “Fell into some cash and was able to pursue my dream a few years earlier than I otherwise might have been.”

  “That’s great.”

  Yeah, it would have been. Then he wouldn’t be sitting here snowing her this way. Jack was tempted to inquire about her work, ask her what she’d meant by being self-employed . . . only he was all too sure he knew.

  Margaret Katherine Peale hadn’t held down an actual job for two years, a fact that Jack had unearthed through his cousin Moira, who worked for the Social Security Administration in their Queens program center. Although it was strictly verboten for SSA employees to tap into the agency’s database for personal reasons, Jack had found his cousin more than willing to sniff out a subject’s employment history from time to time in exchange for a nice, crisp fifty-dollar bill.

  Armed with a name and a date-of-birth range of 1967 to 1970, Moira had snagged Kat’s social security number, plugged that into an earnings database, and discovered that she’d worked for the New York City public school system from 1990 to 1999. Since then, she had been either unemployed or employed off the books somewhere. Had she truly been self-employed, Moira assured Jack, she would be paying Social Security tax and the system would have a record of her.

  Despite her official lack of income, Kat was hardly living in poverty. She dressed well and seemed to have plenty of cash to throw around. Not to mention the upscale building she lived in, a nineteenth-century limestone townhouse down the street from the Morgan Library in the tony Murray Hill section of Manhattan. One-bedroom apartments in buildings like that rented for around two grand a month. Could a woman who hadn’t pulled down a paycheck in two years afford a place like that?

  Maybe, if she was young and gorgeous and not squeamish about sleeping with married men. Especially if—strike that, only if—they could provide her with costly gifts and a snazzy apartment and, he assumed, a generous allowance.

  How many other sugar daddies had there been before Preston? She probably hooked up with just one at a time; men who could afford mistresses of her caliber would expect fidelity, wouldn’t they? Which was why she’d burned Jack off at first, or tried to.

  It struck him suddenly that getting Kat away from Preston would be about a hundred times harder than he had anticipated. Why should she even agree to see him again? What was in it for her? And if he actually pulled it off and got her to trade in Preston for him, what then? Turn around and dump her once he had that fifty grand in his pocket?

  Somehow he couldn’t picture it. But what was the alternative? A relationship? With someone he’d been paid to essentially scam?

  Maybe he should just pack it in now—pay the check, wish Katherine Peale a happy life, and walk away with his dignity intact. Not to mention his self-respect. Screw the money. It wasn’t worth it.

  “So, do you think you’d be interested?” she asked.

  “Hm?” He’d zoned out while she was talking. Real smooth, O’Leary.

  “In checking out my apartment.”

  He stared at her. “Um . . .”

  “To see if you can boost the security. It’s got first-floor exposure, is the problem. As a woman living alone, it makes me a little nervous.”

  “Oh.” Say no. Get out while you can. “Yeah. Sure. I don’t see why not.” Sure you do. “Uh, but really the best thing you could do is to put bars on the windows. You don’t need me for that.”

  “Bars . . . that’s not really an option, I’m afraid.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’d have to see the place to understand.” She glanced at him, then frowned and looked away. Savvy New York women weren’t in the habit of inviting virtual strangers into their apartments, regardless of how “nice” they claimed to be. Brightening, she said, “I know. You could come over next Friday night. I’m having a few people over for a little Christmas party—a couple of old friends, some women I work with . . .”

  Work with? Did the demimonde of New York have a union?

  “You’ll like them.” She started rummaging around in her purse—a laborious undertaking, given her bandages. “They’ll like you, too. I’ve got a couple of girlfriends, they’re really my best friends—Pia and Chantal. They’ll probably get into a shrieking catfight over you the second you walk in the door.”

  “I hate it when that happens.”

  “Here.” She retrieved a business card and handed it to him: cream vellum engraved in a graceful script. It gave her home address on East Thirty-seventh, with “Apartment One” spelled out on its own line. There was no company name or indication of profession. “This is where I live. Say, eight o’clock? Oh, I should warn you, it’ll be dressy. I invited this big-time Internet tycoon, and I mean to wow him.”

  Could she already be scouting out a successor to Preston? “Um . . .”

  “Say you’ll come.” Her hopeful smile undid him.

  He rubbed a hand over his jaw. Oh, hell . . . “Can I bring anything?”

  “Just yourself. Unless you, uh, want to bring a date. That’d be . . . I mean, you should feel free to . . .” She glanced away briefly, but not before he saw it again, that little waver in her expression, the fleeting hint that maybe, just maybe, if there were no Preston in the picture, she might not be inviting him to bring a date. “You should bring someone.” She smiled and shrugged. “You’d avoid the catfight, if nothing else.”

  “No, that’s okay.” He met her gaze, returned her smile. “What’s life without a little risk?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Don’t tell me—you’re Jack,” greeted the woman who opened the door to Apartment One at half past eight the following Friday evening, where Jack found Kat’s party already in full swing. “I’m Chantal,” she said over the tapestry of conversation and lively piano music. Chantal was a willowy, sepia-skinned beauty with extravagant dreadlocks and earrings that rat
tled when they brushed her shoulders.

  “Uh, hi,” Jack muttered as Chantal led him through the foyer and into a palatial, high-ceilinged room filled with richly upholstered antiques and Oriental rugs, the focal point of which was a Christmas tree that must have been fourteen feet tall. Flames leapt in a monumental fireplace surmounted by a proportionately outsized wreath, around which several guests stood laughing and sipping champagne. The back wall was mostly one giant leaded-glass window overlooking a moonlit private garden, in which fairy lights twinkled through a dusting of snow that looked as if it had been special-ordered for the occasion.

  This was a duplex, Jack realized when he noticed the curved staircase heaped with poinsettias, and an immense one, given what he glimpsed through open doorways—a huge formal dining room, a more intimately scaled room next to it with leather furniture and sage-green walls, and a library with a baby grand in the corner, at which a tuxedoed pianist was launching into a spirited rendition of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”

  “Pia!” Chantal was waving someone over, a young woman with spiky black hair and rhinestone-studded cat-eye glasses who had a mug of eggnog in her hand. “Look who’s here,” Chantal exclaimed, yelling to be heard over some guests who had gathered around the piano for a sing-along. “It’s Kat’s knight in shining armor. Jack O’something.”

  “O’Leary,” Jack clarified, hand outstretched.

  “Well, don’t be!” Pia said loudly as she took his hand. “We won’t bite.”

  “Uh, no, what I—”

  “We love you!” Tugging him close, Pia kissed him on the cheek. “You’re our hero!”

  “Kat told us how you faced down that purse snatcher,” Chantal shouted as she took the bottle of wine Jack had brought and helped him off with his snow-dusted topcoat, handing both to a white-jacketed young man hovering nearby. “Way to go!”