Page 9 of Lawbreaker

Tony saw that smile. It was more like a smirk. It bruised his ego. It shouldn’t have. Why should he care about the opinion of a rich girl from Texas, after all? He ignored it.

“Who’s coming this weekend?” Stasia asked.

It was an easy subject. He rattled off names, including one that he put some emphasis on. Burt Donalson.

“Oh, not him,” Stasia groaned.

“I had to invite him,” Tony protested. “He and Tom are best friends. He’s driving Tom down to the house.”

“We could have sent a car,” she said.

“Sure, and he’d have found an excuse not to come. It will be okay. I’ll put him out by the garage. Ben will keep an eye on him.”

“Is his poor wife coming, too?” Stasia asked.

“No. She probably has had enough of him pursuing any pretty face he can find.” He thought about Odalie’s pretty face as he processed the thought, and he had a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.

So did Stasia. She knew Burt from her time as a single woman. She’d finally had Tony have a word with him about being too forward. When Tony spoke, people listened. Burt was scared of him.

But Odalie was Burt’s sort of target, a beautiful high-class woman. Odalie could handle herself, but she shouldn’t be subjected to a predator like Burt for a whole weekend. Of course, it was possible that he’d pursue somebody else. Tony always had plenty of people staying at the estate when he went up there. It would be crowded. So, maybe there wouldn’t be trouble. She hoped so, especially when she’d had to coax Odalie into going with her.

The house on Long Island was a revelation to Odalie, who’d never seen it before. She caught her breath as it came into view past trees and a wrought iron fence with gates around the house proper.

“It’s gorgeous,” she exclaimed.

Tony almost ground his teeth. He’d wanted her to hate it, to live down to his opinion of her as an empty-headed rich girl.

“It’s huge,” Stasia said, noting that Tony didn’t say a word. “It has about a dozen bedrooms all with private baths. There’s an indoor heated Olympic swimming pool, a tennis court, a huge garage—Tony needs it for his classic cars,” she added with a wry glance at her boss.

“Like Dad has,” Odalie mused. “He has a 1960-something classic Jaguar convertible, the one with the teardrop-shaped headlights, that John keeps trying to sneak off the property. He’s dying to drive it. Dad keeps hiding the keys,” she added gleefully.

Tony gave in to curiosity. “Why doesn’t he want your brother to drive it?” he asked.

“John just wrecked his second Jaguar,” she explained.

“And he was lucky they make Jaguars with excellent safety features, to say nothing of air bags,” Stasia added. “He walked away with scratches and bruises. But this time his insurance company made threats.”

“Is he that bad a driver?” Tony chuckled, addressing Stasia.

“He’s absent-minded,” Odalie answered. “He was reaching for his cell phone in the pocket of the car door and took his eyes off the road. He went over a bridge into the river. Well, it’s not a river this time of year, only when the rains come,” she added.

“Okay, what was that?” he asked abruptly.

“A lot of our rivers don’t have water certain times of the year,” Odalie explained.

Tony, used to rivers that were full all the time, just stared.

“It’s a Western thing,” Odalie continued. “In Arizona, even in West Texas, it’s way worse,” she said.

He shook his head. “Every day, you learn something new.”

Odalie’s face revealed to her oldest friend that she was about to say something outrageous.

“Did your housekeeper come up already to supervise the cleaners and the other weekend hires?” Stasia said before Odalie could ask anything embarrassing.

“Yeah,” Tony told her, leaning back in the comfortable seat. “It takes a lot of work to get ready for that many people. I always have the checks issued with bonuses for the workers.”

“My parents do that for our workers when we have parties,” Odalie mentioned, without meaning to. “It’s a good thing to do. So many of them don’t make much from the agencies they work for.”

---