Page 41 of Dangerous Lover

Fuck!Deaver stared at the phone, jaw clenched, breath coming in spurts. The son of a bitch hadsold the company. His father barely dead in the ground and the bastard hands over his life’s work, just like that. Well, of course. Fucker had a fortune in diamonds. He wasn’t going to go to work every day when he had a fucking fortune in his hand.

Deaver angrily punched out another number. Prescott’s home line. Secretive bastard had never given him his home number. Deaver’d had to lift it from company files.

Eight rings. He was about to hang up when a female voice answered. “’Lo?”

“This is Larry McAllister. Can I talk to Jack Prescott?”

“Listen buddy,” the female voice said sharply. “Jack Prescott sold us this house a week ago. I’ve been working fourteen-hour days, plus the move, and I don’t appreciate being woken up on Christmas day.”

“Do you have a forwarding address I can?—”

“No,” she said and hung up.

Son of a bitch hadrun!Simply pulled up stakes and disappeared!

Deaver hadn’t factored that in at all. Prescott had thrown him to the dogs and stolen his money, but it hadn’t occurred to him that he would disappear with the money.

Prescott was a close-mouthed bastard and didn’t have friends—or at least men he’d have confided in—in the company. Even if Deaver wanted to take the chance of showing his face in Monroe, he’d probably come up with nothing. No one would know where Prescott had run off to.

Deaver knew. Fucker had gone to his woman, this Caroline Lake. Find her, find him, find the diamonds.

He needed to regroup, and he needed ID and weapons.

There was a man in New York named Drake, lived out in Brighton Beach. Drake could get anything, anywhere, as long as you had the price. Deaver would hang out in Manhattan, get himself kitted out with new ID, while he searched the net for Caroline Lake.

Deaver punched in a Brighton Beach number and waited.

“Drake,” a smooth bass voice answered.

Chapter Eight

“Caroline, go back upstairs. Please.” Jack kept his voice gentle but he wanted to growl in exasperation. The unheated basement was dank and damp and cold. It would take him at least another half hour to get the piece of shit Caroline laughingly called a boiler going.

She was standing next to him anxiously, eager to help though she couldn’t distinguish a lug wrench from an eyebrow pencil, shaking with the cold. Her nostrils were pinched and white and her hands were milky blue even though she surreptitiously tucked them under her armpits when he wasn’t looking. He couldn’t stand seeing her like this.

“No,” she said, through chattering teeth. “That’s okay. I want to help.”

“You know what would help me?” He put the screwdriverdown and pried away the backing plate. “You’d really help me if you went back upstairs where there’s still some warmth left. Your teeth are distracting me. They sound like castanets.”

“Sorry.” She clenched her jaw.

He sighed. “That was a joke. Obviously not a very good one.” He wrenched the plate open and contemplated the rusting wires and leaky pipes with disgust. “Please go up, I can’t stand seeing you like this. I mean it.”

“If you can stand it, I can. I mean you’re a soldier. Were a soldier. Don’t soldiers stick together?” She edged closer to peer past him into the bowels of the boiler, as if looking into the face of a long-despised enemy. “So that’s the inside of the beast? Doesn’t look like much, does it? I mean considering how much damage it causes.”

Jack clenched his own jaw. No, it didn’t look like much. It was the worst, oldest, crappiest boiler he’d ever seen and he couldn’t believe she was trusting this piece of shit to keep her warm. It should have been tossed on to the garbage heap ten years ago.

“You need a new filter.” And a new casing and a new feedwater drum.

“Tell me about it.”

“You’re spending more in fixing it than a new one would cost. And you’re just guzzling up electricity.”

“Uh huh.”

“And you’d save even more money if you bought?—”

“A condensing boiler,” she finished for him. “I know. Believe me I know. I’ve been told all of this, repeatedly. What can I say? I don’t have the money for a new filter and—trust me onthis one—I certainly don’t have the money for a new boiler. Maybe some day. But definitely not now.”

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