Page 23 of Match Me If You Can (Chicago Stars 6)

“It’s my business, too, and I’m not—”

“Yeah, you really are.” He steered her between two parked cars. “But if you make nice, you might be able to convince me to keep my mouth shut.”

She stopped struggling and gazed at Mr. Bodyguard through the corner of her eyes. So…he was willing to sell out his boss. Heath should have known better than to hire a thug, but since he hadn’t, she’d take advantage of his naïveté because she did not want him to find out about this. If he did, he’d see it for exactly what it was, a sign of weakness.

The bar they entered was smoky and sour, with a cracked linoleum floor and a dying philodendron sitting on a dusty shelf between a couple of fly-specked trophies and a faded photograph of Mel Torme.

“Hey, Bodie, how’s it hanging?” the bartender called out.

“No complaints.”

Bodie steered her toward a barstool. On the way, one of her shoes st

uck to something on the floor. As she freed it, she wondered how such a seedy establishment could exist so close to Clark Street’s best restaurants.

“Two beers,” Mr. Bodyguard said as she perched gingerly on the stool next to him.

“Club soda,” she interjected. “With a sliver of lime.”

“No limes,” the bartender said, “but I got a can of fruit cocktail in the back room.”

Muscle Man found this hilarious, and a few moments later she was staring at the faint outline of a leftover lipstick imprint on the rim of a beer mug. She pushed it aside. “How did you know who I was?”

“You match Champion’s description.”

She didn’t ask how Heath had described her. She tried not to ask any question where she wasn’t certain of the answer, and something had gone seriously haywire in her relationship with Heath the moment Annabelle Granger had entered the picture.

“I won’t apologize for doing my job,” she said. “Heath is paying me a lot of money to help him, but I can’t do that properly if he cuts me out.”

“So it’s okay if I tell him about the spying?”

“What you call spying, I call earning my paycheck,” she said carefully.

“I doubt he’ll see it that way.”

She doubted it, too, but she wouldn’t let him intimidate her. “Tell me what you want.”

She watched as he thought it over. Reading people was an important part of her business, but her clients were wealthy and well educated, so how could she tell what was going on behind those ice pick blue eyes? She hated uncertainty. “Well?”

“I’m thinking.”

She opened her purse, extracted two fifty-dollar bills, and set them in front of him. “Maybe this will help that difficult process along.”

He looked down at the money, shrugged, and shifted his weight to stuff the bills in his pocket. His hips were much narrower than his shoulders, she noticed, his thighs long boned and solid.

“Now,” she said. “We can just forget all about tonight.”

“I don’t know. It’s a lot to forget…even for someone like me.”

She gazed at him more closely, trying to decide if he was putting her on, but she couldn’t read him.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t we talk the situation over next weekend? Let’s say a week from Friday. See how things are coming along by then.”

She hadn’t expected this. “Why don’t we not.”

“I’d do it this weekend, but I gotta be out of town.”

“What do you want?”

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