Chapter 3 #3
Josh turned gratefully to find his mother and his uncle Leon, his biological father’s brother, so actually the only person in his life who could technically be called his uncle, which was an irony for another day.
Tonight “Uncle Leon,” who had been located and contacted and dragged into Josh’s life for the express purpose of donating his bone marrow so Josh might live, was playing Josh’s mother’s besotted swain—a role that was damned close to real life.
“Of course, Ms. Dormer-Salinger,” he said with a nod. “Mr. Di Rossi. I haven’t forgotten my promise.”
He gave Kadjic an apologetic smile and led the couple toward the staircase. Behind him he heard his mother say, sotto voce, “Dear God that man gives me the creeps.”
“I do not like the way he was staring at you,” Leon said, definitely to Josh. “I was pretty sure none of our plans involved laying a honey trap.”
Josh chuffed air and made a production of showing the two of them the planned beauty of Celeste’s sitting room, laid out below them like a living work of art. As he did, he saw that Kadjic had lingered at the bottom of the staircase, waiting for his two goons, and he gave a sigh of relief.
“They didn’t,” he blew out on a hiss. “I almost threw up again—”
“When did you throw up?” his mother asked, and he grimaced to himself as he remembered she hadn’t been out on the balcony.
“Unimportant,” he said with dignity. “The point is, I don’t think I’m as forgettable as I’d hoped I’d be.”
“Hahahahahaha,” Grace laughed crassly in his ear. “Oh my God, Joshy-Sue, are all the boys chasing you?”
Josh grunted, and behind him his mother said, “Grace, I can hear you, and you’re being an ass.”
“But I’m right, Mrs. Josh’s Mom,” Grace said with the innocence of a choir boy.
“And that’s what’s important. Liam’s following the mark.
” He said that last with absolute professionalism.
“And Kadjic is looking to catch up to you by the time you reach the top. Mrs. Josh’s Mom, Uncle Leon, you guys need to make room for him—I don’t think he’s pleased. ”
“Shit,” Julia murmured.
“The bathroom,” Josh said, loud enough to carry, “is on the next landing. Would you like me to wait for you so I can present the art myself, or….”
“Oh, bless you,” Julia said, almost on a giggle. “Leon and I can find our way up. But thank you. One too many glasses of champagne in a tight dress, you know.”
That had been for Kadjic, as they’d known their voices would echo, and it would keep the man from making a dangerous play for Josh on the damned slat-stairs.
“I told you not to wear the stilettos,” Josh murmured for his mother’s ears alone.
“I’ll be damned if I let this Nazi cow show me up in Manolo Blahniks,” Julia muttered, and Josh’s smile was real this time.
“You could take her out wearing those shoes or with those shoes,” Leon said, and in Josh’s ear, Grace murmured, “Nice work, Mr. Rich Tycoon Man. We’ll keep you.”
Leon’s pleased grunt let Josh know that he was mic’d too, and that made him smile.
Going begging for bone marrow hadn’t been Josh’s idea, and he’d spent some time being resentful of Leon di Rossi and the sudden need for the biological father Josh had never missed.
But Leon—a shipping magnate on paper but an ex-smuggler in real time—had fit right into Josh’s little Robin Hood syndicate.
Part if it was, Josh thought, that the crew had solved the mystery of what had happened to Leon’s brother, Josh’s father, who had been killed in a terrible accident for trying to do the right thing.
But part of it was that, like Josh’s mother and Grace, he’d discovered that a rich family did not necessarily buy a rich life.
He appreciated the family banter, and he loved that they set out to help even the odds for people who otherwise might not have anywhere to turn.
It could just be that he really loved that they let him in.
And, Josh was starting to suspect, love was a weak, all-purpose, worn-thin word when it came to what Leon felt for Josh’s mother.
For her part, once Josh’s illness had gone into remission, Julia Dormer-Salinger had begun to glow, radiant as a star.
Josh—who was not used to thinking of his mother as a person so much as a warm, maternal, glorious force of nature—had been thinking more and more often that his mother had never really had a chance to fall in love… until now.
Josh’s father had been a weeklong dalliance—dangerous for both of them since they both had powerful, violent fathers who would not have approved of the match.
And Felix and Danny had been in love long before they’d gotten embroiled with Julia and the danger growing in her womb at an extraordinary rate.
When they’d concocted the plan for Julia and Felix to marry and for the three of them to raise Josh like a family, they’d been younger than Josh was now, and as he watched his mother finally meet an equal, somebody as fierce and brilliant as she was, somebody who could love her like she deserved, the last of his reservations about “Uncle Leon” melted away.
If he could make Julia Dormer-Salinger happy, Josh would welcome him into the family with a whole heart.
And Leon was getting to be damned helpful on the job too.
Although he tried to hide it, Leon also worried for every member of the family when something dangerous was afoot—especially for Josh.
The glance he gave Josh as he escorted Julia to the powder room at the next landing was parent code for “be careful,” and Josh nodded in acknowledgment as he continued up the stairs.
This next bit was going to be tricky. It was everything they’d engineered to this point, but it needed their full attention nonetheless.
Kadjic wasn’t supposed to be able to pick Josh out of a crowd, but he’d zeroed in on Josh from the very beginning.
He likes them young, Josh could hear Danny saying in preparation. He may try to flirt with you, to pick up on you, but he usually likes his toys weak and pretty and pliable. Be yourself and don’t lead him on. Being his lover is dangerous. Pretending to be his lover is a death sentence.
“Okay, we’ve got an exfil if this goes bad,” Grace said in Josh’s ear.
“Exfil?” Josh was surprised enough to vocalize.
“Trust us,” Grace said smugly. “You import Mr. Interpol Officer with the power of your tiny saggy ass and you expect no exfil?”
Josh wanted to groan. He’d wanted Liam left out of this.
The memory of that kiss suffused him.
Did you really?
I don’t need to be rescued.
No, but maybe he wants to be by your side.
And like that Josh found a tiny smile working its way through his game face.
“My ass is not saggy,” he murmured, barely loud enough for Grace to hear.
“Bony as a box of tossed chicken, boy-o,” came Liam’s voice, and he scowled to himself but, mindful that the procession of art goers trooping up the stairs could hear odd bits of conversation as they moved about in the space vault that was Celeste’s four converted floors of apartment, kept his retort locked firmly behind his lips.
Liam laughed softly, and Josh could hear the sound in echo and resisted the urge to glance wildly around.
For one thing, his balance wasn’t what it had been before the cancer, and a wild glance around the loft could end up with him falling down the stairs and going splat.
If it hadn’t been for his damnable pride, he could have asked to be in the party that took the elevator up, but Celeste didn’t know who Josh Salinger was, and she certainly didn’t know J.D.
Morgan had only been in full remission for a couple of months.
He marched grimly on up the last set of stairs, and as he came to the landing where Celeste was holding court, he was aware that while Liam may have been somewhere in the procession to see the new painting, Andres Kadjic really had shouldered his way to arrive on Josh’s heels, practically panting on the back of his neck.
Josh was very careful to take several steps forward, close enough for Celeste to point him out as she made her opening remarks as the “genius” who had unearthed a real Gertrude Abercrombie from the “pit of forgotten despair.”
Of course Celeste would think of an estate sale as the “pit of forgotten despair.” She probably planned to sit on her treasures like a vampire, until her firm thirty-fiveish skin shriveled like dampened crepe paper adhering to her skeletal frame.
Tall, willfully emaciated, with any extra body fat relocated to her lips, Celeste could have been a great beauty if she’d simply accepted that she was a human being and not a stick figure.
Her hair had been dyed fire-engine red so many times, Josh had actually seen strands of it break and float down into the air like tiny feathered corpses to match the boa that trimmed her garish dress.
For all that, the woman had been kind to Josh to the point of obsequy; he absolutely couldn’t be bitchy to her.
He knew what her policy was—knew what her politics were—but until she was crass enough to use innuendo as opposed to her paycheck, sniping at her would get him kicked out of her circle, and this moment wouldn’t happen.
“Have you seen the picture?” Kadjic asked, up against Josh’s shoulder again.
Josh barely peered behind him. “Yes, this morning, when it was mounted.”
“Mounting can be an exciting moment,” Kadjic purred, and Josh was disgusted enough to glance over his shoulder and wrinkle his nose.
“Ew,” he said, meaning it with every fiber in his being.
Kadjic cackled, showing yellow teeth, as Celeste said, “And now, I present to you, the forgotten work of one of Chicago’s most famous native artists, Crown of Roses.”
And with a grand gesture (and a few woebegone feathers floating to the floor in sympathy), Celeste indicated the curtain hanging over the modern wood frame, mounted on the center load-bearing wall of the gallery level.
With the press of a button, Harvey, the head of security, unveiled the prize.