Chapter 9
NINE
“When were you going to tell me you knew Luis Amauri?” Easton hissed.
“Don’t snap at her,” Maxine butted in. “This isn’t her fault. This is all you, idiot! Just how many people do you owe money to?”
Francesca watched them go back and forth with mounting dread. In her mind, everything had seemed so simple. The reality had proven far from it.
She sat in a chair in the corner of the room, her heels abandoned and her mind full of white noise. Her body still buzzed with arousal, an ache that hadn’t even come close to dissipating, and the lingering effects of adrenaline. She knew she should’ve left well-enough alone. She knew it.
But some phantom bent on ruining her life had possessed her and now everything was shit. It was that damn selfish, screaming little demon in her that came out sometimes, slipping through the cracks of her armor when her willpower to just keep going weakened.
That desperate thing always made her do something reckless. Last time it was packing up and moving to United Washington on a whim. Now it was… this.
“Why does that matter?” Easton sputtered. “Everything will be settled tonight. If the Amauri maniac doesn’t kill me first!”
Amauri maniac? Francesca made a face. He seemed like a lot of things, but a madman pushed it a little far.
To be fair, she didn’t know much, if anything, about Luis Amauri. She barely knew anything about Casanova. For all she knew, he could’ve been a particularly charming serial killer or something.
Maxine sliced her gloved hand through the air like an executioner’s axe. “If you’ve done something as stupid as owing money to the Amauris, maybe you deserve to be murdered! It’d save the rest of us from enduring the social manifestation of an infected tooth that is your presence!”
“You don’t have to be mean,” Easton muttered, arms crossing like the toddler he was.
Despite the silk of her gloves, Maxine managed to snap her fingers in front of his nose. “Au contraire mon cousin idiot! I clearly haven’t been mean enough if you were able to pull off this shit show. I never should’ve let you talk Frankie into this.”
Easton shot Francesca a dirty look, like all of this was her fault. “Well, how was I supposed to know she had a thing with Luis fucking Amauri?”
“What’s so bad about Luis?”
The cousins turned to look at her. Maxine wore a soul-deep grimace, while Easton looked annoyed that she’d spoken at all.
“How do you not know who the Amauris are?” he demanded.
Rapidly losing her patience with him, she asked, “Do you know who the Jacksons are?”
Easton’s auburn brows furrowed. “No. Who—”
“They’re a wealthy family from my hometown,” she explained, hands up in a slow down sort of gesture. “But you wouldn’t know them, would you? Since it’s not fair to think you’d know every damn family who lives in a place you’re not that familiar with.”
Before a new sort of argument could bloom, Maxine explained, “The Amauris are a famous syndicate family. They own a good chunk of United Washington, have their fingers in just about every illicit weapon sale on this side of the continent, and…”
“And they’re batshit nuts,” Easton finished for her.
“They’re famous for killing each other — and whoever else gets in their way.
Luis is in charge of the gambling and racketeering side of things, as well as torture.
I once heard a rumor that he keeps all the fingers he chops off mounted on a shelf in his bedroom. ”
“Oh,” she breathed, swaying a little in her chair.
Francesca wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t nearly as naive as people tended to think she was. Of course she suspected that Luis wasn’t exactly working within the limits of the law.
He never said what he did for work, yet he managed to afford one of the nicest penthouses in UW, which sat mostly untouched. She never wanted to jump to conclusions about things that weren’t her business, but it was hard to ignore what was right in front of her face.
It just never occurred to her that he might not be a crooked businessman or a lobbyist. He was a real, bona fide criminal.
And he’d had his hand in her panties not an hour ago.
Oh gods.
The bright side, if one could call it that, was that she’d never seen nail clipping or knuckle hair of any disembodied fingers when she cleaned Luis’s penthouse bedroom. That had to be a good sign that not all rumors were true. Possibly.
Maxine rounded on Easton again. “And you went into business with these people.”
“Me and Russ,” he protested, throwing his arms up.
“Yes, and the reason my brother isn’t here right now is because he’s smart enough to actually pay his debts back!
It’s one of the few things he’s actually good at.
” Maxine put her hands on her shapely hips and let out a slow, calming breath.
In a calmer voice, she continued, “Okay. Right. There’s no point in arguing about this anymore.
We need to figure out what we’re going to do now. ”
Easton rubbed his palm down his face. In a muffled voice, he replied, “There’s nothing to do. We’re stuck here now. He’s signed a contract to enter the Games and paid the fee. As long as nothing goes tits up and no one tries to murder me, we should be in the clear by the end of the night.”
“What if he loses?” Francesca whispered. She really couldn’t decide whether she wished for that outcome or not at this point.
“He’ll still get his money,” Easton answered a mite uneasily. “Amauris don’t take losing well, though. And if he’s attached to you…” His already clammy face turned downright unhealthy looking.
Maxine came over to lay her hand on the center of Francesca’s back. Giving it a reassuring rub, she asked, “Just how close are you two?”
Her thighs clenched. She did not want to admit to what she’d let happen in this very room, and she certainly didn’t feel like explaining the embarrassing crush she had on a man she now knew to be a few cards short of a deck.
“Not at all! I mean, not really. I clean his house just like I clean yours, Max. Sometimes we talk.”
“I say this with all the love in my heart,” her friend began in a distinctly unloving way, “but I don’t buy that shit for a second.”
Heat spread from her neck to her ears in a flash. Begrudgingly she added, “Sometimes we talk a lot.”
A shrewd look entered Maxine’s eyes. “What do you talk about?”
Francesca ran her palms up and down her silk-covered legs in quick strokes. Looking anywhere but at her friend, she answered, “I don’t know. Normal stuff. How was your weekend, what are your plans, that sort of thing.”
“And it’s never been anything more than that?”
She very deliberately avoided looking at the bedroom door. “He asked me out.”
Maxine recoiled, gloved fingers curling and lovely mouth pinched. “And you said no?”
“Of course I said no,” she exclaimed, standing up from her chair.
“I keep saying no! He asked me out and I turned him down because we’re way too different and I’d already signed the contract.
He then broke in here and offered me money to leave with him, so of course I told him to shove it up his ass!
Who does he even think he is? No one with any self-respect would say yes to someone who does that. ”
Voice going a little higher than her normal calm, collected tone, Maxine pressed, “And that’s all?”
“Well…” Sweating a little, Francesca picked the lesser of two evils. “We kissed. Once.”
Her dread mounted considerably when Maxine lifted her chin and looked away, her eyes wide. In a mutter, she said, “And that was before he knew you were a golden anchor. Oh, gods.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t really care about that part,” Francesca offered.
Easton sank onto the mattress and covered his eyes. “I’m gonna die.”