Chapter 3 #3
“Well, the place featured live music every Tuesday and Thursday evening. The music was provided by this ancient jazz singer who wasn’t actually…
um…very good. His voice was shot to hell by years of smoking and drinking and he had arthritis in his hands, but he’d been playing there for twenty years, the customers were used to him and knowing the boss, he’d stay for another twenty.
One night he didn’t show up. We found out later that his heart simply gave out.
” Honorius Lime. He’d been one of the good guys, who’d found life simply too hard to face without the help of the bottle.
He’d once had talent, but he’d flushed that, and his life, down the toilet.
Ellen had grown up with people like that. Talented but weak, living life on wishful thinking until there was nothing left but charity and then the grave.
She’d studied and worked so hard all her life to get out of that hole and now look at her.
It was a sign of her exhaustion that she even let these thoughts inside her head, because they were wasted energy and she couldn’t in any way afford that.
She drew in a deep breath. “So my boss was left without live entertainment. I, um, I offered to step in.”
For the first time, she saw lightness in his face. It wasn’t a smile, but something amused him. “Do you have any talent?”
Well, that was the problem. “Some. More than poor old Honorius, anyway. So I started singing every Tuesday and Thursday and the place filled up. The boss gave me Wednesday and Friday off. He said I was bringing in so many new customers, he wanted me fresh. And then one evening, about six months ago, after I’d been singing there for a couple of weeks, an agent was in the audience.
We talked after the gig and he asked me to record some songs and we did.
He knew this great studio and we did it all in one take, in one day.
Enough for two albums. One just voice and keyboard and the other bass and sax and drums. Covers, mostly.
I also had some songs that I’d, um, composed myself. Just for…something to do.”
The solace of music. How grateful she’d been over this past year of terror and flight, that she could find solace in music.
“I didn’t think too much about it. I thought maybe he’d use the recordings for some private purpose or something. Play them at parties. But he didn’t. He put out two albums under a pseudonym and…” she shrugged, almost embarrassed, “one went gold and the other went platinum. We never thought—"
The words died in her throat as Harry Bolt jolted, looking as if he’d been stuck with a cattle prod. His face was tight and harsh. He placed his big hands on the desk and leaned forward on powerful arms.
“Christ,” he breathed. “You’re Eve.”
Harry thought he was impervious to surprise. More or less everything that could happen to him already had. At least twice. He’d been a Delta operator and had been trained and trained hard not to show surprise.
Had there been any capacity for surprise left in him when he signed up, Delta had beaten it right out of him.
But right now, he felt as if someone had whacked him upside the head with a two by four.
Eve. Fuck him, he had Eve sitting right across from him, with that soft Southern-tinged voice he piped most evenings straight into his head.
And she wasn’t a seven-chinned hippopotamus, either. She was a real beauty. Run-down and scared, sure, but still gorgeous. While listening to her, it had been really hard to pay attention. He was ashamed of himself, but there it was.
Harry wasn’t Mike, the man-slut. Harry’d been celibate for almost two years now, the whole year in Fuckedupistan where to bed a woman meant her death by stoning and the year after, when he’d come back in pieces and had had to put himself painfully back together.
It was as if sex had fled his life and fuck him if it didn’t decide to come roaring back into his life right this instant. He had a scared beauty in front of him and she wasn’t thinking about sex, she was thinking about survival, so he should be ashamed of himself.
And he was, sort of. Except the hard on took precedence over the shame.
Yep. Harry Bolt, Mr. Self Control himself, was getting a hard on even though he was sweating to keep it down.
Everything about this woman turned him on.
That pale, porcelain skin that contrasted so delightfully with the rich, shiny, dark-red hair, the fatigue-bruised, beautiful eyes, the delicate lines of her cheekbones and jawline.
Even exhausted, rumpled, with deep purple smudges under her eyes, so tense she was practically thrumming, she turned him on more powerfully than any other woman he’d ever met.
And then…and then it turned out she was fucking Eve.
Harry was still getting over the shock of that when a soft knock sounded at the door separating his office from Sam’s, and Sam stuck his head in.
“There was someone to see me?” Sam had a few lines in his face he hadn’t had yesterday so Nicole’s morning sickness must have been bad. But if he was here, that meant she was feeling better and she’d come in to work. He wouldn’t be here otherwise.
Sam looked at Nora Charles—or whatever the hell her real name was, though he could think of her now only as Eve—and at Harry, sensing the electricity in the air, and walked into Harry’s office.
Sam’s presence rearranged the molecules in the room and gave Harry a little space to get his head out of his ass and try to get his dick to go down a little.
Nora—Eve—was looking as if she’d been run over by a truck.
She hadn’t wanted him to figure out who she was.
Even though her story had been carefully edited to keep all details out, Harry could figure them out now.
The city in the north was Seattle. The agent was Roddy Fisher, who’d discovered Broken Monkeys and Isabel.
Sam was looking at him, at Eve, and back at him.
Eve was sitting at the very edge of the chair, clutching her no-name canvas backpack with white knuckles.
Terrified.
And Harry was a dickhead. Hard-headed, tough-as-nails Harry had morphed right into fanboy and had scared this woman who, it turned out, was not just gorgeous, but who had a once-in-a-generation musical talent and was terrified.
If she was here, her life was on the line, and he had to get a grip on himself.
Harry turned to Sam, keeping his movements slow and unthreatening. “Come on in, Sam. Meet Eve.”
Sam was pretty unsurpriseable, too. So maybe it was sleep deprivation, or the stress of watching his wife throw up her stomach lining, that had him opening his eyes in shock.
“The Eve? The singer?”
“That’s highly confidential information,” Ellen said sharply. Information that could get her killed.
So this was Sam Reston.
Ellen looked at him carefully. Though he didn’t look like Harry Bolt at all—Reston was dark-haired with rough features, Bolt was dark blond with fine, angular features—they shared a look. Tall, impossibly strong, self-possessed.
And they both looked really dangerous. Not for the first time, she wondered whether she’d made a mistake in coming here. If she was wrong, if Kerry had somehow steered her to the wrong place, she could have sacrificed her life for nothing.
These men spirited away endangered women. You’d think that there would be softness and kindness in their gaze. That they’d be sort of like social workers, only taller.
These two men looked worlds away from being social workers. If she’d been told they were crime lords or killers, she’d believe every word.
No softness, no kindness, no discernible mercy.
What had she done?
There was silence in the room for a minute, two. Ellen’s throat was too tight and dry to even think of speaking.
“Well?” Harry Bolt fixed her with an unblinking stare, light brown eyes like an eagle’s gaze, and just as impersonal. “You are Eve, aren’t you?”
Yes. And I have just given you enough personal information to track me down. If you’re not going to help me, I’m done for.
No. Of course not. What a ridiculous notion. And excuse me, I need to be somewhere else right now.
Yes. No. Yes. No.
“Yes,” she blurted out, as if some seal across her lips had just been shattered.
Except for her agent, no one else knew. Well, maybe her boss Mario, because beneath his laid-back tattooed exterior he was really smart.
Still, he’d never asked and she’d never told.
“Yes. And I’m afraid that might be the way my former boss found me, though everyone on the production side signed a confidentiality agreement. ”
She’d made Roddy swear to secrecy and they’d drawn up the confidentiality clause together.
She knew enough legal lingo to make it air-tight and to make anyone think twice about selling out to the tabloids.
The musicians had played in a separate room, with a separate entrance and had never even seen her, only heard her. She’d insisted on that.
Roddy hadn’t really taken her seriously, but he had seen the marketing potential. At a time in which anyone in the media ran a web site, Instagrammed, vlogged, friended on Facebook, posted on X, had a Substack, a mystery identity was a sure-fire publicity gimmick.
Harry Bolt addressed Sam Reston without taking his eyes off her. “So Sam, this is Nora Charles, aka Eve. She got our number from Dove. Eve, this is Sam Reston, the man who helped your friend.”
She was vibrating with nerves, sweat trickling down her back and between her breasts. She knew her pale skin would be ice white with stress.
Sam Reston didn’t even try to shake hands with her, he must have seen that she was on the knife’s edge. He simply nodded soberly, said “Ma’am,” in a low voice and sat down next to his partner.
He addressed his partner without taking his eyes off her. “Harry? Sitrep.”
Now both of them were looking at her intently. Most stares come off as aggressive, but theirs didn’t. Just…intense. Like they were listening carefully to what she said but that other information was coming their way from her eyes, her hands, her feet. Maybe even her gut.