An Offer He Cant Refuse - By Christie Ridgway Page 0,55

was wearing. It was a simple, polished cotton shirt dress that was fastened from knees to throat with snaps. So instead she stared at his hand, holding fast to her history, holding fast to her shame. Inside the bag was a Pepto-pink pre-teen diary, the kind that came with a little brass lock and key. Both were ineffective in really keeping away eyes interested in the confessions of a twelve-year-old, but the package made a perfect disguise for the grown-up secrets of a Mafia boss. No one, not in the mob or in the FBI, had ever suspected that the Loanshr.rk book they wanted so badly to find had always been hidden in plain sight - in the room of Salvatore Caruso's eldest daughter.

Conveniently there, because Salvatore had given his eldest daughter the responsibility of all the record-keeping, from the entering of new names to the adding and subtracting of sums. The little job that had made her feel like his most important princess.

"Tea?"

Her heart stuttered inside her chest. She hadn't seen a man's hand holding that book in sixteen years. While she'd prayed for that time to come during the first days of her father's disappearance, she'd prayed just as hard it wouldn't happen in the many, many years since.

'Tea."

Johnny's bark brought her gaze to his face. And from there to the rest of him. She stared.

"What's the matter with you?" he asked. "You're silent, you're jumpy, it's near ninety outside and you're dressed in another of your nun-suits."

He wasn't dressed at all. Elegant, urbane Johnny Magee, the one who she was designing a home for filled with sophisticated decorations like a George Nelson slatted bench and Joseph Blumfeld original wool rugs, had gone jungle on her, wearing nothing more than cut-off Levis, ratty tennis shoes, scruffy whiskers, and a sweat-dotted tan.

"What have you been doing?" she replied, noting streaks of dirt across his arms and chest and a leaf in his hair. If she had to hazard a guess, she'd say he'd been working with the landscapers she'd seen about the property on her way in. In the parking area she'd squeezed her Volvo between two decrepit trucks with guerroro gardening painted on the doors and plywood walls extending the sides of beds nearly filled with palm fronds and half-decayed vegetation.

But would the urbane Johnny she knew play day laborer? Though this didn't feel like the Johnny she knew. Gone were the easy smiles and the facile charm. This man was a tense, bad-tempered stranger who was looking at her as if he wanted to push her away... and eat her up whole at the same time.

Her throat closed down, trapping the air in her chest. With panic fluttering in her belly, she grabbed the makeup bag from him. It didn't matter what he had been doing or what he was doing to her. On Friday night, spooked by her mother's warning, she'd considered having sex with Johnny so she wouldn't have to be alone. Dumb. Really dumb. But now she remembered that she had a job to do, that they had a business relationship.

End of story.

Clutching the bag to the chest of her basic black shirt dress, she forced in a breath and aimed a polite smile just past him. "I was hoping to get inside and take some measurements this afternoon," she said. "I warned you that we'd be tripping over each other if you were living here while I worked, but if you want me to come back another time - "

"No," he muttered, running a hand through his hair. "No. You just surprised me, that's all."

"Okay."

He hesitated, ran his fingers over his hair once more. "I haven't been sleeping well. I apologize for... shit."

He apologized for... what? For being rude this afternoon? For leaving her on Friday night? For causing her to go home alone and remember the way he'd kissed her, touched her, and then left her with all the unrequited sexual lust that he'd promised in his devil's voice would be so simple to slake?

She hadn't slept well either. So she'd pulled the Loanshark book off her bedroom shelf and paged through it, studying line after line of perfect Catholic schoolgirl handwriting. For the thousandth time she'd considered shredding it or burning it or burying it deep, deep, deep in her tiny backyard, and for the thousandth time she'd wondered if her father might really be alive. If he came out of hiding, he could use the information inside the book for