queen from the pages of a bodice ripper. No wonder there was nothing—literally nothing—about her online. Ange Renault didn’t sound much realer, though I’d Google that name later, just to be sure. Both names were dramatic, and French, and had the same initials. Maybe she chose noms de plume that sounded close to her real name.
If I had her real name, what kind of power would that give me? She was using fake ones for a reason. There might be a warrant for her arrest. That seemed likely, given her profession. Her real name might be all I needed to own her.
“Rumpelstiltskin. Rumpelstiltskin.”
I didn’t realize I’d whispered it aloud until Tig said, “What?”
“Sorry, I— Ange Renault. This is her. This is who I meant. When did you meet her?”
“A couple of weeks ago,” Tig said.
“Two weeks?” I said, shocked.
“Maybe three,” He said.
God, but she moved fast. She’d moved in fast on me anyway. She must have left here and gone straight to sex with Boyce Skelton, then landed in my neighborhood twelve days ago.
“Tell me about her. Tell me everything,”
And Tig, unlike any other person on the planet, didn’t ask me one damn question. He simply told me.
He’d met Roux at a junkyard he frequented. He was skimming for parts. She was there to sell a beater Honda so ancient that Tig wouldn’t have let a dog drive it. Luca was with her, sitting in the office playing with his phone, but at first all Tig saw was Roux, sexy as hell and clearly in a mess. She didn’t have the paperwork for the car, only her word that she owned it. The junkyard owner, a shady guy named Pete, was negotiating price with her.
Pete took a phone call, and Tig and “Ange” had started talking.
“The car was stolen?” I asked.
“Technically, not that that would bother Pete much,” he said. “But it was hers-ish.”
“‘Hers-ish’ is not really a legal term,” I told him, and he smiled.
According to Roux, her husband had the pink slip, but it was her car. She and Luca, whom she introduced as “Randy,” had left the husband; he wasn’t good to her. He wasn’t good to her boy either, she’d said, in a way that was pregnant with subtext. The husband was looking for them, she told Tig, eyes wide, clearly frightened. Tig asked her if it was a custody issue. He didn’t want any part of a kidnapping charge.
She swore it wasn’t. The husband was Randy’s stepdad. His real dad wasn’t in the picture, and that made sense to Tig; she’d obviously had the kid quite young.
I had to work hard not to snort there. Sure she had.
Tig believed her. She talked about taking a beating like a woman who knew how. Plus, she’d had old bruises on her back and hips.
“You saw her hips?” I said, though this was not germane. And not at all my business.
He shrugged, giving me another sheepish grin. He was good at them. “Eventually.”
But that was getting ahead of the story. He talked Pete into giving her a break, and he offered Roux a place to crash for a night or two. No strings, though he admitted he would not have made the offer to some beardy hipster guy in equal trouble.
I couldn’t blame him. Roux had gone full damsel on him, and I knew how charismatic she could be when she chose to shine it on.
“Ange and Randy Renault” stayed with Tig for a few days, until she got in touch with a friend who wired her more money. I translated this in my head: She played her game and found a local client, or she retapped an old one. Either way, she got flush, and Tig drove her and Randy to the airport. She didn’t tell him where they were going. She said it was safer if he didn’t know.
But I knew. They had gone to Boston. She was hunting me by then. Tig had somehow put me on her radar. The story she’d told Tig sounded like lies to me, but maybe not all lies. She was on the run from something.
I still thought a warrant was the most likely scenario, considering her profession and her use of fake names. Roux, who loved Botox and raw silk and sparkling water from France—she wouldn’t be in a beater Honda unless things were desperate. And the timeline was so short. She’d been in enough of a hurry to come at me unprepared, claiming to be Lolly Shipley.
“You told