Last to Know: A Novel(56)

“When you rescued her,” Mal said.

Harry looked at her. “The flaming hair was a wig.”

Their eyes linked across the tiny table, their knees touched beneath it. Mal clasped Harry’s hand in hers. “Now I have something to tell you,” she said. “The woman’s name was not Lacey Havnel. That woman died ten years ago.”

Harry said, “I believe Rossetti found that out.”

“What none of us has found out though, is who, exactly, is the young woman who calls herself Lacey Havnel’s daughter?”

“I left that to Rossetti,” Harry said, weary now it was all being brought back to him.

“Leave it to me, too,” Mal said. “I’m here to help you.”

“And I’m here because I love you,” Harry said.

She gave him a long look and waved a hand to the waiter for the bill.

“I’m taking you home to bed,” she said, sliding her knees out from under the table and getting to her feet. “I just want to love you, Harry Jordan.”

*

In the too-small bed, France’s famous “lit matrimonial,” never meant for sturdy U.S. citizens, Mal lay on top of Harry. Both were naked.

“We fit,” she whispered, “like a pair of old gloves.”

“Socks,” Harry corrected her.

Mal raised her head from his chest and met his gaze. “Gloves. On hands. Sort of like that.”

“Or, socks. On feet.”

“There’s two feet and two socks,” she insisted. “One glove, one hand, if you get my meaning.”

“Jeez,” Harry groaned. “Why are we talking in euphemisms? My cock is in you and it fits perfectly. At least it did a few moments ago before we got into semantics, and I lost…”

“Lost your ‘glow,’” Mal said, giving Harry’s bum a pinch that made him yelp in pain but did nothing for his erection.

“It’s my turn to say ‘Jeez,’” she told him indignantly. “I saved myself for you, here, in Paris.” She remembered the cute French guy at Deux Magots and added for good measure, “All alone.”

Harry raised his head from the pillow, looking over her shoulder at the naked length of her. “You are beautiful,” he murmured.

“I know,” she said. “I’m beautiful when I’m here, like this, with you. I’m beautiful when you have your arms around me. When you taste me and make me cry out in either agony or joy, I’m never quite sure which, and when you are inside me and I’m empowered by that great surge I feel as you come, and I find myself crying out again, and again, and I want more.”

She felt Harry’s chest moving and glanced indignantly at him. He was laughing. “What’s so friggin’ funny about that?” she snapped.

“You are insatiable,” Harry said, running his hand the length of her back, along the indent before the curve of her behind, which reminded him, he was forced to say out loud, of twin melons.

“Cavaillons? Or watermelons?” Mal asked.

“One of each,” he replied. So she hit him.

“What about the tits?” She pushed him away, clasping her hands under the twin rounds whose nipples now stood out like laser pointers.

Harry groaned. “Please, please—they are breasts,” he said. “And they are beautiful. And you are beautiful, even first thing in the morning with bed-hair and faded perfume and the scent of last night’s sex on you.”

“You’ve forgotten morning breath,” she reminded him.

“I think I’d rather forget that,” he admitted.

Mal sighed. “I always knew you were not a true romantic.”

Harry rolled over. He pulled her hair back with one hand and gazed at her un-madeup face, still rosy with recent lovemaking, eyes still brilliant with excitement. “Oh, yes, I am a romantic,” he said. “And regardless of what might happen, don’t you ever forget it.”

Mal stared at him, surprised. What could he mean—what might happen?





42


Rossetti obtained the details of the death of the real Lacey Havnel ten years ago in Miami, primarily through social security, which allowed access not only to her identity but to her bank account, both of which had been taken over by the woman they now believed was Carrie Murphy, aged fifty-two, originally from Gainesville, Florida. The real Lacey Havnel had never been married, had no children, and had died in a hit-and-run in the parking lot of the bar where she worked as a waitress. It was not known whether Carrie Murphy, the woman who had stolen her identity, the “new” Lacey Havnel, had any children, though it was clear that prior to becoming Lacey, she’d had three husbands, all of whom “died on me” as she was quoted as saying at an inquest of the third. The first husband’s saw had slipped when he was cutting wood in the garden; the second suffered a heart attack, though there had been no autopsy; and the third had simply disappeared at sea. “Out fishing,” Lacey had told the court.

Then Rossetti read the rest of the text:

Our Drug Enforcement Department had Murphy (Havnel) under surveillance in Miami for some months before she left the area. We had been given information to the effect that she was expediting the shipment of cocaine and possibly heroin out of Mexico, where she went frequently “on vacation.” Efforts were made to locate her, the thinking being that she had been “eliminated.” She was a risk to those higher up in the drug cartel. No further activity was registered with those with whom she had had previous contact, though there was some evidence that she might have been working with a partner.