Indulgence in Death (In Death #31)(69)

No one would mistake the woman at the corner table for a cop. A mass of wavy red hair with golden highlights spilled past her shoulders in a fiery waterfall. It tumbled around a porcelain face dominated by bold green eyes, such was the family resemblance to her cousin.

It ended there.

She wore a snug, low-cut tank over very impressive br**sts and a snug, short skirt over fairly stupendous legs. A multitude of thin chains of varying lengths sparkled around her neck, over the impressive br**sts, and to the waist of that snug, short skirt.

She looked . . . indolent, Eve thought, as if she had all the time in the world to sit there—all sparkle and flame in the dull room—and was mildly amused at where she found herself to be.

“Ms. Delaughter?”

“That’s right.” Patrice did one quick up-and-down sweep, then offered a hand. “You’d be Lieutenant Dallas.”

“I’m sorry you had to wait. I was expecting to go to you at some point.”

“Felicity contacted me. I was in the city, so I decided to come here. It’s a fascinating place. That’s a fabulous jacket. Leonardo?”

Eve glanced down at the blue jacket she’d put on to cover her weapon. “Maybe.”

“Simple lines in a cropped length matched with a strong color in that Nikko blue, and the interest of the Celtic design on the buttons, which match the one on your ring. Clever. And the fit’s perfect.”

Eve glanced down again. She’d just thought of it as the blue jacket.

“Leonardo’s one of the reasons I’m in the city. He’s designing a gown for me.”

“Okay. Do you want something to drink?”

Patrice’s smile went from beautiful to breathtaking. “What’s safe?”

“Water.”

With a laugh, she gestured. “Water it is.”

Eve crossed over, scowled at the vending machine, and mentally warned it not to give her grief. She plugged in her code, ordered two bottles of water, and to her surprise the machine spit them out without incident.

When Eve came back to sit, Patrice held up a hand. “Let me just say, before we start, that I knew some of what Felicity told you today, but not all. We’re friendly, and we love each other, but we tend to drift in and out of each other’s lives. I wish, back when she got involved with Winnie, I’d taken more care with her, that I’d taken care of her. We were both young, but she was, always, softer than I. Sweeter, and more easily hurt. So I suppose I’m here because of that, because I feel, in some ways, responsible for what happened to her. How he treated her.”

“She came through it.”

Felicity smiled again. “Softer and sweeter, and in some ways stronger. The woman he ended up marrying was neither soft nor sweet, and came out of it richer. Maybe a bit harder.”

“You know Annaleigh Babbington?”

“I do, though we’re not particularly close. I dated her second husband for a while.” Patrice flashed that smile again. “We’re colorful, playful fish in an incestuous little pond. From what Felicity said, I imagine you’re going to talk to her at some point. It may have to be a later point, as she’s vacationing on Olympus for the next couple weeks. I can tell you, as it’s common knowledge in our little pond, there’s no love lost between Leigh and Winnie.”

“Is there any lost between you and Sylvester Moriarity?”

“None.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it? About him.”

“Sly.” She sighed, sipped her water. “No woman forgets her first—husband I mean. You’re still on your first.”

“Planning to stay there.”

“We all do. I was crazy about him. Maybe I was a little crazy altogether, but I was young and rich and considered myself invulnerable. He was exciting, maddeningly aloof, and a little dangerous under all that polish. It attracted me—the undercoating, you could say.”

“Dangerous how?”

“Everything was immediate, and harder, faster, higher, lower than everyone else. It had to be or we’d be like everyone else, and that we would never be. We drank too much, did whatever illegals were in style, had sex anywhere and everywhere.” She angled her head. “Did your mother ever pull out that chestnut about if your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump, too?”

Eve had a flicker, very brief, of her mother’s face, and the loathing in her eyes for the child she’d borne. “No.”

“Well, it’s an old standard. We had to be the first to jump off the cliff. If there was a trend, we were going to set it. If there was trouble, we were going to make it. God knows how much money our parents pulled out of the coffers to keep us out of jail.”

“There aren’t any arrests on your records.”

“Greased palms.” Patrice swept her fingers over her palm. “It’s also a standard and works in every language. We were self-indulgent and reckless, then I did the most reckless thing of all. I fell in love. I believe he had feelings for me, which I thought were love—and might even have been, for a while, in some strange way. Then he met Winnie, and though it took me a long time to see it, Sly loved him more.

“Not romantically, exactly, and not sexually,” she added. “Sly likes women. But what I came to realize after we were married, after it became clear we couldn’t remain so, was he and Winnie weren’t like two sides of the same coin. They were the same side. They didn’t want anyone, not long-term, on that other side.”