Rock Chick (Rock Chick #1)(28)

If he wasn’t my height, I didn’t have an ugly bruise on my face and I didn’t already have enough man problems, I would have been flirting with him ages ago. I didn’t do men my height or shorter, they had to be taller than me if I was wearing heels. That was a rule.

I watched him for a few minutes, thinking that had to be a helluva magazine to require more than three hours of study.

Lee told me he had a lot of men. Maybe men enough to go to North Dakota and sit in surveillance at Rosie’s. Maybe men enough to hang out at Fortnum’s and keep an eye on me.

Fucking Lee.

I sauntered over to the guy and stood in front of him until he looked up.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he replied and smiled. Definitely cute and definitely not one of Terry Wilcox’s steroid-ridden bad guys. The look of this dude said he would never hit a woman, or at least I hoped so.

“You need another espresso?” I asked, giving my head a flirty tilt.

“Nah, thanks, I’m juiced up enough.” He went back to reading.

Hmm. What did I do now? Never really had someone gone back to reading after I gave them the flirty tilt. Even if they weren’t entirely interested, they gave more reaction to the flirty tilt. Maybe it was the mini-shiner.

“Good magazine?” I asked and he looked up again.

“Yeah, the best.”

I nodded and wished I’d worn a tank top or camisole that day so I could have leaned over and given him some of my power cle**age. My cle**age would have negated the effects of the shiner.

Instead, I was in jeans, a brown, hand-tooled belt with a big, silver buckle that had a design made out of what looked like miniature rope, brown cowboy boots and a chocolate brown, fitted tee that said “I do all my own stunts” across my boobs in yellow and red lettering.

“I’m not into sports,” I told him and then sat on the arm of his chair, peering over the magazine to look at it. His entire body tensed and he turned his head to stare at me and I gave him a mega-watt smile. “Though I like going to games and stuff, do you go to games?”

I pressed the side of my breast against his arm, still pretending to try and get a look at his magazine.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I gave him an innocent look.

“Who me?” Then I winked.

His face went pale and his cell phone rang. He stood up to get it out of his jeans and he stood so fast, he nearly knocked me off the arm of the chair.

I righted myself as he said, “Talk to me.”

Then his eyes cut to me and he handed me the phone. I stared at it, astonished, then took it and put it to my ear.

“Leave Matt alone, he’s just doin’ his job,” Lee said.

I was a little shocked at the call, I just wanted to fluster Matt a bit.

How did he…?

Fucking, f**king Lee.

“What’s his job?” I asked, my blood pressure ratcheting up a notch.

“Making sure you don’t get kidnapped or shot at.”

“Or do anything stupid?”

“That too.”

“How did you know I was screwing with him?”

“Trade secret.”

“Tell me or I’m moving to Venezuela, losing myself in the jungle and shacking up with a local.”

Silence, then a sigh.

“Fortnum’s is wired and there are cameras. We did it last night.”

“What? Why?”

“Remember the conversation we had in the kitchen yesterday?”

I remembered every encounter I’d had with Lee since I was five. I most vividly remembered those that occurred in the last twenty-four hours, and not just because they were the most recent.

“Yeah.”

“You’re on Terry Wilcox’s radar. That’s not good. I’m trying to keep you safe.”

“By bugging my store?”

“That and anything else I can think of.”

I stood staring at Matt who was beginning to look amused.

“Do you remember the part of the conversation this morning where you said you’d be at Fortnum’s whenever you were done?” Silence but I didn’t wait for a response. “Well, don’t bother.”

* * * * *

Ally and I walked up to Rosie’s house.

Matt followed us there and was now sitting in his SUV watching us, but we were ignoring him.

Jane had returned, no sign of Duke or Dolores, but she’d taken the opportunity to, what she called, “canvass the neighborhood” (as Duke lived in log cabin surrounded by four acres of evergreen trees, I wondered what neighborhood she was talking about). Nevertheless, she scored some points by learning that the dirt lane to Duke’s cabin had been a hive of activity in the last day or so, including a sighting yesterday morning that could have been Rosie. No sign of Duke’s return before or after Rosie.

This meant that Rosie was looking for Duke too, or had been yesterday morning. Whether he found him or not was anyone’s guess.

We stood on Rosie’s porch and knocked. Rosie lived alone, in a bungalow that needed serious renovation. I used to wonder how he could afford the bungalow, I didn’t exactly pay him a fortune. It was on the out, out, outskirts of Platte Park but close enough to the park and to Pearl Street to be a prime piece of real estate.

Now I knew how he could afford it.