Players: Bad Boy Romance Read online

  "So how's that apology coming, by the way? You got it ready yet? I mean, it won't count now, of course. We've got cameras set up for the event and everything, but I have to say, I'm really looking forward to it. Can I have just a sneak preview?"

  "You must hate Christmas, huh?" Josh leans heavy on his hands, pressed into his knees. "Having to wait to get the presents. I guess you'll just have to stay in suspense until next week."

  Mitch's face sours a little bit. "No, you're right. I can't stand waiting. That's true."

  "Well, you're just going to have to get used to it. Just this once. I know it's probably a big imposition, but… oh, well. Shit happens, I guess."

  "I guess it does," he says.

  His face is pinched into a frown that Josh doesn't feel bad about at all. "Oh, I did order for you two. You don't mind, do you?"

  "What, am I supposed to recognize that you're the alpha male now?"

  Mitch's smile comes back, like a rash you can't quite get rid of. "Not at all, Detective. It still hurts to chew, you know? I can't imagine that there's anything about you that isn't up to those standards. You're as tough as they come, no doubt about it."

  "Good to know," Josh says.

  He's past tired of this conversation, and it's only just beginning. How lovely. He takes a deep breath. This is going to be every bit of the challenge he had hoped it wouldn't be.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Anna had seen this sort of thing before from Mitch. In fact, regardless of 'should' or 'would rather,' it wasn't even uncommon. He acted like this whenever he couldn't lose. As if he were bragging.

  He's got something up his sleeve, something that neither her, nor Josh, is going to like. There's more than just a little bit to worry about, at this point. It's not totally clear where things are going to go from here, except that they're going to both end up regretting the hell out of it.

  Anna takes a breath and sits back. Whatever's coming, she's got nothing that can stop him from playing his trump card. She never had anything like that before. Why would she have it now?

  The waitress comes and brings food. Mitch continues to play the affable playboy. Josh continues to glower. He should have realized it by now. That there was nothing either of them could do. They might as well just let him have his show.

  A big stack of pancakes for each of them. It was high enough that Anna couldn't have eaten it on her best day. As it stood, only a couple hours after breakfast, she was relegated to picking away at her food.

  That must have been planned from the start, too. Nobody would serve ten pancakes in a big old smokestack if you just ordered 'three orders of pancakes.'

  So this was all part of it.

  Anna's jaw felt tight, almost as if it were rusted shut. She kept eating in spite of that, because she had to. It was important to Mitchell's plan that they all look perfectly ordinary. Either she was going to wreck it, or she wasn't.

  What she wasn't ready to do was throw away any remaining chance of seeing Ava again, which meant, when it came right down to it, that she would play along with almost any plan. It was, after all, her own fault. If she'd known better, if she'd thought clearer, if she'd planned more…

  If she'd had a security system, if she'd kept Ava safer then none of this would happen.

  If she hadn't gotten Mitch involved in all of this, then she would have been left alone, in peace, with time to spend playing with her daughter.

  Instead, they'd invaded her home, twice now, and they'd torn open wounds that she'd thought had healed completely by now. Torn open her entire life, and for what? A few measly dollars?

  Mitchell pours the last of the syrup onto his stack and takes another bite. He sees Anna looking and gives her a thin-lipped smile. How terribly like him, in the end. Everything he does is just that way.

  "How's your food," he asks to the table in general. "Mine's fantastic."

  "It's fine," growls the detective. Anna can see—anyone could see—that he's more than had it with Mitchell's act, and there's plenty of good reasons not to like it. But there's nothing to be done, can't he see that?

  You might as well just play along with it. He's smart, and he's had all the time in the world to plan this out. Anna—and, presumably, Josh as well—didn't have much time to think any of this through.

  They were too busy getting roughed up by kidnappers, they were too busy worrying about Ava, they were too busy with everything other than making a big plan to screw Mitch over. That was the one thing that he couldn't say. The one thing that Mitch could never say.

  He never just let himself walk into a situation like that. Not like they had, just now.

  Anna takes a deep breath and takes another bite of pancakes. Her stomach is already full, but she doesn't want to get the lecture about finishing her food.

  "Good, thank you," she says after she swallows the bite. Softly enough that the next table probably wouldn't hear, but not so quiet that it would be a problem for Mitchell and Josh.

  Mitch gives that tight-lipped smile of his again. He takes the last bite and pushes the plate back, washing it all down with the last mouthful of water from his glass. He'll want it refilled soon. Mitch can't stand to be without something to drink.

  A minute later, as if by magic or by clockwork, a woman comes by with a pitcher of water and refills it silently, before walking away with Josh's plate in her hands.

  Anna looks down at her own food. She'd never be able to finish it, not in a hundred years. It's too much. She pushes her own plate away and braces for the lecture that's sure to come, the lecture that she absolutely doesn't want to hear and absolutely cannot avoid.

  Deep breaths, now. Her stomach hurts. Too much food will do that. She wants to smile back at Mitch. He'd want that. It's her own little act of rebellion that she doesn't. She's here because she has to be here, because Ava is more important than Anna's own petty desire to be away from the man who'd helped make her.

  Josh, on the other hand, has barely touched the food. He pushes the plate away and leans in hard on his elbows. That's bad manners; Mitch won't like it.

  "Get to the God damned point," he growls.

  Mitch smiles at him. He's showing teeth this time. An aggressive smile, the sort of thing that a person does from time to time, when they're not worried about what you're going to do.

  Or, for other people, it might come naturally. Nothing has ever come naturally to Mitch Queen, though. He's an unnatural sort of man.

  The only things that come naturally are his unfailing and unflinching ability to find where there are mistakes being made, and his ability to correct them. In both himself, and in others.

  He wouldn't let something like elbows on the table, such an obvious slip of good manners, go unnoticed. Nor, under normal circumstances, would he let it go uncorrected. At least, that was Anna's experience.

  Of course, it's entirely possible, even likely, that with other men he doesn't act in that exact way. It's likely that he only acts that way with Anna.

  Does that mean that he's being more appreciative, though, or less? She doesn't want to wonder about it.

  "You're right. I'm keeping you both in suspense, aren't I?"

  "Suppose that you are," Mitch growls. He's not happy.

  Anna understand why he's not. But he's keeping himself in check better than he could have. With how things have been going, it wouldn't be hard to imagine the big detective leaping over the table to throttle Mitch right there in the middle of everyone.

  It's actually almost impressive that he manages not to, in the end. He keeps his hands to himself, and keeps himself away from Mitch's throat. Almost in spite of himself.

  "You're absolutely right. How rude of me." He turns to Anna. "I am concerned, you see. I worry. Not only for myself."

  He pauses for dramatic effect. He's always been concerned about that sort of thing. Some might say over-concerned, but Anna knows better than to make any judgments about that sort of thing.

  After a moment, he continues. "No, I
worry, you see, for our daughter. For Ava. Can she be raised without her father? Do you know the statistics, Anna, on what happens to the children of households where the parents are separated?"

  Anna shakes her head. She can guess, though. She can guess that they're not very good. Otherwise, he wouldn't have brought it up. It's about as simple as that, the same as it has always been.

  "Take a guess."

  "Get to the point," Josh growls.

  Anna gives him a look for a moment. He should have realized, by now, that there's nothing that can be done but to play the game. That's the only way you get out of this without too much trouble, and the one thing Anna doesn't want right now is trouble.

  All she wants is to get away from all of the trouble she's been having. She wants her daughter back. She wants to have her life back.

  "They're bad?"

  Mitch turns to Josh, smiling that toothy smile. "You see? She's smarter than she looks." He turns back to Anna now. "That's exactly right. They're bad. I wouldn't want that to happen to Ava."

  "What's your point?" Josh cuts in. He's not seeing it, and to be honest neither is Anna, but she wasn't going to say anything.

  There's no way around it. She's not going to let Ava just go into the foster care system, or anything like that. There's just no way.

  And of course, there's no chance of abortion. It wasn't an option then, and it's much, much too late now. So what exactly is he trying to get at?

  Anna gulps as Mitch reaches into his pocket. When he pulls out a little box and gets down on one knee beside her, the eyes of the entire room seem to turn and look at them, all at once.

  Just in time to hear Mitchell Queen, son of the congressman whose kidnapping has been getting wall-to-wall coverage on every news station in the country, propose to her.

  Chapter Thirty

  Josh Meadows is sitting on the comfiest sofa in the house. There are three, around the entire house, and this is the good one.

  The sofas around the house are among the best he's sat on, and this is the best of the three. Which, in effect, makes it the nicest sofa he's sat on altogether.

  Which isn't remotely the problem. The problem is that he's alone. It should feel normal. He should be able to look down at the manila envelopes on the coffee table in front of him—the ones that he was still supposed to get back to Jeffries on—and get to whatever work he was still hoping to be able to do.

  He shouldn't have been off work in the first place. He should have had better control of himself.

  But now that he's in this situation, sitting alone on a sofa at home at eleven thirty in the morning feels like the last in a very long list of things he shouldn't be doing today.

  Why had she said yes? It was a foolish question, of course. He knew exactly why she'd said yes, and he wouldn't have told her she was wrong if she'd asked him for permission to say it.

  She'd said yes because it meant making all of her problems, all the little threats that had built up over the past months, it made them all just… go away. There's very little more powerful than the promise of all of your troubles disappearing. Very little, indeed.

  Anna found a way out. All it meant was giving up whatever independence she'd found. All it meant was marching back into the lion's den, knowing full well what she was getting herself into.

  All it meant was taking a big risk. But it was a big risk with a much bigger reward, and the reward was paid up-front. As long as things didn't go too far off the rails…

  Well, life as someone's trophy wife might not have been the most glamorous thing in the world by any means. But that doesn't mean that she's doing wrong by herself. It's totally natural, for a woman that looks like that.

  And as trophy wives go, it's not that unusual. Most of them aren't happy. But hey. Maybe he'll get her treatment for it, eventually.

  Josh can't afford to worry about her future. He doesn't have the time. He needs to get back to the work of catching bad guys. People who committed real, provable crimes. People who can be brought in. Not people who are above the law like Mitch Queen.

  He should be working on those things. But it's not going that well, because for all that he can't afford to worry about Anna Witt, the sad, anxious girl who showed about every sign of abuse that he could think of off the top of his head, he was sick with worry about her.

  Was she at least alright? Not hurt? Mitch Queen might be able to stop bullying the girl for a few days, at least. Maybe long enough to get to the wedding. Hopefully.

  Long enough for his father to get picked back up. Long enough for everything in his life to fall back into place.

  Josh looks down at the pile of cases. There's not a lack of evidence, per se. There's plenty of evidence. Someone broke in to the bank. That's a job in and of itself. They'd taken things from several safety deposit boxes. Several.

  The contents of those boxes, as usual, is unknown.

  There's plenty of evidence that someone broke in. There's a big god damn hole where the safety deposit boxes used to be, for example. And there's an open vault door.

  Those things don't just open on their own. Safety deposit boxes don't just walk out.

  But the job was done at night. The night guard didn't see anything out of the ordinary. For all anyone knows, maybe he was looking at Playboys when he was on the job. Too focused on texting his wife instead of watching the building. Who knows.

  Second, the video feeds show a single man come in, drop a bag, and then head over. Video feeds all cut around the same time, about thirty seconds after he walks back under the frame of the lobby camera.

  Nothing really points to anyone. Which is why the papers are sitting there, right this second, on Detective Meadows' coffee table. Because the guy in charge, he's not sure what to figure.

  The men in the photos are not particular-looking men. They're wearing heavy black coats that terminate at the mid-hip. Probably pea-coats, like the British navy used to wear back in the day. Warm. Very warm for August.

  They've got masks on. Nothing that would stand out. Nothing unique. Black masks. Ski masks. The eyes are blacked out somehow. The camera feed is too poor to make it out. For all that they know, it could be that the fellow is just dark-skinned, but for a very brief glimpse of the man's arm.

  His coat, as it turns out, is not exceptionally well-fitting for a man with such long arms, and so for a brief moment his wrist is visible between his gloves and his sleeve, and it's light-skinned.

  Hence, the skin around his eyes has been blacked over with something. Grease paint, probably. Grease paint available just about anywhere. Costume shops all around the country carry the stuff year-round.

  For a well-planned job this size, a year of preparation wouldn't be outside possibility. Most criminals don't have that kind of patience, but most criminals don't plan well in the first place.

  By and large, it's why they're criminals.

  If they, for some reason, couldn't bear to go into a party supply store, though, they could get something like this almost anywhere around Halloween. Which is to say, almost totally untraceable.

  The bag is a standard duffel bag. Looks like canvas.

  Josh looks it over. Someone must have thought long and hard about this job, which begs several questions. The most important of them, though, is… if they've planned this out enough to avoid being seen, to cut the camera feeds, all that…

  Would they have taken the contents of roughly a dozen random safety deposit boxes? Why fourteen? Why not thirteen or fifteen? Why not twelve?

  Is it a matter of timing things? Do they know specifically at what time the security guard calls up his booty call every Friday night and gets his jollies off in the parking lot, and specifically at what time he finishes?

  That could excuse it, maybe. But it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. None of it does.

  Josh leans his head back and takes a breath. He looks down at the notepad beside him. He was right. He'd have regretted leaving it at the office. Worst case scenario, he ends
up with two notepads. Never sure which one to use in the moment.

  He flips back a page, to the speech he'd been writing out. It sounded vaguely apologetic. That was probably good enough, in the end, right? It was hard to say with any certainty. But it was even harder to say how anyone expected a better apology.

  After all, Mitchell Queen should be happy that it doesn't open 'When I first met Mitch Queen, I knew with absolute clarity that he was a son-of-a-bitch and a bully, and I knew that he'd driven every person who was ever close to him away—some of them with his bad attitude, and for those who stayed, by telling them he didn't want them around.'

  But he wouldn't be happy with that. Nobody would. Even Josh would probably be unsatisfied reading it out. It lacked a certain sense of gravity when he just laid it all out like that.

  No, he needed to get his job back. Queen wasn't worth it. He'd be outed by some tabloid sooner or later. They'd get themselves a picture of Anna Witt, who would be Anna Queen by then no doubt, with a big god damn wallop on her eye.

  Then they'd post it around, it would be the talk of the town for a couple of days, and it would die down. Well, if she went back to him, she knew what she was getting herself into.

  She knew what was going to happen. None of this would be a surprise to her when it finally did happen. Josh Meadows had a promising career ahead of himself, if he managed to keep his nose clean and keep himself under control.

  As long as he left Mitch Queen and his fiancée alone, there wouldn't be any trouble.

  His throat felt tight, but that wasn't because of Anna. It wasn't because of her that his stomach churned, that his heart felt like it was racing.

  His throat just felt strange because he was… because…

  Josh Meadows, who might still be a Detective after he makes this televised apology, takes another drink. It doesn't matter why he's panicked, it doesn't matter why he's upset.

  What matters is that he looks at these case files, and he writes his apology, and he forgets about anything that resembles a pretty, sad-eyed girl with a missing daughter.