Free An Offer He Can't Refuse by Christie Ridgway Page B

a lot of energy to live a good, long life so you shouldn't use it all up in one day."
    "Yeah?" Johnny muttered. "Maybe I'm not so sure about a good, long life ahead." He wasn't sure he wanted one, if it would never include the answers he needed to get a decent night's sleep.
    "You might be right about that if you decide to contact them."
    "Contact who?" Johnny asked.
    'Those Caruso girls," Stan replied. "Cosimo is very protective of those three."
    Which got Johnny thinking about Téa again. For some reason, he was starting to feel a little protective of the contessa himself. She was smart, she was funny, she was sexy in a half-exotic, half-innocent way he itched to explore.
    He remembered the sleek feel of her lips against the tip of his finger and the way her perfume had bloomed in the car like the scent of hot flowers when he'd touched her. She turned him on. She tempted him. To put it bluntly, he wanted to take her to bed.
    That was the hell of it, though, because his Main Street Magee values were starting to nag at him again. While he might not be a man who enjoyed getting close to people, he'd never considered himself a user before either. A player perhaps, but not a user.
    And besides sex, he wanted to use Téa Caruso for information.
    Jesus, the one he should be protecting her from was
himself
.
    And he could. He could go away from Palm Springs. Go back to Vegas or to somewhere else. Delving into the past was all so damn complicated to begin with and the temptation of Téa would only make it more so. Perhaps the best thing to do now was to sell the house and hope that time would rebury the memories.
    It hadn't happened in nine months and he didn't think it would happen in another nineteen, or twenty-nine, but he could hope.
    He drew the last of his golf balls toward the rubber tee. Fine. As soon as he was done here, he'd drop by Téa's office, he decided. Unless a lightning bolt hit before he got out the words, he was going to tell her the design job was off.
    He might never know the complete truth, but then she'd never find out that the man rumored to have rubbed out her father was his. And that the family who ordered the hit that killed Johnny's father in retaliation had been hers.
----
Eight

     
"Too Close for Comfort"
    Johnny Mathis
    Wonderful, Wonderful
(1957)
    There was a tall and wide white box on Téa's office
doorstep. She dropped her briefcase and purse to pick it up, and the slick cardboard felt cool to the touch—proof that it had recently spent time in refrigeration. "Celebrity Florist" was embossed in silver across the lid.
    Though the office was still locked up because Téa's assistant was coming in late that day, a delivery person wouldn't have just dumped the package on a doorstep, she thought, glancing around. Even at ten a.m., the morning was too warm to leave flowers unattended for long.
    And who would have sent her flowers anyway? If "Caruso" hadn't been inked in tiny letters on one corner, she would have already been walking them toward the insurance company in the next office over. The receptionist there had caught the fancy of a seventy-something taxidermist from Indian Wells. Last week he'd sent her a bouquet of helium balloons anchored by a stuffed coyote. A real stuffed coyote.
    Both she and Rachele had heard the young woman's screech of repulsion and come running.
    But the only man Téa had had recent contact with was Johnny Magee.
    Beneath her oatmeal-colored blouse and skirt her skin prickled, in every place it had no business prickling. Because no matter what had happened last night in her car, no matter what had been said—both real and imagined—he was supposed to be business. Just business.
    Yet she could remember that light touch of his fingertips to her face as if they were still there. She could still taste him too, male and salty, on her tongue. Her mind flashed back to that lip-to-lipstick sip that Eve's latest had taken from her drink, and from there it was only a short mental