Playing With Fire Page 2

Her encounter with Sam felt anything but accidental, but she didn’t think she could come up with a way to tell the host that without him handing her another one of those horn-spouting stares. Better to cut her losses and get out of here before she did anything else to make herself look like a complete idiot.

  She said, “Okay, sorry. My mistake.” She wasn’t sorry, and she didn’t think she’d made a mistake, but she did know she’d already wasted enough time here. Sam was obviously long gone. No point in pursuing the matter any further.

  Cool night air surrounded her as she stepped outside. She felt better almost immediately, even though the evening breeze was dry, all moisture stolen by the bluster of Southern California’s Santa Ana winds. At least she couldn’t smell the fires; the smoke had been driven out to sea by the harsh gales. It was beginning to get chilly, despite the day’s heat, and she wished she had thought to bring a jacket.

  Her loft was only a few blocks from the restaurant/bar where the speed-dating event had been held, so she didn’t bother with a taxi. Friends told her she was crazy for roaming around downtown by herself, but she’d never felt unsafe. The local news broadcast far more stories of people going nuts in suburbia than of mayhem in L.A.’s center. A few miles away, down in the sprawl of South Central, things were different, but the people here in the heart of the city tended to leave one another alone.

  She’d purchased the loft a few years back before gentrification had really taken hold. At the time she’d had to drive miles to get to a supermarket, but now a gleaming new Ralph’s was within walking distance. Her newer neighbors were just as likely to be lawyers or Internet entrepreneurs as artists and musicians, but that was all right. She liked the variety, and the fact that, while everyone in her building tended to keep an eye on everyone else, people mostly stayed out of her business.

  Not that Felicia had much business to stay out of. Between making sure her mother was doing all right in the managed-care facility where she now lived and keeping an eye on her younger sister Carrie, now a junior at UCLA, men had been pretty low on Felicia’s priority list for some time. Her agent Lauren had poked and prodded until Felicia finally agreed to the speed-dating event, mostly to get her off her back.

  And see how well that turned out, she thought, as she turned her key in the lock and let herself into the loft. She dropped her purse on the kitchen counter and went to put the kettle on the stove. What she really needed was some peppermint tea to bring much-needed moisture back to her throat, followed by a good night’s sleep. She knew better than to paint when she felt like this; the deadline for her latest commission was coming up quickly, but she knew she’d make it. What she couldn’t afford was any mistakes brought on by exhaustion…

  …or preoccupation with a certain black-haired stranger. Despite her best efforts to put the brief encounter behind her, his face kept swimming up in her mind. Those eyes like pools of ink, the clean, sculpted lines of his jaw. She’d always been a sucker for a good chin.

  Or maybe just a sucker, period. She needed to stop making the mistake of dating creative types; they invariably left her high and dry when things got the least bit difficult. On the other hand, she couldn’t think what she’d have in common with someone in a supposedly stable career, like an accountant or a banker or a high school principal. Carrie kept hinting darkly about trying to fix her up with a certain eligible anthropology professor, but that was more of a running joke between them than anything serious.

  The loft was well over two thousand square feet. Normally, Felicia enjoyed the feeling of space it gave and the warm, natural light that poured through its high windows, but tonight it felt oddly hollow, cavernous. The whistle from the kettle echoed off wood floors and exposed brick.

  A shadow moved outside one window, and she started. Then she realized it was only her next-door neighbor’s cat Dempsey, making his usual nightly rounds. Shaking her head at herself, she went to the kitchen and turned down the burner, then dropped a tea bag into a mug and poured hot water over it. The reassuring smell of peppermint drifted up to her nose.

  Really, was one encounter with an interesting stranger enough to make her this jumpy? Better to chalk it up to the Santa Anas and their well-publicized effects, including short tempers and all-around jitteriness. Hadn’t someone once tried to use the hot, dry winds as part of an insanity defense?

  Her windows looked east, toward Boyle Heights and the hills of Mount Washington and the Arroyo Seco. A gibbous moon had just begun to rise beyond their dark shapes, its face tinged yellow-orange from the dust and smoke in the air. Felicia wrapped her fingers around her mug and stared out into the night sky. She wondered if Sam was looking at the moon as well.

  • • •

  He found Abigor in one of his favorite haunts, at the base of the first “O” in the Hollywood sign. From this vantage point one could see the entire city spread out below. Tonight the air was almost achingly clear, save for the smudge of smoke that hung off the coast. Despite his form, Samael’s eyes weren’t quite human; no mortal could have differentiated between the haze from the fires and the equally black blur of the Pacific Ocean.

  “Slow night?” he asked.

  A beer bottle glinted as Abigor raised it to his mouth. He swallowed, then said, “Slower than the 405 at rush hour.”

  “I had no idea L.A. was such a hotbed of virtue.”

  “It’s not. I guess all the baddies just decided they didn’t want to check out on a Friday night.” He extracted a bottle from the six-pack next to him and offered it to Samael.

  Since it was something drinkable this time — a Belgian ale — Samael took the offering and neatly popped off the cap. His nails looked human, but they were stronger. Far stronger.

  “Weren’t you the one catching hell for drinking on the job last time?”

  Abigor shrugged. “Technically, I’m not on the job right now. I’m just taking a break. Capturing souls with a Corona in one hand — yeah, they didn’t like that too much.”

  Rules got bent all the time, Samael knew. After all, what could Lucifer or his lieutenants Beelzebub and Asmodeus do, except bust their minions back to Hell? Samael would prefer to stay topside, but he’d done guard duty in the Pit and survived to tell the tale. At least he wasn’t one of the souls stuck upside-down in a lake of boiling blood for all eternity.

  He took a meditative swallow of ale. No beer in Hell, though. No steaks or air-conditioned movie theaters or the smell of wet earth after the rain.

  No redheads with laughing hazel eyes and distracting dimples, either.

  He was silent for awhile, his gaze fixed on the glittering carpet of light beneath him.

  “You look like a demon with something on his mind,” Abigor remarked, just before he cracked open another beer. “Or someone, that is. The last time I saw you this moony, you’d just met that brunette up at the Observatory. Or was it the blonde down on Melrose?” He shot a glance at his watch and grinned. “It’s been what, five years since the last one? I guess it’s about time for you to be scratching that itch again.”

  Samael raised an eyebrow but didn’t bother to reply. Sometimes it could be downright annoying to have someone around who’d known you for an eternity or two.

  “I still don’t see the point,” Abigor added. “Seems like too much work to me. Hookers are so much easier. They don’t give a shit as long as you pay them what they’re asking. No weeping and wailing if you’re not there when they wake up in the morning — unless crying’s your kink, of course.”

  “You’re pure class, Abbie,” Samael drawled. Abigor hated that nickname.

  His companion scowled. His mortal form was that of a large black man with a shaved head, and the frown only made him look more forbidding. Forbidding to mortals, of course. Samael had worked with Abigor for several centuries by now. He was used to the other demon’s frowns.

  And the ribbing. Samael sometimes wondered if he went so long between liaisons because he didn’t want to deal with the inevitable ration of shit Abigor
gave him.

  “Not much use for class in our line of work,” the demon said. “But hey — you want your class and your ‘relationships’ and your amusing house wines? Go for it. I know they — ” and Abigor jerked a significant thumb downward — “don’t give a fuck as long as the job gets done.”

  True enough. Abigor’s choice remarks were the only feedback Samael had ever received in regard to his relationships with mortal women. If those liaisons didn’t interfere with his real reason for being topside, then no one seemed to care.

  Why, then, did he feel a most un-demon-like trickle of disquiet down his spine when he thought of Felicia McGovern? He wanted her, but this went beyond that. It was one thing to want more of her flesh than the creamy throat he’d spied above her loose-fitting shirt. It was quite another to desire the sound of her voice or the flash of a dimple next to her mouth.

  It had been a long time. That was all. Had he gone this long before? A year here, a year there, but five? He couldn’t recall. Days and nights blended together and became one long, flashing kaleidoscope of memory when time had no true meaning.

  “The job will get done,” Samael said. “It always does.”

  Abigor clapped a hand on his shoulder and offered him another beer. “I know, brother. I know.”

  • • •

  “So?” Lauren prompted. “How was it?”

  Felicia pretended to consider. “More fun than a root canal but probably not as much fun as having bamboo shoots shoved under my fingernails.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Okay, it was probably more fun than being waterboarded.”

  Lauren gave her a pained glance. “I know some of these things can be kind of shady, but this one came highly recommended.”

  “By whom? The head of the NSA?”

  “You mean you didn’t meet anyone? Not one guy worth a phone call?”

  Not for the first time, Felicia wondered why Lauren cared so much. Then again, her agent had gotten married a scant ten months ago. Now she seemed convinced that her life’s mission — besides getting her clients the juiciest contracts possible, of course — was to make sure everyone single around her got paired off as well.

  She hesitated. “Well — ”

  Lauren pounced. “A-ha! Spill it.”

  “There’s nothing to spill.” Fighting the bubble of annoyance rising in her, Felicia went to the window where she’d positioned her easel to catch the best of the morning light. Had she gone a little too yellow in her flesh tones? Maybe it was just the uneasy ochre-tinged sunlight outside. Another fire had popped up overnight, this one in the hills above Glendale. “Okay, there was this one guy who seemed moderately interesting. But he must have been a gate crasher, because they didn’t have any record of someone named Sam there that night.”

  “But you got his number.”

  “No.”

  “You gave him yours?”

  Felicia picked up an easel and began mixing more paint. Weird light or no, the studio exec was looking distinctly jaundiced. “No.”

  An audible sigh. Lauren crossed her arms and came closer, although she kept a respectable distance between the fresh paint and her expensive suit. “You know, Fel, in some ways you’re the most capable person I know. And in others — ”

  “ — I might as well be five. I know.” Despite the peppermint tea the night before and the healthy seven hours of sleep she’d gotten, Felicia could still feel the phantom edges of a headache lurking at the base of her skull. Much more questioning from Lauren, and it would probably grow into a full-blown three-aspirin monster. “It’s all right. I really don’t have time for that sort of thing right now anyway.”

  To Felicia’s surprise, Lauren nodded. “You’re right — you don’t.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Lauren flipped a few strands of her expertly highlighted bob away from her face. “You’ve got the contract, if you want it.”

  “If I want it?” Felicia didn’t have to ask which contract it was. The negotiations had been going on for so long she’d felt certain they were never going to end. Or maybe they would, but not in her favor. “I get to paint the governor?”

  “Not just the governor, but his whole family.”

  At a price tag that would keep her going for the next couple of years. Not that she’d ever allow herself to coast like that. More to the point, Lauren would make sure enough new contracts were lined up that Felicia would be lucky to get a week off before she had to plunge into the next painting.

  Still, she’d be a complete idiot if she didn’t admit she was a very lucky woman. She’d abandoned false modesty about her work back in her undergrad days, but Felicia knew that in this business, talent made up only a small part of actual success. Several friends whom she’d thought of as equally talented were still hustling to get their first gallery show.

  “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Thanks, Lauren. I really do appreciate all the work you put into making this deal.”

  Her agent waved a hand. “Of course I’m going to hustle for ten percent of a pie this big. Frank and I are thinking about going to Tuscany next spring. I’ve got to start saving up.”

  “That’s why I love you, Lauren — it’s that altruistic streak.”

  Of course Lauren didn’t seem fazed at all. “I’ll let you get back to work. I just wanted to deliver the good news in person.”

  And pick my brain about the speed dating, but Felicia just nodded. She didn’t want to get back into that again, not when she kept feeling that disappointed stab in her midsection whenever she thought of Sam and the way he had disappeared on her. Stupid, really, to get so knotted up over a guy she’d talked to for only a few minutes. Maybe she couldn’t completely control her physical reactions to a man, but at least over the years she’d learned how to channel that energy into something worthwhile.

  Repressing a sigh, she picked up her paintbrush and returned to the neglected portrait.

  • • •

  It was easy enough for Samael to get her address. He didn’t pretend to be omniscient — he left that sort of thing to the Man Upstairs — but her name was unusual enough that a quick online search turned up a portfolio of her work, as well as her agent’s contact info. And the agent seemed all too happy to spill the details when he went to her office and introduced himself.

  “Sam, is it?” asked the agent, a sharply attractive woman in her late thirties. The quick up-and-down glance she sent in his direction seemed to say she didn’t mind giving the hairy eyeball to a strange man, despite the rock on the ring finger of her left hand.

  “That’s right. I had to leave in a hurry — I was on call that night — and I didn’t have time to get Felicia’s number. But then I Googled her and got your contact information, and — ”

  “Say no more, Sam.” Another arch look. “Normally I wouldn’t do this, but since I know Felicia regretted not getting your number…” She lifted her shoulders, then bent down and retrieved a pen from her desktop. “I don’t think she’ll mind too much.” With a flourish, she scribbled a phone number on a piece of scratch paper and handed it to him.

  “Thanks,” he said, and gave the paper a quick glance before shoving it in his jeans pocket. Now no matter what happened, he had the number committed to memory. “Do you mind if I tell her where I got her number?”

  “Not at all.” Her lips curved under their layer of expensive lacquer. “Just let her know she can thank me later.”

  • • •

  The phone rang, and Felicia muttered a curse. Always at the wrong time. Just as she had finally gotten that damned flesh tone right….

  After shrilling for what seemed like an interminable stretch of time, the phone went quiet. Thank God for voicemail. It was so much easier to ignore a call when you didn’t have to listen to an answering machine broadcasting a message.

  She set her brush down on the tray at the base of the easel and reached up to knead the tight muscles at the base of her neck. Vaguely, she realized it had gott
en to late afternoon without her even noticing. The quality of light had changed enough that she knew she should stop working. Oh, she’d paint under artificial light if she had to, but she was getting really close now. No point in screwing up the painting just because she wanted to sprint across the finish line.

  The phone rang again, and Felicia felt a spasm of guilt. Most people knew to email her instead of calling, but what if it was the nursing home trying to get hold of her for some reason?

  When she picked up the phone, she heard the fast dial tone that indicated she had a message. She typed in her access code and waited, back tense with misgivings. Ever since her mother’s diagnosis, she’d steeled herself for the inevitable phone call, the one she dreaded and yet, in some dark little corner of her soul, wished would come sooner rather than later.

  No brisk nurse’s voice or cool doctor’s tones came to her ear, however. Instead, she heard the baritone of a man she thought she’d never encounter again.

  “I’d say you were a hard woman to find,” Sam’s message ran, “but you’re really not. Your agent gave me your number. Want to try again without a time limit?” Then he left her a phone number.

  He sounded relaxed, casual, as if he weren’t the one who had pulled the disappearing act. Her first instinct was to erase the message without even writing down his number. But what would that prove? She’d already admitted to herself that the guy had gotten under her skin. And he’d been interested enough to track her down through Lauren. His actions spoke of a certain tenacity she found admirable. There could have been a perfectly logical reason for his hasty departure from the speed-dating party.

  She was done painting for the day, anyway. And what better way to celebrate her new contract for the governor’s portrait than to go out to dinner with the first man she’d found remotely interesting in longer than she could remember?

  Well, when you put it that way…. She grinned, then played back the message so she could write down Sam’s number.