Sky High (Three Contemporary Novella's) Read online

She shook her head. “He said he had a big condo in an upscale part of town, but I’m sure if I’d made it that far yesterday, that would have turned out to be a lie, too. God, I feel so stupid.”

  David paused in his note-taking and looked up at her. “Meg, do you know why we call him the Sheep of Wall Street? Because he’s a sociopath who fools everyone he meets and has done so for his entire career. This plan of his took years to put in place. Years when he met with investors and lied to their faces while he plotted to steal their retirement savings. Years of lying to every single one of his colleagues. Even with the mountain of evidence we have against him, there are people he worked with who simply can’t believe he did it because he seemed like such a nice guy, so harmless. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. Trust me, the guy’s a master manipulator. You weren’t the only one he fooled.”

  “Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. So what now?”

  David sat back and exchanged a look with Ken. “We’ve been chasing this guy for a year and this is the closest we’ve gotten to him, but we still don’t know where he is. Mexico City is huge. He could stay hidden here for his whole life. We’re hoping you’ll work with us to help bring him in.”

  “Me?”

  “You’ve already got an established relationship with him and a way to contact him.”

  She held up her hands. “I threw a drink in his face yesterday. I’m pretty sure we’re done. He doesn’t want to hear from me.”

  “No, but he’s desperate to hear from your money.”

  Then Garrett spoke up. “And the fact that the money comes in a package with you will be a tremendous incentive. Trust me.”

  She looked up and their eyes met. She’d been sitting in a bathrobe talking to two FBI agents for hours and she hadn’t felt as exposed as she did the moment Garrett’s eyes dipped down to the low V of her robe and back up.

  Clearing her throat, she refocused on David. “So what do you want me to do? Email him?”

  “Tell him you’ve had a change of heart. You want to give it another chance.”

  “That won’t be an easy sell after yesterday.”

  “Meg,” David implored. “You’ve been talking to the guy for four months. He learned you so he could play you. But you were learning him, too. Right now, you’re our number one expert on how Mark Rubiak thinks.”

  She sat back and thought about that, all those emails and chats, months of sharing and planning. Did she know what to say to Spencer to make him want to see her again? Something sparked in her chest, something hot and a little bit malicious. It was an unfamiliar sensation, but it felt good. It felt the way Garrett’s scotch tasted, warming her up from the inside out. She let it grow and spread. Yes, she knew exactly what to say to Spencer. He’d used her own weakness and need against her? Well, that street went two ways.

  Garrett, David, and Ken all clustered around her chair as she opened her laptop and logged in to her email. She typed his name into the address box.

  “Hey, can’t you just track his IP address or whatever?”

  David gave her a bored glance. “The guy expertly shifted millions of dollars around the world through elaborate phony electronic financial structures. Trust me, he’s not using the IP address of his local internet cafe.”

  “Oh. Right. So what do I say?”

  “What would make him reconsider?”

  She thought about it, hands poised over the keyboard. Banishing all thoughts of Mark, the creepy predator she met yesterday, she summoned up Spencer, kind and handsome. She forced herself to remember everything Spencer made her feel, even if those feelings were already starting to seem secondhand, like they belonged to some other version of herself. When she was back in the mind-set of the girl she’d been two days ago, she started typing.

  Dear Spencer,

  I’m sorry about what happened yesterday. The situation threw me. It was a lot to take in all at once. But I’ve been up all night reading our old emails, and Spencer, we have something real, don’t we? You feel it, too? This connection is bigger than what we look like or what our lives are like or how much money we have. You know me, and I still feel like I know you. The you inside. So I’d like another chance to get to know the rest of you. We had something good before. I think we still might. I’m still here in Mexico City, staying at a hotel. Let’s get a drink and start over.

  Love, Meg

  “What now?” she asked as she hit send and sat back.

  “We wait for his answer,” David said. He gave her their numbers with instructions to call day or night, then they left to go back to their office and debrief the Sheep of Wall Street team. Mark had a team of FBI agents on his case.

  Garrett poured her another scotch as soon as they were gone. “So what do you want to do now?”

  Meg looked around the room and then down at herself, still wearing the bathrobe she’d put on that morning. “I want to go shopping.”

  #

  Garrett took her to the upscale shops along Avenida Presidente Masaryk in Polanco because it was the only place he knew. It turned out to be the right call. For such an unassuming girl, Meg asserted her heiress bona fides by racking up some impressive credit card action in a record short time. At her first stop, after she paid, she changed into new clothes in the ladies’ room, slipping into a little black dress that was astoundingly sexy for being so simple. Perhaps it was that Meg was so uncalculating about it. When she emerged, tugging her skirt into place, she didn’t even spare a glance to see how he reacted to the dress. If she had, she’d have seen the way his eyes glazed over, the way his lips parted in speechless lust, the way he had to subtly shift positions to hide the evidence of what she did to him. But she didn’t notice any of that. She merely retrieved her shopping bag from him with a sunny smile and headed off to the next store.

  This was ridiculous and way too domestic. He probably could have left her to finish up alone. He could go find some nice, cool bar and drink the afternoon away. But what David said about the possibility of Rubiak tracking her, however remote, made him paranoid. So here he was, minding her like a border collie, holding her stuff, and following her to the next store.

  He’d successfully zoned out of the whole ordeal until he glanced up in the middle of the Prada boutique and spotted Serena, of all people, making her way toward him. He’d figured he’d run into her at some point while he was in Mexico. They tended to cover the same stories, and the ambassador’s trial was a big one. But encountering her in the reporters’ pen at the courthouse was a lot different than encountering her in the Prada store, holding Meg’s shopping bags while she tried things on.

  “Well, well, fancy meeting you here,” she purred, coming to a stop in front of him. She looked pretty good, tall and model-thin with a long sweep of dark brown hair she’d always been really vain about. Her face, with its high, sharp cheekbones and clear blue eyes, was still lovely, but he thought he detected just a little bit of age creeping in around her eyes. Even a cold-blooded bitch like her couldn’t make her scorched-earth way through the world without it showing on her face eventually.

  “Serena,” he said, inclining his head slightly. “You’re looking well. In town covering the ambassador’s trial?”

  “Of course. It’s the big story right now.”

  Garrett suppressed a smirk. “Sure is.”

  “What brings you to this part of town?” Serena asked, arching one finely sculpted eyebrow. “It’s a long way from those seedy bars you tend to favor.”

  Garrett was scratching the back of his neck, searching for a plausible reason he’d be shopping on Masaryk, when he glanced over Serena’s shoulder and realized the situation had just gotten much more complicated. Meg had paid and was making her way toward them, her eyes fixed curiously on Serena. Fuck. He’d have to make some brief introductions and scoot Meg out as quickly as possible. Serena noted his gaze wasn’t on her and followed it to Meg.

  “She’s a little young for you, isn’t she?” Serena drawled under her breath a moment befo
re Meg reached them.

  “Ah…Meg, this is Serena, an old work colleague. Serena, Meg.” If Meg noted the name and remembered his story, she never let it show. Maybe she’d forgotten.

  Serena held out a perfectly manicured hand and smiled. She was seemingly friendly and sincere, but Garrett wasn’t fooled. Serena was going in for the kill. “Hi. Hope this isn’t too awkward for you, running into the ex and everything.”

  But Meg hadn’t forgotten the story or the name. She shook Serena’s hand, her bright smile never faltering, and said, “Huh. He never mentioned you.” Then she turned her megawatt smile on Garrett. “Of course, if Garrett told me about every old girlfriend from the dark ages of his youth, we’d be here all day. You ready to go?”

  Garrett blinked. He didn’t dare look at Serena. He didn’t have to, because he knew what he’d see. She’d just been scathingly set down by a girl ten years her junior and half her size, declared insignificant, and—worse in Serena’s mind—old. She was probably ready to explode with rage. Good.

  “Uh, yeah. Let’s go. Serena, guess I’ll see you around the courthouse?”

  The pause before she replied spoke volumes. “Sure. Nice meeting you, Meg.”

  “Same!” Meg chirped, curling her hand around Garrett’s arm and steering him out of the shop. He was sure he could feel Serena’s eyes burning holes in his back as he left.

  “What the hell was that?” Garrett asked when they were safely out on the sidewalk.

  Meg shrugged absently. “She came at me with her claws out, so I slapped her hand.”

  “I didn’t know you had it in you, Meg.”

  “I went to an all-girls private school. I know how to play that game. I may have fallen for Mark Rubiak’s bullshit, but I’m not dumb.”

  “Never said you were.”

  “Wow, she’s a real bitch. You’ve got excellent taste in women, Garrett.”

  “Says the girl who was engaged to the FBI’s most wanted criminal until yesterday afternoon.”

  He was afraid he’d gone too far, poked at something too tender, but instead, she erupted in laughter, soft at first, and then, as if a dam had broken, loud, helpless guffaws. Before he knew what was happening, Garrett was laughing, too. It was all too ridiculous—Serena’s shocked face as they left, the crazy, improbable circumstances that had him spending this weekend with Meg, the unbelievable way she’d fallen into his life. Meg laughed until tears were streaming down her face. He laughed, too, holding her around the waist to steady her. The lightness in his chest was so unfamiliar that he almost didn’t recognize it. Happiness. A specific kind of happiness centered around a specific person.

  Oh, hell.

  Meg was still laughing. It was tapering off into breathless, sighing giggles as she tried to control it, and Garrett tried to control what was happening inside himself. He could not do this. He could not have her. Not under ordinary circumstances and certainly not under these circumstances. It wasn’t helping that as her laughter subsided, she didn’t release her hold on him. Her hands splayed out on his chest, and her eyes were fixed somewhere around his Adam’s apple. His fingers curled slightly into her hips and she leaned in closer on a sigh. She wanted him, too. He wasn’t mistaking the obvious signs of physical attraction. He was fairly certain if he made a move, he wouldn’t be rebuffed. But that was not going to happen. He wasn’t a good guy, not by a long shot, but he wasn’t so bad that he’d take advantage of a woman in Meg’s emotionally compromised state. She couldn’t possibly know what she wanted right now, and it would be all too easy for her to do something she wouldn’t ordinarily do. He didn’t want to become another thing for her to regret. She had plenty of those already.

  So he took a casual step back from her and smiled, holding out his hand. “Carry your bags?”

  Her eyes skittered warily up to his and she bit her lip. Good Lord, he wished she wouldn’t do that. But then she looked away, breaking the spell, and handed him her new shopping bags. “Thanks.”

  The sexually charged moment dissipated, but Meg stayed in good spirits. She loved Mexico City, which surprised him. As they left the shopping district and ambled back through neighborhoods toward his apartment, she exclaimed over everything she saw. It was amazing to him that, in the face of such fresh betrayal, she could still find plenty of things to enjoy about everything she experienced. He’d been betrayed by the person he loved ten years ago and he hadn’t put himself back together half as well as Meg had in twenty-four hours.

  They stopped for dinner, choosing to sit in the back courtyard of the restaurant and enjoy the remarkably temperate weather. The sun was fading and there were little twinkle lights strung up over the tables. The leaves of the tree in the back corner rustled and sighed. Meg propped her elbow on the table, chin in hand. A votive candle in a red glass holder cast flickering light across her face, making her eyes glint. She looked around herself and sighed.

  “It’s so pretty, just like I imagined it would be when I got to Mexico.”

  Garrett scowled, suddenly feeling like that blond Adonis, Fake Spencer, was crowding into the table with them. Meg didn’t seem to be thinking of Fake Spencer tonight, though. She seemed to be living entirely in the moment, not lingering in her past. Just like when she told him about her dad on the plane.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  She sipped her sangria. “Sure.”

  “Why did you go home to your dad’s when he got sick? Now that I know his situation, it’s obvious he had the money for a full-time medical staff to take care of him. Why you?”

  “He did have nurses. But nurses aren’t family. My parents got divorced when I was little and things were strained for a long time. I didn’t see him much. When he got his diagnosis, I think he had a lot of regrets about that. He thought he’d have more time to fix things. So I made sure we did what we could with the time he had left. Why do you ask?”

  He shrugged, trying to mask how very interested he was in her. “Just curious. You confound me sometimes. Just trying to figure out what makes you tick. Like Spencer.”

  “What about him?”

  “Two days ago you were talking about marrying the guy. I don’t know… I thought you’d be more upset. You can be, you know. It’s okay to be angry or sad or—”

  She closed her eyes and sighed. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “You want me to be sad. You want me to get all caught up in the awfulness of it so I start seeing the world the way you do, because you think I need to learn a lesson about people. You want me to be angry and bitter and—”

  Garrett reached across the table and covered her hand with his own. “No, Meg, I really don’t want that to happen to you. Actually, I’m praying to God that this shitty thing this asshole did to you won’t make you start seeing the world the way I do. Because that would be the real tragedy. I like seeing you still enjoying your life even after what’s happened. I think I lost that ability along the way. You’re strong, much more so than I gave you credit for.”

  “It’s no different than losing my dad. I was sad. I still am. But I don’t want to live in my sadness, and he wouldn’t want me to. I chose to be happy and move on. In this case, Spencer—Mark—doesn’t deserve my sadness. I can’t give him the satisfaction of another tear shed, not over a guy who was never real. He deserves something from me, but it’s not tears. It’s revenge.”

  Garrett squeezed her hand, wishing he didn’t need to let her go, but knowing he did. “Attagirl.”

  His fingers had just slipped away from hers when her phone, which she’d kept close to her side all day, vibrated. She flipped it over, checked the screen, and looked up at Garrett.

  “He wrote back.”

  #

  Meg,

  You seemed pretty furious yesterday. I thought we had something, too, but you were more than ready to walk away when it all wasn’t as perfect as you wanted it to be. Frankly, I’m not eager for more judgment from you. I thought you’d have been more understa
nding after everything we shared. Was I wrong about that?

  Spencer

  They called David and Ken as soon as they got back to Garrett’s place. Mark’s email back was short, a little angry, but not a confirmed “no.” David and Ken were excited; Meg was less confident, but she was willing to try. Garrett set them up on a group phone call and David remotely accessed her laptop so they could see her screen as she tried to initiate a chat with Mark. Garrett pulled his chair up next to her.

  Meg: Hey, are you there?

  “What are you going to say to him?” Garrett asked as they waited for a response.

  “He’s clearly looking for me to convince him. So I need to convince him.”

  “Convince him?”

  She looked over at him. He was closer than she thought, right next to her. She could almost feel his body heat all along her right side. “Seduce him.”

  Garrett swallowed thickly and looked back to her screen. An instant later, Mark’s reply popped up.

  Spencer: I’m here.

  Meg: Can we talk? I’ve missed talking to you like this. Remember how we’d spend all night online like this?

  Spencer: I remember.

  Meg: Those nights meant a lot to me, you know.

  Spencer: Me, too.

  She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders.

  Meg: You know, after we’d finish those chats, I’d dream about you.

  Spencer: You would?

  Meg: Yeah. We were always together in my dreams. Not online. Together. You could touch me and I could touch you.

  There was a longer pause before he replied. She could almost feel his intrigue. She cast a sideways glance at Garrett. The blue glow from her laptop outlined his strong profile. His broad shoulders were angled slightly toward her, his left arm resting on the back of her chair, just behind her shoulder. She didn’t want to think about the reality of Mark Rubiak while she did this, pale and sweaty and a sociopathic liar, and she couldn’t even bring up Spencer anymore. He was already fading in her memories, like he’d always been no more than smoke. If she were honest with herself, she wanted to imagine she was typing this to Garrett. Just the thought made her throat get tight with a confusing mix of nerves and anticipation. Fine, she’d imagine it was Garrett. As long as Mark took the bait, who cared?