He clasped the ends of my fingers as I held my hand out for a handshake and brought them to a surprisingly full mouth. “Modest and beautiful. You have a rare breed here, Phillipa.”
“Thank you,” I said softly but I’d already taken the measure of this man in the expensive, custom-made suit and Italian loafers, with the slick hair and the gold ring on his pinky.
He was candy coated, poverty enrobed in class. It was obvious in his manner, in the shrewd almost feral look that made his brown eyes murkier than most; swamp water that held hidden depths, most of them filled with monsters.
I knew monsters, I’d had one as a guardian growing up, so I knew what to look for.
And Javier Ventura was one of them.
“She is lovely, isn’t she?” my mother agreed after taking a sip of her dry vodka martini with a lime twist.
I’d been making her that cocktail since I was a young girl. Whenever my father cut her off and the serving staff had to refuse to serve her, she used to send me into the alcohol closet for the copper cocktail shaker, a plump green fruit and a martini glass she made me chill in the fridge first.
It was one of the reasons Debra had been willing to keep me on at The Lotus. I made a mean martini.
“Smart as a whip too,” my dad said, rounding the table where he had stood with Mr. Warren, Headmaster Adams from Entrance Bay Academy, Harold Danner, the staff sergeant, and his handsome officer son, Lionel, all of whom were frequent guests in our house. “You should see her IQ scores, Javier. She gets it from me, of course.”
His laughter was meant to play his comment off as a joke, but I knew better and as I watched Javier smile thinly, I knew he realized it too.
“I’m sure,” he demurred before his eyes came back to me. “You must meet my wife, Irina. She’ll love you.”
As if on cue, a glamorous dark-haired, pale-skinned woman floated into the room, probably from the restroom. She wore a white dress that hugged her curves indecently and so many diamonds she looked like walking star shine.
Cue the trophy wife.
“Ah, you must be the Louise we hear so much about,” Irina purred as she glided forward to take my hands in hers. Her red lips blossomed into a beautiful smile. “Just lovely. You know, I mentor many young girls just like yourself. You must come to my studio some day and pose for me.”
“My wife is a skilled photographer and director back in Mexico,” Javier explained.
I pursed my lips but didn’t say anything even though their Mr. & Mrs. Smith perfectness was giving me the creeps.
“Let’s sit down for dinner,” my mother suggested and began to usher people to their assigned chairs.
I took my place in the middle of the table on the left, between Mr. Warren on one side and Javier on the other. Immediately, they both leaned toward me, moths to the flame of my youth and beauty, to the glimpse of my breasts nestled in the draped folds of my satin pale pink chemise.
“Louise,” they both said at the same time and then chuckled.
“Please, guests first,” Mr. Warren said with an elegant wave of his hand. “I can speak to Louise any time.”
Javier’s lips thinned but he nodded his acceptance then waited until it was Mr. Warren’s turn to frown and turn away to speak with my mother on his other side. Only then did Javier lean even closer to me to say, “You look absolutely lovely in that dress, Louise.”
“Thank you,” I said neutrally, curious to see where he would take the conversation.
In my experience, it was either to issue a backroom invitation to test my virtue against their lascivious intentions or to offer me up as a possible candidate for their son or grandson.
In this case, I thought it might be something else.
“I can see why your parents are so proud of you,” he continued as our cook, Mrs. Henry, served him an individual portion of her famous French onion soup.
“They raised me right,” I preached.
I was almost surprised I remembered how. It’d been awhile since I’d had to do any ass kissing but I guessed after years of it, it was muscle memory.
“I’m sure,” he agreed but there was vein of dark humor in his voice that I wanted to excavate.
So, I said, “What is your business with my father?”
He laughed softly. “Assertive. I like a woman who knows what she wants.”
I sent a skeptical glance at Irina that had him laughing again, this time louder so that my parents both sent me approving glances from each end of the table. This was, after all, what I was there for; lubricating the guests with my looks, youth and charm so that my parents could swoop in and take from them whatever they needed: political merit, money, social connections or extramarital affairs.
“Irina would surprise you, I think. She is very involved in my businesses and quite successful with her own.”
“Mmm.”
“As for my business with your father, I hope to open a Canadian branch of my import/export company. In order to do this, I need his political support getting the right tax exemptions and his moral support, as I won’t open a business in a town where outlaws run rampant.”
I startled slightly, hesitating with a spoonful of gooey onion goodness suspended and dripping halfway to my mouth. Carefully, I settled it back down and turned my eyes to his bright, intelligent gaze.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean you have a cancer…” His dark eyes caught the light of the chandelier and reflected like obsidian, inhuman and deadly sharp when pointed, as they were at that moment, at me. “In this town, I mean. The Fallen MC, as I understand it, have run roughshod over this city for years. I plan to rectify that.”
“And how might you do that?” Lionel asked from across the table.
I wasn’t surprised he was listening. We weren’t friends exactly because he was a good nine years older than me, but we’d been around each other all our lives and I knew him well enough to know that he listened to everything and missed very, very little.
Javier smiled at his wineglass as he stroked the faceted stem of it. “When there is an infestation, you must not kill one rat at a time, you understand? You must take them all and to do that there is an order to things. First, you take away their food, their basic means of survival. If there is no food, the rats will panic. Then, you set the traps. Those eliminate the stupid rats, the young and the old, the women and the children, maybe. All that remains are the male rats and they are hungry, growing mad. Finally, you smoke them out and as they spill out their little rat holes you shoot them one by one until the last rat remains, the strongest rat of the bunch but the one who had to watch all the other rats die before him. And then you put a bullet in his brain too.”
There was a long stagnant silence full of disgust like a still pond filled with breeding mosquitoes.
“I’ve heard rat poison works too,” Lionel suggested drolly.
I hid my surprised laughter behind a cough I covered with my napkin, but our eyes caught and danced at each other from across the table. His were green, greener than wet grass and ripe Granny Smith apples.
“Of course,” Javier said with a one-shouldered shrug as he dabbed daintily at his mouth with his napkin after finishing his soup. “Less poetic of course, but if we’re talking about rats then I suppose that would work.”