Staying On Top (Whitman University) (8 page)

He sat up slowly, squinting out the window and self-consciously wiping the corners of his mouth. “Where are we?”

My fingers itched to check my chest and shoulder for drool, but I ignored them. “We’re landing in Vienna. Are you going to be okay to drive?”

“To Slovenia?”

“Yes.”

“Won’t your dad’s vast network of spies be able to see us if we rent a car?” He yawned, unaware of how badly he made me want to slap him and kiss him with equal fervor, then peeked at me out of the corner of his eye.

Maybe not so unaware.

He seemed to think me paranoid, to assume my estimation of my dad’s omniscient nature higher than the reality. In truth, I wasn’t positive how closely Neil monitored his marks—or me, for that matter. It didn’t really matter. We weren’t going anywhere near my dad. All of the stops I had planned hadn’t been utilized since before my mother died, as far as I knew. The crazier the trek, the more uncomfortable the travel, the faster Sam would wear down and cough up the signatures I needed. 

He would go back to his life a few million lighter and I would go . . . wherever I went.

I hesitated to answer his question about the rental car, unwilling to argue with him or to let him farther into my secret life. He was along for the ride now, though, and there would be consequences to pay at the end of this sham partnership. Those couldn’t be helped.

It wasn’t as if he wouldn’t notice committing a felony.

“We’re not going to rent a car,” I whispered. “We’re going to . . . borrow one.”

“Borrow one?” His golden brown eyebrows shot up. “You have a friend in Vienna?”

“Not exactly. Why, do you?” Borrowing a car from a friend would be preferable to boosting one, even if I did plan to give it back.

“No.” Sam gave me a strange look, his typically soft brown eyes sharp and probing. “What does
not exactly
mean?”

The woman sitting on the aisle, who hadn’t slept a wink but had recognized Sam the moment we sat down, shifted. Her head tilted toward us, and her constant and obvious eavesdropping made me wonder if I should have said yes to his cheeky suggestion of a disguise.

“Can we talk about this once we have more privacy?”

He shrugged, unbuckling his seat belt and grabbing his bag from under the seat as the wheels touched down in Austria. I followed suit and the two of us disembarked with a couple hundred other passengers who looked as tired as I felt. Sam, for his part, appeared way too perky and refreshed for someone who had slept half bent over on a plane. The woman who had been sitting next to us grabbed him at the top of the Jetway.

“Could I have an autograph? It’s for my daughter. She’s a big fan.”

The spiderweb of lines around her eyes and lips put her in her fifties, probably, and I supposed her dark brown, brittle hair came courtesy of a box and a drugstore. She had been pretty once, though, and the smile she turned on Sam dropped years from her face.

“I don’t believe you could possibly have a daughter old enough to watch tennis.” He rummaged around in his pack and came up with a tennis ball, then signed it with a wink. “There you go.”

She hurried away toward baggage claim, her cheeks red and cracked wide with a grin. Sam’s smile widened when he saw the look on my face, which I imagined was somewhere between incredulous and disgusted.

“What? Jealous?”

“Hardly. I’d just forgotten what a shameless flirt you are.” I would never admit it, but I did feel the slightest twinge of . . . not jealousy. But something. Irritation?

“It goes with the territory.”

I snorted. “Right. Because you can’t be good at tennis
and
be an asshole to fans. No one has ever done that.”

The smile slipped from his face, not disappearing, just shrinking. Even asleep on the plane, his lips had curled up at the corners. Not that I’d been staring. 

“I know you want to think the worst of me, and I suppose you must have your reasons for that, but I’m not an asshole. A bit of a whore, if you want to be judgy about it, but never an asshole.”

A funny feeling, shame or maybe guilt, took root in my stomach. It was foreign—a virus that my father had long ago vaccinated me against, and my body attacked it now. How Sam Bradford lived his life was none of my business. There had been good people in my path before and it had never stopped me. It wouldn’t now. I was almost out.

“I don’t care who you flirt with or where you stick your penis, but I
do
care about how long this whole endeavor keeps me away from school. So, if you could
try
to focus.”

“Okay. Fine. No funny business.” He reached out and tugged on the hairs that had fallen out of my bun, loosening the whole thing until it flopped low on my neck. “With anyone but you.”

I groaned and trailed after him as he wound his way toward the ground transportation. My neck tingled where his fingers had landed and my own lips tried to twitch into an unused smile. Once outside he turned to me, eyebrows raised, but I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take us to a restaurant in a quiet, cheap neighborhood in the city.

Twenty minutes later we stood on an uneven street. The sun’s rays reached fingers over the horizon, scrabbling for purchase against the night. Austria in late November meant freezing cold. Sam looked refreshed, his cheeks a healthy pink and the chilly wind ruffling his wavy brown hair. I felt disgusting after thirty-five hours of travel, but he may as well have stepped out of a shampoo commercial. That fact boosted my level of grumpiness, which helped me ignore the twinge of desire in my stomach, at least for the moment.

I could not be attracted to him
and
rip him off. One of them had to go, and thanks to my dad, it had to be the former.

My eyes adjusted to the lightening dawn. We were alone on the street, at least at the moment, and I could feel Sam’s silent questions pummeling me. Instead of having a conversation about it—which would mean protests—I moved, expecting him to follow. My tennis shoes made little noise on the old streets. The first car on the street had a blinking red alarm light, the second was too nice to not be missed. The third and fourth had locked doors, but the fifth was the jackpot. 

The doors on the beat-up, dark blue Volkswagen Jetta were unlocked and the keys fell into my lap when I tugged on the sun visor. The standard transmission didn’t trip me up, though it had been a while since I’d driven one in Europe. Shifting with the left hand never felt natural.

The passenger door opened and Sam’s face appeared. “Um, what exactly do you think you’re fucking doing?”

“Borrowing a car, like I said.” The more clandestine and illegal the trip became, the faster Sam would lose interest. I crossed mental fingers that stealing a car would be the place he balked.

“We’re not stealing a car, Blair. People know who I am. Between the two of us, we have access to millions of dollars.”

“Look, you don’t know my dad like I do. He has security and IT people on twenty-four-hour payroll, monitoring me and all of his clients. If either of us uses our ID to rent a car, we’re screwed. If you’re not down with doing this my way, then give me the information I need to do it myself and go back to Melbourne. Otherwise, get your ass in the car before we get caught.”

The truth was, my dad’s con business was a two-man enterprise—me being man number two. He used a few shady individuals, like the PI and the occasional property manager, on a contract basis but, with one exception, they didn’t know shit about his real business. 

I could find my dad if I really wanted to, at least I thought I could, and he probably wasn’t monitoring Sam’s movements. He’d worked contacts to verify whether or not Sam had reported the theft to Interpol and the FBI, but that was as far as it went.

He had reported it—or his manager, Leo, had. Law enforcement dutifully added Sam’s name to the list of victims swindled by Neil Saunders, a.k.a. Neil Paddington, a.k.a. a few other names that had been compromised over the years, but they didn’t have a clue where to start. Or finish.

Indecision skittered across Sam’s classic cheekbones and down his strong jaw. The desire to see this thing through warred with his knee-jerk response to stealing, the entire thought process laid bare in his too-honest eyes. An arrest could damage his career, his only way to make back what my father had taken, and that thought had to weigh heavy on him, too.

I was counting on it. I wanted him out of my hair, and this new and uncomfortable conflict out of my gut.

Instead, he folded his six-foot-three frame into the tiny car and buckled his seat belt. “Let’s go.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. Can you drive this thing?”

“I can do lots of things.”

He didn’t respond to my teasing statement, telling me that I’d been closer to making him fold his cards than I’d suspected. Dammit. Where would he draw the line? Every man had a breaking point, an invisible line in the sand his code of morals wouldn’t let him cross. I needed to find Sam’s so I could get on with my life.

The car rumbled to life and slid into gear under my guidance, and we rolled down the street and around the corner. I thought about what my dad had said about using all of the tools available to me, feeling sick to my stomach again, and not because I didn’t
want
to sleep with Sam. Reconnecting with him had made our spark impossible to ignore, and the constant heat under my skin was only going to get harder to dismiss as harmless. 

But that was
my
line in the sand. My body had always been mine—the one thing safe from my dad and his life, because no matter how many times he suggested such a thing, he’d never forced me and I’d always figured out another way to make it work. As much as I lusted after the lanky, too-confident, handsome guy in the passenger seat, I would have to do it again.

“Can you check and see if there’s a map in the glove box? My phone battery is shot.”

He complied without argument, finding a map of Austria and the surrounding region, then directed me toward the best route to Slovenia in a quiet voice. A few hundred yards farther he reached over and put his hand over mine.

Tingles soaked into my skin, raising hairs and goose bumps up my arm and neck that only had a little to do with his cold fingers. I jerked free. “What?”

“You’re exhausted, Blair. Pull over and I’ll drive.”

“No. If we get caught this way you can say I kidnapped you.” Despite my protest, the heaviness of my eyelids moved my foot from the gas to the brakes.

Sam chuckled, the sound warm behind the chill of his touch. “Come on, gorgeous. No one’s going to believe you wrestled me into a stolen car, and you don’t have a weapon . . . do you?”

“Not on me,” I said with a quick smile. 

“Good to know.”

I pulled up the parking brake, leaving the car in neutral and reaching for the door handle. Sam headed for the front of the car, so I crossed at the rear. My fatigue and guilt were making my body respond despite all of my self-righteous internal lectures about steering clear. Avoiding close proximity wasn’t an option, so my self-control needed to buck up.

We settled back into the car and it felt good to let Sam take charge. The whir of the wheels against the pavement, the wind outside, and the sun climbing over the horizon tugged me toward sleep faster than I would have thought possible.

It crossed my mind that Sam might drive us to the closest police station, but even that worry couldn’t keep me awake. He might not agree with my methods, but he wanted his money, and he was smart enough to know that I was the only way he’d ever see it again.

He would keep driving. I could sleep the sleep of a girl who knew exactly what waited at our destination—an empty house on the side of a mountain.

*

“Hey, gorgeous. Time to wake up.”

I left my eyes closed for a few seconds after my brain registered Sam’s request, until the situation in which I’d fallen asleep came back. It felt nice to wake up to a voice that sounded sorry to disturb me. Much better than the alarm clock on my phone that roused me for 8 a.m. classes. Not to mention what the huskiness and close proximity did to my heart.

Sam Bradford possessed many, many assets that made girls around the world swoon in their tennis skirts—and climb out of them—but the rich quality of his voice, the way it gave me the ability to picture the look on his face, the expression in his eyes, ranked highest on my list.

Of course, I hadn’t seen all of his assets.

In that moment, in between the blessed nothingness of sleep and waking to the reality of this debacle, avoiding the inevitable seemed silly. The reaction between my legs at the mere thought of going to bed with him suggested that it wouldn’t be a disappointment.

Shaking off sleep and, with it, pointless fantasizing, I opened my eyes and stretched the kinks out of my neck. My breath tasted like week-old anchovies. A package of mints in my purse helped, but I waited until the fuzziness of lust faded before trusting my voice. “Where are we?”

“About three miles outside of Jesenice. Do you want to drive or give me directions?”

A second later, I remembered this part of the con.
Sheesh.
Sleeping had erased half of my brain, it seemed, had made me think Sam and I were college kids on a tour of Europe with nothing to concern me but when we’d give in to the tension between us.

The plan was to appear to be that couple on holiday, even though we weren’t that. One of us had to remember that fact, and since Sam had no idea what he’d actually signed up for, that person had to be me.

“I don’t know exactly where we’re going.” A road sign that promised food at an upcoming turn caught my attention. “Let’s get some breakfast and I’ll work some contacts, see what I can find out.”

“I’m not even going to ask what that means.”

“That’s probably best.” I smiled, unsure why. Maybe because Sam did it first.

He steered the car into the half-f parking lot of a restaurant. Jesenice was a small community nestled among mountains—beautiful and friendly enough, and more undiscovered than many places, at least as far as tourists were concerned. It made finding restaurants that didn’t give me the willies a little difficult. I’d spent perhaps a collective month here, a couple of two-week stays back when my mother had been alive. More than ten years had passed since she’d left me alone, since her attempts to keep me from my father’s life had been thwarted by cancer.