“What were you doing with Dorian Redthorne?”
The last question hadn’t come from inside her head, and Charley sat up, blinking away her thoughts. From the adjacent seat, Rudy stared at her, impatient and annoyed—his default setting.
“Who the fuck’s Dorian Redthorne?” she asked, but as soon as the name passed through her lips, sheknew.
Her man. The formality in his mannerisms, the obvious money, the sheer power emanating from his every word and movement. Only a man like that would have a name like Dorian Redthorne.
She repeated it in her mind, the memory of his accent making her stomach lurch.
He still had her underwear, she realized suddenly. Stuffed into his pants pocket.
Biting back a smile at the image of him discovering them later, she turned back to the window, hoping her disinterest would send Rudy sniffing up another tree.
But he wouldn’t let it go.
“You’re telling me you spent the night with a man and never bothered asking his name?”
“I didn’t spend the night withanyone, Rudy. I’m here. With you. As usual.” Then, tempering her tone, she waved her hand in front of her face like she was shooing a fly. “I didn’t get his name because he’s nobody—just some rich guy from the auction. We left at the same time, and he offered to walk me to the park.”
Rudy glanced at his watch, a gold monstrosity that had probably cost more than a year’s worth of Sasha’s schoolbooks. “I may be old, kiddo, but I’m not blind.”
“How doyouknow him?”
He turned away from her and stared out his window, rubbing his thumb along his watchband. “He’s the CEO of FierceConnect, among other things.”
“FierceConnect? Never heard of it.”
He turned and leveled her with another icy glare. “You two clearly had a connection.”
“Sure. Keep dreaming, Uncle Rudy.”
“You’re wearing his clothes.”
Charley glanced down, shocked to find herself clutching the suit jacket around her shoulders. In the chaos of the near-mugging and the rushed goodbye that followed, she’d all but forgotten about it.
She released the soft fabric, folding her hands in her lap.
“You wasted precious time on a job you claim yielded no results,” Rudy said. “You ignored my calls and texts. You ducked out early, forcing me to waste even more time driving around the block looking for you. And this isn’t the first time you’ve turned up empty-handed lately. Not by a long shot.”
“I know,” she said softly, shame heating her cheeks.
“So I’ll ask you again. What were you doing with Dorian Redthorne?”
“Nothing—I swear. He… he bought the Whitfield,” she blurted out.
Rudy cocked his head, looking at her with renewed interest.
Shit. Why had she said that? God, she hated the way Rudy got under her skin. He’d been like that ever since she was a kid, needling her until she finally gave up whatever secrets he was after—what her parents had been fighting about, where her mother kept the stash of tips from her waitressing gig, where her father had hidden the whiskey.
Looking at him now, she wondered how he’d managed to survive the game these last five years without her father around to clean up his messes. Sure, he played the part—tailored suit, that blingy-ass watch, the formal tone he’d adopted in recent years to impress wealthier clients. To anyone else, he probably looked like a successful businessman. But whenever Charley looked at him, she saw the same old Uncle Rudy from the trailer park, dressed in worn jeans and a beer-stained Bon Jovi T-shirt with holes in the armpits, a cheap gold chain around his neck, banging on the door and asking her father for a loan, for help with another one of his schemes, for a place to crash for the night or the week or the month.
Despite the money they’d earned since, the high-class art scenes they’d worked, and their lavish Upper East Side addresses, most of the time, Charley felt as if they’d never left that run-down double-wide in Jersey.
And sometimes, in her darkest moments, part of her wished theyhadn’tleft.
“I asked you a question, Charlotte.”
His cold voice brought her back to the present, and she blinked away the memories.
