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“I don’t know yet,” he replied.
“Where are you now?”
“I’m in a strangers-with-benefits kind of situation. Besides, I thought I’d be staying on the Cavendish estate. Can’t I just meet you there?” he asked.
Stone laughed derisively.
“Buddy, I can’t believe you’re still hooking up with bar chicks,” Stone said.
“I merely offered to escort the lady home, and she made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he murmured. “And now she’s cooking me something I’m going to have to refuse so we don’t have any misunderstandings.”
Ryder put the phone on speaker and stretched over to close the door. He tapped on his banking app to check his balance.
“Holy shit,” he muttered, his voice a growl. The amount was double his most expensive job. “Did you say deposit?”
His friend laughed knowingly.
“Yeah, and that’s not even half of it,” Stone assured him. “Cavendish pays a 20% deposit.”
He grunted, about to joke about raising his fee, when the door opened.
“Hey, handsome, I asked if you wanted tomato soup with your grilled cheese,” said the woman, and she held a small frying pan toward him. Inside was a flat brown sandwich that oozed cheddar around its edges.
She had a lot more lines around her eyes and mouth than he remembered, and papery skin that made him guess she was north of forty. But she had kind, brown eyes. He took his phone off speaker and pressed the screen against his chest.
“Sugar, I can never eat after a wild time like last night,” he said, grinning as he looked her up and down.
She wore a dinghy white slip and worn slippers, but he made sure his eyes glowed with fond memories when they met hers again. It hadn’t been great sex, but she didn’t need to know that. “Plus, I gotta get back on the road.”
“Little hair of the dog then?” she asked, holding up a bottle of a bottom shelf tequila in her other hand. From her drowsy eyelids, he thought she might have already helped herself to several hairs already.
“Maybe a half shot. I’ve got a long ride ahead of me,” he lied, and nodded his head to shoo her out of the room. “I’ll be out in a sec.”
She smiled and backed away, letting him close the door.
“Can’t I just go to Cavendish and meet someone at the front gate? I remember how to get there,” Ryder said.
“The place is closed down today. After all the excitement last week, everyone needed a mental health day.”
“Huh,” Ryder grunted, remembering what Stone had filled him in on before he left Chicago. A dead cat delivered to the owners and a bunch of stuff buried in a bucket. The only thing that interested him was the knife. From how Stone described it, it sounded like a custom job. As an amateur forger, he was curious about the craftsmanship.
“Maybe you can courier the credentials to the tattoo place I’m going to,” Ryder suggested, then pressed the phone to his chest when Tally came back in.
“Here you go, handsome,” she murmured, handing him a shot glass of clear liquor.
“Thanks, Sugar,” he said, and toasted her before draining the tequila. As he expected, it burned like shitty jet fuel all the way down. “That hits the spot.”
“I can wrap that sandwich up to go, unless you change your mind and want to hang around for a few minutes,” she said with a tempting smile. He noticed she’d put on some lipstick that was somewhere between pink and purple, and he tried not to grimace at the way it made her skin look more pallid.
“It’s tempting, but business calls,” he apologized. When she didn’t leave right away, he held the phone out. “Confidential business.”
Her expression drooped, but she nodded and backed out of the room.
“You’ve got to dial back your sex appeal, buddy,” Stone admonished when he got back on the call.
Ryder sighed.
“She’s sweet, but she’s just like every other woman. You set the ground rules at the beginning of the night and then they blow right past them with soup and sandwiches,” he groaned.
