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All she did was shut her laptop with a loud snap and say, “Not sure that’s really an appropriate nickname anymore.”
Her dry, almost dour, comment surprised a laugh out of him. No, “Blondie” certainly did not represent her true appearance. Tonight, her hair—her real hair—was a thick chestnut brown, pulled into a long, messy braid that hung down the back of an ancient Cubs fleece.
Uninvited, he sat down across from her. “You must win a lot of poker games.”
She shrugged, watching him carefully with those huge brown eyes. “I learned early in my career that you get further if you under-react to pr
oblems.”
He’d learned the same lesson himself. “Very true,” he granted, not surprised that she considered his reappearance to be a problem. Now that he knew who she was, he’d realized she wasn’t in his line of work at all. She was just an upstanding, law-abiding citizen. But maybe that had changed after last fall. Whatever she’d been doing on Saturday night was clearly not aboveboard.
A weathered-looking man with faded red hair plopped a plate of steaming grease on the table while giving Adam an undisguised look of hostility. Adam heard him say, “You okay?” to her under his breath.
She answered just as quietly. “For now.”
Adam cleared his throat. “We’ll have two bourbons on the rocks. Doubles.” Before she could protest, he said, “You’re eating fried pickles with coffee. Disgusting.”
That tugged a little smile out of her. In an instant, he memorized the deep dimple in her right cheek. The wig had hidden that part of her face. “He’s paying, so make it Angel’s Envy,” she said to the red-haired man, who just grunted and disappeared.
She pulled the plate of fried pickles closer and leaned over it to smell it, closing her eyes. He welcomed the quick opportunity to study her unguarded face.
He’d never admit it, but he hadn’t actually recognized her at first when she walked in. He’d been staking out her apartment since early evening, trying to figure out the best way to remake her acquaintance. Knocking on her door offended him with its lack of creativity. Breaking into her apartment probably would have scared her. He’d been pondering it over a drink...and then she’d walked into the bar.
He still couldn’t believe that he’d been checking out the attractive brunette—before realizing it was her. Sheesh, it was too bad that she wasn’t in his line of work. She would have been quite an asset. There weren’t many stunning chameleons out there. Usually, if a woman was beautiful, she was too recognizable and easily remembered. If a woman was too much of a chameleon, she needed a lot of props to make her super-attractive when that kind of thing was needed.
But this woman, Jessica, he reminded himself, was that rare unicorn. She’d looked beautiful as a blonde socialite on Saturday, and she looked beautiful tonight with no makeup on and wearing clothes that were two sizes too big. The kicker was that she didn’t look like the same woman—a huge bonus in his business. Of course, to really disguise herself properly, she’d need to work on hiding her eyes. To someone who was really looking, they were her Achilles heel.
He’d gotten extremely lucky with her inexperience and with the photograph in the Tribune, he suddenly realized. As she looked up from her pickles, he marveled at the dark fringe around her eyes. “Those aren’t your real eyelashes, are they?”
She snorted and picked up one of the fried spears. “You think I wear false lashes to my neighborhood pub?” She bit the end of the spear, threw it back on her plate and then tugged at her eyelashes hard enough for him to tear up in sympathy. Damn, they were real.
The red-haired man returned and plunked down the glasses of whiskey.
“I’ll be right at the bar,” he said to her, but glaring at Adam. Groaning inwardly, Adam wished he’d just broken into her apartment. The bartender clearly had a fatherly interest in the woman, which made him look just a little too closely at Adam. Years of training had taught Adam to fly under the radar, but no Papa Bear would ignore a 6’3” stranger buying a young woman shots of whiskey. Stupid.
“I suppose you know my real name?” She asked.
Back to business. “Jessica Elaine Hughes,” he said, tapping his glass of bourbon against hers, which still sat on the table. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Are you sticking with Michael Collins?”
He should have. She shouldn’t know about any of his other identities. But he couldn’t. Prior to staking out her house earlier tonight, he’d been meeting with one of his hackers. A guy so paranoid that he had a bodyguard frisk Adam every single time they met—and then run his identity to make sure he hadn’t been arrested since their last meeting. To the hacker, Adam was “Thomas Paine” so that’s the driver’s license and credit cards he was carrying. He didn’t think she could lift his wallet, but his gut told him not to underestimate her.
“Tonight I’m Thomas Paine.”
She lifted one dark eyebrow. “Another revolutionary. How appropriate. Didn’t Paine write, ‘These are the times that try men’s souls’...well. You’re certainly trying my soul.”
A sharp laugh bubbled right out of his chest. How did she keep doing that? “Clever girl.”
The corners of her mouth turned down, abruptly showing her hand. Her bravado was hiding a fair amount of fear. “Not clever enough. How did you find me?”
He kept his tone light, not wanting to scare her. He wouldn’t scare her until it was absolutely necessary. “Blondie, you’ve had your picture in the newspaper,” he chided. “When I did a little Google-ing, there you were.”
It hadn’t been quite that easy. But it hadn’t been that hard either. Given her behavior at the ball, she was clearly associated in some way with Ignatius University. After she’d fled, he made some careful inquiries and learned that the gray-haired man she’d been careful to stay away from was Seymour Davies, the Chief Information Officer of the University.
Typing a combination of the University name, Davies’ name, and descriptors like “young,” “woman,” “attractive,” into the search engine had led him to a flood of articles about an uproar at the University last fall. Jessica Hughes, a reputed computer genius and the youngest VP in the history of the University, had been suspected of masterminding an identity theft ring.
Davies claimed that she’d been illegally collecting and planning to sell the social security numbers of the students, faculty, and staff...when he’d become suspicious, discovered her plan, and shut it down. She’d been fired immediately. “We’ll be prosecuting her to the fullest extent of the law,” Davies announced to the Trib.
