The Hook Page 11

“Oh.” Izzie capped the lipstick. “I didn’t want to assume. I don’t really know what’s changed since your divorce and my broken engagement.” Their friendship had unwoven then, and neither had made an effort to repair the damage.

  “We could have coffee, catch up.” Toya hastened to add, “Holden’s off the boob now. I’m coffee-approved.”

  “Holden. You had a boy?”

  “He just turned six months.” Consulting the mirror, she seemed bewildered with the image of herself that confronted her. “I had divorce papers in my purse the morning my water broke. The purse fell on the floor and there went the papers and a tube of hemorrhoid ointment.”

  “I’m sor—Well, that’s messed up.”

  “That’s really messed up.”

  Hazarding a smile, she said, “At least you have a few years before Holden asks you to tell him about the day he was born. There’s that.”

  “You always were the positive one in our circle,” Toya commented.

  “Was I too positive? Misery loves company, people say, so maybe now the circle will take me back.” She’d meant to be sarcastic, but underneath was the question of why Toya and the others had retreated when they’d shared more than taste in fashion and preferences in wine. They’d shared ambitions and had been one another’s cheerleaders.

  “It’s Las Vegas,” Toya said decisively. “It’s this goddamn town and it’s everyone trying to come out on top when there’s only room for a few.”

  “No room for me, huh?” Shrugging, Izzie closed her purse and closed the door on a friendship that had never been there to begin with. “It was nice seeing you, Toya—”

  “The coffee?” Toya shook her head as though to add, “Did you forget?”

  “Sure, but when? This weekend ought to be fine.”

  “I’ll call you. Where do you live now?”

  “In an apartment complex on East Dune.”

  “East Dune? Asher and his cronies call that street Strippers’ Boulevard.”

  “I call it where I live. The ladies who live in my building are nice enough and keep to themselves, which I value more than having someone glued to my side when things are great but nowhere to be found when things are hell.” She headed for the restroom door. “Congratulations on your baby and your settlement.”

  She’d named them in order of importance, but likely Toya hadn’t noticed.

  ***

  “There’s great news and not-so-great news,” Izzie announced, her high heels sharp on the travertine tile in her apartment’s modest-size kitchen.

  It reminded her of the one in her childhood clubhouse. The clubhouse had been a gift from her parents on her first Christmas after she’d overdosed on valium, an incident that had urged them to pull her out of school until she could be trusted with freedom again. To make up for so many restrictions that’d come with being privately tutored and forever surrounded by adults whose conversations consisted of politics and business strategy, they’d had a construction company build her a mini-mansion, complete with travertine floors, tiny granite counters, and crown moulding. It’d been a magnificent gift, and she’d spent many lonely days and nights inside the house, until she’d outgrown it and her father had auctioned it off.

  She hadn’t cared all that much about the house, anyway. It had always been the swing, something her father had designed during her mother’s pregnancy and constructed on the day Izzie was born. Toya’s child would grow up and learn that his parents’ marriage dissolution forms and a tube of hemorrhoid ointment had spilled onto the floor on the day he’d been born. At least Izzie could always treasure that Daddy had had the swing, with its cedar seat and vine-wrapped poly-twist rope, built for her.

  Izzie smoothed the fringe hemline of her short red dress. After leaving Cleopatra’s Barge, she’d changed her look, putting on a dress and makeup guaranteed to get her inside the La La Land club where she’d, fingers crossed, get the material she would need to earn substantial pay. “Great news? We’re all going to survive and thrive through the next several months if this gig goes well. Not-so-great news? I’m staying overnight in California.”

  Silence answered. Izzie gazed across the row of Chia Pets and windowsill plants. A few had begun to lean during her week on the Seychelles, but they’d all survived her neglect and now she was asking for their understanding so she could jet out the door for an overnight jaunt to Hollywood to pry into the supposed bad blood between two hip-hop artists at a club notorious for having crime scene tape up as often as its VIP ropes.

  “I’m talking to plants,” she said, rubbing her glossy red-painted lips together as she reached for the pig. The pig was her favorite of the bunch. “I have a four-hour I-15 drive ahead of me, and I’m standing in a my-first-kitchen talking to fucking plants.”

  Quietly, she confided, I’d rather stay home with you than take this gig.

  Because if she said it aloud, she’d be forced to confront what it meant that she was so reluctant to find a scoop and get paid for it. That was her job now. It was behind the scenes and it allowed her luxuries: dinners at casino restaurants, a kitchen stocked with gourmet chocolate, memberships to landscaping and horticulture clubs, and engagement in eBay bidding wars for excellent finds like the Manolo Blahnik shoes decorating her feet now.

  Scandal sold, and she could either capitalize on it or fail as a runt of a fish in a huge pond.

  “’Til tomorrow,” she said, setting down the pig, turning out the kitchen lights, and going to the door to collect her purse and overnight bag.

  On the other side of the door came a pounding knock, as if somebody had slammed a go-cart against it again and again. Tossing the bag and swinging up the bat she kept nearby for protection, she squinted through the peephole.

  “Oh, my—”

  “It’s me!”

  Toya Messa had been absent from Izzie’s life for six months and was using the “It’s me”? “Toya…what…” Fumbling with the row of locks, she shouted through the door, “Hang tight, okay?”

  “This is a nicer building than I’d pictured,” Toya commented conversationally, which meant on the other side of this door was a model-esque twenty-something wearing designer spring fashions and shouting in the hall. “How many locks do you keep on that door, anyway?”

  Izzie unlatched the final lock and opened the door. “I’m confused.”

  “We said we’d have coffee.” Toya peeked around a squirming bundle. Fresh-faced and bright-eyed, she looked more like a teenager playing grown-up. Coach diaper bag, Christian Louboutin heels, Prada handbag, Tiffany cat-eye glasses—

  Izzie gave up trying to identify it all, and simply opened the door wide. “Uh…come in.” In her voice was inflection. It was better than outright asking, “Are you sure you meant to end up here?”

  A squawk came from the bundle and Toya squeezed through, holding her baby in one arm and carrying a bassinet in the other hand. So that was what she’d used to knock on the door.

  Izzie took the bassinet, glanced inside. Blankets and… “Are these walkie-talkies?”

  “You’re showing your age, thirty-something.”

  “Not thirty-something. I’m thirty.”

  “Miss Thirty, those are baby monitors.” Toya muscled her stuff farther into the apartment, looking like the world’s most fashionable vagrant. “Would you like to meet Holden?”

  “Absolutely.” Izzie had no siblings, so no nieces or nephews, and Toya was the only one in her group of wild girls who’d sealed her marriage with a child. Still, she could be captivated staring into the face of any baby. “Toya,” she whispered, getting her first look at the chubby-cheeked baby, “you found it.”

  “What?” Toya sounded fatigued.

  “Happiness.”

  “Oh,” she scoffed. “Happiness weighs fifteen pounds and won’t sleep.”

  Izzie giggled. “He’s healthy, isn’t he?”

  “Healthy as a six-month-old baby.”

  “Then that�
��s everything.” Izzie cleared a basket of knitting supplies and a half-finished gingham-patterned blanket from the sofa. “Sit here. He smells like powder. Babies have the sweetest smells.”

  “It’s always the women who don’t have babies who say these things. It bewilders me. What comes out of this baby isn’t sweet-smelling at all.” She unwrapped her son from his fleece blanket, threaded her fingers through his curly golden-brown hair. “Mommy wants you to sleep.”

  Izzie knelt to set down the bassinet and remove the monitors. Why had she packed them for a nighttime cup of coffee? “Could he be teething?”

  “He’s not. He’s stressed.” As she spoke, baby Holden began to wail. “He must be picking it up from me. Babies can sense negative energy—did you know that?”

  “I heard it before.” Izzie thought it was a sad fact of life that children were exposed to the negativities of the world. No one was sheltering him from feeling his mother’s stress, and who knew how Toya and her ex-husband interacted together in front of their son? “May I hold him?”

  As they transferred the baby, Toya sighed and finally let the diaper bag and purse slip free of her clutches and she settled back against the sofa. “He keeps me on my toes. I’ve not only lost all of my baby weight, but I’m getting definition in my arms. Come bikini season, I’ll be ready, jogging on the beach…pushing a stroller.”

  Izzie cuddled him against her chest, stroking his tiny back. His body quivered as his wailing began to subside. Turning to consult her clock, she started to worry about getting on the road in time to arrive at the club in Los Angeles before two o’clock, which was when her targets were expected to arrive. “Um, Toya—”

  “He stopped crying.” The woman’s pitch dropped. “Is he asleep?”

  He was, his Cupid’s bow mouth open, the dampness of tears on his eyelashes. He had his mother’s eyelashes. Lucky kid. “Should I hand him back before he starts to drool on my dress?”

  “Oh, your dress! I didn’t notice you’re dressed to the nines. Were you on your way out?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  “A date? Are you seeing someone, finally getting past Luca Tarantino?”

  There were a few questions to tackle. Which should she answer first? If she honestly admitted she wasn’t going on a date but was driving out of town to chase down Hollywood drama, then she’d out herself as a tabloid rat. If she said she was seeing someone, Toya would harass her for details. And as far as her ex was concerned, she was over him in a romantic sense—which, she realized, had never existed. She wasn’t over the hell he’d caused for her, so her decision to help his son find him would do more than bring him to justice’s doorstep and give her material to turn over to The Vegas Beat. It would give her what she’d previously acknowledged as nothing but one of her mother’s therapy vocabulary words: closure.

  She’d meet closure, finality, and maybe then she could release the anger bottled in her heart. It was sealed so tightly that even Toya’s intuitive baby hadn’t detected it. He’d found a peaceful and safe place in her arms, which stunned her because she was certain that she, with all her issues and her dirty past, could offer no one peace and safety.

  “So is it a date?”

  “It is. A date.” Of sorts. What was a date, anyway? An appointment? So infiltrating a shady Hollywood haunt to record some drama for the bloggers she had an allegiance to was, for all intents and purposes, a date.

  Which said volumes about her romantic status.

  “Let me guess. He’s a CEO or an attorney or a—”

  “No, Toya.”

  “Not a CEO or attorney?”

  “I’d just rather not say.”

  Raising both eyebrows, the woman made a thoughtful noise. “I can respect that. But is he an older man? I see you finding a match with someone more like you—younger than Luca, but well-worn.”

  “I don’t need dating advice.” What man, after learning her past and the awful things she’d done, would want to date her? Who’d love the broken pieces of her when she struggled to love them herself?

  “Really listen, Izzie. You were fake-happy with Luca Tarantino. Gold is great, but it’s not worth it to marry someone like that, to be stuck in that way of life.”

  Izzie breathed in the baby’s clean powder scent. “I don’t dig for gold anymore. I retired my shovel. I’m free.”

  “Yeah, you’re free. Some girls can’t get out.”

  “Here, take Holden.” Izzie gently handed him back. “I’m going to get your coffee.”

  “Wait. Can I ask a favor?”

  “What is it?”

  Toya looked down at her baby, but when she lifted her face, it was streaked with tears and her mouth was starting to curl. This was the onset of an ugly-cry. “Would you let Holden and me stay here for a while?”

  What?

  “Why?” Izzie asked. “Your divorce settlement—”

  “Asher’s having it voided. Be-because of the baby!”

  Holden sputtered in his sleep, and Izzie cradled him so Toya could be free to grapple for a pillow and shove her face into its plushness. “I’m sorry I married him. After the baby was born, he—he said he’d had a vasectomy, so Holden couldn’t possibly be his biological son. And I—” Toya dumped the pillow onto the floor, swallowed, and rubbed her already puffy face. “I believed him. I fell for the trap.”

  “I’m not following, Toya.”

  “I had to admit that I was with somebody else, because I panicked that the other man could’ve been…” She gripped Izzie’s shoulder. “It was a lie. Asher never had a vasectomy, and Holden is his baby. But when I admitted someone else could’ve been the father, his lawyers came down on me because when we got married, I agreed to a fidelity clause. It was a mistake.”

  “Cheating on Asher?”

  “Marrying him. He gave me a choice—give up my parental rights to Holden or give up the settlement. He says that since I violated the fidelity clause, technically he has grounds to take back the settlement and give me hell in court. And tonight I made my decision, so here I am, a single mom.”

  “What made you decide tonight?”

  “Inspiration. You, Izzie. I wasn’t there for you when Luca turned, and we stopped being friends for no good reason. But you fought all by yourself. You got out and you’re making a life for yourself. I can be like you, can’t I?”

  “Be like me?” For so long she’d been an antonym of the term role model. She never would’ve believed that a sparkling young woman like Toya Messa would hit incredible heights in society, then wind up looking to her for guidance. “My universe isn’t perfect.”

  “I know, but it’s real. Will you let Holden and me stay here for a while, please? He likes you and he doesn’t cry all the time. And I can…uh…I can help clean up around the apartment.” Toya looked right, then she looked left, then— “Is that a stripper pole?”

  Izzie eyed the pole, which she’d strung twinkling lights around to pseudo-disguise its purpose. “It is. This apartment’s sublet. It belongs to a showgirl.”

  “Oh.” She pointed to the ornamented balsam fir tree near the kitchen and the menorah on the faux fireplace’s mantel. “Which do you celebrate?”

  “Both. Neither. It’s complicated.”

  “Okay. But it is February. It’s time to pack it all away. Oh, and I can help with that!”

  “Deal,” Izzie said, because she was put on the spot and because she saw too much of herself in Toya Messa. She turned on the TV, handed the remote to the young woman. “Roomies?”

  “Roomies. And friends. Real friends this time.”

  Izzie settled back against the sofa, hugged the baby close even though she immediately warned herself to not become too attached. In a minute she’d contact the bloggers and pass up the opportunity to spy on A-list celebrities. She’d chosen a night at home with a friend and a baby who deserved all the peace and safety Izzie could offer.

  “What about your date?” Toya asked.<
br />
  “I’m not going.” Izzie signaled for her to click the listing for a reality TV show centered on brides-to-be shopping for wedding dresses, and Toya snorted at the irony because it’d be a while before either saw themselves in a white gown. “I just decided that I don’t want to be so focused on life that I forget to live.”

  Chapter Seven

  As the doors to the glass elevator at the east wing of Constant and Spencer and Associates’ Law Offices parted mutely and a seductively robotic female voice overhead announced “Floor Three,” Milo knew he wouldn’t like the reason his father’s attorneys had summoned him here.

  Shortly after his brief exchange with Attorney Chuck Constant, his brother had sent him a text message and they’d deduced that the spur-of-the-moment meeting was suspicious and they’d both be there.

  Exiting the elevator, he entered a lobby spacious enough to host a parade and resembled an exclusive club more than a legal firm. It made enough sense—the attorneys represented only high-profile clients and could afford to treat those clients to five-figure business dinners. A six-foot water feature depicted streams flowing from Lady Justice’s scales. The polished black floor reflected the parallel rows of recessed lights that parted ways to form halos over twin reception desks.

  Chuck Constant had been the one to personally contact Milo, so he went to the desk that had CONSTANT engraved into the facade. As he’d had to do to gain entry past main-floor security, he authenticated his identity on a touch-screen computer. Instead of being directed past metal detectors, he was now immediately offered baked goods from a basket and a drink of his pleasure from a double-tier cart.

  “Might I recommend a daiquiri?” the woman steering the cart inquired, coming to a clean stop in front of him. She, along with the other receptionists in the lobby—a symmetrical three per desk—wore all form-fitting black, except she stood out with the bite of a pink hairpin in her raked-back curls.

  Magdalene Kist, her nametag declared.

  Shit.

  They’d met before, when she’d accompanied Chuck Constant and Waylon Spencer to a dinner meeting to meet with Milo and his father. That’d been months ago, when Milo believed the Las Vegas Villains had been forced from his father’s hands and he’d wanted to conquer heaven and hell to see it returned to Tarantino ownership. Actually, he and Magdalene had done more than “met.”