Take Me Tonight by Roxanne St. Claire Read Free Book Online Page B

body.”
    The silence on the other end of Johnny’s cell phone was a little too long not to be calculated. But then, everything Lucy Sharpe did was calculated. That was her gift. Hell, that was her charm.
    “I operate on a need-to-know basis,” Lucy said. “You didn’t need to know.”
    He adjusted the coffee cup so that the gold filigree handle was on the left and he could palm the delicate china cup. His index finger couldn’t fit through the tiny hole, and the hint of hazelnut in the coffee was too delicious to lose a drop.
    “Well, now I do,” he said simply. Leaning forward as he sipped, he peeked over the rail of the tiny deck of the Beacon Hill Bistro, one story above the intersection of Charles and Chestnut, the early-morning sun warming the redbrick buildings and gilding the spring green buds on the trees. “You still there, Luce?”
    “I’m here. So what did she tell you?”
    More than you did. “That her roommate killed herself after she was allegedly involved in a fantasy kidnapping.”
    “Anything else?”
    He frowned. “Isn’t that enough? She wasn’t trying to get kidnapped for fun and games.” As if Lucy didn’t know that. But the question was, why didn’t she tell him? “She wanted to find out what happened to her friend that was bad enough to make her commit suicide.”
    “Whatever it was, it had nothing to do with takemetonite.com,” Lucy said. “I’ve thoroughly checked the operation, they are legit. And this young woman did not show up for her appointment, so she was never kidnapped.”
    “At least not by them.”
    “I thought of that, and I’ve read the autopsy report.” Of course she had. Why should that surprise him? “She was full of ephedra, enough to stop her heart.”
    Ephedra. What had Sage called it last night? The cheerleading drug of choice.
    “I know that the abductions are little more than a playful scare,” Lucy continued. “Followed by an encounter that may or may not be sexual with a rescuer. Whatever made Keisha Kingston take her life is really not our concern.”
    Then what the hell was their concern? But Lucy would tell him only what he needed to know, and if he hadn’t been so damn attracted to Sage, he probably wouldn’t care. It was his job.
    He adjusted the tiny café chair to get a complete visual of Sage’s building. Finding the bistro’s second-story deck, which evidently remained empty during the cooler months, had been pure serendipity.
    “I don’t know, Luce,” he said. “Something about this suicide is bothering me. According to Sage, the roommate was together, smart, ambitious, and seriously good-looking. No depression. No drugs. No money problems. No breakups with a psycho boyfriend. In fact, she was a health nut—”
    “Ordinary women don’t pay money to get kidnapped and rescued. Health nuts don’t power down a substance like ephedra. She obviously had issues.”
    “Ephedra’s in every vitamin store in America, and this whole kidnapping thing was something a bunch of her friends were doing.” Why was he defending some cheerleader he’d never met? To Lucy? He never questioned Lucy’s judgment. Ever. He softened the edge in his voice. “Anyway, Sage thinks there’s some kind of connection.”
    “She wants somewhere to place blame.”
    “Then she’s putting herself into some very tight spots to do that.” He wasn’t about to tell Lucy how tight, or that one of those spots was her bedroom.
    He heard his boss sigh softly before she asked, “What else did she tell you?”
    “Beyond her roommate’s strange methods for getting kicks, nothing.” But they had talked until four in the morning. He’d learned that she was twenty-seven, raised in D.C., a graduate of Boston College who wrote articles for magazines and dreamed of writing a mystery novel someday.
    “And what did you tell her?” Was that nervousness in cool Lucy’s voice? What was it about this assignment that had her wired so tight?
    “The ingredient for a