Then You Hide by Roxanne St. Claire Read Free Book Online

of her grasp and clunked on the wooden table, drenching her shorts and legs with ice and vodka.
    She pushed back from the table and swiped the spill much harder than necessary. “Screw you.”
    He instantly grabbed a napkin and started wiping her soaked thighs. His hand was hot on her thigh, and she jumped back, standing up.
    He looked up at her. “I’m gonna take that as a yes on the tattoo.”
    “Then you’d be mistaken.” She whipped the napkin from his hand, despising the crack in her voice. Crack? That was a bona fide sob. “I hate this. I hate that you’re making me…” Feel . She flicked the napkin at the picture, a clinical-looking thing showing a close-up of a woman’s head, her long hair pulled away to show a tiny dark mark. “Oh, my God.” She leaned down closer, pushing her glasses up her nose. “Does that say ‘hi’?”
    “Miranda thinks it might be the numbers one and four. Which, upside down, look like ‘hi.’” He straightened the picture. “Did you say you don’t have a mark like this?”
    “No, I don’t.” Not since her laser tattoo removal. “And I’m glad. I don’t want any connection to a killer.”
    “I understand that. However…” He sat back in his chair. “Some people believe her trial might have been unfair and that she’s serving time for a crime she didn’t commit.”
    Not a chance. “I read enough about it to know she didn’t take the witness stand, she had the gun in her possession, and she was jealous of the woman she shot. Pretty incriminating stuff.”
    He shrugged a shoulder. “Two sides to every story. Do you have the tattoo?”
    “No.” Damn him. Damn that evil woman. Damn this whole situation.
    “Are you certain?” he asked. “It’s kind of a hard place to see yourself.”
    “I’m certain.” Certain she had a faint red scar that he could see in this sunshine. Certain the scar didn’t look anything like the design in the picture. And definitely certain that she just couldn’t handle this right now.
    She wanted to find Clive, get back to the familiarity of New York and the cool, controlled comfort of her office at Razor Partners. Maybe then, in the vault of protection she’d built around herself since her mother flew the coop and her father was killed, she could figure out what to do. But not here, beaten down by a blistering sun and an equally blistering man on his own mission, with his own agenda and his own pictures.
    Vodka dribbled down her thigh like a tear.
    “Could you excuse me?” she said, as calmly as she would to an enemy attorney in the middle of a merger negotiation when she needed to change the direction from give to take. “I’d like to go wash this off.”
    “Certainly. I’ll order you another.”
    “Thanks,” she said, grabbing the shoulder strap of her bag.
    He stood, gesturing toward the back of the restaurant. “I’ll wait for you.”
    He didn’t sit as she walked away. A Southern gentleman. Great-looking, polite as hell, and carrying a wallet full of news she didn’t want.
    She rounded the bar and gave a questioning look to the bartender. “Ladies’ room?”
    He pointed his thumb to a hallway that led into the building behind the bar. It was much cooler in the dimly lit passageway. As she reached for the doorknob, a clammy hand seized her upper arm and made her spin with a gasp.
    She half expected to see crystal-blue eyes, but the ones she met were dark, bloodshot, and sunken inside the face of a thin Hispanic young man.
    “What do you want?” she asked, wrenching from his weak grip.
    “For you.” He stuffed a piece of paper, folded into squares, into her palm. “From a friend of Clive’s.”
    He disappeared out into the sunlight, leaving the scent of pot in his wake.
    Her heart stuttering, she turned over the note. A friend of Clive’s?
    She shouldered the door open into a dingy bathroom with a yellowed toilet and a cheap vanity, lit only by sunlight filtering through a window over the sink. As soon as