Deal to Die For Read Online Free PDF Page B

Hubbard asked.
    “Nothing,” Paige said. She had the knife turned around in her hand now, held it like a seasoned assassin, point digging into the soft linen tablecloth. She leaned forward, rested her chin atop her fist, felt the knifepoint sink a bit farther into the several layers of linen below.
    She smiled again at Jorie Hubbard. “I listened to them call my name again and again, until finally they gave up and went on to the next person. I waited out in the hall until it was all over and then I rode the bus home. I told my mother I lost.”
    “That’s a great story,” Jorie said, shaking her head. She’d left off scribbling for a moment. “It’s hard to imagine you getting all choked up like that.”
    “I suppose it is,” Paige said, sighing. She was doing her best to keep her smile propped up. She glanced at the curtained alcove again, laughed miserably to herself, put the knife back in its place as their waiter arrived with lunch.
    “If you’ll just excuse me for a minute,” she said to Jorie abruptly.
    The waiter had to step smartly out of the way as she pushed herself up and brushed past him. The buttery fragrance of the shrimp dish she’d ordered had overpowered her, threatening to send whatever it was she’d had for breakfast all over the trio of power brokers who were staring at her as she hurried out.
    She’d barely made it into the hallway leading from the main dining room when the tears came, blurring her vision so that she had to make her way toward the ladies’ room by feel. She fumbled along the narrow passageway, past the maître d’s station, unoccupied, thank God, and no one in the foyer, just give her a few minutes to herself, she could handle this, she had
poise
, she could cope…
    …when she felt a hand at her elbow, someone guiding her back toward the front.
    “Ms. Nobleman.” Dear God. Albertine himself. His cultured voice, soft, solicitous, discreet. But tomorrow it would be all over the trades: “What aging, ultrapoised lady of the silver screen was seen weeping her way toward the ladies’ room while her significant other held court with a pasha’s daughter elsewhere in the same glitter dome…”
    She turned to face him, wondering if a sufficiently poised expression might divert his attention from the otherwise ruin on her face. “I am sorry,” he said, before she had a chance to say anything. He’d given her his little bow, kept his face averted. It took her a moment to understand he was only apologizing for disturbing her.
    “I told the party, no phone calls, but they say it is emergency.”
    She stared at him, her mouth working, shaking her head. “Phone call?” she repeated.
    “Your sister,” Albertine nodded. “From Florida. She say it is about your mother.”
    And then she knew. The call she’d been dreading for months now. “Oh God,” she said, forgetting about the state of her career, about Paul, about gossip and everything else. And followed Albertine to the phone.

Chapter 5
    “So tell me, what do you think, my friend?”
    Deal glanced at Emilio, but said nothing. He was standing outside the body shop entrance, watching idly as the metal door to one of the bays clattered up its track. A chrome-sided lunch wagon pulled into the courtyard of the warehouse-cum-cottage industry complex, tootling its horn outside a furniture maker’s place: lunch at ten-thirty in the morning.
    Emilio was standing beside him, one hand on the key-operated door opener, the other sweeping grandly at whatever was behind the door. Emilio, who’d insisted he come right over, grinning, waiting for his reaction like some Latin Pat Sajak, spin the wheel and win
this
baby, Deal thought.
    Other than that, Deal wasn’t thinking much at the moment. In fact, he’d spent the last few days trying not to think at all, just moving around where he had to—checking in on the endless restoration work at Terrence Terrell’s mansion, overseeing the construction of a small strip center in