Loose and Easy Read Online Free PDF Page A

get through the night in one piece.
    She pulled another pin out, and then another.
    Dammit.
She hated it when she had that feeling.

CHAPTER
THREE
    There was a God.
    Johnny had never doubted it, not really. He was a good Catholic boy, one of the best, but verifiable instances of divine grace and intervention were still welcome and only helped cement his faith.
    He was currently in the midst of one of those instances—
Shimmy, shimmy cocoa pop. Shimmy, shimmy rock.
    Fishnet.
    Coming off into a pile at her feet.
    It was a gift, with Easy Alex stepping into a black satin slip and about half coming out of her red push-up bra, and if she wasn’t the earthly embodiment of divine grace, he didn’t know what was.
    Red lace panties.
    He hadn’t known. The hem of her hooker skirt had just covered them. But he’d seen them now, reflected in a double-hung window overlooking Wynkoop, the one closest to the B & B Investigations office bathroom where she was doing her reverse striptease.
    She couldn’t know—not that every move she made was revealed in the window glass, just like a mirror, and she couldn’t know someone was standing in the low-lit hallway with a clear view through the window in the door.
    And he wasn’t the guy who was going to tell her, not that he’d seen her in her underwear, but he was going to let her know he was there—in a minute, once she got herself dressed. His hand was raised, closed in an easy fist, ready to knock on the door as soon as she put on the suit jacket he could see reflected in the window.
    But the jacket wasn’t what she went for next.
    Amazingly, what she slipped into next was something he slipped into on a regular basis. Nothing could have surprised him more, that he and Esme Alden wore the same thing under their clothes—and he’d never been within a hundred miles of slipping on a pair of red lace panties.
    Well, actually, he had kind of gotten tangled up in a pair one night in the rear bucket seats of a 1960 Chrysler “Letter Car,” a 300-F. The car had been a brute, beautiful and black, sleekly menacing with its 413-cid wedge-head V-8 and tail fins. The girl had been a pure heartbreaker from the get-go. She’d slain him in the back of that car, teased him to the point of no return and then taken him straight over the edge. That she’d only done it once and dumped him for a premed student at the university up in Boulder had damn near driven him crazy.
    He was so goddamned glad he wasn’t nineteen anymore. Not that he felt overly in control of his reaction to seeing Easy Alex doing her Victoria’s Secret model impression.
    She’d filled out a bit in the last few years. Quite a bit. What he was looking at couldn’t all be the push-up bra—though he did love a push-up bra. The only thing better was no bra.
    When she pulled an autoloading pistol out of her ratty white tote bag and checked the chamber before slipping the gun into her shoulder holster, he lowered his hand. The girl was carrying, “cocked, locked, and loaded.”
    Johnny instinctively checked the hall, looking in both directions. Carlson Services was behind him, down at the end of the hall closest to the stairs. The other offices were dark, but Esme Alden was expecting trouble.
    He returned his gaze to her reflection in the window. Or maybe, like him, she made a habit of being ready for trouble whether she was expecting it or not.
    Extra ready,
he thought, watching her slide a folding knife inside the waistband of her skirt. She was starting to look dangerous—damned dangerous.
    So what was this all about tonight, he wondered, with her and her weapons and the German? What had she been after in the Oxford Hotel?
    And did he really want to know? That was always the sticking point. Johnny’d learned a long time ago not to ask questions he wasn’t prepared to hear the answers to, good or bad. Life was funny that way, real life. A guy could be so goddamned sure of what was going on, and then get an answer straight