The Private Concierge

He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. Thank God, a crisis. He didn’t have to face the terrifying prospect of inviting a woman—make that the ultimate sexual-fantasy woman of the new millennium—to dinner and then maybe to his place, and then maybe to something approaching the sexual realm, like his bed?

A one-man Pluto shot would have been more realistic.

“Darwin, you have voice mail,” said a come-hither female voice.

The phone was giving him a reminder, just as he’d programmed it to. If it had had legs, it would have jumped off the desk and strolled over to him. He would have to work on that feature.

He pushed to his feet, grimacing as he limped over to the desk, grabbed the phone and thumbed the Talk button. “What is it, Lucy?” That was her name from the old days when they lived together on the streets.

“Please, Dar, call me Lane,” she said. “I need you. Can you come to my office right away?”

Lane unbuttoned her suit jacket and flapped the lapels to create a breeze. She liked to think that she’d come by her reputation as a cool customer deservedly, although right now she was anything but. Her face was flushed and her cleavage damp. Why did women always perspire there first? She really should plan for that when she was deodorizing in the mornings.

At any rate, she’d just run a crazed segment producer off at the pass and narrowly averted some kind of crisis. She didn’t know what kind because Priscilla Brandt had hung up on her before Lane could ask. But at least Ms. Pris would get another shot at success.

Congressman Carr and Simon Shan might not.

Ned Talbert certainly would not.

“Hey, what’s going on?”

Lane looked up to see Darwin shambling into her office, tall and floppy as an Olympic pole-vaulter, his mop of dark curls bouncing, and his baggy, worn jeans hanging on his narrow hips. He was nearly thirty, but he really hadn’t changed all that much in the fifteen years she’d known him, except that he was a millionaire now instead of a juvenile delinquent—and so was she.

“Shut the door, Dar. Lock it, too.”

His dense, expressive eyebrows lifted. “We have a receptionist out there,” he said. “Why don’t I tell the gray angel that we don’t want to be disturbed.”

The gray angel was their vibrant seventy-year-old receptionist, Mary O’Dell, who could have stalled a tactical squad of marines, she was so good. But TPC had an open-door policy, and anyone really determined to see Lane was unlikely to be stopped for long.

“I don’t want Val barging in on us,” Lane explained.

Darwin shut the door and locked it. Val Drummond had started in the mailroom and his fortunes had risen with the company’s. He ran the administrative arm, but he was also handling concierge operations now that Lane was busy with the company’s new expansion plan. But Val’s promotion hadn’t eased the tension between him and Darwin. Val was like the solid and steady but less gifted younger brother with a bad case of sibling rivalry. He was competitive with Darwin for Lane’s time, and he seemed to resent that she and Darwin were much more than just the creative spark behind TPC. They were close friends with a bond that almost defied explanation, even to them…although, oddly, Darwin himself had been cutting ties with Lane lately.

But maybe it wasn’t odd at all, Lane allowed. He had his eye on a sweet young thing he’d met at a comic-book convention. Seems they’d been friendly for a while, but now they were getting closer, and as much as Lane missed Dar’s company, she knew it was good for a recluse like him to have someone in his life besides her.

Lane slipped off the jacket to her pantsuit and undid a button at the neckline of her blouse, still too warm to relax. It was time to tell him. This business was Dar’s life, too, but it went beyond that. She trusted and confided in him as she did no one else.

“Well?” he said, perching on the arm of the high-back leather guest chair. “Are we going to end the suspense any time soon?”

She held him off a little longer, taking a detour behind her desk to the console that smelled of freshly quartered limes. She always had some there in a crystal bowl, as much for their tart essence as for the drinks. She poured a glass of ice water and held up the pitcher, offering him some, too. He shook his head, and she pressed the glass, cool and moist, to her check, aware that he seemed perplexed by his normally unflappable partner.

“You’re going to say I’m crazy, but hear me out,” she said at last. “I think we could be in trouble.”

“You and I?”

“No, the service, TPC. Dar—” She was actually hoping he would laugh at her. “Do you think someone might be trying to damage this company, even to bring it down?”

He frowned. “You are crazy.”

“Yeah, probably. I hope so.” She took a drink, swallowing some ice chips with the water. The cold streaming into her chest cavity was almost painful. Maybe she was overreacting, but the planned expansion into two more major cities had her spooked. She’d borrowed a small fortune to finance the move, and everything depended on being able to capitalize on the service’s growing reputation. It had been relatively smooth sailing until recently.

Quickly, she brought Dar up to speed on what had happened. He already knew about Shan and the congressman, but he didn’t know that Ned Talbert had signed on the dotted line the day he committed what was being called first-degree murder and suicide.

By the time she was done, Dar had fallen into the guest chair, apparently in surprise. “So, Ned Talbert was a client?” he said. “Wow, what is that now—three of our top clients?”

“Three in three weeks, and one of them is dead. It’s surreal, a nightmare. But, listen to me now. I did something, well, rash. No one knew that Ned Talbert had signed, so I shredded his application.” She hung her head at Darwin’s disbelief. “Don’t look at me like that. I panicked. I handled his credit-card transaction myself because Mary was out of the office—and then I forgot to give Talbert his copy of the contract, so I had all the paperwork.”

She sighed and looked up, beseeching him to understand. “I didn’t know what else to do. When the Burton and Shan stories broke, that sleazy gossip Web site reported that they were our clients. How would it look if they found out about Talbert?”

“Like all our clients are jinxed? Like we’re the kiss of death?”

“Exactly.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before this?”

Thank God, she thought. He understood her impulse to save the company. He was a street kid, too, thinking with his wits, thinking survival. “I didn’t want to believe it. I told myself I was being paranoid. Am I being paranoid, Dar? Two clients, maybe, but three? Can that be a coincidence?”

It raised a question that Lane didn’t want to ask. Who would be next? She hadn’t told him about Priscilla, but she was hoping that would turn out to be nothing. She was hoping it all would turn out to be nothing, just a figment of her overwrought imagination.

She walked to the windows that looked out on Century City and beyond that, the Pacific coastline, continuing to cool herself with the frosty glass and the sharp scent of lime. It was a bright fall morning with a hint of crispness in the air, but the weather wouldn’t get chilly for another month, and at least half the people on the streets below wore shorts. This was southern California, land of perpetual flip-flops.

Darwin spoke over her thoughts. “Considering everything, you’re one of the least paranoid people I know,” he said, “and if anybody had a right to be, it’s you, given where you’ve been and what you’ve done.”

“Yeah, thanks for reminding me.” He was trying to say she’d come a long way, baby, all the way from her distant, sordid past. She and Darwin had been runaways on the street when they met, both of them cold, hungry and sick. Darwin had needed medical attention. As his condition worsened, Lane had been forced to make some desperate choices. Although now she wondered if there was a choice when someone’s life was at stake. The only people who knew about that time in her life were Darwin and the cops who put her in jail and threw away the key.

Darwin propelled his long frame out of the creaking chair and walked over to her, quietly relieving her of the ice water. She relinquished the glass without a word.

“Maybe it’s bad luck and bad timing,” he suggested. “Most celebs have a self-destruct mechanism that gets triggered just seconds after they hit it big. We’ve seen that happen.”

She nodded, wanting him to be right. He wasn’t as driven as she was—and didn’t even want the expansion. It was Val who was pushing her to grow the company. She and Val were alike in that way, hungry, if that was the right word. But it was Darwin who had her heart, and her allegiance.

She fought the urge to brush doughnut crumbs from his T-shirt—and lost. He dodged her questing fingers. “Listen to me,” she said. “Even if everything we’re talking about is coincidental, we have to be on our toes—you and me. I’m not discussing this with anyone else, obviously. But the service’s reputation is at stake.”

He held the glass against his cheek as she had, apparently curious about the sensation. “Why would anyone want to bring this company down? And why would they go to such extremes to do it?”

“That I don’t know, but we are a concierge service, and we take care of our clients. That includes protecting their privacy and their safety, if it comes to that. We can’t ignore anything that could put them at risk.”

“True, but it doesn’t make sense. A competitor wouldn’t want to hurt our clients. They’d want to steal them.”

She shrugged. “So, maybe it’s the paparazzi. Jack the Giant Killer. He’s the one breaking all the stories—and no one seems to have a clue who he is. Why hasn’t someone exposed him by now?”

Lane was angry about that. So far JGK had operated in total anonymity. Even Seth Black, the owner of Gotcha.com, swore he didn’t know who JGK was, but despite that, Seth had been willing to give Jack his own byline and publish his exposés. Everything was done electronically, of course, to protect Jack’s anonymity.

Dar seemed to be considering Lane’s idea. “I suppose it could be some kind of payback, especially since Val and Seth Black tangled earlier this year over Judge Love. But even if Black and his henchmen are targeting us, how much damage can they do? What are the odds that our clients are going to keep screwing up on a grand scale?”

Again, Lane hoped he was right. But Trudy Love was another TPC client—and a perfect example of screwing up on a grand scale. She was an ex-judge who’d officiated over a divorce-court TV show and had made her name excoriating cheating spouses. Lane could do nothing to save her career once she herself had been caught double-dipping, a phrase Trudy had made a household word.

“Jack destroyed Judge Love’s career with those pictures of her and that burly, tattooed biker who wasn’t her husband,” Lane reminded Darwin. She cocked her head. “And then Val tried to scare off Seth Black with a bunch of empty legal threats.”