Cinderella for the Miami Playboy Read online

  She hadn’t known what to expect when she had pulled a number off the We Can Find You Work flyer at the bodega near the sketchy room she’d been renting by the week, but Miami had a thriving underground economy. There were tons of companies that placed undocumented workers in domestic positions. Her desire for cash-only employment hadn’t raised any eyebrows and when she had offered a generous bonus for “extra privacy,” the manager had taken her payoff as a sweetener and sent her to interview for this cushy gig.

  Despite the blue pixie cut she’d given herself when she had abandoned her old life, she’d been terrified she would be recognized, so she had also worn gray contacts and appropriated an old school friend’s Puerto Rican accent. After spinning a story about supporting her ailing grandmother, she had landed the position.

  She lived in the pool house of a mansion on Miami’s Indian Creek. It wasn’t the most extravagant house in the neighborhood, but it was very swanky with two cabanas next to its free-form pool, five bedrooms in the main house, nine baths, a home theater and an elevator to a rooftop bar. The six-car garage held a motorcycle, an SUV, a modern sports car in pristine condition and two vintage ones in different states of restoration. The last bay was taken up with shelves of tools and parts.

  Those fancy cars, virtually the only personal items she’d seen here, were extremely well protected. Every door and window of the house was wired and alarmed. A high brick wall surrounded the property and surveillance cameras monitored every exterior angle, including the path to the private beach where no watercraft were moored.

  That always made her wonder. The dock was built for a large yacht, but there wasn’t even a little runabout. Of course, no one came or went from the road, either. The woman who had hired her—a housekeeper who had possibly hired Bianca for cash so she could take time off while her employers were away—had said the house was being held in trust while the owners were in divorce proceedings.

  Bianca hadn’t asked for more information than that. It was too sweet a deal. Her accommodation was part of her compensation and her duties consisted of dusting, vacuuming, mowing the small patch of lawn and polishing the windows.

  There were so many windows, probably with a square footage equal to the house. They all looked onto stunning views and were all tinted against the intense Florida sunshine. Bianca was well shielded from view if she wanted to stand in the main lounge next to the grand piano and speculate on what all those people in those skyscrapers in Miami Beach were doing as they went about their very normal lives.

  She tried not to do that. It made her yearn to drag heavy bags onto the crowded subway and overhear lively conversations in languages she didn’t recognize. She wanted to drink in spicy food aromas mixed with the gritty stench of city streets and walk through a door calling out, “I’m home!”

  She wanted someone to answer her back.

  Instead, she skimmed the pool or did her yoga practice beneath the weighted branches of the orange trees and tried to convince herself this isolation was a gift. She was paid well and had a generous budget for groceries and household incidentals. Deliveries were left at the gate, allowing her to live expense-free and undetected.

  It was a bizarre arrangement that she had leaped on when she’d been desperate for a means to support herself while staying out of sight. Now that she’d had time to dwell on it—seriously, nothing but time to dwell—she wondered if she had leaped out of the frying pan of financial fraud only to land in a roaring fire of something equally unsavory. That would make her not only an accessory, which she was trying to avoid, but also the world’s biggest hypocrite. Who exposed crimes only to assist in different ones?

  Was the owner of this house a criminal? Wealthy people could be felons. Bianca knew that from her experience with Morris and Ackerley. Her fiancé had been a charming, Ivy League alum with generations of wealth behind him, but he’d still cheated average citizens out of their life savings.

  She felt like such a fool for getting involved with him! For believing his flattery and letting him take advantage of her grief.

  Thanks to her poor judgment, she didn’t have much choice even if she was being paid with dirty money. She’d made her bed and would have to keep sleeping in it.

  With a sigh, she picked the ripe oranges and took them to the main kitchen, as she did every morning. She made her toast and ate it while she squeezed juice that she would freeze in ice cube trays. They made a nice addition to a glass of water or white wine, but she didn’t have enough room in her small fridge to keep it all there.

  As she worked, she daydreamed about where she would go if she could leave. It was one of her preoccupations every single day, along with what sort of career she should retrain for since she had nuked her old one. Where and how could she start over, and would anyone want anything to do with her?

  It was hard being inside her head all the time. She was hideously lonely. Aside from answering the intercom when drivers notified her of deliveries, she hadn’t spoken to anyone since the day she’d taken this job. She barely interacted with the outside world at all, staying offline and buying paperback romance novels and DVDs with her groceries.

  At first, she had watched the news incessantly, but she could barely make herself do even that these days. Morris and Ackerley were being investigated, which was what she had wanted, but progress was glacial. The company was denying and deflecting and throwing mud on her name at every opportunity.

  It was exactly what she had expected them to do, but it was hard to watch her character being assassinated. It made her want to defend herself, but no matter how tempted she was, she never, ever, ever reached out to anyone or checked her social media feeds.

  Or checked up on him.

  Everett.

  Her eyes drifted shut in a mixture of reminiscence and mortification. After meeting him on the plane to Miami, she had looked him up at the library while making her final preparations toward abandoning her old life. She’d still been of two minds as to whether she should meet him for dinner.

  According to the tabloid articles, his father had been a renowned automotive engineer from Switzerland, who suffered a brain injury during a test drive. His French mother had been an interpreter at the UN. There had been scads of family money that had mostly come to Everett in his early twenties.

  With all that gold falling out of his pockets, he had become a playboy in the most iconic sense. He traveled the globe on spontaneous adventures, seeing and being seen. There had been links to nightclub appearances and ski holidays and affairs with this or that socialite. For a time, he had raced cars. There had been a youthful photo of him in Monte Carlo, shirtless and with his arms around two extremely beautiful women dressed in gold shorts and eyelet bikini tops.

  I wonder what he would think of those cars in the garage, Bianca sometimes mused.

  She thought of him far too often, almost as if he was her companion here. It was an odd trick that her mind played on her, probably because she was so starved for company and because he was the last person with whom she’d had a meaningful interaction.

  Meaningful, Bianca? For her, perhaps, but it had been obvious from the first moment that he was a serial pickup artist. Joining him for dinner had served her own purpose, but she had meant for it to only be dinner. Hookups with strangers weren’t her style at all.

  He’d had a charming way about him, though, one that disarmed and encouraged her to trust him. He had fascinated her with his intelligence and nuanced opinions while drawing her out with what seemed like genuine interest in her. It had taken superhuman effort not to blurt out what she was about to do. Only her lifetime of keeping secrets had allowed her to compartmentalize and leave him in the dark.

  Even so, she’d been in a heightened state, fearful of what she was about to do and eager for the distraction he offered. Given the huge step she had been about to undertake, it made sense that she had taken another uncharacteristic risk of letting a stranger seduce her.

  Maybe she’d simply needed to be held.

  Either way, that interlude should have made her feel empty and used, but she had reveled in it, letting go of herself completely. It had been a unique experience where the outer layers of her persona had seemed to burn away in the heat of their passion. When she had left his room, she had walked away altered at her deepest level. Centered and confident. New.

  Or she was completely delusional, and he’d just been really good in bed.

  She longed to see him again and find out. A far more sensible part of her suspected she would be hideously disappointed if she met him again. She doubted he had spared a single thought for her. He might not even remember her, which would be humiliating in the extreme.

  Leaving here wasn’t an option anyway. She would be mobbed by paparazzi, if the way reporters were badgering Troy was any indication. All the letters of the alphabet seemed to be looking for her—SEC, FBI, DOJ. From what she’d seen of other whistleblowers’ experiences, she could face prosecution or be persecuted for leaking information. If she was offered protection, she would likely wind up exactly as she was, cut off from the world but with less agency. Most importantly, if Troy Ackerley and his partner, Kirk Morris, got their hands on her, the outcome could be life-threatening.

  No, she was safest exactly where she was, even if she was claustrophobic and lonesome and bordering on despair.

  She twisted the orange half with excessive force, trying not to cry.

  Oh, stop it. She jammed the last of her toast into her mouth, not caring that her juice-coated fingers gave the PBJ a weird, tangy flavor. Pity parties solved nothing. She swallowed away the lump of toast and reached for the last orange.

  As she t
ouched the knife blade to the skin, a soft, measured sound came to her ears, a muted, rhythmic pattern of thumps.

  That wasn’t the neighbor’s sound system. What was it? She held very still, listening, trying to place it. Not a bird or—heaven help her—a gator? One couldn’t get in here, could it?

  With a lurch of her heart, she realized it was growing louder, coming toward the open sliding door to her left, the one that led onto the courtyard and the paved, poolside dining area.

  She never left doors open, only this one, and only when she crossed into this kitchen from her cabana. She always felt safe leaving the screen in place because the courtyard was completely enclosed—except for the single locked gate that accessed the path down to the beach.

  That gate was on the same circuit as everything else. She glanced at the computer in the nook beside the pantry. The monitor showed the screen saver, not the view from the cameras the way it was supposed to if motion had triggered the system to start recording.

  Something was definitely out there, though. Someone?

  As the sound closed in, Bianca’s breath backed up in her lungs. The wait became macabre. It was timed like footsteps, but that’s not what it was. It was longer and slower with a tap and a rest, a tap and—

  A man on crutches appeared behind the screen and froze as he spotted her. They stared at one another.

  He wore a gray-green shirt with a subtle palm leaf pattern and pale gray shorts, both tailored. His knee was bandaged and so were his knuckles. His cheekbone wore a garish purple shiner, and his eyes narrowed, projecting the warmth of an Ice Age glacier.

  Despite all that, buoyant delight slammed through her.

  “Everett!” She was ecstatic to see a familiar face, even as concern lurched through her at how banged up he was. She was glad to see him, flattered even, after thinking about him so much since—

  Reality arrived in a breath-punching tackle. He shouldn’t be here. He was from her old life. This was her new one. How had he found her?

  Her heart kicked into an unsteady gallop. Her scrambled brain tried to tell her body what to do. Adrenaline seared through her veins like a bullet train, but her muscles turned to stretchy rubber. Think, Bianca. Run.

  She had a go-bag packed in the cabana, but Everett was swishing the screen open, hitching himself into the kitchen, placing himself between the screen door to the courtyard and the door to the lounge. He sucked all the oxygen from the room with his presence. His gaze flickered around as though searching out hidden dangers.

  “Hello, Bianca.” His voice was harder than she remembered. His gaze came back to hers, and the easygoing confidence of a lothario had become a force field of power.

  Some basic, primitive female in her absorbed that he had become even more appealing. His shoulders seemed broader, and his biceps bulged where he braced on his crutches. The other part noted his scowl was pure Hollywood hit man, sexy enough to turn her bones to pudding, but sending her into survival mode.

  She spun and ran through the door into the garage. No bag, no cash, but she had a contingency plan in place for such an emergency. It was a terrible plan, but it was a chance. Her only chance.

  She snatched the fob off the hook and ran for the fancy sports car—

  “Bianca!” His thunderous shout was accompanied by a clatter.

  She reflexively looked over her shoulder, stumbling into the coupe and crashing her hip into its side-view mirror.

  “Do not steal my car,” he warned in a deadly voice. “That would annoy me, and I am already very annoyed.” He was using his shoulder to hold open the door to the kitchen, slouching as he tried to pick up the crutch that had fallen.

  “Your car.” Her brain was trying very hard to think through the miasma of shock and disbelief, fear and compulsion to escape. The thump of her own heart deafened her ears.

  “Yes. My car. My house.”

  But—That wasn’t possible. The sheer coincidence meant he would have known who she was before she got here. Was he a mind reader? Had he known what she planned even as they had made love? Then somehow tricked her into coming here?

  No one had known what she had planned.

  None of this made sense, but all she could blurt was, “How?”

  An exhale of tested patience left him. “Come inside. We need to talk.”

  “No.” She blipped the fob and moved to open the car door.

  “I’m serious. Do not steal my car.” He got both crutches under his arms and swooped fully into the garage, allowing the door to slam shut behind him.

  They were in a standoff in the filtered light through the row of small windows across the top of the big doors. She might be able to leap into the car and lock it before he reached her, but then what? He could disable the front gate in the time it took her to pull out of the garage and get down the short driveway.

  He must have calculated all of that himself. His posture eased slightly while his gaze flickered over her face and shoulders.

  “How are you? You look good.”

  She doubted it and suddenly wished she looked like her old self, not a runaway from a punk rock band. Her brown hair with its faded blue ends hung around her face in air-dried frizz. She no longer owned makeup and her threadbare shorts and T-shirt had been secondhand when she had bought them from a Goodwill store six months ago.

  “How—” Her throat kept going dry. He looked very disreputable and dangerous with his blackened eye and air of watchfulness. Murderous. “How did you get in? The security system is on.”

  “I came by boat and used my phone to disable it before I walked up.” He drew his phone from his shorts pocket and tapped. His mouth twisted in a very poor imitation of a smile. “It’s fully armed again now.”

  Meaning the garage doors would scream bloody murder if she opened one.

  In the months of talking to herself without anyone around to be offended, she had developed quite a potty mouth and let one slip without thinking.

  His brow went up. The corner of his mouth dug in with dark amusement. “I usually prefer some foreplay first, but I’m happy to accommodate if you’re feeling an urgent need.”

  It wasn’t funny. All of this was deeply distressing. Her veins were burning with adrenaline, her chest tight at being trapped. Then there was that other betraying part of her that was overjoyed to see him again. All those bunched muscles that had gathered her up, those sexy lips set between the carved hollows of his cheeks. He had kissed her everywhere. The hot light in his eyes seemed to recollect it as vividly as she did, freshly burning those kisses into her psyche.

  She had spent way too much time replaying their night together. Often, in the dark of night and the privacy of her bed, she had let herself imagine they had had more between them than pheromones and a free evening.

  In stark daylight, confronting him, she acknowledged that she had been played by a player. He had been way too good at sex to be anything less, and he had clearly been ten steps ahead of her the whole time.

  “I thought this house belonged to a couple in divorce.” Her voice wavered despite her best efforts to steady it. “The housekeeper—”

  “Wanted time off. Her daughter was expecting.”

  She blinked as she absorbed that. “Okay, but how did you arrange for me to come here?” She already knew. The offer had been too good to be true and she’d fallen for it anyway. “Why did you? Oh, God, do you work for Troy?” Her stomach bottomed out.

  “No.” The smug amusement that had hovered around his mouth disappeared. “Your story broke a few days after we met.” His jaw hardened and the curl in his mouth became very cynical. “Once it became clear you had disappeared, I made it my job to find you.”

  “Why?”

  His brows winged up. “Why did you go into hiding?” The note of challenge in his tone suggested he knew the answer.

  “Snitches get stitches.” She tried to shrug it off, as if her knees weren’t knocking with terror that she’d been located. And because it was true. People hated a tattletale. “A lot of rich, powerful people are either implicated or lost a chunk of their fortune.” Maybe Everett was one of them? She hugged herself. “I don’t imagine anyone is happy with me right now, but I can’t afford a bodyguard. My only choice was to disappear.” Even her last resort strategy offered no guarantee she would survive it.