Looks are Deceiving Read online

  LOOKS ARE DECEIVING

  Michele Hart

  EROTIC ROMANCE

  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  LOOKS ARE DECEIVING

  Michele Hart

  Copyright © 2008

  Chapter 1

  “Pardon me, ma’am, would you like to make some money?”

  Breaking away from a quiet sing-along with the seventies elevator music, Elissa looked up from the ketchup brands in the sauces aisle and saw a handsome, dark-haired man in his early twenties looking down at her with a curious glint in his eyes, a snicker on his slanted lips.

  She scanned her surroundings to confirm she was the only ma’am in the aisle. Two more men around his age stood at the end of the aisle, smiles plastered on their faces and spectating.

  The young man with too much money could only be speaking to her, and it couldn’t be about her singing. She was just happy she wasn’t off-key. Was this a joke?

  “Would you like a knuckle sandwich in public? Buddy, you need to turn around and go back where you came from.”

  She quit the young man, refocusing on the important business of ketchup selection.

  “No,” he interrupted her a second time with a cackle of delight. “It’s not what you think. Some friends and I are looking for a date for my overworked and boring brother.”

  Elissa sent her eyes around the aisle again, looking for a camera, sure this was a joke on her, a video prank, but she saw no witnesses, boom mikes, or camera crew. Nothing conspicuous. She cast the young man before her a sour glare. “I didn’t realize they stocked mercy dates here at the Cash-n-Save.”

  The college boy gave another sputter. “He’s a nice guy, I swear.”

  “Isn’t that what the neighbors say when a serial killer is arrested? Charlie Manson had a whole family who thought he was cool.”

  “Nothing freaky, I swear.”

  Friendly, he passed an open hand her way in greeting, and she stared at the offer, unsure she wished to touch a stranger who offered her money for a date in a grocery store. There’s no telling what he might’ve done with those hands earlier.

  “My name’s Derek, and I’m looking for a date for my older brother, some female companionship for one evening. You look like a nice girl, and my brother likes redheads, nothing deeper than that. Just dinner at a nice restaurant, a public place. No strings attached, no risk. Money at the end of it.”

  She looked down at herself.

  Her scruffy sneakers were black from helping Mom weed the garden. Potting soil-encrusted shorts hung from her hips, frayed and ratty above dirt-stained knees. A ripped and faded Led Zeppelin concert jersey fell from her shoulders, its arms hacked off. Dirt smears ran down her arms. Her hair was chaotically tamed tight to her head with a clip, but she didn’t know what it looked like. Strays sprung free to tickle her neck.

  She couldn’t imagine the degree of bad she smelled from a sunny day of hard labor, nor could she picture herself looking worse.

  Elissa knew she was no prize pig at this moment.

  “You’ve got to be kidding. Do you hate your brother? Is this a practical joke?”

  The Devil danced in Derek’s dark brown, pretty eyes. She watched him turn back and give an okay signal to his two friends at the end of the salad dressings. The other dark-haired guy spun around and gave her his back, but he shook like Jell-O from his chuckle. The surfer-looking, blond one was less ashamed, brave enough to laugh at her right in her plain sight. Loudly.

  Suspicious, she turned back to the bravest one with the illicit offer. “I think you should find someone else.”

  “How about a hundred dollars just to have dinner with him?”

  Her brow crashed into her sight. “You can’t just walk up to a strange girl in a store and offer to pay her for a date, you know. Not the classiest move, even illegal in most states. Are you mad?”

  “So you don’t want a hundred dollars for a two-hour job?”

  “It’s the job I’m worried about.”

  Elissa went back to her condiments, contemplating the store-brand ketchup, and whether she should buy ketchup at all. The car insurance was long overdue, on its way to cancelled. The guy didn’t lose interest and walk away like she’d hoped.

  “How about two hundred? Think about it.”

  She was stunned by the offer. Two hundred dollars…the car insurance…real ketchup.

  “I’ll pass.” She denied temptation, devoting herself to the decision of whether real ketchup was worth another a dollar and fifty cents over the generic brand. One-fifty was a half gallon of gas, and the V-dub’s tank was nearly empty. She needed the gas more than the ketchup. Already walking to class every day, she thought it more important to save her remaining gas for trips to Mom’s, far from within walking distance. Thank God she lived across the street from campus, and she actually enjoyed the walk to class. Luckily, Florida weather is almost always nice.

  She hated generic ketchup, was lifelong loyal to the big name. If she didn’t buy ketchup, how could she eat her eggs in the morning? No eggs, no good breakfast. No sharp thinking for school. Grades go down. Disaster. End of dream.

  Derek tapped on her shoulder. “Look, if you change your mind, show up at Rubia’s Restaurant tomorrow night, 8 P.M. Free dinner in public, two hundred bucks. He isn’t horrible to look at. Perfectly safe.”

  Rubia’s was a five-star Italian restaurant uptown, a city landmark legendary and almost as old as Tampa itself, the cuisine known worldwide, one of the finest wine cellars in the state. She’d been there once, and the food had been exquisite, the tastes unique. The atmosphere was elegant and shadowed for privacy, decorated with the impression one sat within a huge wine cellar, surrounded by oaken sleeves filled with bottled grape and live vines hanging from racks and brick walls, a lovely place. She’d really enjoy having dinner there again.

  What harm can there really be? We’d be in public. With years of martial arts classes behind her, she didn’t suffer a worry for her physical safety.

  Elissa cast her sight up to the college boy again. Considering her disgraceful appearance, she was pretty sure these guys set out to find the worst female disaster in the store with whom to saddle his brother. How shallow. They deserved a hard payback for this.

  “Make it three hundred,” Elissa told him tartly, “and you have a deal.”

  “Deal,” Derek exclaimed, and signaled his friends again who burst into rolling laughter. “What’s your name, so he can find you?”

  “Elissa Baker,” she told him, a bit annoyed at their entertainment.

  “My brother’s name is Greg Moretti. Give his name to the hostess at the door, and she’ll find him.”

  “Have your brother bring the money.”

  Sour to trust the apparently innocuous offer, she shook her head as she watched them, laughing, disappear around the end-cap of potato chips. Little boys.

  Suddenly wondering exactly what she looked like, Elissa abandoned her shopping cart and power-walked to the housewares department, straight to the framed mirrors, and was horrified by what she found.

  Simply horrified.

  An oddly angled, Hitler-moustache dirt smear was right under her nose. Old mascara had bled a bit under her eyes. Another dirt swatch wiped across her cheek, probably the result of wiping her soil-encrusted arm over a drip of sweat. Clipped in a way that shot portions in bizarre tangents, her hair was mostly sweat-plastered to her scalp in some places, grass entangled in others. She looked like she needed to be stuffed into a washing machine for a good soaking.

  No wonder they laughed.

  Confronted with the truth, she was dumbfounded she’d gone anywhere looking like a hurricane victim tossed through two counties. She probably smelled like a farmer on harvest day.
r />   The college boys were cruel for setting up Derek’s brother with some ramshackle-looking girl. Sibling rivalry.... She could take the insult, actually deserved it for showing up anywhere in such disrepair.

  There was but one thing to do. Elissa decided all three of those evil little boys deserved a stinging punishment for their rotten plan. She could rescue herself from her immediate financial trouble with three hundred bucks, and get a night job to keep above her books and rent, food, gas, the mounting ... everything.

  The corners of her mouth rose. Derek and Company deserved to have their foolishly offered money taken from them, and they'd earn a lesson in judging a book by its cover. She could make their ignorance of female versatility cost them.

  Inside every woman is a beautiful woman.

  Hadn’t Derek and his friends ever heard paybacks were Hell? They shouldn’t have passed up that class in college. If they wanted to throw away their money, she saw no reason why she shouldn’t benefit from their idiocy. She’d take the money offered her as long as their requirements were reasonable.

  Elissa filled with the petty thrill of harmless revenge and imagined their payback. They had no idea she could look like two very different people.

  * * * *

  “So the police are holding the wine shipment?” Sissy asked, as she restocked the bottles of Scotch, putting the open bottle in the front and a full backup bottle behind it.

  “Yep.” Greg leaned against the bar from his bar stool and snatched up a cherry from the fruit tray awaiting drinks to fancy-up. He popped it in his mouth and munched, nodding over an empty bottle of spring water he’d brought in from the car after a long, torturous drive through half of Florida.

  Sissy scooped up the water bottle and threw it into the trash for him. “So how did this bogus crime go down?”

  “A week ago, I placed orders with all the same companies from which Dad had expected shipments that day. The state bureau set up the seizure at the Miami port warehouse to look like a burglary, a teenaged crime-gang snatch, even left a little gangland graffiti on some of the remaining crates. The freight’s sitting in city lockup. The cops expect a negative reaction, if the Mob is somewhere in the mix. Hopefully, over the next few months, they’ll pick up a hint in the right direction.

  “It’s a fishing expedition, but it might shake a few fresh leads from the trees in the forest they can’t see.”

  Sissy refrained from comment, now buffing tulip-shaped wine glasses with a linen napkin to remove water spots, then hanging them by their stems above the bar. Other bartenders passed behind her, feeding the customers of the main lounge on a packed Wednesday night. Rubia’s was never without a full house. Greg thought the music should be a bit more noticeable.

  Tired, he rubbed the tension from his neck. Down to Miami and back up to Tampa had been a long drive. “We’re in Stage Two of the plan, wait-and-see. I’m determined to see the shooting solved, and prove the police wrong that Dad had been involved with the Mob.”

  “Sergio Moretti, a man with no enemies,” she croaked, her head in a subtle shake of denial, an expression of skepticism many had repeated in their hypnosis this past year. It was no new news questions of his death still haunted them all. Greg’s father’s death wasn’t a cold case to Greg.

  “The cops are crazy to think it was a Mob hit. There’s no Mob in Tampa Bay’s restaurant community. The old man wasn’t involved with the crime world.”

  Greg had to agree. “Why should he be? Rubia’s was successful on its own, needed no help from the Mob. Dad knew better than to risk his family’s safety or his wife’s generations-old restaurant in that junk. He was a clean businessman.”

  Weary, not just from the trip but the entire year and a half since his father’s death, Greg leaned his head into his hand.

  “You can’t prove a negative, you know. It's impossible to prove Dad wasn’t involved with the Mob. I just hope to prove it was a simple burglary-gone-wrong and remove the stain of the Mob on his death. We may get lucky enough to find the gunman and put him behind bars. That’s the best possible outcome.”

  Sissy moaned.

  Greg tapped the coaster on the bar. “Julian will be glad I squeezed the wine from the cops’ clutches. We’ll have enough of the chef’s preferred to serve the investors. That’s the important part.”

  Sissy patted his hand, lending him a bit of comfort. “If we must wait, don’t let it eat you up, Greg. Let it go. Think of your blind date tonight.”

  He moaned as if he’d a foot caught in a bear trap. He’d give a lot to get out of this. “I was trying to forget. Why do I let them do this to me?”

  She snickered her familiar laugh over the bar between them, refilling the reservoir of toothpick umbrellas while other bartenders danced around her restocking of the bar.

  “Because you four blockheads grew up together and just can’t stop challenging one another to be the king of stupidity. Being mean to one another is your male-bonding ritual.”

  Greg groaned in resignation. “It’s my idiot fault I told them I could fall for an unspectacular looking woman.”

  Sissy sputtered another laugh laced with that self-righteous, I-told-you-so,-you-dumb-ape look. “Sounds like you knotted your own noose. I’ve never seen you date an unattractive woman, Greg. Dumb move there.”

  “I should’ve known better. I did it to myself.”

  “I’ll say, considering the fact we’re talking about Derek, the instigator, Allen and his flair for irony, and Jerry, the mysterious agent of smoke and mirrors. The Three Amigos of Delayed Adolescence. How does your foot taste?”

  “Needs salt. Make me a martini, Sis. Stirred, not shaken,” he ordered, regretting his curse of kid brothers and choice of childhood friends. Readying himself for disaster, he watched her pour the gin and vermouth into a shaker, and she shook the drink, despite his sarcastic order. She knew how he preferred his martini. He’d been taking them like Bond since college.

  “What’s her name?” Sissy asked.

  “Derek said her name was Elissa Baker.”

  “Pretty name. Familiar with their zest for the tasteless, I think it remains a given the Three Amigos chose a young woman who is…um, not so attractive.”

  Greg glared at her. “I’d bet a bottle of Chianti on it.”

  “Well,” she advised, pouring the drink into a martini stem. “Be nice, don’t be insulting. And don’t stare, even if she has antennae.”

  Greg frowned. She knew him better than that. “I’ve got years of maturity on them. I’m not going to treat the poor girl rudely. I feel sorry she’s been swept up in those guys’ sick senses of entertainment. I plan on telling them to go to Hell for it.”

  Shaking her head, Sissy reached for a swizzle stick, jabbed a green olive from the service tray, and dropped it into his drink. “This fiendish plan could only be Allen’s brainchild.”

  Greg gave a nervous laugh. “Never trust a man who lives for sarcasm. You know they’ll have chosen someone I couldn’t possibly be attracted to. A female bodybuilder, a Goth Satanist, a lumberjack. They plan to win the bet. They’ll play hardball. I can tell you already from Allen’s description she doesn’t sound like my type at all. He warned me she’s missing a tooth, has creepy skin, and speaks with a hillbilly slur that’ll grate my ears. I can barely hold back the excitement.”

  “Looky there.” Sissy pointed toward the restaurant’s front entrance, as she set his martini in front of him. “Now, she’s more your type.”

  Greg turned around on his barstool to see a long-legged redhead built like a goddess speaking to the hostess while impatient parties awaited their tables. She wore a slinky, black satin dress clinging to her hourglass shape and ending mid-thigh. Mid-beautiful-thigh. She tossed gorgeous, dark red tresses over her shoulder, and a spike-heeled foot came up just a little in the sexiest way when she leaned against the hostess podium. Pouty breasts grazed the wooden stand. He found it difficult to swallow when his mouth went dry.

  “I’d hate to see the
pro football player she dates.”

  But then, Sheri the hostess turned around and pointed the woman’s attention across the restaurant toward the bar where Greg sat.

  He spun back to Sissy and took a slug from his drink. “That’s not her. Allen described her to me as looking more like a slobbered-up dog toy. Oh, God. She’s recruited her cute, indignant friend to come in here and throw a drink in my face.”

  “Good plan,” Sissy deadpanned.

  He stirred the martini with the olive and little sword swizzle, preparing himself for a splash. “They’re all walking dead men for this.”

  “It won’t be the first time they’ve deserved it.” Sissy’s eyes went over his shoulder. “She’s coming this way, and she looks angry as a rattlesnake.”

  A few miserable seconds passed, and Greg sensed the goddess now standing beside him against the bar, viewed her long legs propped up on spike heels through the fold of his arm. Those legs went all the way up. She smelled incredible, like something edible. Toasted butter ... he smelled toffee.

  Then he heard a livid feminine voice say, “Excuse me, are you Greg Moretti?”

  He tossed a quarter of the drink down his throat for courage, shoved the olive into his cheek, and turned to her to see the sparkliest blue eyes he’d ever seen.

  “I’m Greg,” he admitted, hoping to get the lecture over quickly. He didn’t waste a moment taking her all in. She possessed a massive head of hair the shade of Hungarian paprika. “Are you a friend of Elissa’s?”

  She cocked her head sideways, her blue eyes poisonous. “No. I’m Elissa.”

  He sucked in a small breath of surprise before he could stop himself, and the olive rolled right down his windpipe. Greg sprang from his seat and began choking. The goddess wound up and struck him on the back so hard he crashed into the bar, barely kept his feet, and spat the olive into the mirror behind the liquor bottles, missing Sissy by just a foot or two.

  Staggering for balance, Greg took a full, deep breath, grateful for the rescue, but not so much the physical assault. Oxygen felt wonderful. Every eye in the bar and half the restaurant was on him now, so he gave a hapless nod to his accidental audience who, thankfully, went back to their evenings.