Cutting Loose Read online

  I put another forkful of crunchy noodles and watery sauce into my mouth. “It seemed so easy! Just boil it and then drain it! I don’t know what went wrong.”

  “And these meatballs contain…”

  I looked at the blackened little lumps, like charcoal briquettes. “The normal stuff! I just used ground turkey instead of ground beef. I guess that means that it burns faster.”

  After stirring his plate another couple of times, Sawyer stood up, headed for the refrigerator. “Any of that tuna salad left over from last night?” he asked hopefully as he stuck his head into the appliance. “That wasn’t so bad, if I picked around the bones.”

  I groaned, pushed my plate aside so I could put my head down on the table. “I’m a total failure at cooking. Just tell me so I can put myself out of my misery with one of those kitchen knives.”

  Sawyer emerged from the fridge, holding the bowl of tuna salad in the crook of one arm. “You’ve just never done any of this before,” he said through a mouthful of tuna. “Keep at it – although my offer of bringing in a private chef to give you some pointers still stands…”

  “No thank you.” I had resolved from the moment I decided to start cooking that, as bad as things were at first, I wouldn’t give up and turn to outside help. I could learn this, with no assistance besides the occasional cooking show or YouTube tutorial. “I’m going to do it on my own.”

  I really did owe Sawyer a good, fully edible meal, I reflected after dinner. I’d emptied most of tonight’s failed experiment in Italian into the garbage, and I thought about my frustration as I scrubbed the dishes in the sink. He occasionally insisted that I was just a convenient hire at the right time willing to work for far below market rate, but it hadn’t escaped my attention all the nice little things he did to me. He clearly didn’t want to be noticed, but he wanted to help.

  The first couple days, he had to keep barging into my room to wake me up each morning. He made a show of whipping back the covers, although I learned to wear something more than just a bra to bed after that first night. No more flashing from this woman! He seemed to take great pleasure in waking me up, artfully dodging the pillows I hurtled in his direction.

  But at the end of the week, I returned to my bedroom after work to find a brand new, shiny alarm clock sitting on my bedside table. It buzzed the next morning and each day after that, and I no longer needed to crawl back under the covers to escape Sawyer as he stood over me and checked out my ass.

  I’d been very concerned about getting paid. I couldn’t access any of my accounts, of course, as my family would use those to track me down. Sawyer had promised that he’d pay me each week. On Friday, he handed me an envelope. I opened it up, tensing myself to ask him to maybe act as my bank… but found a thick sheaf of cash tucked inside.

  “You’re paying me in cash?” I exclaimed, realizing that this solved a lot of my problems.

  He winked at me. “Easier to keep you under the table, metaphorically. No need to pay taxes.” He nodded downward. “Although if you want to crawl under the table literally, I think I could appreciate the view…”

  Laughing, I smacked him. “Knock it off, you jerk.”

  “Takes one to know one,” he countered, and said nothing more about helping me avoid detection through the banking system.

  Despite the near-constant flirtation, it soon became clear that there wasn’t going to be anything happening between Sawyer and myself. There’d been sparks that first night, when he humiliated me by putting me in a maid’s outfit, but the sparks cooled since then. Instead, our relationship felt more like that between siblings – which was doubly odd, considering that I’d never connected with my younger sister in the same way I related to Sawyer.

  We quickly grew comfortable around each other. I learned to read his moods; he often obscured his feelings behind a façade of smiles and glib charm, but he proved to be mercurial and tempestuous. Small matters, like finding a wrinkle in one of his perfectly tailored suits, could put him in a funk that seemed to stick around for hours. Other times, he found great hilarity in watching me struggle with tasks like estimating the price of a taxi ride. He teased me constantly, all of which I happily endured knowing that he didn’t mean a word he spoke.

  It was too bad, I sometimes reflected, that I didn’t feel more romantically attracted to him. Despite being a criminal clear and through, Sawyer exhibited a surprising code of morality. When a man cut in front of us at the grocery store and shouted at the checkout girl until she was on the verge of tears, I watched as Sawyer pulled out a pocketknife and cut the bottom off a carton of frozen orange juice.

  “What’s that for?” I whispered to him as he leaned forward, slipped it into one of the paper bags of the angry, rude asshole in front of us.

  He winked back at me. “It won’t melt until he gets the bags into the trunk of his car. Nice bit of delayed revenge.”

  I gasped. “That’s awful!”

  “Karma,” he shrugged, and that was the end of it.

  Sawyer seemed to truly see himself as an agent of karma, I discovered. He was there to take justice into his own hands, deal out punishments to those who deserved it and shower good fortune on those who had been overlooked or neglected. I watched him once lift a wallet from a pissed off Wall Street type screaming into his cell phone, riffle through its contents, and then drop the entire wad of cash into the open palm of a homeless man a half block down. Sawyer tossed the wallet in a garbage can and walked away, whistling, as the homeless man’s eyes flicked in astonishment between the fortune in his hands and the well-dressed agent of karma who sauntered down the street as if he regularly made such charitable gifts.

  No matter how many times I attempted to explain this philosophy to Eastman, however, the Fed never seemed to grasp the concept.

  “It’s still illegal,” he insisted for the millionth time as I groaned when I realized my latest tail hadn’t swayed him. “It doesn’t matter if someone deserved it. That’s not his decision to make.”

  I shook my head. “Come on, Jack. Haven’t you ever met someone who totally deserves to be punished by Life?”

  I’d started using his shortened first name about a week back. For some reason, despite his formal attitude, I couldn’t keep referring to him just by his last name, and Agent Eastman seemed way too stuffy. I tried out Jackson, but it quickly shortened down to just Jack.

  “It’s not my place to judge,” Eastman stated firmly. “Maybe the guy was just having a bad day. It doesn’t mean that he’s a bad person. And if he is a bad person, he’ll receive his comeuppance eventually – from Justice.”

  “And Lady Justice never chooses to act through an agent? Like a thief?”

  “Not when it’s illegal,” he said, and I couldn’t budge his mind.

  As well as I got along with Sawyer, Eastman and I met like oil and water. Nearly every meeting turned into an argument of sorts, a debate where we both seemed to hop from topic to topic, with the only constant being that we remained almost diametrically opposed to each other.

  And yet, I also found myself looking forward to seeing the FBI agent. In his own way, Eastman became a part of my weekly life, a new acquaintance that, unlike earlier connections and friendships in my life, felt reassuringly real. If Sawyer was the guy I’d call to help me get revenge on an ex-boyfriend, Eastman would be the guy who’d sit with me for as long as it took to break me out of my post-breakup funk.

  I didn’t have much to tell him, aside from periodic updates on how the gala for the Institute of Arts was progressing. Eastman took note of these updates, wrote them down, and promised that he’d be at the next meeting. And he always paid for my coffee, which earned him a big mark in the positives column.

  Yes, despite my continued struggles to get a handle on any of the culinary arts, I felt like I was settling into my new life. Bit by bit, I was discovering myself, being my own person after escaping from under the thumb of my family.

  All of this was great.

  I shoul
d have known that Lady Karma was about to throw a monkey wrench in the works.

  Chapter Thirteen

  * * *

  I’d pinned a calendar to the wall in my little bedroom in Sawyer’s penthouse apartment. I crossed off each day, watching as the number of spaces between the line of crosses and the big day dwindled.

  The Institute gala’s stated purpose was to highlight the new exhibition of works by the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. Of course, I knew the real reason for the gala was to provide an excuse for the wealthy and famous to rub shoulders, and hopefully feel compelled to earn their tax breaks for the year by upping their charitable contributions to the museum.

  Things felt on track. I had agreements in place with most of the vendors, signed and dated, and they’d cashed the down payments that I wrote them from the museum’s corporate account. If nothing went horribly off the rails, I’d be proud of this gala. Who knew? Maybe I had a future in this thing!

  I hadn’t really considered beyond the gala itself. Would Sawyer keep me on? Could I keep staying in his penthouse? If this really was the front for a heist of some sort, he’d likely make himself vanish after the gala. What did that mean for me?

  I kept putting off talking to the man about it. Surely, he’d thought about me, I reasoned to myself. He wouldn’t leave me out in the cold if he did pull some sort of criminal job. And besides, he’d promised me that he wasn’t going to steal anything from the Institute. We’d be fine. Eastman’s concerns were totally overblown.

  Yes, everything was under control – until one morning when, as I walked Rudy through some of the layouts I wanted, Sawyer hanging a couple paces back, I heard a voice that made my blood freeze in my veins.

  “Oh. My. Gawd. No way. It’s not possible, oh my GOD!”

  I froze, half the neurons in my brain screaming at me to freeze in hopes that she wouldn’t see me, the other half insisting that I run, headlong and recklessly, in a panicked dash to just get away. Adrenaline flooded into my bloodstream, and I could hear my heartbeat pounding like a bass drum in my ears.

  I didn’t run. I couldn’t. My feet seemed frozen to the floor. All I could do was slowly turn, eyes wide, and hope that the voice was some sort of auditory hallucination brought on by one of my many failed cooking experiments.

  My hopes were dashed. A vision in pink silks stood in front of me, perfectly manicured hands clasped to her mouth in an overacted parody of surprise. “No way,” she gasped out in a high-pitched, breathy whisper that sounded like a tween girl attempting to seduce her gym teacher. “Alice! It’s you!”

  I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I could just stand there as the girl drew closer, threw her arms around me. “I found you,” she whispered as she hugged me, and my blood crystallized into ice.

  In my head, I vacillated between a couple different options. Maybe I could just drag her away and lock her in a janitor’s closet until I figured out what to do with her? I could push her into one of the nearby marble statues and hope that she cracked her head open? I didn’t really believe myself capable of committing cold-blooded murder, but in the heat of the moment, I saw nothing wrong with considering all my options.

  But then Sawyer stepped up to the two of us, his expression inquisitive. The other girl released her grip on me, although she didn’t step quite far enough away for my comfort. She kept herself inside my personal space, and I knew that she did so on purpose to throw me off.

  “Who’s this hunk?” she asked, beaming up at Sawyer and batting her eyelashes.

  For a second, I just stared, mouth open, at her forwardness. Sawyer, at least, was a bit faster to respond.

  “Darren Sawyer,” he said, extending a hand. He thought he could shake hands with her? “And you?”

  “Lily,” she simpered back, eyelashes in full flutter. She shifted her body slightly, putting her weight on one leg so that she leaned a little to the side. The move managed to both emphasize her hips and stick out her chest even more than usual. I winced as the thin, tight shirt covering her upper half strained almost to the point of popping seams. Lily wasn’t fat or heavy at all – my mother would never bear to have that – but she emphasized her curves to the point of weaponization. “Lily Melton.”

  That made Sawyer’s eyes flick quickly from her to me, as if confirming the similarity in our faces. I winced back at him, not even trying to fake a smile. “Lily Melton,” he echoed. “How surprising!”

  Lily emitted another one of her simpering giggles, but I spun on her, finally finding my voice. “What are you doing here?” I hissed at her, half angry, half flabbergasted.

  She looked evenly back at me, her cutesy little flirty look falling off her face like a mask dropping off a statue. “Come on, Alice. You think that Mother would just let you run away?” She briefly smirked. “I will say that I’ve never seen her flip her lid like she did when she realized the stunt you pulled. I don’t think we had a single wine glass left in the house after she finished her tirade, and she went through four figures of broken crockery and glasses.”

  “Does she know that you’re here? That you found me?”

  Lily shook her head. “Not yet. But that reminds me – I probably ought to text her and send along an update, shouldn’t I?”

  She reached for her purse, and my panic level climbed another couple notches as she unzipped the ridiculously small designer bag and poked around inside. “Lily, please,” I got out, hating how close I sounded to begging.

  No, I really was begging. I’d drop down to my knees, if necessary, to keep her from telling my mother, the rest of my family, about where I’d fled. Visions of everything I’d built over the last couple of weeks crashing down filled my head.

  Lily paused, looked back up at me. “Come on, Alice. My big sister is going to beg me?”

  I took a deep breath. “No,” I replied. “I’m telling you. It’s none of our mother’s business what we do with our lives. We’re grown adults, Lily. Don’t you understand? Do you ever feel like you just need to get away from how everyone treats us?”

  “How everyone treats us?” she echoed, her perfectly plucked eyebrows rising. She looked like a doll that someone accidentally painted incorrectly. “We’re practically royalty, Alice! People treat us with respect!”

  “They treat us with fear and groveling,” I snapped back, anger overriding my fear. “And then they talk all sorts of crap about us as soon as our backs are turned! You know it, Lily. You’re smarter than you pretend to be in front of Mother.”

  Sawyer coughed. I glanced up at him – he’d stepped forward to place himself between us. “Perhaps we should move this discussion to a place that’s a bit more private,” he suggested carefully.

  I realized that we’d been nearly yelling, and several curious visitors to the gallery where we now stood were glancing curiously in our direction. I took a deep breath. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  We headed out to the main lobby of the Institute, where we found an empty corner. Sawyer glanced between us. “Now, can you fill me in?”

  “Mmm, you can fill me in,” Lily immediately answered him, her voice back to its simper and her eyelashes at full flutter.

  I groaned. No way Sawyer would go for that overdone Valley girl charm! “You’re Alice’s sister?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Her younger sister,” she emphasized. “The more fun sister, too. If you know what I mean.” Gah, all she needed was a lollipop to suggestively lick between comments!

  “And your mother sent her to track you down?”

  This prompted a shrug. “Sort of,” she answered.

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  This interjection earned me the briefest of glares, as if I was blocking Lily from flirting more with Sawyer. “For the first few days after she couldn’t get ahold of you, she got worried, sent our private investigator after you,” she said, and I felt a brief twinge of remorse. Not too bad – I wasn’t really that bothered by causing my mother a little bit of pain in payback for all she�
�d put me through – but a small bloom. “And then she figured out that you’d left on purpose. Missing suitcase, missing car, all that. That’s when she got really angry, broke a ton of things, started just shrieking at people all the time. She told me to find you.”

  “And?”

  She shrugged again. “I don’t know. Even if Mother was here right now, I don’t think she’d know what to do with you. Probably either get you committed somewhere, or just try and strangle you with her bare hands, finish it now.”

  I winced. “She’d probably do better if she tried to beat me to death with all her jewelry,” I said.

  That got a snort from Lily. “Or gave you alcohol poisoning with her breath.”

  I laughed along with her, and for a moment, we felt like actual sisters again. The moment passed quickly, however, and I again found myself assessing my sister, searching for exploitable weaknesses. There was my mother’s influence again, rearing its head and searching for the low road.

  “Anyway,” Lily said a beat later, “I probably ought to send her a message and let her know that you’re alive.” She reached for her purse again.

  “You’re not going to tell her where I am?” I asked, feeling hope bloom suddenly in my chest.

  She smiled wider. “Not until I figure out what I can get in exchange for the information. I bet I can get another convertible out of her, even though she got super upset when I crashed my last one.” She kept digging in the little purse as my newfound hope clutched its chest and died. “Oh em gee, seriously, where is my phone?”

  I had to do something. “Lily, don’t tell her. Please.”

  She looked up at me. “Alice, come on. She’s going to figure it out, sooner or later. Or you’ll come crawling back.”

  “I’m not going to do that,” I insisted. “I can’t, Lily. I can’t go back to that. One way or another, I’m going to keep on being free.”

  “But… why?” Her eyebrows knitted together, like a couple of lost caterpillars. “Where are you even living? Do you have any money?”