Glass Houses by Stella Cameron

went back to the checks she apparently didn’t want to tell him about.
    She’d forgotten the gaping skirt. He narrowed his eyes. The outside of her left leg showed from high-cut peach-satin panties at her bared hip, all the way past matching garters and sleek thighs to her pale, very sheer stockings, to a shapely calf and slim ankle. Too bad about the flat brown shoe, not that there was anything wrong with his imagination. Disposing with the skirt altogether, and getting rid of both shoes, painted the kind of picture in his mind, and resulted in the kind of reaction elsewhere, that made him hope she wasn’t studying him too closely.
    “I must have this wrong,” she to l d him at last. “If I’ve got eight hundred and ten, then one, two, three zeros, how much does that say?”
    “Where’s the decimal point?”
    “It comes after all that. Then the final two zeros.”
    “Shit,” Aiden said, applying the brake before he realized what he was doing. Rapidly, he accelerated again. “ Match your figures to the checks again. Add them. Then give me your total one more time. Slowly.”
    He heard her muttering as she did as she was told. Then she announced exactly the same figure as before. “It can’t be, can it?”
    “Eight hundred and ten thousand? If you haven’t transposed numbers, or added wrong, then that little duo represents over three quarters of a million dollars.”
    “Pounds.”
    “ Shit. I forgot. That’s got to be more than a million dollars. ” Something big was going down here. No way was there a chance Mr. Moody and Mr. Fish wouldn’t be searching for their million. “I don’t want you carrying that. It’s not safe.”
    Olivia felt even more sick. “He wanted to push me under a tube train, ” she said softly. “ It was really early in the morning. This morning. Before I left England. He came into a bakery where I was shopping. I’d never seen him before, so I had no idea he was the man who called about the kill fee earlier, but he scared me. Then he followed me, and I went into the station because I didn’t want him to follow me home. He pushed someone who looked like me instead.”
    The Cadillac slowed dramatically. Sam leaned forward over the wheel, frowning fiercely as if trying to be sure he’d heard what he thought he’d heard.
    “ The other woman had on almost identical clothes and the platform was really crowded. One minute he was feeding rats on tire rails with crisps, the next I heard the screams. He was gone, and that poor woman was on the ground. Someone had saved her, thank goodness.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me this the minute you got off the plane?” Sam’s voice sounded different.
    “You didn’t give me a chance—no, that’s not true. I wasn’t sure how to say it, or even if I should.” She was perilously close to tears. “It was in Hampstead. He sickened me. There are rats on the tracks, and he was feeding them crisps. He—”
    “Yeah, so you already said. Sicko.” She wasn’t to know how much it took to impress him. “Then what happened?”
    She told him and added, “So I did all right, didn’t I? I mean, I didn’t completely panic when I realized he was the man at the door later. And I managed to get away without him knowing where I’d gone.”
    Her innocent ability to believe in this scenario was disconcerting. “Possibly,” he said. Treating her like a child wouldn’t help.
    The skin on her thigh was smooth and very white. Her head was bowed, and her dark hair separated to show equally vulnerable-looking skin at the back of her neck. He’d like to kiss her neck first, then make his way to her thigh, the inside of her thigh where his tongue and lips and warm breath would tickle and make her squirm.
    Holy hell, Flynn. Get a life.
    “You did well, ” he muttered. And what, he wondered, had the man who fed rats done when he discovered what he’d put through Olivia’s front door? “You think he just went away after leaving your house? Simple as