Undercover with the Mob

“’Yo,” he finally said by way of a greeting, still not looking at her. But then he did glance over at Mrs. Klosterman, seeming as if he just now remembered she was present, too. “How youse doin’?” he further inquired, looking up briefly to include them both in the question before glancing nervously back down at his shirt again.

Okay, so he wasn’t a native Southerner, Natalie deduced keenly. Even though she had grown up in Louisville, she’d traveled extensively around the country, and she had picked up bits and pieces of dialects in her travels. Therefore, she had little difficulty translating what he had said in what she was pretty sure was a Brooklyn accent into its Southern version, which would have been “Hey, how y’all doin’?”

“Hi,” she replied lamely. But for the life of her, she couldn’t think of a single other thing to say. Except maybe “You have the dreamiest eyes I’ve ever seen in my life, even if they are what I would expect a Mob informant in the Witness Protection Program to have,” and she didn’t think it would be a good idea to say that, even if she could punctuate it with a period instead of a question mark. After all, the two of them had just met.

“‘Yo, Mrs. Klosterman,” Jack Miller said, turning his body physically toward the landlady now, thereby indicating quite clearly that he was through with Natalie, but thanks so much for playing. “I couldn’t find a key to the back door up in my apartment, and I think it would probably be a good idea for me to have one, you know?”

Mrs. Klosterman exchanged a meaningful look with Natalie, and she knew her landlady was thinking the same thing she was—that Mr. Miller was already scoping out potential escape routes, should the Mob, in fact, come busting through the door with tommy guns blazing.

No, no, no, no, no, she immediately told herself. She would not buy into Mrs. Klosterman’s ridiculous suspicions and play “What’s My Crime?” Mr. Miller wanted the key to his back door for the simple reason that his back door, as Natalie’s did, opened onto the fire escape, and—let’s face it—old buildings were known to go up in flames occasionally, so of course he’d want access to that door.

“I forgot,” Mrs. Klosterman told him now. “I had a new lock put on that door after the last tenant moved out because the other one was getting so old. I have the new key in my office. I’ll get it for you.”

And without so much as a by-your-leave—whatever the hell that meant—her landlady left the kitchen, thereby leaving Natalie alone with her new mobster. Neighbor, she quickly corrected herself. Her new neighbor. Boy, could that have been embarrassing, if she got those two confused.

The silence that descended on the room after Mrs. Klosterman’s departure was thick enough to hack with a meat cleaver. Although, all things considered, maybe that wasn’t the best analogy to use. In an effort to alleviate some of the tension, Natalie braved a slight smile and asked, “You’re not from around here originally, are you?”

He, too, braved a slight smile—really slight, much slighter than her slight smile had been—in return. “You figured that out all by yourself, huh?”

“It’s the accent,” she confessed.

“Yeah, it always gives me away,” he told her. “The minute I open my mouth, everybody knows I’m French.”

She smiled again, the gesture feeling more genuine now. “So what part of France do you hail from?”

His smile seemed more genuine now, too. “The northern part.”

Of course.

She was about to ask if it was Nouvelle York or Nouveau Jersey when he deftly turned the tables on her. “You from around here?”

She nodded, telling herself he was not making a conscious effort to divert attention from himself, but was just being polite. Somehow, though, she didn’t quite believe herself. “Born and bred,” she told him.

“Yeah, you have that look about you,” he said.

“What look?” she asked.

He grinned again, this time seeming honestly delighted by something, and the change that came over him when he did that nearly took her breath away. Before, he had been broodingly handsome. But when he smiled like that he was…She bit back an involuntary sigh as, somewhere in the dark recesses of her brain, an accordion kicked up the opening bars from La Vie en Rose.

“Wholesome,” he told her then. “You look wholesome.”

Oh, and wasn’t that the word every woman wanted to have a handsome man applying to her? Natalie thought. The accordion in her brain suddenly went crashingly silent. “Wholesome,” she repeated blandly.

His smile grew broader. “Yeah. Wholesome.”

Swell.

Oh, well, she thought. It wasn’t like she should be consorting with her new mobster—ah, neighbor—anyway. He really wasn’t her type at all. She preferred men who didn’t use the word “whacked,” even in relation to cockroaches. Men who didn’t dress in black from head to toe. Men who weren’t likely to be packing heat.

Oh, stop it, she commanded herself. You’re being silly.

“Sorry about the tea,” she said for a third time.

He shrugged off her concern. “No problem. I like tea.”

Really.

“And don’t worry about your cat,” he added. “I like cats, too.”

Imagine.

Mrs. Klosterman returned then, jingling a set of keys merrily in her fingers. “Here’s the new key to your back door,” she said as she handed one key to him. “And here’s an extra set of both keys, because you might want to give a set to someone in case of an emergency.”

Natalie narrowed her eyes at her landlady, who seemed to be sending a not-so-subtle signal to her new tenant, because when she mentioned the part about giving the extra set of keys to someone in case of an emergency, she tilted her head directly toward Natalie.

Jack Miller, thankfully, didn’t seem to notice. Or, if he did, he wrote it off as just another one of his landlady’s little quirks. He better sharpen his mental pencil, Natalie thought. Because he was going to have a long list of those by the end of his first month of residence.

“Thanks, Mrs. K,” he said.

Mrs. K?

Mrs. Klosterman tittered prettily at the nickname, and Natalie gaped at her. Not just because she had never in her life, until that moment, actually heard someone titter, but barely five minutes ago, the woman tittering had been worrying about waking up in the morning with her throat slit, and now she was batting her eyelashes at the very man who she’d been sure would be wielding the knife. Honestly, Natalie thought. Sometimes she was embarrassed by members of her own gender. Women could be so easily influenced by a handsome face and a tantalizingly expansive chest, and temptingly solid biceps, and deliciously hard forearms, and a delectably flat torso, and a very savory—

“Now if you ladies will excuse me,” Jack Miller said, interrupting what could have been a very nice preoccupation, “I got some things to arrange upstairs.”

Yeah, like trunks full of body parts, she thought.

No, no, no, no, no. She was not going to submit to Mrs. Klosterman’s ridiculous suggestions. Especially since Mrs. Klosterman herself was apparently falling under the spell of her new mobster. Neighbor, Natalie quickly corrected herself again. Falling under the spell of her new neighbor.

With one final smile that included them both, Jack Miller said, “Have a nice day,” and then turned to take his leave. Almost as an afterthought, he spun around once more and looked at Natalie. “Natalie, right?” he asked, having evidently not been paying attention when Mrs. Klosterman had introduced the two of them. And, oh, didn’t that just boost a woman’s ego into the stratosphere?

Mutely, she nodded.

But instead of replying, Jack Miller only smiled some more—and somehow, Natalie got the impression it was in approval, of all things—then turned a final time and exited the kitchen.

For a long, long time, neither Natalie nor her landlady said a word, as though each was trying to figure out if the last five minutes had even happened. Then Natalie recalled the broken tea cup and spilled tea, and she hastily cleaned up the mess. And then she and Mrs. Klosterman both returned to their seats at the kitchen table, where Natalie poured herself a new cup. In silent accord, the two women lifted their cups of tea, as if, in fact, the last five minutes hadn’t happened.

Finally, though, Natalie leaned across the table, scrunching her body low, just as Mrs. Klosterman had only moments earlier, before Jack Miller had entered the room, when they had been discussing him so freely. And, naturally, she went back to discussing him again.

But of all the troubling thoughts that were tumbling through her brain in that moment, the only thing she could think to remark was, “You said he wore normal clothes.”

“He does wear normal clothes,” Mrs. Klosterman replied. “He just wears them in black, that’s all.”

At least he hadn’t reeked of pesto and Aqua Velva, Natalie thought. Though she did sort of detect the lingering scent of garlic. Then again, that could have just been left over from whatever Mrs. Klosterman had cooked for last night’s dinner.

Or it could have just been the fact that she was reacting like an idiot to her landlady’s earlier suspicions.

“You heard him talk,” Mrs. Klosterman whispered back. “Now you know. He’s a mobster.”

“Or he grew up in Brooklyn,” Natalie shot back. “Or some other part of New York. Or New Jersey. Or Philadelphia. Or any of those other places where people have an accent like that.”

“He’s not a John Miller, though,” Mrs. Klosterman insisted.

And Natalie had to admit she couldn’t argue with that. Just who her new neighbor was, though…

Well. That was a mystery.

JACK MILLER MADE it all the way back to his apartment before he let himself think about the cute little brunette in his landlady’s kitchen. It had never occurred to him that there would be someone else living in the building who might pose a problem. Bad enough he was going to have to keep an eye on the old lady, but this new one…

Oh, jeez, he had behaved like such a jerk. But what the hell was he supposed to do? The way Natalie Dorset had been looking at him, he’d been able to tell she found him…interesting. And the last thing he needed was for her to find him interesting. Never mind that he found her kind of interesting, too. Hey, what could he say? He’d never met a woman who wore singing pajamas. That was definitely interesting. Hell, he’d never met a woman who wore pajamas, period. The women he normally associated with slept in a smile. A smile he himself had put on their faces. And he tried not to feel too smug about that. Really. He did. Honest.

Then he thought about what it would be like to maybe put a smile on Natalie Dorset’s face. And that surprised him, since she wasn’t exactly the type of woman he normally wanted to make smile, especially after just meeting her. What surprised him even more was that the thought of putting a smile on her face didn’t make him feel smug at all. No, what Jack felt when he thought about that was the same thing he’d felt in junior high school at St. Athanasius when he’d wondered if Angela DeFlorio would laugh at him if he asked her to go to the eighth grade mixer—all nerves and knots and nausea.

Ah, hell. He hated feeling that way again. He wasn’t a thirteen-year-old, ninety-pound weakling anymore. Nobody, but nobody, from the old neighborhood messed with Jack these days. They didn’t dare.

Damn. This was not good, having a cute brunette living upstairs. This wasn’t part of the plan at all.

So he was just going to have to remember the plan, he reminded himself. Think about the plan. Focus on the plan. Be the plan. He’d come here to do a job, and he would do it. Coolly, calmly, collectedly, the way he always did the job.

There was, after all, a whacking in the works. And Jack was right in the thick of it. He had come to this town to make sure everything went down exactly the way it was supposed to go down. No way could he afford to be sidetracked by an interesting, big-eyed, singing-pajama-wearing, tea-spilling Natalie Dorset. So he was just going to have to do what he always did when he was trying to keep a low profile—which, of course, was ninety-nine percent of the time.

He’d just have to make sure he stayed out of her way.

2

“WELL, HELLO AGAIN.” The words came out sounding far more casual than Natalie felt. After all, the last person she had expected to run into at the Speed Art Museum was her new downstairs neighbor, Jack “The Alleged” Miller. But there he was, in all his…darkness…standing right behind her when she turned away from the Raphael to enjoy the Titian.

But she enjoyed seeing Jack even more. And not just because of the way his black jeans so lovingly outlined his sturdy thighs and taut tushe, either. Or because of the way his black leather motorcycle jacket hung open over a black T-shirt stretched tight across his expansive chest. Or because his overly long black hair was once again pushed back from his face in a way that made Natalie itch to run her fingers through it. Or because of the odd frisson of heat that exploded in her belly and shot out to every extremity, electrifying her, dizzying her, making her feel breathless and reckless, as if she were on the verge of an extremely satisfying—

Ah…never mind. She just enjoyed seeing him because…because…Well, just because, that was all. And it was an excellent reason, too, by golly.

Despite both her and Mrs. Klosterman’s misgivings about the man’s name, in the week that had passed since her new neighbor had moved in, Natalie had come to think of him as Jack. She had been able to do this because over the course of the week, she’d run into him a few times and whenever she’d greeted him as “Mr. Miller,” he’d always insisted she call him “Jack, please. Mr. Miller is my pop’s name.”

At first, it hadn’t felt right to call him that, and not just because, in spite of telling herself she was silly for doubting him, she really did find herself doubting it was his real name. But, too, he just didn’t seem like the sort of man with whom one would share such intimacies like first names. If anything, he seemed the sort of man who would prefer to go by his last name, if any name at all. But “Miller” didn’t suit him, either. Had his last name been something like Devlin or Steed or Deacon—or even Mancuso—that would have worked. Miller just seemed too…normal. Too common. Too bland. Not that Jack seemed appropriate either, but she had to call him something. Something other than “The Mobster Who Lives on the Second Floor” at any rate, which was how Mrs. Klosterman continued to refer to him.

Natalie, however, still wasn’t convinced of Jack’s, ah, connections. For lack of a better word. Even if she had heard faint strains of Don Giovanni coming up through the floor a few times—it wasn’t like it was the theme from The Godfather. And even if the faint scent of garlic always did linger around his door—lots of people cooked with garlic, Natalie included, and it wasn’t like he reeked of pesto and Aqua Velva. And even if she had seen him toting a bottle of Chianti up the stairs one day when he was bringing in his groceries—maybe he was just planning to make one of those interesting candles out of it. None of that proved anything. Except that he liked Italian food and opera music and that he maybe had a hobby that included hot wax.

He hardly ever used the word whacked as far as Natalie could tell. And not once had she seen him dragging suspiciously heavy black plastic garbage bags out to the Dumpster under cover of darkness. So that was a definite plus. And he’d worn a suit once or twice, too, she’d noticed. Boring, bland suits, too, and they weren’t always black. And he wore them with neckties that were tasteful. Silk, even. And the toes of his shoes weren’t quite as pointy as she’d first thought, and they might have been made someplace other than Italy, possibly even with man-made uppers. So there. Take that, Mrs. “I-know-a-mobster-when-I-see-one” Klosterman.

And now here he was, viewing a visiting art exhibit at the Speed Museum. Totally, totally non-Mob activity, that. Even if he did seem to be preoccupied by the Italian masters.

He appeared to be as surprised to see her as she was to see him, and suddenly, Natalie wished she’d worn something other than the flowing, flowered skirt in shades of fall, and the oversized amber sweater that came down over her fanny. She had thought the outfit feminine and comfortable when she purchased it. Now, though, it just felt frumpy. Jack Miller seemed like the kind of man who went for tight and sleek and bright, and, quite possibly, latex. Not that Natalie cared, mind you. But she did wish she had worn something different. The hiking boots, especially, seemed inappropriate somehow.

“Well, hello to you, too, neighbor,” Jack said in a deep, rough baritone that belied the Mr. Rogers sentiment. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

Natalie looked first left, then right, then back at Jack. “It’s an art museum,” she pointed out. “It’s a nice place.”

He smiled at that. “So it is,” he agreed. “I stand corrected.”

She wasn’t sure what he meant by that, so she pressed onward. “So you’re an art lover, are you?”

He nodded, and fiddled with the program he’d already twisted into a misshapen lump of paper. Vaguely, she wondered what had made him do such a thing. It was as if he were anxious about something. But what was there to feel anxious about in an art museum? This was where people came to escape the pressures of the day.

“Yeah, I like art okay,” he said.

But something in his voice suggested just the opposite. He seemed uncomfortable here somehow. Or maybe he was uncomfortable because he’d seen Natalie here. Maybe he was trying to keep a low profile—that was what people did when they were in the Witness Protection Program, right?—and now he was scared that if Natalie had fingered him, the Mob might, too.

Because, hey, it was common knowledge that mobsters hung out in art museums, she told herself wryly, wanting to smack herself upside the head for her Mrs. Klosterman-like thoughts. If Jack was uncomfortable, it was more likely because she’d made him feel uncomfortable by asking him what she just had. Maybe he was here because he wanted to learn more about art, and he was embarrassed to let her know how unschooled he was on the topic.

She opened her mouth to change the subject—she did, after all, completely sympathize with that whole being-out-of-one’s element thing, since she’d felt out of her element since the day she was born—but he started to talk again before she had a chance.

“Yeah, I especially like the Italian masters,” he said.

But again, he seemed uneasy when he spoke, and instead of looking at Natalie, he was looking at something over her shoulder, as if he couldn’t quite meet her gaze. Oh, jeez, she really had caught him out with her question and embarrassed him, she realized. The male ego, she thought. It was such a fragile thing.

He was probably only saying the Italian masters were his favorite because he’d glanced down at his hastily rear-ranged program, where it read, in part, The Italian Masters. She told herself to just let the matter drop there. But there was something in his voice when he spoke, something kind of tense, something kind of apprehensive—something kind of suspicious, quite frankly—that gave her pause. And still he was looking over her shoulder, not meeting her eyes, as if he were wishing he was anywhere but here.

To alleviate his distress, Natalie decided to step in and take the lead, thereby preventing him from having to say anything that might get him in deeper than he could afford. “I like them, too,” she said. “Especially Michelangelo, but we don’t have any originals by him here, which is a real shame.”

Jack lifted his shoulder and dropped it again in a gesture she supposed was meant to be a shrug. Somehow, though, it came off looking like strong-arming. “I like all of ’em,” he told her.

Of course he did. Poor guy. He was still trying to make her think he was knowledgeable about the subject, clearly trying to preserve his male pride. Next he’d be telling her he didn’t know much about art, but he knew what he liked, since that was the cliché everyone uttered in a situation like this.

“It’s kind of funny, really,” he said. “I know a lot about art, but I’m just not sure what I like.”

Man. He couldn’t even get the clichés right.

“Michelangelo is arguably the master of the masters,” he said. “I mean, I wouldn’t argue it, but some people might. Like you, he’s a favorite for a lot of people.”

Natalie wondered just how deeply he was going to wade into this stuff, and prepared herself to throw him a line if that became necessary by tossing out a few other names to him. Raphael, perhaps, or, Titian, since she’d just been looking at that one herself.

“Raphael, too,” he continued, making her think maybe he’d read his program a little better than she’d first suspected. “Even if he did borrow nearly all of the Big M’s repertory gestures and poses,” he continued, rattling Natalie just the tiniest bit. “He was still a better portraitist. Me, though, I’m more of a Titian kind of guy, I think. He was just so great at that whole opposing the virtuosity of pigments to the intellectual sophistication thing, you know? And the distinction between High Renaissance—all that formalized and classic balance of elements—and Late Renaissance—the more subjective, emotional stuff, not to mention all those bright colors—wasn’t as sharply divided in Venice as it was in the rest of Italy.” He nodded. “Yeah, I like the Venetians, I think. And Uccello. You don’t hear much about him, but you gotta admire the way he tried to jibe the Gothic and the Renaissance stuff. Plus, he had a really great beard. Piero della Francesca’s okay, too, but his portraits have kind of a pedantry without compassion, knowwuddamean?”

Natalie blinked a few times, as if a too-bright flash had gone off right in her face. Wow. He really did know a lot about art. And he really didn’t know what he liked. She was intrigued.

“I, um, I actually prefer the Flemish painters myself,” she said lamely.

Jack swept a hand carelessly in front of himself. “Yeah, well, they were all profoundly influenced by the Italians, you know.”

She did know. But not nearly as well as he did. “So,” she began again, “you come here often?”

That something over her shoulder seemed to catch his eye again, because he suddenly glanced to the left and frowned. As Natalie began to turn around to see what was going on, Jack quickly shifted his body into that direction, taking a few steps forward, as if he wanted to block whatever she was attempting to see. Then he said, “This is my first visit to the museum. What else do you recommend I see?”

So Natalie stopped turning. But it wasn’t his question that halted her. It was the way he extended his hand and curled his fingers around her upper arm and pulled her toward the right, as if he were trying to physically regain her attention, too. And boy, did he. Regain her attention, she meant. Physically, she meant. Because the minute his fingers curled around her arm, another shiver of electricity shimmied through her, right to her fingertips, and another wash of heat splashed through her belly with all the force of white-water rapids.

Jack seemed to feel it, too, because he stopped looking over her shoulder and fixed his gaze on her face, and his eyes went wide in astonishment. Or maybe alarm. Or panic. Natalie couldn’t be sure, because she was too busy feeling all those things herself. And more. Desire. Need. Wanting. Hunger. Yes, she thought she could safely say now what it was like to hunger for something. Someone. Because that was how Jack Miller made her feel when he touched her the way he did.

“I, ah…” she began eloquently.

“Um, I…” he chorused at the same time.

“Gotta go,” they both said as one.

And, just like that, they turned around and sped off in opposite directions.

And as she fled, all Natalie could think was that, for a mobster, he had a very gentle touch. Not to mention exceptionally good taste in art.