Undercover with the Mob

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.