Those were the only details I found.
As I neared the bottom of the page, I came up empty-handed in the information department. But I didn’t need her name to know I wanted to see her again.
Wait.
There it was. In small print.
The gala had been organized by . . . noted Las Vegas philanthropist Sophie Winston.
Johnny Cash deposited the Frisbee at my feet, but I couldn’t pull my eyes off that name.
Could she really be related?
Nah.
I was getting ahead of myself.
“It’s just a common last name, right?” I asked the dog. He panted, then eyed the Frisbee. A reminder. Didn’t matter to the dog what the woman’s name was. Throw the damn Frisbee.
I picked up the purple disc, chucked it across the yard once more, and peered again at the screen through my shades. My fingers tingled, itching with possibility.
Winston.
Sophie Winston.
Showing up at the same building where John Winston worked.
The same John Winston who knew why my father’s murder investigation had been reopened but wouldn’t pony up the details.
Winston. Winston. Winston.
I took a deep breath. Maybe the detective just happened to have the same last name as the woman I wanted to see.
I popped open another browser window, plugged in her name and John’s together, and soon the all-knowing Google revealed that the woman who’d invited me to the fete was indeed the detective’s sister.
“Huh,” I said, staring at the screen in a sort of awed silence. As my dog scurried back to me, I kneeled down and patted his head. “What kind of lucky son of a bitch am I?”
Johnny Cash panted, and I imagined he was saying, The luckiest.
I scratched his chin. “It doesn’t make me too much of an asshole to hope she might know something, does it?”
The dog had no answers. Instead, he nosed the Frisbee.
Not wanting to deny my best friend and confidant, I pointed to the pool, then threw the Frisbee into the glistening crystal-blue oval in my yard. The dog splashed in loudly and paddled to the shallow end.
As I returned my focus to the screen, I told myself to slow down. Just because Sophie-come-hither-to-my-party-tonight-Winston was the detective’s sister didn’t mean she was going to serve up details of the case to me. Hell, she probably didn’t know anything. I didn’t share the details of my job with my sister, so it was foolish to think John had told her the things I was desperate to know.
Besides, I was interested in the woman because there’d been some kind of fuse lit between the two of us this afternoon, and far be it from me to deny that kind of heat. I wasn’t some fool who believed in love at first sight. I had no interest in love, nor any faith that it existed. I did, however, believe in the almighty power of lust.
I’d been invited to spin into Sophie’s orbit, and that was precisely where I intended to be tonight. But I didn’t like to be unprepared. I vastly preferred arming myself with data and details, so I spent a little more time with Google and Sophie, learning she possessed a hell of a lot more than a beautiful body.
Apparently, she had quite a large brain too.
She wasn’t simply “noted Las Vegas philanthropist Sophie Winston.”
Several business news articles told me what else she was, and it shocked the hell out of me.
Never ever would I have pegged her as a goddamn tech millionaire.
I zeroed in on a well-known tech blog and read its coverage of the sale of an internet start-up to an online search giant several years ago.
Stanford graduate Sophie Winston sold the encoding compression start-up InCode in a deal rumored to be valued at $100 million. She launched the company while finishing her computer science degree at Stanford, and oversaw two rounds of venture capital funding for the technology, which has been used by networks and broadcasters and in enterprise applications. Her brother was the original investor, having provided the initial seed funding from his savings, she has said. Winston tells us she is “delighted” with the acquisition, and plans to step down as CEO, return to her hometown of Las Vegas, and begin charitable work. “I’m thrilled that InCode will be in good hands and am eager to return home to be with my family.”
I whistled in admiration. The sound caught the attention of my sopping wet dog, who cocked his ears as he trotted to me.
“Guess what, Johnny Cash?” I asked, as the dog shook the chlorinated water from his fur at Mach speed. I stepped away, making sure the tablet screen wasn’t in the line of fire. “Seems I was wrong when I thought she was a movie star. The woman’s a retired Mark Zuckerberg.”
I chucked the disc into the pool again, and my dog raced after it, launching into the deep end.
But maybe that wasn’t the best comparison, because there was nothing unfeminine about Sophie. She was all woman, and all sex appeal, and I intended to find out tonight what made her tick.
Because my desire for the beautiful—and evidently brainy—blonde had nothing to do with the fact that she might be privy to things I wanted to know. Nothing at all. It had everything to do with how she looked in that dress, and how insatiably curious I was to learn how she looked out of it.
I was living for that moment, and that moment only.
4
Sophie
I was late.
I was often late.
Being on time was so hard when there was makeup to do and hair to blow-dry and stockings to pull on just so, inch by delicate inch, because you didn’t want them to rip.
Stockings took time to do right, with the garter attached at the thigh.
I’d be wearing them even if I didn’t have that fluttery little hope of a hot man in my near future. I wore them because I loved stockings. Stockings were sexy and fun, and after years of donning jeans and hoodies and knit caps—because as a woman in the tech field, I’d desperately wanted to look the part—I’d shed the old Sophie when I left the land of bits and bytes behind me.
Now, with my new focus on philanthropy, dressing up was not only embraced, it was essential.
The panties though . . . those were just for me.
Tonight’s panties were black like my dress and sheer, with a slim crisscross tie up the side.
I smoothed a hand over my dress, gave myself one more quick once-over in my full-length bedroom mirror, then snagged my purse from my bed. I headed down the hall, pausing in the living room, one hand on the back of the soft chocolate-brown couch, wondering if I’d remembered to put fresh pillowcases in the guest room at the other end of the condo for my brother.
A flicker of tension skimmed through my veins.
I knew I had. This was just a momentary bout of OCD making me doubt myself.
I stood stock-still, tapping my fingers against my forehead. I could recall perfectly having placed new linens on the bed just this morning. The gray-and-white striped ones.
I headed for the front door. But it was always better to be safe than sorry, right? Checking and double-checking, and then checking one more time in that final quality assurance test—well, that was what had gotten me far in life. I race-walked down the opposite hall, turned the doorknob, and breathed a sigh of relief as I took in the sight of the bed, as crisply made as a hotel room in the Bellagio.
Okay, I could go now.
I made my way to the front door and gripped the handle, when I was nearly knocked on the floor by the unexpected force of the door opening.