Million Dollar Road Read Online Free Page A

again!”
    A towel knotted around his lean waist, Con surveyed his jaw in the mirror, his red-blond furze of beard shaved close and smooth. He picked up a bottle of Hermès cologne and slapped some on his neck before he answered her.
    â€œLizzie, baby.” Con sighed, marshaling a weary patience. His blue eyes met her angry sherry-brown ones in the mirror. “It’s where the money comes from. Strip clubs and drinking are just part of the job.” The words echoed slightly in the spacious, travertine-marble bathroom. Con braced his muscular forearms on the edge of the vanity and quirked an eyebrow at her reflection. “You know this, sweetheart.”
    Liz made a rude noise. She tossed her hair, artfully streaked caramel and gold—the color of the best molasses taffy. “I know you don’t have to like it so damned much,” she declared. Liz’s lips, recently enhanced with some bovine injectable, were turned down in an almost-frown. The Botox wouldn’t let her really cut loose and scowl, but Con knew that look. Hell, he didn’t have time for an argument. He was running late again.
    After eighteen months of marriage, his second wife was proving to be a different animal from the exciting young associate who’d worshipped him as a god. The Mercedes SUV, the new house on the golf course, and her endless trips to the dermatologist’s for whatever harebrained procedure was currently rampant among Covington’s lunch set ought to have been enough to keep her content, but Elizabeth MacBride-Costello never let a day pass without a new complaint.
    Tonight’s expedition to Rick’s Cabaret was not a new complaint.
    â€œC’mon, Liz,” Con coaxed. “Don’t be mad, honey.”
    Lizzie folded her arms, her eyes angry. “It’s goddamned sick, those skanky sluts and that disgusting pole. If you think I don’t know what goes on there, well, think some more, honey .”
    A couple of months ago Con had taken his wife out to Rick’s for an evening so she could see there wasn’t much to get worked up about—not within the environs of the strip club, anyway. While at the time she’d seemed to enjoy her lap dance, unfortunately Lizzie’s trip to Bourbon Street had only served to provide her fresh ammunition. Now she knew about the pole.
    â€œWhy can’t that fat son-of-a-bitch Hannigan take them?” she asked angrily. “Why does it have to be you?”
    Donning a conciliatory smile, Con turned around to shower his wife with a bigger helping of attention. “Because he’s in the South of France, Liz. Because that’s why they pay me the big bucks. Besides, Rog never goes on these things anymore.” Lizzie’s face remained a study in high piss-off. Con, already dragging from the daylong Obi-Wan effort, fought the impulse just to throw on his clothes, pat her briskly on the cheek, and hustle out of the house.
    â€œIt’s only business, babe.”
    But as though he hadn’t said a word, Liz snapped, “And whatever happened to that bullshit about how you always bring it home to me, how I’m the only one who can do it for you? The last time this crap went down I waited up in a garter belt and stupid stockings, but you didn’t get in until seven the next morning. They don’t pay you enough, not if you have to troll the French Quarter whenever these foreigners need a thrill. You should be making at least twice what that jackass pays you, if this is only business .” Liz bracketed this last with angry air quotes.
    Suppressing his memory of the dancer from that last visit to Rick’s, her train wreck of an apartment in dawn’s gray light, the messy scene afterward when she’d actually demanded cash, Con crossed the cool marble of the bathroom floor to wrap his arms around his wife. He was a tall man and the top of her head came to just under his jaw, but he noted Liz’s