Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You (v1.2) Read Online Free Page A

you for calling. Have a nice circus.”
    Maisie was their first line of defense, and she had exactly the right attitude for her job: Quick, sharp, with a very necessary sense of humor for the wackos, and definitely ballsy enough to handle their most demanding clients.
    Quinn laughed, shook his head, and headed through the glass doors into the large, square, windowless room that functioned as the nerve center of D & S Securities. Five secretaries serving the two dozen bodyguards who made up the staff sat at their desks, all of them busy enough to warm the cockles of Quinn’s heart—and pocketbook.
    Hallways to the left and right led to five offices each, shared by the associates when they weren’t in the field. On another morning, Quinn would have visited each office, checked on his employees’ cases, shot a little bull, lingered over some bad coffee. But not today, not when he still wanted to make Grady pay for badgering him into a night with the R&Rs.
    Smiling his hellos to the secretaries—executive assistants all, at least in their politically correct job descriptions— he made his way to the opposite end of the room and the large hallway that ended at the double doors to the conference room, with his and Grady’s private offices flanking it on either side. All three rooms had window walls, glass from floor to ceiling, and a great view of the evolving skyline of Philadelphia —at least at sixteenth-floor level.
    His secretary, Selma , was out on maternity leave, and had been for nearly two weeks, so Quinn gave himself a moment to grimace at the stacks of paperwork sitting on her desk, knowing he’d have to wade through them sooner or later. Preferably later. Definitely later.
    Right now all he wanted to do was check his phone messages, then go choke Grady until his tongue turned purple. It wasn’t much, but he believed it would satisfy him.
    Quinn’s own office was modern and more functional than fashionable, all chrome and glass and white paint and rugs with gray and navy accents and outfitted with two, count ‘em, two state-of-the-art computers. A locked cabinet held his fairly extensive arsenal of shoulder holsters and nightscope rifles, as well as a flak jacket his mother had given to him for his thirtieth birthday. You could grow up, you could move away, but you could never really cut through that cast-iron umbilical. You could even tell yourself that you’d retired from fieldwork because it was time, and not because Mommy worried.
    He checked the phone messages written in Maisie’s large, looping scrawl, decided none of them were earth-shatteringly important, then took off his suit jacket and slung it over his gray leadier swivel chair. It was Grady time.
    “Good morn— afternoon, Quinn,” Ruth, Grady’s secretary, said a few moments later when he entered her office. Ruth had been with them from the beginning, a matronly woman of more than fifty who considered herself to be right-hand man and surrogate mother to both of them.
    She chuckled as she looked at him. “What’s the matter, sweetie? Rough night on the baby-sitting squad? Did Uncle Alfred jump in the pool again? Grady says he swears he’ll let the old lush drown next time. He’s ruined three tuxedos in the last year, jumping in after him. Not that replacements don’t go right on the old expense account. Oh, and wait until you see your partner. He won’t tell me what happened, but I’ve got some really great ideas, all of them having to do with Miss October. And maybe a trapeze or something.”
    Quinn’s eyebrows rose on his forehead. “Trapeze? What are you trying to do, Ruth? Corrupt me?”
    “Any way I can, sweetie,” she told him with a wink, then pointed to the door leading to Grady’s office. “Make him suffer, Quinn. I’m pretty sure he’s been a bad, bad boy.”
    Quinn entered Grady’s inner sanctum, stepping onto a plush Oriental carpet, instinctively halting just inside the dim room until his eyes adjusted to the