Читать книгу Ms. Longshot - Sylvie Kurtz - Страница 12

New York City Late April. Present.

I was probably the only undercover agent in history who’d get fired for removing her prosthesis in an airport and pissing off a French gendarme. But the hyper frog barking at me in French at the security checkpoint at Charles de Gaulle had far exceeded my limit of patience when he refused to understand that my leg was setting off the alarm, not a hidden weapon.

Ever since the accident, I’d been sensitive about my leg. So when my cell phone rang shortly after my flight touched down in New York and I was summoned to tea at the Gotham Rose Club, I was sure the ax was about to fall and I was going to get booted out of their secret agency.

The car service dropped me off in front of the gray cut-stone townhouse that housed the Gotham Rose Club on Sixty-eighth Street between Park and Madison on the Upper East Side. I stood outside the black wrought-iron security grate over the carved wood front door with its rose design and pretended to admire the architecture. Mostly I was composing myself.

Renee Dalton-Sinclair ran the Gotham Rose Club, an elite, members-only club intended to attract young, wealthy New York women like me to fund-raise and volunteer their time for charity. I was doing both for the Horses of Hope Foundation long before Renee asked me to join. But Renee also had another use for the club—taking down high-society criminals. And that’s why I was here today, and why I couldn’t decide if the nerves jumping around like fleas on a barn dog were from anger or anxiety.

I tugged at the hem of the silver-leaf sleeveless V-neck top and smoothed the ivory Vera Wang cotton-tulle skirt with my sweaty palms, then pressed the doorbell. Olivia Hayworth’s voice sang across the intercom. “Welcome, Alexa. Come on in.”

A security buzzer released the latch and I walked into a white Italian marble foyer that reminded me of a gilded cage. The place smelled of old money and older traditions. And despite my background, I never felt like I quite fit in.

Olivia, Renee’s assistant, greeted me with an extended hand and a bright smile that eased some of my anxiety. Okay, so maybe I’d just get a warning.

“Hello, Alexa, how was your trip to Paris?”

“Nonstop crazy.”

Olivia chuckled. “With Nathalie Huston, what else did you expect?”

I winced. Maybe this was about the incident with the gendarme.

My silver Delman ballet flats echoed against the marble as Olivia led me back to the Irish tearoom, one of the many that served as meeting rooms. Renee sat alone at the table. That couldn’t be good. My stomach took a sharp dive south.

Renee’s hair was pulled into a French twist. The hint of gray snaking through her auburn locks here and there merely added to the air of dignity that surrounded her. The winter white of her Chanel suit complemented her creamy complexion. As always, her smile was warm and welcoming and her striking royal blue eyes assessing.

The reason I’d joined Renee’s secret agency was to prove to myself that I could do anything I wanted—even catch bad guys. Not to mention the promise of excitement—which, I should mention, had failed to materialize. Unless you counted poring through piles of business reports as exciting—which I did not. For some reason, Renee insisted on treating me as if I were Swarovski crystal.

Frankly, I don’t know why Renee asked me to join the Gotham Rose Club when she barely made use of my skills. My guess was that it was some sort of employer requirement—round out the roll call with a token cripple and get patted on the head for following all the equal-employment opportunity rules. She knew how I felt, and that didn’t make me one of her favorite agents.

I often thought that the illusive Governess was the one who’d insisted Renee hire me, and Renee had done so only reluctantly. Of course, who the Governess was and what she had at stake in this cloak-and-dagger agency was as mysterious as why Renee had agreed to play front woman for the agency. I had to admit curiosity was one of the things that kept me coming back.

Renee pushed away a file and rose. A small smile lifted the corners of her lips. “Come in, Alexa. Sit. Tea?”

A file was a good sign, right? Unless it contained a list of my transgressions.

I greeted Renee with a stiff air kiss. A vintage linen tablecloth covered the round Charles X table set with Hewitt Gold bone china and Pelham Gold flatware. Scones from my favorite bakery on Madison crammed a three-tiered silver Tiffany tray. Steam curled from the blue-and-white Lynn Feld porcelain teapot. White tea roses in a Lalique vase spiced the air. Renee had impeccable taste and it served as a perfect veil for the true work she did here. Still, I couldn’t help wanting to throw a Tupperware tub on the table at one of the functions just to hear the proper ladies gasp.

“I’d love a cup of tea.” I took the chair across from Renee’s. Fragrant bergamot scented the air as Renee poured hot Earl Grey tea with slow precision into pale-blue, gold-trimmed cups.

“Where is everyone else?” I asked. Tea with Renee usually meant dealing with Tatiana Guttmann, Becca Whitmore and one or two more of the agents. I didn’t have anything against them personally, but they got all the good assignments.

“It’s just the two of us today.” Renee slanted me another one of her cryptic smiles as she served me a cup.

“Oh.” I forced my fingers to relax against the china. Was she going to fire me before I ever got any of that promised excitement? I tried to delay the inevitable. “How is Emma doing?”

Emma Bromwell, another agent who’d gone through the same training class I had, suffered a severe arm fracture and a concussion during an explosion at a post-Oscar fund-raising party for the Miller Children’s Home in California a couple months ago.

Renee glanced away. A certain sadness seemed to weigh on her soul. I figured the sadness existed because her husband, Preston, whom she dearly loved, was serving prison time for fraud. Five years ago the case made headlines in all the papers. But asking about Emma seemed to carve deeper grooves into that sadness, aging her. Was she taking Emma’s accident personally? Was this sense of personal responsibility why Renee never gave me a real assignment?

“Emma’s doing as well as can be expected,” Renee said. “She’ll have to have physical therapy for a bit longer, but she’ll regain full use of her arm.”

“That’s good.” When I noticed my hand unconsciously rubbing at the edge of my socket, I snapped it back to the warmth of the teacup. “She was worried she wouldn’t be able to play the piano anymore. And that brought her such joy.” I knew how I’d felt when I’d thought I’d never ride again.

“How are the preparations for the Horses of Hope Foundation wine-and-cheese party going?” Renee asked.

“Fine.” I placed my cup back on its saucer. “Tickets are selling well and sponsors are lining up to host a table, including the esteemed mayor of our city, Mr. Siegel.”

“Can your assistant handle the rest of the preparations?”

Ah, so that was it. An assignment, not an indictment on my lack of propriety at Charles de Gaulle. My shoulders sagged with relief. “Yes, of course she can.”

“Good.” Renee added a slice of lemon to her tea. “The Governess has asked me to send you on an assignment. I’ll take over your hostessing duties at the show.”

Send? As in field? I sat up a little straighter, and anticipation shot through my veins. Thank you, Governess! At least someone had faith in me.

None of the agents had ever met the mysterious Governess, not even Renee. The only thing we could agree on was that, whoever she was, she was well connected. And when the equally mysterious Duke entered the conversation, you’d think we were a book club discussing an old Victoria Holt novel.

The Duke was said to be some sort of Godfather-like figure who ran in elite circles and had fingers in all sorts of dirty dealings. If you believed the rumors, he had a hand in everything from corruption to gambling. I had a suspicion he was one of the reasons the Gotham Rose Club was started. But if Renee knew who he was, she wasn’t spilling the secret.

It was all supposed to be hush-hush, but I’d heard that Renee had struck a deal with the Governess to create and run the Gotham Rose Agency in exchange for her husband, Preston’s, early release from prison. Someone had to go to jail for the Sinclair family’s illegal business dealings and poor Preston was the scapegoat.

“Have you been keeping up with the news of the show circuit?” Renee asked, reaching for a scone.

“No, not really.” What was the point of salting a wound? I got my fix of horses through my foundation and my weekly trips to my estate in Darien, Connecticut, where I kept two horses. “Why?”

“A string of accidents have happened this winter on the Palm Beach show-jumping circuit. Canterbury Crown died of a heart attack while going over a jump and his rider was hurt from the fall. Drug testing showed cocaine in the horse’s blood.”

“Cocaine?” Who would do such a thing? Of course, some people would do anything to win—even hurt a defenseless animal. “What happened?”

“The police investigated but came to no conclusion.”

I leaned forward, my heart fluttering against my ribs. “You want me to look into it,” I said hopefully.

“A few weeks later, a barn fire killed four horses, including the current National Horse Show champion, Total Eclipse.”

Just thinking about the terror those poor animals had to endure raised my blood pressure and sparked my anger. But I bit my tongue. This was definitely my kind of assignment, but Renee was obviously not asking for my opinion.

“The latest victim is Monica Lightbourne, daughter of the media heiress,” Renee continued. “Someone injected her horse, Blue Ribbon Belle, with a drug that caused a neurological reaction so violent the horse had to be put down.”

“That’s awful. How do you want me to help?”

“The Metropolitan Spring Classic Charity Horse Show begins in a week.”

“You want me to investigate at the show since I’ll be there for my foundation’s charity event.” Yes! This I could do. No stretch at all.

“Not exactly.” Renee sipped her tea, humor glinting in her eyes. “As you know, the mayor’s daughter participates in show jumping. Elliot Siegel is afraid his daughter, who’s a front runner to win the Grand Prix, will be the Horse Ripper’s next victim and that he’ll strike some time before or during the show.”

“You want me to protect Leah Siegel.” A small thrill spurred my pulse into a gallop. Finally a chance to do more than shuffle paper. Protecting the mayor’s daughter was an elite assignment.

“We want you to go undercover at the stable where she trains.” Renee tilted her head. “As a groom.”

“Excuse me?” I had to have heard wrong. Renee wanted me to go undercover as a groom? Just what had she put in her tea?

“You heard me.”

Needing to gather my wits, I picked up my teacup, but it never made it to my lips. I plunked the cup back on its saucer. “You want me to shovel manure? How’s that going to help protect Leah?”

Renee studied me, then lifted both eyebrows and a shoulder in a gesture of dismissal. “I told the Governess this wasn’t a good idea. With your leg, you can’t possibly be expected to perform such hard physical labor.”

“Wait a minute. This has nothing to do with my leg.” I slid to the edge of the chair caught between wanting to tell Renee what she could do with her condescending attitude and fighting for my first real assignment. I hadn’t realized how badly I needed her approval until now. “You don’t want me here. You never have.”

“That’s not true. The trouble with you, Alexa, is that you have no concept of the limits of your skills and that makes you dangerous. You think you can do everything. Everyone needs help. And I don’t want to see you, or any of my girls, hurt.”

Hurt? She was thinking of Emma. But the situations were different. Renee hadn’t even given me the chance to chip a nail. The last assignment had relied more on my understanding of avionics and electronics systems produced by my father’s defense-contracting business than on physical prowess.

I rode again after the doctors told me I never would. I survived the brutal training I’d gone through with Emma, Chloe and Becca. I ran the business side of my foundation without anyone there knowing about my handicap. My chin crept up and my back got stiff with steel. “I can do anything as well as anyone else.”

The tilt of Renee’s smile widened. “You’re proving my point.”

I strangled the linen napkin in one fist. Control, Alexa. Get yourself under control. If I didn’t watch out, I’d blow this. I had to make Renee realize there was more to me than my missing lower leg, and the only way I could think to do that was to put her on the spot. “Why did you ask me to join the agency if you have no faith in my ability?”

“You have many outstanding abilities,” Renee said so silkily that I could feel my ruffled feathers smoothing. Her gaze didn’t waver—almost as if she’d expected this flak from me and had her side of the argument ready to deflect anything I could throw at her.

“We brought you in,” she said, “because you know your way around a business statement in several languages. You have access to the defense industry through your father. You have connections with several highly placed branches of society both in New York and in London. And you, more than any of the other girls, can physically alter your looks to fit any situation.”

“But…” I said and waited for Renee to fill the space. There was always a damned but.

“Your blinders get in the way. I can’t give you a field assignment if I feel I’ll be putting you in physical danger.”

“We’re back to the leg thing again.” Didn’t everything in my life come back to that blasted leg? If it didn’t matter to me, why should it matter to anyone else?

“No, you’re back to the leg thing again. You made it through training. You’ve proved you can cope with your handicap.” There was actual warmth in Renee’s voice as if she really did admire what I’d overcome. She reached for my hand and squeezed it gently. “It’s your impetuous tendency that worries me. You grow impatient, you bend the rules and look for the shortcut. There’s no place for that in the field. Not when there’s so much at stake. Think of it as dressage. Everything has to be precise or you put the whole operation at risk.”

“Wait,” I said, pulling back, confused by Renee’s simultaneous praise and excoriation. “You said you were sending me to work as a groom.”

“Then you took offense and didn’t let me get to the second part of your mission.”

Second part of the mission? Man, I was burning bridges before I even got a foot on them. This was the one thing I kept forgetting about Renee: how good she was at manipulating people to do exactly what she wanted. Now I couldn’t refuse the assignment without coming across as a self-pitying spoiled brat.

“I’m sorry.” I shrugged. “It’s just a groom isn’t exactly what I’d had in mind when I’d thought of an undercover assignment.”

“In this case, it’s the best means for you to gather information on the owners and workers at the Ashcroft Equestrian Center. Grooms are easily overlooked, yet people tend to speak freely around them because the stables are a relaxing environment.”

Okay, so this was a test. If I could prove to Renee I could do this, then next time she’d give me something as glamorous as she’d given Porsche Rothschild. I still couldn’t believe an airhead like Porsche had gotten to protect the actor Jeremy Reins as her first assignment. She’d even gone to the Oscars!

“You’ve heard of Firewall?”

I nodded, grateful Renee hadn’t completely written me off yet. Firewall was a seventeen-hand high fire-red chestnut that loved to jump and made it look easy. Whispers of Olympic gold floated around him. All he needed was a few more years of seasoning and he could be a real contender. “Firewall is a jumper owned by Hardel Industries.”

“With his major competitors out of the picture, Firewall comes out as a favorite to take over the summer season.”

“Killing to win seems redundant when you have such great horseflesh to do all the work for you.”

Renee lifted a shoulder. “Hardel Industries has put a lot of their advertising dollars into promoting Firewall. The more often he makes headlines, the more often the company does. You can’t buy that kind of publicity. They can’t afford to lose him. Do you know Ross Hardel?”

“I know who he is.” I’d met him over ten years ago when his trainer had insisted he improve his seat by taking some dressage lessons. He’d been an arrogant twit then and, if Rubi Cho’s gossip column was to be believed, he hadn’t changed. Treachery required hard work and Ross Hardel had never liked to work up a sweat. Of course, maybe bumping off the competition was the easiest way for him to win.

“Would he recognize you?” Renee asked.

“I doubt it. We don’t run in the same circle.” Nor was I the type of woman likely to be photographed clinging to his elbow. He preferred blond Barbie-dolls with IQs smaller than their bustlines. Of course, I’m sure he wasn’t seeking intelligent conversation from them.

“Perfect,” Renee chirped. “Since both Waldo, Leah Siegel’s horse, and Firewall are the top two candidates to become the Horse Ripper’s next victim, your job is to make sure nothing happens to them and to report any information you glean about who might have a stake at seeing the competition eliminated.”

A secretary who shoveled shit—definitely not what I had in mind when I asked for excitement. Still I put on my best obedient agent face. “That’s going to be tough if I’m stuck cleaning stalls while Ross and Leah are hobnobbing poolside.”

“Which is why you’re to accept any invitation from Ross Hardel.”

Oh, God, no. I didn’t think I could stand being around that that arrogant prick for five minutes. Being pawed by a pervert was not my idea of fun. Or having him feel my prosthesis and shrink back in disgust. “This guy has a reputation for being a cad.”

“And a reputation for a fondness for stable girls. That gives you an in at keeping tabs on him and who might want to do his horse harm.”

My fork snapped through the scone and plinked on the gold-trimmed plate. “I certainly hope you’re not expecting me to sleep with him!” I didn’t need this assignment that badly. “Your whole undercover ploy is going to fall apart if anyone finds out about my leg. There aren’t too many one-legged riders around. And he’ll have heard of my accident since he was training with my coach at the time.” Not to mention that one look at my residual limb usually sent my dates scrambling for excuses to run out the door. Funny how they never called back. Which is why I usually got the leg business out of the way first thing—before I could get attached.

The Mona Lisa half-twist to Renee’s mouth had me wondering what she found so amusing. “I don’t expect you to prostitute yourself. You can be charming when you put your mind to it, Alexa.”

Renee had this groom scenario all figured out. I could accept the assignment and prove myself to her. Or I could pass and very well get skipped over every time. “I’ll pack some charm. But wouldn’t I be able to get more out of Ross and Leah if I played someone within their circle? I could play the role of an owner. Bring one of my horses along.”

“As a groom, you’ll have a better chance of extracting information from the help. I’m told they will know all the dirty little secrets the owners try to hide and the goings on behind the scene. The help wouldn’t talk to you if you played the role of an owner. From what I understand the horse world is small and almost incestuous.”

She got that right. When I’d showed, I’d bumped into the same group of people every weekend. And if someone were to write a book about the lowdown, dirty things that really went on behind the glitz and glamour of the show ring, no one would believe it. Reality was much stranger than fiction.

Renee fingered the edge of the file sitting on the linen tablecloth, and like a good performer, waited until I was practically salivating before opening the red cover. “Ally Cross is to report to Bart Hind at the Ashcroft Equestrian Center just outside of Ashcroft, Connecticut. He’s the center’s manager and knows nothing about the operation. He’s expecting Ally at seven tomorrow morning. Your résumé and job were provided by the center’s owner.”

“Who is that?”

“Patrick Dunhill.”

“The former Olympian?” His black horse Messenger had soared through many of my dreams as I was growing up. He spared no expense on his horses, and his facilities were said to be the Rolls Royce of stables. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Renee nodded. “He’s made sure you’ll be assigned to both Ross Hardel and Leah Siegel’s horses. That will allow you to get close to both of them. Alan will provide you with all the necessary paperwork to backstop your Ally Cross identity. No one is to know your true background. Since you used to show, will that be a problem?”

I hadn’t stepped foot into a show ring in ten years. Memories were short. “Dressage people and jumping people run in different circles.”

“This will require hard physical work, Alexa. Are you up to the job?”

I’d never let my “defective” leg stop me from achieving my goals before. I certainly wouldn’t now. If Renee wanted a groom, I could become a groom. “How hard can it be to muck out a stall?”