Catching a Man

by Elizabeth Corrigan

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgements

  Catching A Man

  Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Corrigan. All rights reserved.

  First Kindle Edition: November 2014

  Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics

  This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  To Kevin,

  Who may have wanted to see Kadin in print more than I did

  Chapter 1

  Callista DeValeriel gazed out the window at the two full moons that shone over the twinkling lights of Valeriel. Tradition claimed the twin orbs portended inauspicious events, but what mattered ill omens to the woman who ruled the city?

  Most of the proletariat who scurried around the dirty streets thought her husband Ralvin reigned over them, but he only controlled the political arena. He and the uptight men of the Assembly, all those hereditary Imperials and elected Merchants, spent their days squabbling over what further scraps they could take from the working class. She cared nothing for that.

  Callista lorded over the side of the city that mattered—the social side. Her image appeared in every glossy, and her name peppered every gossip column. Fashions and reputations depended on her. A year ago, Mabea Wage had dared wear a taffeta ball gown after Callista had declared the fabric passé. No self-respecting Imperial had invited Mabea to a gala for months, and then only because Callista had chosen to grant forgiveness.

  Callista turned away from the window and sat in front of the looking glass. For once, she didn’t take time to admire her flawless reflection. She knew she looked perfect. Earlier that evening she had pinned the curls of her blond bob in place with ruby-encrusted barrettes that set off the gold and white gown that seemed to all but flow from her alabaster skin. Her maid may have clipped the locks in place, but the queen could hardly credit the look to the person who had merely implemented it when Callista had created it and carried it off.

  None of that mattered tonight, though, because she, the woman all men desired, would see the one man whose affections she returned.

  She plucked the clips from her hair one by one and let the golden ringlets fall loose around her face. She hadn’t felt his arms around her in so long. Almost a full year, in fact, but she had made up her mind to stop counting the days once she knew that she would no longer have to.

  She picked up a hairbrush from her white and gold bureau—everything was white and gold for the royals of Valeriel, much to Callista’s wearied dismay—and ran the rough bristles through her silky curls. She had had several lovers in the past year. Her husband hadn’t been among them, of course, but any number of nobles had, men who wanted to brag about their experience with the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. She didn’t care two pence for any of them, though several of them had convinced themselves of her affection.

  She stood and unfastened her dress, the amber sillage of her perfume drifting into the air as she slid the gown down her hourglass figure. She almost felt bad for some of the men in her life, particularly her husband’s cousin. Dear Baurus was so in love with her and had been since the moment they had met. She had strung him along like all the others, and sometimes in the past year she thought she might capitulate and commit herself to him, inasmuch as a married woman could devote herself to another man.

  The bureau drawer creaked as she slid it open and pulled out a garment, a shimmer of ivory silk trimmed with golden lace that someone not troubled by its length might call a nightgown. As she pulled it over her head, she thanked the Deity that she had not pledged herself to Baurus. She would have had to break her promise now that her true lover had finally returned to her after a year with no word. Breaking faith didn’t matter overmuch to her, but she would have had to manage the fallout from one of Baurus’s rages. He wouldn’t have harmed her, but his hysterics could damage lamps and one-of-a-kind antiques in his vicinity.

  She smoothed the cool material over her flat stomach and sat back down in front of the mirror. She picked up the damp cloth her maid had left and swabbed it across her face. She didn’t leave her boudoir without her face painted to perfection—foundation cream and powder to make her pale skin shine, dark eyeliner and mascara to widen her blue eyes, and lipstick as red as the rubies in her hair to shape her lips into a sultry smile.

  As she finished wiping away the last of her makeup, she heard a whisper of fabric behind her.

  She turned toward the door. She had wanted time to re-make-up her face, not in the ostentatious colors she had made popular in Imperial society, but in softer tones designed to highlight her natural beauty. But she didn’t mind if he saw her without her tweezed eyebrows penciled in a perfect arch. He loved her with or without adornment. And when he stepped into view, thoughts of her appearance flew straight out of her head.

  Her heart fluttered as she took in his familiar features. Callista had known many richer and handsomer men, but from the moment she met him, she had known that he could understand her like no one else. Others might call her shallow, callous, and selfish, but he understood her. And she saw the best and worst of her nature reflected in him.

  She stood and took a single seductive step toward him. She met his eyes, and a cold smile formed on his lips.

  “Callista. At last.” He held out a hand to her.

  She extended her arm to take it, but before their fingers touched, her chest began to burn. She pulled her hand back and placed it over her breast.

  “Excuse me. I seem to have…” She gave a small cough as the fire intensified. “I need… water...” She tried to take a deep breath, but the air would not go into her lungs. She reached behind her to get a solid grip on the chair.

  She looked up at her lover. “Help… me…”

  The cool smile remained on his face, and she realized his eyes bore not even that chilly expression. “I’m sorry, my dear. It had to be this way.”

  She fell to her knees, still clutching her heart. “I don’t… understand… How… could you?” She gasped again and realized she could no longer take in enough air to form words.

  He knelt down in front of her and ran a delicate finger along her cheek. “If it’s any consolation, I do love you. This wouldn’t have been necessary otherwise.”

  She collapsed onto her side, and he continued to stroke her face. As her vision darkened, she fixed her gaze upon his remorseful expression. Because even though he had killed her, she wanted him to be the last thing she
saw.

  Eight hours earlier…

  “Valeriel Investigations! How may I direct your call?” The perky brunette at the switchboard plunked the front cord in a jack near the top of the panel and flipped the “talk” key to ring the office at the other end of the line.

  Someone’s calling robbery, Kadin Stone thought, knowing that her fellow operator’s switches matched those on every board in the row. She looked back at her own assortment of wires and lights and thanked the Deity for about the ten millionth time that in another hour her switchboard days would be behind her. She wouldn’t miss the drafty basement office, with its grey brick walls and moldy scent, and the sooner she got away from the constant clacking of fingers on keys, punctuated by the occasional ding followed by the whirr of a carriage return, the sooner she could stop spending so much money on aspirin.

  “You’re so lucky, Kadin.” Trinithy Gold studied her reflection in a pearly, gold-trimmed compact and poked a curl back into her blond beehive. “Working upstairs as an aide to a homicide detective, among all those men! I don’t think I’m ever going to get out of this basement. This morning I actually considered accepting when Darson asked me out.”

  Anything but that! The postboy was good-looking enough, with his crew cut and scuffed white bucks, but he had been at the menial job when Kadin had started at the company three years ago and didn’t seem inclined toward promotion any time in the near future. He could never support a wife on his salary.

  Kadin mimicked Trinithy’s movements and ran her fingers through her own dark red curls. “I kept telling you to take the training course with me.”

  Trinithy wrinkled her snub nose at her reflection, then snapped her compact shut. “An entire year of night classes? Given Ollie’s tales of how much work he had to do, I am quite certain that I have better employed my time meeting people, not to mention getting my beauty sleep. This perfect complexion does not come naturally.”

  Kadin nodded and turned to her switchboard to ensure that none of the lights were blinking. The detective coursework had been quite intensive, and some nights she’d had to sacrifice more sleep than she’d wanted writing papers and completing assignments.

  She glanced down the line of switchboards at the coifed women with their full skirts puffed out around their stools. If she looked behind her, she’d see rows of typists at cheap plywood desks, as done-up in the height of fashion as the operators. Kadin dressed to her best advantage, but with her strong features and sturdy frame she would never stand out among the sea of beauties desperate to impress any unsuspecting man who wandered into their lair by mistake.

  Even Trinithy, the tiniest, most delicate flower in the cellar, couldn’t find a man in this crowd. If the blonde had considered going out with Darson—an exaggeration, Kadin suspected—she might have done well to put up with the detective course.

  Judging from past experience, though, within a few weeks Trinithy’s mother or sister would introduce her to a new crew of eligible men, all of whom would be falling at the blonde’s feet. Trinithy claimed she spent hours on her hair and make-up, but Kadin suspected her friend rose from bed looking lovely. Trinithy’s blue eyes would always look more innocent than Kadin’s brown ones, and Kadin could never get her rosy features to rival Trinithy’s fair complexion. Trinithy’s pink dress, solid except for the white and pink polka-dotted bow across her chest, would have clashed with Kadin’s red hair.

  Kadin sat up straighter. “Education is an investment in your future.”

  “So is taking the proper amount of rest so that I don’t develop wrinkles before I’ve got a ring on my finger.” Trinithy propped her bare elbows on the table in front of her and glanced at the clock on the wall. “Where is Ollie? He promised he’d skip out early to get drinks with us, and I’m dying to leave.”

  Kadin swallowed a laugh. No doubt Trinithy did want to leave—she avoided work more than she did the ugly men her grandmother kept setting her up with—but her eagerness had less to do with the end of the workday and more to do with Olivan’s promised presentation.

  Olivan worked in personnel and had a lax view of what information should remain confidential, as well as a keen mind for discerning behavioral trends. He knew more about the eligible men at the company than they knew about themselves. He had promised to give Kadin a breakdown of the bachelors she should look out for, with a special emphasis on those in the homicide department.

  “Relax.” Kadin’s voice remained calm, but she, too, shook with anticipation. “You know Ollie. He probably ran into someone he knows and absolutely had to tell him some of the latest news from Imperial Society.”

  “Oh my Deity, Kadin.” Trinithy splayed out her manicured fingers and set her palms on the desk in front of her switchboard. “Did you see the issue that came out yesterday?”

  Oh, here we go. “You know I didn’t, Trin. Octavira hates to see me spending money on something so frivolous as glossies.”

  Kadin sent a brief mental apology to her sister-in-law for once again using her as an excuse for not embracing her friends’ celebrity gossip hobby. That Octavira did refer to their interest as an “overinvestment in the lives of people they would never meet” lessened Kadin’s guilt.

  Besides, Kadin didn’t need to read the society columns. Olivan or Trinithy would regale her with the contents, whether she wanted them to or not.

  Trinithy leaned forward and spoke in a softer tone. “Well, of course it covered Duke Chaise Imbolc’s charity ball. You remember I told you about that, right? No one could believe that he, of all people, would have a charity event, but I heard that his daughter refused to consider another marriage proposal unless he donated something to the schools in Smoke Row. Which is absurd. I mean, it’s one thing to want to help children get a better education or whatever, but Lady Elyesse is twenty-eight years old. She may be a duke’s daughter, but she doesn’t have forever.”

  Kadin vaguely remembered Trinithy telling her about this particular event, but the Imperials’ galas ran together after the first hundred or so. And Lady Elyesse’s unmarried status, though a constant scandal, was hardly newsworthy. People had commented on her perceived failure for the past three years. Though the reminder made Kadin all the more grateful that she was a good three years away from being twenty-five and shamefully unmarried.

  “—the dress she wore was such an unflattering shade that it’s no wonder she can’t catch a husband. I mean, vermillion! As if her long hair weren’t unfashionable enough! But Lady Elyesse is old news.” Trinithy barely took a breath before continuing on her next item of gossip. “The big story is—“

  “Let me guess.” Kadin knew Trinithy could only get this excited about one woman’s exploits. “The big story is who Queen Callista brought as her escort.”

  “Yes!” Trinity disregarded the note of sarcasm in her friend’s tone. “You will never guess!”

  Kadin waited for a few seconds before she realized that Trinithy actually expected her to guess. “Well, since it’s not someone I would expect that rules out Duke Baurus.”

  The duke’s affair with his cousin’s wife was the worst-kept secret in the Imperial circle. The society pages only ever hinted at the romance, but since the commoners in the city followed every tawdry detail they could read between the lines, Kadin imagined the nobles did as well.

  Kadin’s gaze wandered to the door. “I guess I‘ll go for the long shot and guess that she showed up with her husband.”

  Trinithy pouted, and Kadin suspected her friend had practiced shaping her lips into that perfect bow more times than she would ever admit. “Don’t be absurd. You know that King Ralvin doesn’t attend social events. He never appears in public without full ceremonial garb, and you know that would be far too uncomfortable to wear to a ball.”

  Kadin had never been to an Imperial gala and knew no such thing, but Trinithy liked to pretend that she ha
d close relationships with all the players in Imperial society.

  Kadin studied her long, almond-shaped red nails. “It’s as good a guess as any.”

  “I suppose.” Trinithy fiddled with her popped collar. “Anyway, the truth was nearly as shocking as it would have been if she had come with King Ralvin.” She held up her hands and clasped them to her chest to give the appearance of waiting with bated breath. “She came alone.”

  That’s it? Well, I guess it is shocking.

  “Why alone?” Kadin asked.

  “That’s the thing. Nobody knows.” By “nobody” Kadin assumed Trinithy meant the many society columnists who had discussed the issue at length in the various gossip glossies on which Trinithy spent a significant portion of her income. “None of the people interviewed—” i.e. the minor nobility who were unimportant enough to value seeing their names in print but consequently had little inside information “—had any idea what statement she was trying to make. Because of course even Queen Callista wouldn’t do something so scandalous without good reason.” Trinithy sat back. “She danced with everyone just the same.”

  “Except Duke Baurus.” A man came up between Trinithy and Kadin and leaned his quiff into their huddle. “Garson Gray thinks that she came unaccompanied in order to add greater insult to their most recent break-up. She was stating in no uncertain terms that even if she didn’t have another escort, she wouldn’t be seen with him.”

  Trinithy turned to face the speaker, as if grateful to have a more interested party than Kadin with whom to discuss the issue. “Please, Ollie. Garson Gray thinks that everything is to do with the DeValeriels. I give more credence to Nandra Colt’s theory that the queen was showing Lord Dimka that she is still unattached. Everyone knows she’s wanted to resume their affair ever since he got married last spring.”