Duty and the Beast

by Chelsea Field

  Duty and the Beast

  Chelsea Field

  DUTY AND THE BEAST is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, poisons, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Chelsea Field

  All rights reserved.

  Published by JFP Trust

  2018 First Digital Edition

  ISBN: 978 0 9945756 9 2

  www.chelseafieldauthor.com

  To every person who has ever been screwed over or shoved around by forces bigger and nastier than them.

  I hope this book helps a little.

  But I’d also advise chocolate.

  Copious amounts of chocolate.

  Contents

  Series Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Connor

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Connor

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Connor

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Connor

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Connor

  Chapter 24

  Connor

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  From the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from EAT, PRAY, DIE

  Series Introduction

  If you’ve never read an Eat, Pray, Die mystery, here’s what you should know about us poison tasters:

  Harry Potter got a letter inviting him to Hogwarts to become a wizard. My offer was less exciting, but no less top secret. In fact, they didn’t even tell me the truth until I was weeks into the training.

  Welcome to the Taste Society.

  A secret organization where you’ll only be told what you absolutely need to know.

  Throughout recorded history, wherever there was power, there was poison alongside it. As the use and knowledge of poison became more sophisticated during the rise of the Roman Empire, the role of food taster, known then as praegustator, was introduced.

  Both poisoners and tasters still exist today. But instead of poor, untrained slaves putting their lives on the line every time someone important wants a meal, you have Shades like me. Poisons are more advanced but so are the antidotes and job training. And while I don’t have magic in my blood the way Harry Potter does, I do have the rare gene mutation PSH337PRS, which gives me increased resistance to toxic substances. That’s why the Taste Society recruited me in the first place.

  So why haven’t you heard of any of this?

  The same reason I hadn’t until I’d jumped through a thousand hoops and commenced my training. Because both the authorities and the Taste Society go to great lengths to cover it up.

  There’s a scary logic behind why the rich and powerful elite favor poison over more direct methods. It’s discreet, versatile, hard to protect against, and damn near impossible to trace back to the person responsible. Nobody wants to popularize poisoning among the masses.

  But beneath the falsified news stories? The climb to power and fortune is a war zone, and poison is the weapon of choice. And around a third of those accounts you see about yet another public figure dying from a drug overdose or ruining their careers while under the influence are, in truth, carefully planned sabotage.

  Oh, and Shades like me are the only means of protection.

  1

  TEN DAYS EARLIER

  Six months ago, I’d walked into a job interview that I would’ve done anything to win. This time as I walked through the extravagant hall on the heels of a maid to meet my potential client, I planned to sabotage it.

  The man I was meeting—Mr. Lyle Knightley—was looking for someone to protect his son, who happened to be the accused in a multimillion-dollar fraud case. A fraud case that was fast becoming a nationwide spectacle. But that wasn’t why I was trying to sabotage it.

  His son Richard—the dirtbag who’d lied and cheated over a hundred senior citizens out of their retirement funds—was by all accounts a privileged, self-entitled brat who hadn’t shown a shred of remorse. But that wasn’t why I was trying to sabotage it either. Most of my clients were on the undesirable side.

  No, the reason I wanted to sabotage it had walked me to my car this morning and was waiting to take me to dinner later tonight. I could still feel the lingering touch of his lips on mine. The way one strong hand pulled me toward him while the other caressed my cheek. The look in his gray eyes as I left that begged me to do something his words never would: “Don’t take this job.”

  The maid’s staccato footsteps on the tile floor came to a halt, and I almost crashed into her back. “One moment,” she said before slipping through a polished timber door and shutting it in my face.

  I waited a moment, then another. My mind sifted through possible strategies. Play dumb. Nope, Mr. Knightley might like dumb. His son had allegedly enjoyed pulling the wool over the eyes of scores of people he considered of inferior intellect. Incompetent then. Except it would be hard to demonstrate my poison-tasting skills in the parameters of this interview, and incompetence was one thing that might warrant immediate dismissal by my employer. I needed to disappoint the client, not the Taste Society. That left me to play uncooperative and difficult. Maybe nosy too since I was guessing the Knightleys wouldn’t want me poking into their affairs. Half the nation was already doing that.

  The door opened. “Mr. Knightley will see you now.”

  The maid scurried away, her heels clattering on the tiles, giving me the impression she was glad to leave.

  Like I would be doing in a few short minutes. I hoped.

  Mr. Knightley Senior was seated behind a desk large enough for a woolly mammoth to shelter under. Bookcases encircled the walls, which might have endeared him to me if the titles hadn’t all been the yawn-inducing nonfiction variety. He rose when he saw me. High-society manners ingrained into him from birth rather than any true courtesy.

  He was a tall, austere man with pronounced cheekbones, scholarly black frames, and neatly trimmed gray hair. Despite being in his own residence on a weekend afternoon, he was wearing a suit and tie.

  Given I’d let my own unruly mop hang loose around my shoulders and wore a casual white tank top, an old pair of jeans, and runners, I was expecting his reception to be cold, unimpressed. The way I intended.

  But for the first time since I’d moved to Los Angeles—land of the image-obsessed, medically enhanced, sun-kissed actresses, models, and pop stars—the stranger in front of me was ecstatic at what he saw.

  “You’re perfect.”

  I was too dumbfounded to speak, and he took my silence as a request for more information.

  “You look so wholesome. So innocent. Just what my son needs to improve his public image.”

  Dammit.

  And in another first since moving to LA, I wished I’d gotten a spray tan and stuffed my bra with… well, whatever those who couldn’t afford surgery stuffed their bras with.

  This was not a good start to sabotaging the interview.

  “I’m not sure how I feel about being used for public relations, Mr. Knightley. It’s not part of my job description.”

  “Then we’ll pay you more for it.”

  Ugh. One thing I’d learned after keeping co
mpany with the rich and famous was that their knee-jerk solution for everything was to throw money at it. Worse, most of the time it worked. If only the rest of us had it so easy.

  “I don’t do this for the money,” I said. A blatant lie. That was the sole reason I did this gig.

  A smile spread across his face like an ink stain over a page.

  Actually, it was a nice smile. If his son’s was anything like it, I could see how it might have conned so many out of their hard-earned cash. Except, come to think of it, the stories I’d heard said the scam had been played out over the phone.

  “That’s even better,” he told me. “Your naïveté is more than skin-deep. The press will love you.”

  Crap. Everything was backfiring. What other reason would people do this job?

  I wandered over to the bookshelf and pretended to snoop. Pretended I was apathetic toward this whole conversation. “The truth is, the one thing I’m interested in is rubbing shoulders with celebrities,” I lied again, borrowing the motive from a few of the other Shades I’d trained with. “And your son isn’t very interesting to me.”

  Surely that would offend his ego and make him rethink his assessment.

  Instead, he looked as if I’d given him a freshly baked plate of cookies. “Excellent. My son isn’t taking his safety seriously, so I need a Shade who won’t be swayed by his charisma or pushed around by his strong personality. Listen, I’ll sweeten the deal for you. We both know this fraud case is the talk of the country. Think about how getting an exclusive, inside account will give you an in with those stars you admire. They’ll want to hear what you have to say, and they’ll remember you for it.”

  This guy was a gifted negotiator. If I hadn’t intentionally misled him about my motives, he would be pressing all the right buttons. I supposed his son had inherited the skill.

  I pushed a book—Investment Banking: Institutions, Politics, and Law by Alan Morrison, a gentleman who must’ve been the life of every party—back into its place on the shelf. Then thought better of it and reshelved it in an empty slot farther down. As if I hadn’t already failed my objective to sabotage the interview and this tiny act of defiance would change Mr. Knightley’s mind.

  “Plus I’ll match whatever the Taste Society’s paying you,” he added, ignoring the misplaced book. “You might not need the money, but everyone likes to have more. And remember, the assignment will be over in three months or less. What do you say?”

  My brain blank of ideas to turn the situation around and my heart heavy with the thought of breaking the news to Connor, I walked back to that polished door. “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  Not wanting to give Connor the bad news, I retreated to my Corvette to make my final attempt at getting out of the assignment.

  It was a lovely spring afternoon in Los Angeles, one of the first of the season. The kind of day where the air felt more breathable, the crowds less oppressive, and that had neither winter’s rain nor summer’s smog to mar its blue skies.

  I rolled down the windows and tried not to feel unseasonably glum. This was my last chance.

  I phoned my Taste Society handler.

  Jim greeted me in his usual warm and friendly fashion: “State your ID.”

  Since I wanted him on my good side, I didn’t try to engage him in conversation. I’d learned several hours into our acquaintance that any attempts at befriending him only pissed him off.

  “Shade 22703,” I said.

  “What was the outcome of your interview?”

  “The client offered me the job.” The words were bitter on my tongue—not unlike many of the poisons Shades were trained to detect. “But I was thinking I might turn it down.”

  “You’re kidding.” Jim didn’t say it with surprise the way most people would. He stated it with obvious displeasure—strongly suggesting that I better damn well be kidding.

  “Um.”

  “Let me give you a piece of advice.” Again, he didn’t say it with genuine concern the way a normal person would. He said it with a you’re-too-dumb-to-live intonation. “You’ve already turned down two jobs in the past two weeks. You’re getting a bad reputation with the assignment team. And you don’t want to get a bad rep. They’ll make sure you get the worst clients.”

  “But…” The thing was, I couldn’t tell him the real reason I’d refused the last two jobs. Connor’s and my relationship wasn’t strictly prohibited, but it was understood within the Taste Society that your job came first. You could have relationships so long as they didn’t interfere with your assignments. Easier said than done when those assignments required you to adopt a girlfriend-boyfriend relationship as a cover story or travel around the world as a rock star’s groupie on a six-month tour.

  “You only get one more refusal this year,” Jim said. A fact I was excruciatingly aware of. “Do you really want to waste it on an assignment this short?”

  No I didn’t. That was why I’d tried to sabotage the interview. But I was limited in how far I could take that sabotage without landing in trouble with my employer. And my attempt had failed dismally.

  If I accepted the job, Connor and I would have to publicly break up. The assignment necessitated that I pretend to date Mr. Knightley Junior to give me plausible reason to spend long hours in his company and taste his food in public. Which meant the whole freaking country would think I was dating one of the most despised men of the month.

  Far worse was that Connor’s family and my friends would believe it too.

  The one potential upside was that the job might be over in two weeks. The trial was scheduled to begin in just eleven days’ time. After that, Mr. Knightley Junior was either going to prison or leaving the country.

  If he went to prison, my duties were over.

  But if he won the case, he’d be going on a daddy-financed trip to Japan, and I’d be dragged along with him. One more piece of carry-on luggage for the spoiled rich kid.

  The overseas move was designed to give Knightley Junior a fresh start. Somewhere his face hadn’t been splashed across every news outlet for the past weeks insinuating his guilt in the biggest fraud case of the year.

  Okay, we were only a couple of months into the year, but it was a big case. One that tugged at the heartstrings of millions of Americans. Even if the jury concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him beyond all reasonable doubt and he won the trial, he’d never recover if he stayed here.

  The single perk to that much publicity was the Taste Society would avoid assigning me another “girlfriend” cover story for a while; that way nobody would get curious why I was dating one powerful person after the next. A valuable gift with just one refusal left until my first twelve months of employment ended in September.

  It was like gambling, and I wasn’t a gambler by nature.

  But I was guessing Richard Knightley was guilty. Why else would a chief federal prosecutor and dozens of elderly folk around the country point the finger at him? And justice would prevail, right?

  Except I wasn’t so naive as to believe that anymore.

  “Take your time,” Jim said, sarcasm dripping like the fat from a pork belly roast. “I don’t have anything better to do than wait for your answer.”

  The assignment might be a horrible one, but it was a maximum of three months long even if Knightley Junior did win the case. What if I used up my last refusal and the next job offered would steal me away from my loved ones for an entire year?

  I felt my shoulders slump. “I’ll do it.”

  “Gee, your enthusiasm could use some work,” said the pot to the kettle. “I remember how excited you were to get your first assignment not so many months ago.” He sounded pleased with the change. “Welcome to reality, kid. You start tomorrow.”

  The thing that sucked most was my failed sabotage attempt wasn’t the worst thing that happened to me that day. I returned to my apartment—a tiny place in Palms I shared with my affable British housemate—to find Connor in my bedroom. Usually, I was ecstatic to ha
ve Connor and bedrooms in the same place at the same time, but since my bed was a single and the walls were thin, my bedroom was not where we tended to hang out.

  Plus my mood was dampened by the knowledge of our impending fake breakup.

  I drank in his familiar features. No-nonsense short, dark hair, gray eyes the color of an overcast wintry morning, and an unreadable expression that was the envy of poker players everywhere.

  He was sitting on my bed. If it had been me, my back would’ve been resting against the wall, my legs slung over the bed covers, and my housemate’s cat, Meow, would’ve been sprawled on my lap. Meow was sprawled on his lap, but the man I was loath to give up for the spoiled Knightley kid was sitting at the edge of the mattress, straight-backed, strong, controlled, unbending. A stark contrast to the ball of fluff stretched over his knees.

  Connor was like that. All hard edges except for a splash of softness reserved for a select few. It gladdened my heart every day that he’d allowed me to become one of those select few.

  I walked over to him, leaned down so he wouldn’t have to disturb Meow, and kissed them both, hoping to bring out some of the warmth in his eyes that I loved so much. Sometimes I thought Connor was a bit like a cat. Proud, dignified, aloof until you’ve won him over, and meticulously well-groomed. Not like me.