by Holly Hart
Of course, it actually works in Carson’s favor. When he’s all sweated up, his physique glistens in the sun like an oiled-up bodybuilder’s. Except he’s not afflicted with their pig-ugly, veiny head.
“Whatever makes you say that?” I ask sweetly, plucking an ice cube from my gin and tonic and dropping it down my cleavage. If I’m suffering, I figure Carson has to as well.
Okay, it could be worse. The restaurant – and its blessed air-conditioning – is only a few steps away. And there’s a bit of a breeze coming off the ocean.
But my God, the humidity. I’ve read that it’s impossible for it to go above one hundred percent at sea level, but I’m seriously wondering if the hypothesis needs more research. If I could prove it’s possible, I could publish and go for my PhD.
Or I could stop being such a baby and finish my drink. That seems like the more viable option. And more pleasant. I down it in a gulp, my taste buds puckering at the bitterness of the tonic.
“I promise I’ll make it up to you,” Carson says. “After we’re done here, we can fly to Reykjavik. Shouldn’t be more than sixty degrees there.”
I smile sweetly and stroke his cheek.
“Oh, honey,” I soothe. “It’s going to take a hell of a lot more than that to make up for this.”
He grins and drains his Corona. It joins the army of empties on the table. Dealing with this weather is thirsty work.
In the distance I see Tricia and Maksim trudging toward us through the sand. Neither of them seems all that put out by the heat, although it’s hard to tell with Maks. He sort of has a light sheen to his skin all the time, regardless of temperature.
“Who would have thought those two would get along?” I say as they approach.
Carson drapes an arm over the back of his chair, letting his shirt fall open to expose his torso.
“Maks is pretty easygoing,” he says. “Although, to be honest, I wasn’t sure if he’d come on this trip. The last time we hung out, we didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.”
“What happened?”
He looks at me over his Oakleys.
“He wanted to go out with you.”
An involuntary snort escapes me before I can stop it.
“Sorry,” I say. “He’s a really nice guy, but me and him? Especially when you’re in the picture? I don’t think so.”
“Actually, I think I owe him for driving home just how much I want you to myself.”
“Is that right?” I drop my own glasses. “Well, I guess I owe him then, too.”
Speak of the devils. Tricia and Maksim arrive at the table, shaking the sand out of their beach towels. Tricia’s compact curves fill out her wet one-piece nicely, while Maks’ kind of looks like most of his time in the gym is spent chatting up girls. Still, I guess Tricia knows what she’s doing.
“There were stingrays flying out in the surf!” Tricia says, grinning like a kid.
“I saw no fish flying,” says Maks. “I was only seeing lovely Patricia.”
She wraps her towel around her and sits at the table, plucking a beer from the ice bucket on the concrete.
“I appreciate the effort, Maks,” she says as she pops the cap off the bottle. “But it’s not going to happen.”
To his credit, Maksim just smiles and spreads his hands wide in a “what are you gonna do?” gesture.
Carson glances at his phone on the table and then up at me.
“I suppose we should get to the bank,” he says. “Money never sleeps, but bankers sure as hell do. It’ll be closed in an hour.”
I gather up my beach bag. We’ve been so busy being obscenely rich the last couple of days that I almost forgot I just won a multi-million-dollar prize. Carson suggested we come directly to Cayman to deal with the money, given the legal tightrope I’m walking with it.
We wave good-bye to our friends and hop in a passing taxi van that speeds us to the Grand National Bank of the Islands. A tall black gentleman in island business casual greets us in the deliciously frigid foyer as we walk in.
“Ms. Vincent, a pleasure to meet you,” he says. “Andre Moreau. We spoke on the phone.”
“A pleasure,” I say, taking his offered hand. “This is my friend, Carson Drake.”
Andre’s eyes widen. “The Carson Drake?”
“Well, a Carson Drake anyway,” he replies. He bends down and kisses me on the cheek. “I’ll wait for you out here.”
I love that he’s leaving this to me. It means a lot that he’s not trying to horn in and give me advice. Mainsplaining, they call it. But Carson would never.
Andre ushers me into his office and we take a seat. He boots up his computer and begins typing.
“If I remember correctly, we will be discussing a sum of $2.75 million USD.”
“That’s correct,” I say.
Three days shy of the full $3.5 million, because of circumstances beyond our control, but Carson said he’ll reimburse me for his impatience.
“I’m interested in the best way to access it in the States in a lump sum for a business investment.”
After a few moments, he stops typing. His eyes narrow and his brows draw together as he peers at the screen.
It’s never a good thing when someone looks like they don’t believe what a computer is telling them.
“This is… unusual,” he says.
“How so?”
He looks at me with a mix of disbelief and sympathy.
“Madam, I’m afraid this account is empty.”
Chapter Seventy-Eight
47. CASSANDRA
My heart sends out a single kick drum beat in my chest as adrenaline pumps into my system.
“There must be a mistake,” I say, trying to keep my voice neutral. Inside, I’m anything but.
“Perhaps,” says Andre. “There was a balance of $2.75 million USD, but the funds were withdrawn the day before yesterday.”
“That can’t be. I haven’t accessed the account in over forty-eight hours.”
He continues typing, scanning the monitor for clues. I quickly get the impression that he’s only humoring me. Staving off the moment he has to confirm the unpleasant truth. But I already know what it is. The pit of my stomach makes that fact absolutely, unpleasantly clear.
“It appears the money was recalled by the depositing account.”
What? A cold fury creeps into my guts.
“How is that possible?” I ask. How could you let that happen, I want to scream.
“There are certain unique provisions in accounts of this nature. Payments can be withheld or withdrawn in extraordinary circumstances, usually to do with breach of contract.”
I draw a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“I am very sorry, Ms. Vincent,” he says. “Obviously this is a mistake. Unfortunately, it is not one I can rectify here at the bank. You will have to contact your lawyer.”
He smiles nervously. I swallow the rage building inside me and manage to smile back.
“Of course,” I say, rising from my chair, as if this kind of thing happens to me all the time. “These things happen.”
We shake hands and I walk out of the office. Carson looks up from a copy of Yachts International as I emerge into the waiting room. His eyes widen as he sees my expression.
“I take it things didn’t go as planned,” he says cautiously.
I flash a thousand-watt smile.
“The fuckers took my money back,” I say.
Carson’s jaw literally drops open.
“What?”
“Every cent. Two days ago. Andre said they have the right as the depositor and to take it up with my lawyer. I don’t have a lawyer.”
“I’ve got about eighty,” he says absently. “But we can’t get them involved in this. You don’t want something like this coming anywhere near the eyes of a judge.”
“No kidding.”
He takes me by the shoulders and looks me in the eye.
“We can fix this,” he says.
“I can
fix this,” I say, trying to keep the venom out of my voice.
I don’t want Carson Drake riding in on his white horse to save the helpless damsel in distress. This may be distress, but I’m far from helpless.
He holds up his hands in surrender.
“Absolutely. I know what you’re capable of.”
He wishes. That flip on the dance floor was child’s play. I was just surprised then.
You don’t want to see me when I’m angry.
Carson smiles crookedly.
“Can I ask one favor?”
“Make it good.”
“Can it wait till we get back to New York tomorrow night? I’m sure there’s a logical explanation. Until then, let’s enjoy the next twenty-four hours.”
I’m still pouting, but the idea is growing on me.
“I’m still obscenely rich,” he says.
“Yeah, and I’m flat broke.”
“But soon to be rich. Maybe not obscenely, but rich enough that people will shake their heads and cluck their tongues.”
I fight the smile as long as I can, but I finally I give in. How does he do this to me? Before he came back into my life, I wouldn’t have slept until I’d figured this out.
“All right,” I say, wrapping an arm around his waist. “Let’s go find Tricia and Maks. Might as well have a night out while we’re here. Besides, I want to show off my body. I’ve sweated away fifteen pounds since we arrived.”
He shakes his head.
“You’re not going to let that go, are you?”
“If you think that’s bad, imagine if you’d stolen a couple million dollars from me.”
Chapter Seventy-Nine
48. CARSON
One of the great things about Grand Cayman is that the sun sets between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. every day of the year.
And when the sun goes down, the party starts.
The club we’re in – it’s called JetStream – is all blue lights and bright whites, with electronica throbbing out of the speakers. But we’ve got a booth in the VIP section, and it’s low season for tourism, so we can actually hear each other. Sort of.
Cassie points to the dance floor and puts her lips to my ear.
“Look at them!” she says. “Who’d have thought?”
I know from experience that Maksim is a seriously good dancer – he literally lives in nightclubs, how could he not be – but Tricia is a surprise. She’s writhing and grinding with him like an old pro. All while holding a triple mojito.
If nothing else, the girl knows how to cut loose.
“I think Tricia likes him,” says Cassie.
“Are you kidding? He’s been talking to the hand since we took off from JFK.”
“She was just playing hard to get. She wants a guy to work for it.”
“That’s good,” I say. “It’s about time Maks had to work for something.”
We clink our glasses together and down some of the blue concoction inside. It’s sweet and coconut-y and totally unlike anything I usually drink. But hey, it’s Cayman. And what happens in Cayman…
I can tell by the look in her eyes that Cassie’s mind isn’t here in the club, though.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s figure out how we’re going to tackle this when we get home.”
She grins like a kid who just got a parent to play Barbies with her. The fact that she gets so giddy about planning revenge disturbs me a little.
Not to mention the way it causes my shorts to fit more tightly.
“The woman in the red dress is key,” she says. “If we can find her, we can communicate with the organizers.”
“Agreed.”
Cassie pulls on her lower lip. It’s been a sign of deep thought since we were kids.
“Of course, that’s easier said than done,” she says. “They have plenty of kompromat on me and you – and the other contestants. But we have nothing on them. They like it that way.”
“Kompro-what, now?”
“Kompromat. It’s Russian for blackmail. Their intelligence community collects or manufactures compromising info on public figures, then uses it as leverage to ensure compliance. The US does it too, but the Russians are masters at it.”
Her competence turns me on. Is that wrong? I don’t know, but if this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
I slide my hand under the table and onto her bare thigh. She returns the favor, but her expression is still all business.
“We should operate under the assumption that this was deliberate,” she says. “But we need to make sure we don’t go in with guns blazing, just in case it wasn’t.”
“That’s what I was thinking. Diplomacy can work wonders when you give it a chance.”
“Unless you’re in a situation where someone is screwing with you,” she says. “Then you nail them to the wall with railroad spikes and pour battery acid into the wounds.”
I can’t help myself: I take her hand and lay it directly on my hard-on.
Cassie’s eyebrows go up.
“Easy, tiger,” she says, but gives me a friendly squeeze for my trouble. “We’ve got all night.”
“Believe me, it’s going to take all night.”
Her smile is so sexy it makes my heart stop.
“Promises, promises,” she purrs.
I knock back the rest of my drink in an attempt to steady myself. How was this girl possibly a virgin last week? She’s taken to sex like a fish to water.
I guess she has a lot of lost time to make up for.
“All right,” I say. “We agree that the first step is to find Red Dress and figure out what the situation is. If it’s innocuous, we settle it.”
She smiles. “I love it when you use $50 words like that.”
“It’s my milieu,” I say, buffing my fingernails on my Guayabera shirt.
“Oh my God,” she gasps. “It sounds so dirty when you use it the wrong way like that.”
She’s right, dammit, I did screw it up. I chuckle and shake my head.
“The question is what we do if it’s not innocuous,” she says. “If they’re trying to pull a fast one.”
That prompts an unpleasant idea that never occurred to me before. It should have, but it didn’t.
“What if the whole thing was a set-up to get kompromat on a group of wealthy men?” I ask. “Maybe you were meant to be collateral damage the whole time.”
Molten lava seethes behind her eyes. Apparently it never occurred to her, either. Now that is has…
“You’re obscenely rich,” she says. “So are the other contestants. That means you have resources.”
“What are you driving at?”
“Just like Liam Neeson, I’ve got a very particular set of skills.”
“Okay, you’ve got the skills, I’ve got the resources. What are we going to do with them?”
She raises her glass in salute and downs it in a gulp.
“We’re going to fuck them up,” she says. “Hard.”
“First things first,” I say. “We have to find Red Dress.”
Cassie rummages in her purse and pulls out her phone. She slides her finger along the screen for a moment, then turns it toward me. On it is a photo of a laptop screen, featuring a woman with long, golden curls.
“It’s not much,” she says. “But it’s a start. I wish I had full access to my agency computers. But then I’d have to explain what I was doing.”
A Cheshire cat grin threatens to circle all the way around my head as I picture the floor-to-ceiling screen in my computer room running through thousands of online photos per hour.
“I happen to have something back at my penthouse that may be of service,” I say.
Before I can elaborate, Maks and Tricia suddenly appear, sliding into their seats on the other side of the booth. They’re sweating freely and laughing like kids.
They see the looks on our faces and the laughter dries up.
“I am thinking you need drinks,” Maksim says.
Tricia’s eyebrows go up. “Quadr
uples, by the looks of things. Everything all right?”
I smile. Cassie follows suit.
“Nothing we can’t figure out,” I say. “Man, you guys were tearing it up out there!”
Maksim beams at Tricia.
“A dancer is only as good as his partner,” he says.
“You notice his English always gets better when he’s throwing out pick-up lines?” Tricia says, shaking her head.
Cassie giggles, and it’s almost as if our previous conversation never happened. She’s the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met.
She raises her hand to catch the server’s eyes. She twirls her index finger in a gesture to signal another round.
“All right,” she says. “Let’s kick this night into high gear!”
The waitress arrives with a tray of drinks and a shot of what smells like top-shelf Don Julio tequila for each of us.
“Compliments of the house,” she says with a practiced smile.
We each grab a glass and clink them together.
“To obscene riches,” I say.
We drink. The smooth liquor goes down like a fire in the walls, heat without flame. I highly recommend expensive tequila if you have the means. The cheap stuff is just rubbing alcohol in a fancier bottle, as far as I’m concerned.
Suddenly Cassie’s lips are at my ear. The scent of her shot fills my nostrils.
“Pace yourself,” she whispers. “We’ve got a long night ahead of us, remember?”
Under the table, her hand slides under the hem of my shorts and finds the delicate skin of my cock.
“Trust me,” I say. “It’s all I can think about.”
Chapter Eighty
49. CARSON
The screen-window in my computer room displays blonde after blonde after blonde. I’m hoping Red Dress is a natural, or I’ll have to do this all over again with brunette when this cycle is done.
In any case, this is going to take awhile, so I might as well be doing something else while it does.
I suit up in my running shorts and a tank top and lace up my Reeboks. Matthias worked me like a rented mule this morning, but after all that booze and rich food in Cayman, I feel like I need to put in some extra effort.
