“I didn’t have anything to do with those photographs!” Christopher yelled at him.
“Good.” Arthur grappled Christopher, pulling him closer and practically putting him in a headlock with his arm around Christopher’s neck, holding Christopher’s ear close to his mouth. “With luck, some of them might believe you. Now take your wife and your daughters and go somewhere far away. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Get a new cell phone. Don’t access your email from wherever you are.”
“I can’t do that,” Christopher broke Arthur’s hold and shoved him backward. “I’m a doctor!”
“You’ve embarrassed all those people in those photographs,” Arthur said, keeping his voice low. “They’ll come after you for causing them to lose face. They’ll kill you and your family. The girls, Christopher. For the love of God, think of the girls. All the people in those photos, they know they were played. They know what I am.”
Christopher’s pale eyes widened, and he shook his fist, threatening violence. “Everyone knows what you are. You’re a rich asshole who uses England’s money to gallivant about with dictators and terrorists. You’re a traitor.”
Arthur growled, “They’re going to come after me, you jackass, and they’re going to come after you. I’m trying to save your life and your family’s. Run now. Go into hiding, you insufferable prat.”
Treason
GEN sat with Arthur on the living room couch in his penthouse apartment.
Outside the glass wall and over the balcony, Hyde Park rolled out far below them, turning green with new spring growth, and the city of London spread to the horizon.
Arthur had told the staff to go home, so they were alone in the sprawling apartment. Even Pippa and Mr. Fothergill were gone.
Arthur sat on the other end of the couch, his head in his hands, staring at the floor.
Goddamn him.
Ruckus lay at Arthur’s feet, his worried eyes twitching as he looked between the two of them.
When Arthur had shown her what was on his phone’s screen, Gen had marched into that committee room and asked for a continuance until the next week.
Some developments in the case, she had said. Some problems.
Understatement of the fucking year.
The committee, all the people she had met over the last week—David Sumner, Hazel Honeycutt, Ewan Caine, Josceline Bazalgette, Andrew Butterfield, and the rest of them—had fidgeted in their office chairs at the long tables built in a square, looking at each other, confused.
They hadn’t seen the newspapers yet.
Not the gossip pages. The “problem” wasn’t way back in the gossip pages.
The front page of the newspapers had picked it up.
At the committee meeting, while Gen had begged for a continuance, Christopher and his barrister had sat at the other table and stared straight ahead at the art nailed ten feet up on the walls, smirking.
Christopher’s barrister had argued against the continuance, stating that they were ready to go and that Mr. Christopher Finch-Hatten had cleared his busy calendar this week. It was an imposition and unfair for him to close his practice for weeks on end due to the defense not anticipating developments in the case. Patients’ lives might be endangered if Mr. Christopher Finch-Hatten were not allowed to practice.
Gen pointed out that Mr. Christopher Finch-Hatten was employed primarily by the National Health Service and many other plastic surgeons could cover his caseload of matrons and gents with dodgy moles or bags under their eyes.
Finally, the committee chairwoman, the Baroness Hazel Honeycutt, who was the Law Lord they had met at the wedding in Paris, had scowled and told everyone to meet back there on Wednesday to continue the case.
Not a week. Wednesday.
In less than forty-eight hours, the committee would reconvene to hear the case.
They needed a plan in place with documentation before that.
Gen punched a pillow on the couch. She said to Arthur, “Tell me they’re photoshopped.”
Arthur shook his head. He hadn’t said much since she’d found him assaulting Christopher outside the committee chamber and pulled him off.
She said, “Tell me they’re actors or comedians doing impersonations.”
He shook his head again.
“Tell me they’re old chums from school.” Although most of the other people in the photos were decades older than Arthur.
“No,” he croaked, his voice hoarse. “I got access to them through connections made at Le Rosey.”
Gen stared at the pictures on her phone.
The tabs showed twenty-three separate pictures. All of them had Arthur sitting with some of the most ruthless, evil people of the last decade, smiling and drinking.
In one photograph, Arthur was smoking a cigarette.
Gen said, “I didn’t know you smoked.”
He shrugged. “I don’t. You say yes. Whatever they offer, you always say yes.”
In another picture, Arthur was laughing with a terrorist mastermind whom Gen recognized from the TV news. He had been called the very personification of pure evil by the talking heads.
In yet another picture, Arthur was eating a meal with a South American dictator known for his brutality toward his own people. He had wiped out whole villages for their inconvenience when he wanted to build oil pipelines, and he had machine-gunned impoverished children to show that his administration was reducing the number of slums.
Arthur was posed with a glass of wine in his hand, saluting the horrible man and laughing.
Gen asked, “Can you explain this one?”
Arthur glanced at it. “It was necessary.”
“How could this be necessary?”
Arthur combed his hair away from his face with his fingers. “It’s not what I drank in his house, and it’s not what I said. It’s what I left behind.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There was new information about his activities after that picture was taken. He also allowed NGO aid groups into the country. Maxence went in with his group. It saved lives.”
“You need to tell me, right now, if you’re working for the CIA or MI6 or whatever.”
Arthur touched the skin below one silver-blue eye and then his ear. “Of course not. I’m just a drunken degenerate nobleman,” he gestured at the ceiling and walls, “who parties so heartily that it ends up in the tabloid pages. I’m absolutely nothing more.”
Gen got it. Other people might be looking through the windows or listening through hidden microphones.
She grabbed her phone and texted, Can we text?
Arthur flinched when his phone buzzed and read her text off the screen. He shook his head and said, “Worse.”
Dammit. She wasn’t good at this covert stuff.
“We have to talk about it,” she told him. “We have to plan for how to defend your case. Can I say that it’s all lies?”
“You could say that.”
Another non-answering answer, and he still wasn’t looking at her. No eye contact was a huge poker tell for him. He must know his silvery eyes were striking, and he used them whenever he wanted to flirt or influence people.
Gen said, “I’m detecting deception, here.”
Arthur smiled, but pain creased the skin between his eyebrows. “You learned that well.”
“This is isn’t just a lawsuit anymore, Arthur. They’re accusing you of treason.”
He nodded.
“They’ll arrest you and put you in prison for the rest of your life.”
He nodded again.
“These pictures show that you’re a traitor,” she said, trying to provoke him into an answer, any answer. “It looks like you betrayed Britain and the free world and democracy and everything that you said is important to you.”
He shook his head.
“What am I supposed to tell the House of Lords committee?”
“It doesn’t matter what you tell them. They can’t vote for our side. They can’t be seen voting for o
ur side.”
So all that shmoozing at the wedding and the dinner at Spencer House was all for naught as far as the committee’s votes were concerned. Great. “But you didn’t do it.”
He shrugged.
“Tell me if you did it!”
He shrugged again, and his sigh sounded exhausted.
“I can’t defend you if you won’t talk to me!”
He said, “I understand.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I need to think about what to do, Gen.”
“Talk to me.”
He gestured to the windows, the ceiling, and the walls. “I can’t.”
Gen stood up and jammed her fists on her hips. “Fine. Then I have to go to the office. Maybe Octavia has some ideas on how to contain this fiasco. Come on, Ruckus.”
The dog followed her, his leash in his mouth, as Gen grabbed her briefcase and wished like hell there was some way to slam an elevator door.
In the elevator, she jabbed the ground floor button extra hard with her finger, but the damned doors slid closed like normal.
Damn it.
Treason.
Ruckus sat at her feet and whined. He liked his lead fastened just in case he lost his mind and tried to run off. She crouched to clip the leash on his collar.
Of all the fucking possibilities—treason.
By having Gen wear those gloves with the sticky crap on them, Arthur had used her to pass something to ostensibly American people in that dark bar in Paris. Using very clandestine methods, he had gotten something in return.
They had said they were American.
That didn’t mean shit.
They could have been Russian or Serbian or French or working for absolutely anyone, including terrorists or any other country or organization in the world.
Good thing that everything that had happened that whole night was probably covered under attorney-client privilege so she wouldn’t have to testify against Arthur for fucking treason.
Gossip
GEN strode into Serle’s Court Barristers with Ruckus trotting beside her and made a beeline for Octavia’s office. She put Ruckus in her office where she had a little blanket-bed for him because they usually took an office break during their long weekend walks.
“Octavia, I don’t know what to do,” Gen said as she pushed open the door. “My own damn client won’t talk to me.”
“No, but he’ll fuck you, won’t he?” Octavia asked, her face immobile with rage. She was staring at the computer that perched on her enormous, ornate desk that looked like a church altar.
Okay, granted, Octavia’s immobile-with-rage face was dang close to her usual immobile-with-Botox face, but Gen could tell that Octavia was flaming mad.
Gen asked, “What’s going on?”
“Haven’t checked your intra-office email yet, have you?”
“Kind of busy with the my-client-committed-treason thing,” Gen said.
Octavia spun her laptop around. “One of the senior barristers found this on YouTube this morning. You were in public and had no expectation of privacy.”
Shaky cell-phone footage filled the laptop screen. From how pixelated it was, the footage appeared to be zoomed from across a room.
Actually, the footage had been filmed not in a room, but a restaurant.
Lee and Rose were sitting in chairs, and Gen was almost facing the person who had filmed them eating lunch.
Subtitles at the bottom read, Yeah, I banged him.
Panic flashed through Gen, blasting her face with fire. “I can explain.”
But she couldn’t explain, other than the obvious.
The subtitles changed to, I can tell you that he’s six-four and his shoes look like liferafts, but he’s not proportional.
Nope.
Bigger.
Octavia sneered, “How on Earth can you explain divulging the size of your client’s todger?”
Gen shrugged. “Well, it’s not slander.”
“Genevieve!”
This was the least of her worries right now. “And it’s not about the case. It’s not covered by attorney-client privilege. I’d have been in hot water if I’d have told them the size of his bank accounts, not his shoe size.”
“But it wasn’t his shoe size, was it? It was a personal matter that could only be explained if you were sleeping with him. Now, when I tell the other senior barristers that you aren’t fucking him, they will rightly scoff at me.”
Gen sighed. “I’ll send a takedown notice to YouTube.”
“That will not begin to staunch the bleeding.”
“I know.”
“I’ll start asking around at other chambers for a third six-month pupillage. I had such high hopes for you, Gen, but third-sixers don’t take silk, and they aren’t named as judges.”
She would be a low-ranking ambulance-chaser for the rest of her days, if she even got a third six-month pupillage.
Gen sucked up the tears that threatened to burn her eyes. “I know.”
She knew too well.
Oh, God.
She had done the math a thousand times. If she had to do a third six-month underpaid pupillage, her mother would have to be moved to a cheaper nursing home.
Asking Arthur for financial help would be fruitless and cruel. His finances were spelled out in her court documentation. Now that he was almost certainly going to lose the case, he was going to lose absolutely everything. That other “pittance” that he had finally divulged really was a pittance, though he didn’t know what its current value was. It wouldn’t support a middle-class lifestyle for even a year, and Arthur probably didn’t have any real skills or career.
She assumed their engagement was off. She couldn’t imagine a wedding at all anymore, not if he wouldn’t even talk to her about the pictures that appeared to show him committing treason.
No bank would loan Gen money for her mother’s healthcare expenses. Credit cards wouldn’t be enough. Her mother’s house was nearly upside-down in her mortgage, so selling that wouldn’t help.
Gen couldn’t keep her mother at home because Gen needed that third six-month pupillage desperately. If she didn’t become a barrister at all, thousands of pounds would be wasted between the bar course and her undergraduate education, and most of that had to be paid back to the government in loans or to her mother’s accounts.
Gen made it back to her office and closed her door before she wrapped her arms around Ruckus’s neck and sobbed into his white fur.
Ruckus licked her tears with his soft, doggie tongue and leaned against her shoulder.
Settle It #1
ARTHUR sat in his computer cave, leaning back in his chair. The sheer curtains fluttered over the windows, even though those floor-to-ceiling panes were triple-glazed and coated with odd chemicals that the SIS had supplied.
The computer screens looming over the desk were dark. Even his phone was face-down.
Gen would break up with him at the first opportunity. Of course, she would. Who could stand beside a traitor, and a destitute traitor at that?
Nothing in England would keep him here. He could take Ruckus with him. That was a small comfort, but it was a comfort on an otherwise very cold day.
The next few days would be uncomfortable, and after the hearing Wednesday, Arthur would need to go into hiding, too.
Maybe Arthur should go to Africa and help Maxence build schools and dig wells. Grueling physical labor might take his mind off everything he was losing.
The way Arthur had chosen to make the world a better place.
His career.
His identity.
Gen.
Oh, Gen.
He wished he’d spent less time with her naked at his feet and more time with her in his arms, but as always, Arthur could see what people wanted. He knew to say yes so that they would do what he wanted.
And he had wanted her, so he had said yes.
If she hadn’t come to her senses yet, if her friends and pupil mistress ha
dn’t quite convinced her to throw him over yet, he might have one or two more nights with her.
He knew he should run now, that he should walk into that ugly faux Mayan temple in Vauxhall and demand relocation, but if he had one or two more nights with Genevieve, he wanted to wait.
His phone vibrated, nearly crawling across the table.
When Arthur turned it over, the number was one he didn’t recognize.
He answered it. “Yes.”
Elizabeth’s voice said, “You’re compromised.”
“Obviously,” he said. “Am I going to be arrested?”
“We’ve already contacted our counterparts and told them that we’ll relocate you instead. How the hell did this happen?” Her accent was crisp and British with none of her old, soft Swiss slurs. She might be in the office, but phones are never secure.
Arthur said, “I can only imagine that my brother’s amateur sleuth stumbled upon someone with real information who wanted to blow my cover.”
“It’s bloody awful.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“The extraction team is on their way.”
“No.” Arthur was on his feet in his small, dark office before he realized it. “No. I’m not leaving until Wednesday.”
“Your barrister can plead your case in your absence.”
“I can’t imagine that those loyal British lords and ladies would decide the case in my favor in any circumstance.”
“Then it truly doesn’t matter. We’ll relocate you this afternoon.”
God, no. “Not until Wednesday after the hearing.”
“They’re coming after you. The chatter has already increased.”
“I will make my own security arrangements. I used them last weekend.” He would have to call that Dieter Schwarz and convince him to free up a few operators immediately.
“Von Hannover’s adjunct paramilitary force?”
“I assume they’re reliable?” he asked.
“We have people in there.”
Arthur took a slow breath to avoid stuttering or gasping in shock. “You’ve infiltrated a private mercenary force? Or it is a front?”
“It’s not a front. Some of their operators are former MI6 officers and UK Special Forces,” she said, laughing.
Hard Liquor: Runaway Billionaires: Arthur Duet #2 Page 14
