Hard Liquor: Runaway Billionaires: Arthur Duet #2

by Blair Babylon

  Maxence dropped his hand but didn’t look away from Tatiana’s eyes.

  It was like watching a snake entrance prey.

  “Hey,” Arthur said to Max. “Focus.”

  Max glanced at Caz and smiled. “Gen, come over here. We’ll talk while these two work the room.”

  Gen had been chatting with the bartender because she was always friendly and personable to everyone, and she side-stepped toward Maxence.

  Max said something to Gen that Arthur couldn’t hear over the crowd’s muttering and the string quartet playing shrill strings in the corner, and she looked up at him.

  Damn him, Arthur saw the instant that she fell under his influence. Her sweet eyes glazed over.

  “Gen,” Arthur said, moving closer. “I’ll be right back.”

  “What? Oh, yes. I’ll be right here.” She looked at her drink. “I think I’ve had too many of these.”

  “How many have you had?” Arthur asked her.

  “I’m not sure.”

  The bartender called over her, “One.”

  Gen frowned. “Really?”

  Casimir slapped Maxence’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “Seriously, cut it out with Gen.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Max said.

  “I’ll hold your arms back while Arthur takes his first shot. Come on, Arthur. He’ll behave himself.” Caz circled his finger in the air, and security guys closed around Gen, Maxence, and Tatiana Butorin, who was still wobbly on her heels.

  Arthur didn’t like leaving her alone at the party with just Max and a few of his less-than-professional bodyguards, but Casimir had some sort of a plan worked out.

  At the first knot of people, Casimir walked right up to them, towing Arthur. “Hello, Gerry and Mei Lei! How are you? You remember our friend Arthur Finch-Hatten, Lord Severn, don’t you? Yes? Wonderful. Yes, he’s recently defeated that terrible lawsuit.”

  Gerry and Mei Lei Oakes were the Baron and Baroness of Lincolnshire, a respectable barony with deep roots. Arthur had been friendly with them, but they had few people in common.

  Casimir added, “So unbecoming, don’t you think?”

  The couple was still looking at Arthur out of the sides of their eyes, their lips pursed, only pretending to accept Arthur back into society after seeing him pictured with terrorists and the word Traitor! emblazoned above his head.

  Arthur would have to accept this. People would be polite—everyone was British, after all—but he was tarnished in a thoroughly unredeemable manner.

  Again, wistfully, if only those pictures had been of hookers and blow.

  At least Tatiana’s endorsements would be propagated through the underworld, and he wouldn’t be assassinated as a spy. There was that. He and Gen would be safe to raise their family, even if they were social pariahs.

  Casimir watched the Baron and Baroness of Lincolnshire. He told them, “Arthur will retain the earldom and his title, you know. He’s still the Earl of Severn.”

  Mei Lei nodded, entirely unconvinced, but Gerry wouldn’t even nod to Arthur.

  British upper-class society is a harder sell than Russian oligarchs and Turkish warlords, evidently. Under the pinch of rejection, pride rose in his chest that British people were not so easily fooled.

  Casimir van Amsberg was Dutch, and even though he certainly had a great deal of social cachet, he didn’t have the clout to ingratiate Arthur with British society. It should end now before it became embarrassing for all those involved.

  Arthur said, “Casimir, they’re serving hors d’oeuvres by the stairs. I’m famished. Very long day, you know. Thank you for your time, my lord and my lady. Casimir, shall we?”

  “Not just yet,” a woman’s voice said behind him.

  Arthur turned.

  Gen was standing behind him, a tight smile on her face, with Lady Josceline Bazalgette and Baroness Honeycutt.

  Lady Bazalgette had spoken, and she stepped right up to Gerry and Mei Lei. “Our Arthur, here, has had a spot of trouble these last few years.” She gestured to the Baroness Honeycutt and leaned in toward Mei Lei. “Hazel and I heard his case today in a House of Lords committee. I can’t divulge anything, of course. It’s a sensitive matter.”

  “Of course,” Mei Lei said and leaned toward her, more interested.

  Lady Bazalgette said, “There have been many fabrications to which Arthur has not been at liberty to respond, due to the lawsuit.”

  “Oh,” Gerry said, his fuzzy, orange eyebrows rising on his face.

  “Some rather amateurish Photoshopping, if you look closely.”

  The pictures had not been altered with graphic photo-manipulation software, but Lady Bazalgette was using an interesting attack. Arthur settled in to watch.

  Baroness Honeycutt gestured with her drink. “Arthur is an upstanding British citizen. Anything else said about him is a lie and possibly slander. Arthur is one of us.”

  Gerry and Mei Lei exchanged a glance with raised eyebrows. Communication passed between them like electricity.

  Lord Gerry Oakes, the Baron of Lincolnshire, extended his hand to Arthur. “I’m pleased that your troubles appear to be over, Lord Severn. I’m sure we’ll have the pleasure of seeing much more of you, now.”

  “Thank you, Lord Lincolnshire.”

  After handshakes, Arthur whispered to Gen, “Thank you.”

  “Oh, don’t thank me yet,” she said. “Hazel and Josceline are here to squire you around the room for the rest of the evening. You’re never going to get over to that shrimp bowl.”

  Indeed, Lady Bazalgette and Baroness Honeycutt were strict taskmistresses, shepherding Arthur from group to group, re-introducing him and smoothing his way back into society.

  Gen stood with him and the ladies and said, “How do you do?” when appropriate, but she allowed her surrogates to speak for her.

  Genevieve might have been an impressive British spymistress in the Great Game, given half a chance. She certainly was learning to play the British game well.

  Hours later, they were called to go into dinner.

  Arthur tucked Gen’s soft hand under his arm, and they walked to the area with dinner tables with Lady Josceline Bazalgette and Baroness Hazel Honeycutt, who had insisted that they sit together, despite many invitations to host Arthur and Gen that night.

  Just another bit of social proof that Gen had orchestrated. When a Law Lord says that you didn’t commit treason, you didn’t commit treason.

  Arthur smiled as they walked in and covered Gen’s hand with his.

  After some dinner and a little dancing—always a little dancing—they would go back to their London penthouse for the evening, where he could express his appreciation in a satisfactory manner.

  Gen smiled up at him, perhaps aware of what he was thinking, but probably not.

  If she had known what he was planning, she might not have been able to meet his eyes in this crowded dining room.

  It was later in the evening, after Arthur’s fifth or sixth very light vodka tonic, when he was leaning on the bar and pretending to be a bit more in his cups than he was, when another woman leaned against the bar beside him.

  Some people, you have known for so long in your life that you know the way they displace the air around them.

  Arthur didn’t need to look up. “Hello, Elizabeth. We need to talk.”

  She sighed, looking off into the crowd. Her platinum and gold hair swirled into a sophisticated bun on the back of her head. “Tomorrow afternoon, the deer park?”

  Arthur sipped his drink, wishing it were stronger. “Exactly what I was going to suggest.”

  Arthur’s Dark Mistress, Again

  ARTHUR waited among the trees, watching the deer gambol in the high springtime grass. Sunlight washed across the field, warming his shoulders and back.

  Elizabeth was strolling across the field toward him, high boots stomping on the grass and small shrubs.

  He looked around the meadow, keeping an eye on Ifan and his grandson G
eorge, who had come home for the occasion. They were sitting in tree stands with spotting scopes, glassing them and holding long hunting rifles.

  If there were other people in the trees or on the hills around them, Arthur doubted he would spot them. Elizabeth could call in Special Air Services snipers if she chose to. Arthur had worked with them occasionally, and he had nothing but respect for their skills and professionalism.

  Elizabeth reached him. “Hello, Arthur.”

  He wasn’t in the mood, and he didn’t need to reiterate what he knew. “You burned me.”

  “It was necessary,” Elizabeth said.

  “You were going to ask me for the ultimate sacrifice.”

  “Yes.”

  “After everything I’ve given, my whole life, my body and blood.”

  “Sometimes, it’s necessary.”

  “I need an explanation.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re a soldier in this war, and soldiers don’t need explanations. We don’t do quid pro quo.”

  “I’m an intelligence officer with contacts and access that no one else on Earth may have. Now, why would you burn someone like that?”

  Elizabeth sighed. “Christopher was too close. His private investigators discovered that you were passing information. He came to us to inform on you as a spy for a foreign intelligence service.”

  Arthur mused about Christopher’s motivations. Yes, if Arthur had been arrested and convicted of treason, Christopher would have inherited the earldom.

  Christopher might have done it out of patriotism. Arthur couldn’t discount that.

  Elizabeth said, “We told him to back off, that you were under surveillance and could not harm the empire. He wouldn’t. He was like that rabid Jack Russell Terrier of yours.”

  Yes, Ruckus didn’t like Elizabeth, either. The one time she had come to Arthur’s apartment, they’d had to lock the infuriated dog in a bedroom.

  She said, “He had latched onto the idea that you were spying for the Russian oligarchs, said that you had spent too long with their children at school and then at their dachas as an adult. He’s obsessive, isn’t he?”

  Arthur shrugged. “He has never retreated from the idea that he ‘deserves’ the earldom somehow, in spite of all our laws.”

  “He was insistent about hounding our tip lines and the MI5 officer who had visited him to take his information. He seemed to think that your treason was his ticket to the earldom, ranting about fairness and justice.”

  While Arthur could envision that, he automatically suspected anything Elizabeth said as manipulation. Consummate intelligence officers do that. You can’t trust what they say about anything. Arthur was no fool when it came to Elizabeth.

  She said, “He threatened to go public if we didn’t do something. We had to neutralize him.”

  “So you sent Bentley with the photographs.” The ultimate betrayal.

  “We have contacts at all the newspapers,” Elizabeth explained. “If Christopher had tried to dump the photos on a reporter, we would have had him for espionage and quietly sent him to prison. Instead, he took out ads that didn’t trip our monitors. Those pictures should never have been published. You should never have been burned. The pictures were bait, but Christopher went around the trap.”

  Air rushed into Arthur’s lungs even as he admonished himself to believe nothing that she said. “So you didn’t intend to burn me.”

  “No. We meant to entice Christopher into treason and put him in prison before you were burned. That way, we could put an end to your nuisance lawsuit so you could concentrate on your job.”

  And yet, she had been going to kill Arthur and float his body down the Thames. “Then why would you ask me to die for the service?”

  “You were burned. Your assets were in jeopardy. We needed those assets to stay in place. If you died as a traitor, your assets would not be blown and would stay in place. If you lived as an outed MI6 spy, everyone you had been known to meet with would be suspected as a traitor to their organization. We all stand ready to die for our assets. You nearly had to.”

  “Am I so expendable?”

  “We all are.”

  It was logical, but they should have never given Christopher those pictures. “Christopher is a British citizen. You shouldn’t have tried to entrap him.”

  “We coordinated with MI5.”

  Which made it legal, if not ethical. Arthur sighed. “He’s still my brother. What have you done with him?”

  “He and his family have been relocated with new identities, as you requested.”

  “I’ll need proof.” Trust but verify, right?

  Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “I’ll have some video footage drummed up, and you need to stop by Vauxhall to get another phone. I need to be able to contact you. This skulking around is ridiculous.”

  Arthur said, “I’ll need to be reassigned to another case minder.”

  “But Arthur! You’re my best boy. We’ve worked together for over a decade!”

  “Don’t make me use my contacts to insist upon it.”

  She stomped off through the grass, muttering and scaring the deer with her flailing about.

  The deer wheeled and stampeded across the meadow, running through the tall grass and sparkling afternoon sunlight.

  Arthur waited until she was out of the clearing before he started the hike back to Spencer House.

  No snipers. Interesting. Maybe she had been telling him the truth.

  Ifan and George met him on the trail, and they hiked back in companionable quiet.

  Ah, this was where Arthur belonged: at Spencer House, ensconced in his history and the fight for England’s future and with Gen waiting for him to return.

  Maybe pregnant with the future Earl of Severn.

  Even the best spy wouldn’t be able to uncover that secret for a while.

  Visiting Momma #3

  GEN took the next day off of work, damn it.

  After the hearing in the House of Lords, the reception at the Dutch Embassy where Arthur was wedged back into society, and the two unbearable hours that she had spent freaking out at Spencer House while he went solo out to the deer park to have it out with Elizabeth, Gen needed a goddamn day off.

  She spent most of it reading to her mother, who seemed to be even more frail than the last time Gen had seen her. Her breathing sounded raspy, and her movements were weaker.

  The breathing was the worst part.

  The nurse confirmed that her mother had lost almost two kilos, which was about four pounds, no matter how much nutrition they squeezed into her stomach, but her breathing was the problem.

  The nurse patted Gen’s hand. “This is not a good sign. You should prepare yourself.”

  Gen didn’t want to prepare herself, but her mother had always stressed to her that she needed to be strong, to be able to take care of herself and any children no matter what happened to her, just like when her mother had been widowed when Gen had been a teenager. Her mother had insisted that Gen not rely on her looks, men, or people who make promises. Pull yourself up by your chubby little bootstraps and make sure you’ll be all right, her mother had insisted.

  Perhaps her mother’s tough love was pretty harsh by most people’s parenting standards, but Gen was strong enough to survive. There was that. Gen would do things differently someday, but we all make all new mistakes with our own children.

  Gen held her mother’s hand that day and read books to her, finishing the mystery that they were reading.

  When her mother’s breathing slowed, Gen held her hand and spoke softly to her.

  She called Arthur, who arrived out of breath after a sprint down the convalescent home’s corridor, his eyes wild that he might not have made it in time.

  They sat with her mother most of the evening.

  Rose and Lee brought them take-away curry and sat with them a while.

  Arthur held Gen. She could feel him shaking even with his arms wrapped around her, or maybe that was just her.

  Gen held her m
other’s hand until her mother didn’t take another breath sometime around nine o’clock.

  She didn’t cry until they got home to the London penthouse, and she didn’t need to say anything.

  If anyone understood the loneliness of losing one’s mother, Arthur did, and he held her tightly while she sobbed.

  Obtaining Tenancy

  THE day after that, Gen sat at her little pupil desk in her closet-sized office. Storm clouds rolled outside the window, but no rain had splattered against that little window yet. The towel was ready to wedge in there, just in case.

  But she was fine, goddamn it. She was fine.

  She had locked the door, however, and Ruckus slept at her feet. Arthur hadn’t wanted her to go to the office, but she thought she needed the normalcy of work to take her mind off everything for a few hours.

  People grieve in different ways.

  Someone banged on Gen’s door.

  Ruckus lifted his head off Gen’s foot, her skin suddenly cool and moist without his face drooling on it anymore.

  A woman’s voice yelled, “Genevieve! I know you’re in there! You checked in with Celestia this morning! Open up!”

  Yeah, that was Octavia, damn it. Gen just wanted to drink her coffee without having to deal with Octavia and the rest of the office. She wanted to sit at her rickety desk and write briefs, carve them down until they were an arid argument that no one could refute.

  She hadn’t picked up fresh cream for Octavia’s coffee in about a week, either. The old stuff in the dorm-sized fridge had probably turned to cottage cheese.

  Octavia rattled her door. “Genevieve!”

  “Coming.” Gen trudged over to the door.

  Ruckus chuffed and went back to sleep.

  She turned the bright brass latch on her door that Arthur had had installed when she had first taken his case. It was silly to be fond of door locks, but she was.

  Octavia pushed open the door as soon as Gen unlocked it. She said, “You’re in.”

  “I’m in what, deep shit for screwing a client?” Gen asked.

  “Oh, yes. That, too. But the senior barristers voted this morning. You’re in. You’re being offered tenancy.”