“WHAT?”
Home sweet home.
The next day, Connor and I finally had an opportunity for another date night. I’d come over early, mostly so Maria would spoil me with her delicious cooking, and was there when he came home from work.
He joined me where I was reading by the window.
“Did you want to go out tonight?”
“Actually, if it’s okay with you, I’d kind of prefer to just stay in.”
“Don’t want to risk being bitten by a black widow?”
“Something like that.”
We spent the perfect night together, for an old married couple anyway. We started with food, of course. Shrimp scampi linguini followed by gooey-in-the-middle chocolate fondant with ice cream. I stole the last bite of Connor’s dessert, much to his disgust, and he let me get away with it, much to my delight. Then we were both so stuffed that we decided to read for a while before getting amorous. He read Advanced Strategies of Close Personal Protection Operatives, and I read a funny action adventure about a guy flossing intergalactic camel’s teeth.
Then he made me forget what I was reading. Made me forget everything except the pleasure of being in his arms.
When I woke up from a light doze, he’d gone around and collected the clothes I’d flung onto the floor and put them away. He’d also disappeared. So I stole his shirt, went to the kitchen, and made us a midnight snack using a family recipe Harper had told me about: grilled cheese sandwiches with jalapeños. I found him in his office and lured him back to bed with the sandwiches… and my slapdash job of buttoning up the shirt.
Snuggled into his side, I yawned contentedly. “Thanks for a wonderful night.”
He raised an eyebrow a smidgen. “You really enjoy this kind of thing, hey? Does that mean it could be classified as a romantic date?”
“Yep.”
“In that case. I suppose it’s only fair that I tell you what those three things are.”
I shot up in bed. “Really?”
“Sure. One is how I came to work with the Taste Society. One is, well, about Sophia, the woman who died. And the last is whatever you’d like to know—barring confidentiality agreements I have to honor. Your personal choice.”
I was so curious that if I were a cat, I would’ve been in severe danger. “Can I pick one now?” I barely dared to breathe while waiting for his answer.
“No. Because despite what you just said about tonight being wonderful, I figured out a safe date to take you on.” He opened his nightstand drawer and pulled out two plane tickets to Australia.
My eyes latched onto them, my heart so full it could burst. I’d wanted to go home for so long but hadn’t been able to afford to, especially after the firebomb in our apartment had eaten up my savings.
“You survived okay without me there for twenty-eight years, so I figure it’s a safe place to take you. And I know you’ve been longing to fly back since you got here…”
I threw my arms around him. “It’s perfect, thank you.”
He pulled me closer, wrapping me in the strength and security of his embrace. “My pleasure.”
I grinned into his chest. “You might not be saying that after you meet my parents.”
From the Author
I hope you loved POISON AND PREJUDICE. That way I can rub it in my brother’s smug face since he scoffed at me when I first started writing at the tender age of sixteen. If you want to help me make sure he gets his comeuppance, take a minute to leave me a review or mention this book to a friend who’ll also enjoy it. That’ll show him.
As a small token of my appreciation for everyone who already did this for other books in the series, I drew you this picture of my brother devouring my books in secret. Enjoy!
My brother secretly reading my books and loving them
Acknowledgments
Allow me to be a little cliché here and give a huge shout-out to my readers. You guys have literally changed my life for the better (as long as no longer needing to wear pants counts as better). Thank you.
To my ever-faithful beta team who does a fabulous job of both tearing me down and cheering me up: Tess, John, Rosie, Bec, James, Vicki, Naomi, and Mum. Your feedback is invaluable. Special thanks to each of you for the brainstorming help on this book or series.
Thanks also to my ever-nitpicking proofreaders and final pass editors at Victory Editing. And I don’t mean that as a criticism. Nitpicking is exactly what I look for in an editor, and you’re very sweet about it :).
Husband-dear, thank you for putting up with me without resorting to either poison or prejudice. I love you.
And to God, thanks for placing in me an irrational urge to keep writing novels so that I would eventually cotton on and give this author thing a shot.
Excerpt from DUTY AND THE BEAST
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 d
umbfounded 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 company 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 w
in 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 have 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.
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