The Professional Read online

  I turned. She turned out to be an instantly familiar, impossibly tall blonde that could only be pop singer extraordinaire Sarah Summers. Sarah Summers who I supposedly worked for during her 1991 tour.

  “Cora!” Sarah Summers said as she approached, followed by a small posse of friends. She gave Cora a hug, and I almost laughed at Cora’s dumbstruck face over her shoulder. “I’m so glad you could come!”

  “Thanks for inviting me,” Cora said with unusual enthusiasm. “You have a beautiful apartment.”

  Summers waved a hand. “Oh this ol’ thing? Look who I’m talking to! Every time I walk by the Harmont Manor I can’t believe you actually live there! You have to give me a tour sometime.”

  Cora’s eyes bugged a little, but she kept her smile strong. “Of course! My family’s coming soon, but once they leave I’m all yours.”

  I couldn’t help it; a chuckle escaped me. It was adorable to see Cora act starstruck. It was so opposite her personality. Unfortunately it was loud enough for both of them to turn toward me.

  “Ms. Summers,” I said quickly, “it’s nice to see you again. I’m Alex Flynn. I was one of your bodyguards on the 1991 tour.”

  Sarah’s eyes flicked to Cora whose face was impassive. I could see the dilemma on her face. On one hand, I’d never in my life met Sarah Summers and she had no idea who I was. On the other, she probably had dozens of shifting bodyguards that changed frequently and without warning. They must get pretty faceless after a while. She also probably had people approaching her all the time that had met her once years ago and expected her to remember. I was sure she knew how to make a person feel remembered. Whether she was going to extend that courtesy to me was the question.

  The answer came soon enough: “Of course, Alex! It’s so nice to see you again.”

  I grinned ear-to-ear, mostly at the annoyance on Cora’s face. “It’s fantastic to see you as well, Ms. Summers. I hope life is treating you well.”

  We exchanged pleasantries for a few moments as well as two people pretending to know one another could before Sarah Summers took her leave to say hello to other guests.

  “Does my story check out?” I asked Cora as Sarah Summers sashayed away.

  “Barely,” she muttered.

  “Why are you so suspicious of me?” I asked her. Risky to call her out on being suspicious of my lies, but I couldn’t help myself.

  She gave me a whithering look that still managed to be playful. “I just want to make sure my mother’s getting her money’s worth.”

  “Oh I assure you. She is. You just can’t tell because you never do anything dangerous.”

  “What are you talking about?” She laughed. “I do dangerous things. You’ve only known me for four days.”

  “So last week you were whipping your Lambo across the Brooklyn Bridge? Or going to a rave in a basement in Jersey?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be an asshole. Nobody owns a car in New York.”

  I looked around the room. “I’ll bet a few of these people do and you’re definitely as rich as most of them.”

  “So because I’m not an asshole using my mother’s money to endanger the public means I don’t take any risks?”

  I smiled. “Fine, name a risk you’ve taken in the past week.”

  “I tried to sneak out of the house today.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, that doesn’t count.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “And why doesn’t it? I had to come up with a lie, race to the front door, sneak past Scott-”

  “He let you go,” I pointed out.

  She glared at me and continued, “-and get here on time.”

  I considered her for a moment and then shook my head again. “Nope, sorry. Doesn’t count.”

  “What do you mean it doesn’t count?”

  “Which part of any of that was risky?” I leaned back against the bar and regarded her seriously as she started to protest. “No, really think about it. OK, you lied, but what was the worst that could have happened if I didn’t believe you? I was going to figure out you sneaked out once Jackie set me straight, so you were never really going to ‘get away with it’. And like I said, you didn’t sneak past Scott. He let you go. Again, not really making a case for his employment. As for racing to the front door? Cora, you’re an adult, not a teenager. Risks are supposed to get more intense as you get older. Plus, I caught you so, as risks go, it’s a little half-assed”

  She crossed her arms and regarded me coolly. “OK so I don’t lead a life fraught with peril. That’s the exact reason I don’t need a bodyguard. Besides, I like my life. I like school and I like the path I’ve chosen which, by the way, is considered a major risk by my family’s standards. We don’t all have to be cocaine cowboys jumping out of helicopters or smashing bad guys to have a meaningful life.”

  “So what does make a meaningful life?”

  The question caught her off guard and she didn’t answer right away. She looked out the window, across Sarah Summers’ pool deck, and out at the city below. I held my breath, waiting for an answer to the question that I hadn’t realized had been starting to consume me.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. The breath left me, disappointed. “But it can’t be any of this,” she said, gesturing around at the apartment.

  “Are you sure about that?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I live in a house worth ten times this place and it doesn’t seem to add any extra ‘meaning’ to my life. It adds complications more than anything, honestly.”

  “Like me?” I asked.

  She smiled slightly. “Yeah, you’ve been a massive pain in the ass since you showed up.”

  “Glad to be of service.”

  Her smile matched mine and in that brief moment, the wall between us crumbled at its foundations. In it there was a promise of something more.

  “Oh my God, Cora!” Diana ran up between us and grabbed Cora’s arm, shattering the moment. “Derek just told me my lipstick makes me look like a corpse. It’s completely over between us.”

  I stepped back to let the girls talk, but Diana, who looked as though she might have had something to drink, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me closer.

  “You need to beat up my ex.”

  Yeah, no. “That wasn’t exactly what I was hired for,” I said.

  “Can I hire you?”

  “No.”

  Diana looked like she was going to complain rather loudly, and Cora must have sensed it too because she pulled her friend away from the bar and outside onto the patio. I probably should have stayed put, but curiosity compelled me to follow.

  Outside, the wind whipped against the building, but it was warm and the night was hot and the New York lights lit the patio in Technicolor. Nobody was in the gleaming infinity pool, but several couples lounged around on deck furniture or looked over the balcony at the six hundred foot drop to the street below.

  Cora took Diana over to an empty chair and sat her down, talking to her in hushed tones. I stood a safe distance away, close enough to keep an eye on Cora, but far enough to prevent Diana from dragging me into the conversation. To amuse myself, I wondered how I would break into Sarah Summers’ penthouse if I were so inclined. I’d bet Saul fifty bucks that I could paraglide onto this patio. But to do that, I’d have to jump off a taller building…

  “Alex?”

  Cora’s voice was almost in my ear by the time I realized she was calling me.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Diana’s a bit drunk,” she said. “I’m taking her home.”

  “Already?” I asked. “We just got here.”

  Cora cocked her head. “Don’t tell me you’re enjoying this?”

  I shrugged. “What’s not to enjoy? It’s a rich kid party. Soon they’re going to start getting really drunk and start destroying things. That’s high quality entertainment if you ask me.”

  She snorted. “Well, I’ll be sure to tell my mother that you didn’t want to leave.”

  �
�Why will you be talking to your mother about any of this?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You sure you won’t be telling her?”

  She still didn’t quite believe me. I crossed my arms. I’d play. “All right, fine. Since you won’t let it die, I will tell her everything-” Her eyebrows shot up and she opened her mouth to argue, but I continued. “- if you don’t take a risk right now.”

  “A risk?” she repeated. “What kind of risk?”

  “That’s up to you,” I said. “But it can’t be half-assed.”

  She considered me for a moment before taking a step forward, than another, and then another until she had to look up to meet my eyes. She was so close I could smell the perfume she’d dabbed behind her ears. She leaned up and whispered in my ear, “Then let’s test your abilities, shall we?”

  I was just about to asked what the hell that was supposed to mean when she kissed me lightly on the cheek and said, “I can’t swim.” Then she turned and took a running dive directly into the infinity pool.

  For the second time that night, Cora Harmont had left me speechless. Then I laughed so loudly that all the guests not looking at her in the water turned to stare.

  Then I realized she wasn’t lying about not being able to swim.

  I ran after her, almost slipping on the wet deck and breaking my neck. I managed to make it to the pool and dived next to her flailing shape. If she wasn’t lying than she was a pretty damn good actress because she really looked like she was drowning. The minute I grabbed hold of her waist, she clutched my shoulders, threatening to sink us both. By now, the party-goers weren’t just staring, but actively trying to help. Someone threw a life preserver to me. I let Cora grasp the floating ring and slowly guided it toward the shallow end of the pool.

  The going was still difficult even after we could touch the bottom. Cora’s dress and my suit were so waterlogged it weighed both of us down so that we could barely move through the waist-deep water.

  “Cora! What are you doing!” Diana seemed to have sobered up slightly at the excitement of watching her best friend almost die, maybe even briefly forgotten about her feud with Derek.

  “I’m OK, Diana,” Cora called, laughing as she tripped over her dress and crashed down into the water, clinging to my arm as she brought me down with her.

  “Watch it!” I shouted, spitting out water as I tried to haul both of us back to a standing position. Now that we weren’t going to die, most of the onlookers moved on to other, more important things.

  “What were you thinking?” Diana demanded from the side of the pool. She looked like she wanted to help, but was completely incapable of doing anything.

  “It was an accident,” Cora said, still laughing.

  I had to chuckle too, remembering her straight up dive into the deep end. Diana wasn’t going to believe that unless she was completely obliterated and, judging from the look on her face, she didn’t.

  I helped Cora up the steps of the pool, the both of us still laughing like idiots. The wind had changed after our dunk in the pool and the summer evening didn’t seem quite so warm anymore. I took off my jacket and rang it out as Cora tried to do similarly with individual parts of her dress. Diana disappeared and then reappeared with two thick towels and we dried as best we could before escaping inside.

  Our wet, bedraggled forms drew some appraising looks of disapproval from some of the guests, but nobody commented. I didn’t know if that was because of Cora’s royal heritage or because they thought we’d leave quicker if nobody started a scene.

  “We should stay,” Cora whispered in my ear. “Drip on some of this perfect white furniture.”

  I grinned at the thought, but Diana was firmly escorting the both of us towards the door. She looked like she would have liked nothing more than to disappear into the carpet.

  The ride down in the elevator was silent with Diana fuming and Cora and me trying to stifle our laughter. After a minute of struggling to keep it together, both of us started to die again, now at Diana’s annoyance. By the time we reached the lobby, she had to laugh too.

  At the street, Diana got a separate cab and Cora and I got into another. The silence thickened in Diana’s absence. I watched the lights of Midtown flash by as we inched through the evening traffic. I tried not to think about Cora. Think about the Crown. Think about the mission. Think about the prestige.

  We didn’t speak a word during the cab ride. I paid the driver and we walked down the alleyway through the private entrance past Dan, snoozing at his post, across the back patio. At the door, Cora stopped and turned to me.

  “Was that risky enough for you?”

  I consider the question. “Can you really not swim?” I asked.

  “Not a stroke. A minute longer and I would have been dead,” she said, smiling. “Thanks for saving me.”

  I smiled back. “The pleasure was all mine, Princess.”

  The smiles dropped from our faces as we stood, still dripping, face to face in the darkness of the patio. This was a bad idea all around. That thought still didn’t stop me from leaning down and kissing her.

  She pressed against me, warm despite the chill, smelling like hickory and summertime. I slipped my tongue into her mouth and hers danced into mine, grasping my waist with her hands. I pulled her closer, one hand on her shoulder, the other on her chin, joining us together in the darkness. All thoughts of my plan slipped away, all thoughts of the Crown, of my future, of the lies I’d told, disappeared from my mind as Cora became mine in the shadow of the manor and the towers around us.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Cora

  I lay flat on my back staring up at my ceiling and wondering just what in the hell had come over me last night. I’d jumped in a pool, dripped water all over Sarah Summers’ beautiful apartment, and, most shockingly, I’d made out with Alex Flynn on the patio like a teenager afraid of waking up her parents after prom.

  I squeezed my eyes shut at the memories, hoping that I might be able to erase them from my brain with enough concentrated effort. Nope, not happening. They were scarred there forever, for better or worse. I groaned and rolled over, hoping to go back to sleep so I could forget for just another couple hours.

  That also didn’t happen. My brain was too active to fall back to sleep. All I could remember was the feel of Alex’s lips on mine, of his hard, muscular body pressed against me. It had felt perfect. For a moment. Then I’d woken up and realized exactly what I was doing, what a mistake I was making. I’d run away, fled inside and left him standing, wet from saving me, on the patio alone.

  Was I a terrible person? No, I told myself, Alex is. He’d goaded me into doing something stupid. He didn’t know you’d jump into the pool like that, a little voice inside me whispered. No, but I’m sure he was thrilled that I did. So he could be the hero.

  And he was.

  And then I’d left him outside, wet and alone.

  I checked my phone for the time. It was nine o’clock, way past my normal waking hour. I rolled out of bed and cautiously approached the door, listening at the crack for signs of movement. It was quiet. Too quiet. I pushed the door open and peered around the corner into the living room. Alex wasn’t there. Maybe he was sleeping?

  With a quick glance around, I approached his door and listened, trying to hear footfalls or maybe faint snores.

  “Good morning.” Alex’s voice came from the other side of the room and I lurched away from the door. Of course he’d come upstairs to find me listening at his door. How much more embarrassing could it get? Wait, no. Don’t answer that.

  “Alex!” I half-shrieked then caught myself. “Alex,” I said as formally as I could barefoot and in a nightgown. “You’re up.” An obvious statement that didn’t give him much to go on; he just stood there and looked at me. An awkward tension threatened to descend. I could feel it beginning to drip over my shoulders and leak down my back.

  “I’m staying in the house today,” I said, moving away from his door and into the kitchen where I started
to prepare a pot of coffee. “So you do whatever you want.”

  He was quiet and I could feel his eyes on the back of my head. They seemed to say, Seriously? We’re not going to talk about this? No, Alex. No, we are not. We are going to pretend that last night’s little incident was part of a highly elaborate fever dream brought on by bad champagne and whatever toxic chlorine Sarah Summers used in her pool.

  I poured my coffee into a thermos and brushed through the living room where Alex sat on the couch pretending to watch a TV that wasn’t on. We didn’t make eye contact. Kill. Me. Now.

  It was a horrifying paradox - stay in the house and risk bumping into Alex around every corner or leave and be forced to walk side-by-side with him wherever I went. I briefly considered going to Diana’s house to hide, but the thought of him sitting outside her door gave me more anxiety than I’d cared to mention. No, I was housebound until I decided to be an adult and talk to him about it. So a while.

  I tried to return to my hiding spot on the third floor, but found that Jackie’s occupying force had moved up a level to invade it. Thankfully, that meant they were done with the second floor and I took up residence there. I had to admit, the place did look a hell of a lot nicer.

  Finding a new bed to flop onto, I let my mind roam, trying to think of something else other than Alex and the kiss I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to take back. My mind went to my family, arriving tomorrow whether I wanted them to or not. That wasn’t any better of a topic. I went back to Alex.

  He was an odd man, different from any I’d ever met. He wore his idiosyncrasies proudly, like medals on his lapel. It was in his step, light, like he perpetually walked on the balls of his feet. It was in his deft touch, gentle yet firm. And in the way he talked with confident authority, yet was unafraid to joke and laugh and make a fool of himself just to make me smile.

  I remembered Sarah Summers’ bodyguards last night, thought back to my mother’s at home and the few I’d occasionally had watching me over my lifetime. If it wasn’t for his resume, I’d have thought Alex had decided to try this job as a lark after a decade as a fast-talking carnival barker. It certainly would explain some things - although not how he managed to look more comfortable in a full suit than most men could in a t-shirt and shorts.