Читать онлайн книгу «The Willful Wife» автора Suzanne Simms
The Willful Wife
Suzanne Simms
THE MAN: Rugged private investigator Mathis Hazard.THE MISSION: Pose as the estranged spouse of beautiful hotel owner Desiree Stratford - for investigative purposes only, of course.POSSIBLE COMPLICATION: Inability to keep his mind - not to mention his hands - off said Desiree.As soon as the once-reluctant detective Mathis Hazard got a look at lovely Desiree Stratford, he suddenly became a lot more eager to get to the bottom of all the weird goings-on at her hotel. And what better way to proceed than to pretend to be Desiree's husband?Yes, he knew what a tough job it would be - t would probably take twenty-four-hour-a-day, one-on-one surveillance. But hey, a man had to do what a man had to do… .
“Wife?” (#u93ba7261-df57-524c-81e8-85329779a454)Letter to Reader (#u587347e7-e6a4-5a41-b0e8-a8c25b4f28d4)Title Page (#u58f62101-ce89-540e-bb0b-df942faf58c8)About the Author (#ue9503cde-dd2e-5c41-8a31-78bf620c3384)Chapter One (#u938b8303-a374-5f60-bdbf-9c4e8077816e)Chapter Two (#u78f0e6ba-2e30-5e06-a865-d45f25b86170)Chapter Three (#u2ca0d1fa-fa45-54b2-b348-a99910b430e3)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)A Word About Sapphires (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“Wife?”
Desiree choked out, as she speared the man with her eyes.
Mathis Hazard didn’t even have the good grace to appear sheepish or apologetic. “Ex-wife,” he corrected. “Well, almost.”
Her voice rose half an octave. “Almost?”
“We’ve been separated.”
Desiree continued to stare at him. “Have we?”
Mathis was, apparently, a teller of tall tales. “But the divorce hasn’t gone through yet.” He grinned at her. “We’re still hoping to work it out.”
As Desiree looked at him in unrestrained wonder, she heard the voice of Miss Mays, one of her guests.
“We’re all rooting for you, Miss Stratford. Or should I say...Mrs. Hazard?”
Dear Reader,
Why not sit back and relax this summer with Silhouette Desire? As always, our six June Desire books feature strong heroes and spirited heroines who come together in a highly passionate, emotionally powerful and provocative read.
Anne McAllister kicks off June with a wonderful new MAN OF THE MONTH title, The Stardust Cowboy Strong, silent Riley Stratton brings hope and love into the life of a single mother.
The fabulous minisenes FORTUNE’S CHILDREN: THE BRIDES concludes with Undercover Groom by Merline Lovelace, in which a sexy secret agent rescues an amnesiac runaway bride. And Silhouette Books has more Fortunes to come, starting this August with a new twelvebook continuity series, THE FORTUNES OF TEXAS
Meanwhile, Alexandra Sellers continues her exotic SONS OF THE DESERT series with Beloved Sheikh, in which a to-die-for sheikh rescues an American beauty-in-jeopardy. One Small Secret by Meagan McKinney is a reunion romance with a surprise for a former summer flame. Popular Joan Elliott Pickart begins her new miniseries, THE BACHELOR BET, with Taming Tall Dark Brandon. And there’s a pretend marriage between an Alpha male hero and blue-blooded heroine in Suzanne Simms’s The Willful Wife.
So hit the beach this summer with any of these sensuous Silhouette Desire titles...or take all six along!
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Please address questions and book requests to:
Silhouette Reader Service
U.S. 3010 Walden Ave , P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
Canadian PO. Box 609, Fort Ene, Ont L2A 5X3
The Willful Wife
Suzanne Simms
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
SUZANNE SIMMS had her first romance novel published fourteen years ago and is “thrilled” to be writing again for Silhouette Desire. Suzanne has traveled extensively, including a memorable trip to the Philippines, which, she says, “changed my life.” She also writes historical romance as Suzanne Simmons. She currently lives with her husband, her son and her cat, Merlin, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
One
She was a looker.
Mathis Hazard handed the photograph back to the gentleman on the other side of the desk and told him as much. “She’s a good-looking woman.”
“Desiree is beautiful and we both know it,” George Huxley stated as he leaned back in his executive-style, ergonomically-correct leather chair. He steepled his fingers under his chin and studied the picture that occupied one corner of his desk.
No doubt former Ambassador Huxley saw in the black-and-white studio portrait what Mathis had seen: a young Grace Kelly type, right down to the long, lithe legs, the patrician features, the flawless complexion and the shoulder-length blond hair.
Yup, she was a looker, all right.
Mathis decided to concede the point. “She is beautiful.”
“To tell you the truth the photograph doesn’t do Desiree justice,” the older man claimed, running his hand back and forth along his chiseled jawline. It was some time before he added, almost as an afterthought, “She’s a Brahmin.”
Mathis managed to keep a straight face. “As in bull?”
“As in Bostonian.” George Huxley went on to explain. “Desiree was born and bred in Boston. She has the right pedigree. She attended all the right schools. She traveled in all the right circles. She traveled to all the right destinations—Paris, Florence, Venice, Rome. Naturally she studied all the right subjects.”
“Naturally,” Mathis echoed. He wondered exactly what constituted the “right” subjects for a Boston blue blood.
His companion turned out to be a mind reader. “Art history, classical music, foreign languages.”
Mathis grunted.
George Huxley continued. “Desiree lives at the right address, works at the right place, even wears the right designers. Nothing flashy, of course. Mostly Chanel or Armani.” The distinguished sexagenarian behind the rosewood-inlaid desk paused and drew a breath. Then he shook his head from side to side and admitted, “Damned, if she doesn’t do all the right things.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“According to her parents—and it’s her parents who contacted me—my goddaughter did all the right things.”
Mathis couldn’t help but notice the use of the past tense. “I repeat, what’s the problem?”
“The Hotel Stratford.”
His brow crinkled into a studied frown. “The Hotel Stratford here in Chicago?”
“The very one.”
Mathis had .only been in town a week but he’d heard of the Stratford. “It’s a landmark.”
“More like an albatross,” his client confessed. “The founder was Desiree’s great-grandfather, Colonel Jules Stratford, late of His Majesty’s Bengal Lancers. Colonel Stratford served King and country in India well over half a century ago. Apparently the gentleman felt if he could command a regiment, he could run a hotel. He retired from the military, emigrated to this country, bought an old hotel, which he refurbished, and named it the Stratford.”
“After himself?”
“Yes. Anyway, the Stratford was once the premier small hotel in Chicago. Then the Colonel got older and began to fade, as we all do, and the hotel did likewise. The gentleman passed away some twenty years ago. His widow—she was his second wife, his first preceded him in death—tried to keep up with the business, but it became more difficult with each passing year.” George Huxley paused for perhaps a quarter of a minute. “Anyway, Charlotte died a few months ago and Desiree inherited the Hotel Stratford, lock, stock and dilapidated barrel.”
Mathis waited. He was good at waiting.
“Desiree is an adult. She can spend her time and money any way she wishes to,” Ambassador Huxley declared. “That is her prerogative.”
Mathis agreed.
“However, her parents are concerned that she is allowing sentiment to override her usual practical nature. I’ve reminded them that their daughter is not only beautiful, but amply endowed with brams.” In an aside, the man said, “She graduated magna cum laude from my own alma mater, Harvard.”
Mathis was suitably impressed.
George Huxley picked up the thread of his conversation. “I have also pointed out to her mother and father that Desiree’s whole life has been spent preserving the past.” The one-time ambassador stroked his chin as if he were tugging on an invisible beard. “It’s no doubt the reason Desiree is so good at what she does.”
“Which is?”
“She’s a curator for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Her specialty is document preservation.”
Mathis stared at the black-and-white photograph again. Strange, the woman didn’t look boring.
“Anyway, my goddaughter has taken a leave of absence from the museum and is now here in Chicago, trying to find a way to restore the Stratford to its former glory. Frankly, none of us believes Desiree realizes what she’s let herself in for. That’s why I called on Jonathan and Hazards, Inc. for help.” It was another minute or two before the former diplomat said, “Your cousin once did me a great favor.”
“Jonathan was the special agent who smuggled you out of Beirut,” Mathis stated matter-of-factly.
That brought a raised eyebrow from the man behind the desk. “Yes.” It was no more than ten seconds before George August Huxley’s curiosity obviously got the better of him. “Although it was a long time ago, I can’t imagine Jonathan telling anyone, not even his own family, about the mission.”
“He didn’t.”
“Then how did you know?”
Mathis shrugged his shoulders. “I used to know a lot of things back in the old days.”
His companion thumped his knee and laughed out loud. “Back in the old days?” Robust laughter filled the office. “How old are you? Thirty-five? Thirty-six?”
Mathis gave a semblance of a nod. The renowned emissary to several of the world’s trouble spots had hit the nail neatly on the head. Mathis had turned thirty-six on his last birthday.
“You Hazards are all alike.” Despite his many years of diplomatic experience, and nearly as many as the driving force behind the Kemet Museum in Chicago, George Huxley evidently couldn’t make heads or tails of the Hazard clan.
The ambassador wouldn’t be the first person who had found his family, with its assortment of brothers, half brothers, cousins and nephews confusing, Mathis acknowledged. Confusing and intimidating, if the truth be known.
“I assume that’s a compliment,” he said.
The white-haired gentleman came forward in his chair and rested his elbows on the edge of the desk. “Of course it is. There isn’t a man I admire, or trust, more than Jonathan Hazard. Hell, if push comes to shove, I want Jonathan on my side.”
“He was.” Mathis absently brushed at the brim of the hat he was holding in his left hand. “He still is. But I’m sure he considers the debt long repaid, especially since the ‘situation’ involving the Egyptologist and the Egyptian antiquities.”
“Marryng Samantha Wainwright was an added benefit of that assignment,” the older man offered up with a delighted smile. “I understand that Jonathan is on paternity leave.”
Mathis returned the smile. “He’s taken several months off to spend with Samantha and their new baby.”
“Where’s Nick?”
“On his honeymoon with Melina.”
“And Simon?”
“Simon was never really part of the agency. Besides, he just got back from Thailand.”
“With a wife, I hear.”
“He married Sunday Harrington.”
George Huxley leaned back again, raised his eyes toward the ceiling and drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, keeping tempo with his own words. “Sunday Harrington? Sunday Harrington? The name sounds familiar.”
“Sunday was a model. Sports Illustrated. Now she’s a successful fashion designer.”
“So while the others are out of the office, you’ve been left in charge of Hazards, Inc.?”
“Let’s just say I agreed to come to Chicago for a couple of months and keep an eye on things,” Mathis said, crossing one leg over the other and plucking a nonexistent speck of lint off his jeans. His jacket was weathered brown leather. His shirt was starched and white. His tie was a southwestern bolo with a gold nugget the size of a thumbnail. His cowboy boots were polished to a mirror sheen.
All dressed up and no place to go.
“I hear you’re pretty good.”
Mathis shrugged his shoulders and made a noncommittal sound. Since his reputation always seemed to precede him, he rarely found it necessary to mention his credentials..
The former ambassador sought confirmation of his facts. “Army Rangers.”
Mathis nodded.
“Border patrol.”
He nodded a second time.
“A few covert operations for the government.”
Mathis lifted his shoulders and then lowered them again. Appropriately, it was neither a confirmation nor a denial of the gentleman’s statement.
“Then private surveillance and security for some of the leading heads of state.”
Another movement of his head.
“You get around.”
“I get around.”
“You’re still alive.”
“I’m still alive.”
“Unscathed?”
There was a moment of hesitation. That was inevitably the question. Had he come out of it unscathed?
Mathis decided to give the socially acceptable answer. It was the only thing he could do. “Unscathed.”
Shrewd gunmetal gray eyes assessed him from beneath snowy-white eyebrows. “Good.”
It was time to get down to business. “What do you want me to do, Ambassador?” he inquired.
“I want you to check it out,” he replied.
“The hotel or your goddaughter?”
George Huxley was blunt. “Both. I hear you’re a pretty good businessman as well as an ex—” one hand drew random circles in the air “—whatever-you-are. I want you to find out if Desiree is getting in over her head, if she knows what she’s doing.”
There was more. Mathis could hear it in the cultured voice. “And...?”
The retired diplomat took in a deep breath and then slowly released it. “And...”
The infinitesimal hairs on the back of Mathis Hazard’s neck stood straight up on end. “And what?” he inquired, almost certain he didn’t really want to hear the answer.
There was another moment of hesitation, this time on the part of George Huxley. “There have been several incidents.”
“Incidents?”
“Unexplained occurrences.”
“Such as?” Mathis prodded.
The distinguished-looking man appeared almost embarrassed to say. “Furniture moving.”
“Furniture moving?”
“By itself.” He continued, albeit reluctantly. “Strange noises in the night. Glimpses of someone—something—but nothing is ever there.”
Mathis was amused. “Are you trying to tell me that the Hotel Stratford is haunted?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“That makes two of us, because neither do I.”
“Then you’re just the man for the job. You’ll be a sane voice in an otherwise insane world.”
“Is there anything else?”
Huxley squirmed in his seat. “Well, now that you mention it, there is one more thing.”
Somehow Mathis had known there would be.
“My gut instincts tell me that this is an inside job,” the older man confided to him. “No one other than my goddaughter must know who and what you actually are. Otherwise, I’m afraid that we’ll never get to the bottom of it.”
He waited for George Huxley to get to the point.
“You’ll have to go undercover.”
Mathis made certain his voice was devoid of any inflection. “You want me to go in disguise.”
“Something like that.”
He arched a quizzical brow. “Any suggestions?”
Observant eyes glanced from the expensive black Stetson, with its hammered-silver hatband, resting on Mathis’s right knee down to his highly polished, hand-tooled black leather boots. “You could always go as a cowboy.”
Mathis didn’t crack a smile. “What would a cowboy be doing at the Stratford?”
“We’ll think of something.”
“We?”
“I’m certain that between the two of us we can come up with a suitable cover story.”
Mathis was certain they could, too. “When would you like me to start?”
“Today.”
Mathis gazed out the expanse of office windows toward downtown Chicago. He wanted—no, he needed—some information on the Hotel Stratford and its former and current owners before he presented himself to the lady from Boston.
“Tomorrow,” he finally proposed to his distinguished client. “There are a few details I want to check out before I drop in on Ms. Desiree Stratford.”
“Tomorrow, then,” the other man agreed.
Some fifteen minutes later they concluded their conversation and Mathis was personally escorted to the door of the elegant office.
George Huxley shook his hand in parting. “Good luck, Hazard,” the ambassador said to him.
The unspoken words hung in the air between the two men. You’ll need it.
The penthouse he was living in for the summer, courtesy of Hazards, Inc., was on the forty-second floor of a Chicago high-rise. It was glass on three sides and had a panoramic view of Lake Michigan.
The evening light was stealing across the unusually placid surface of the great lake. As far as the eye could see it was dark blue water dotted with white sailboats.
The scene somehow reminded Mathis of the view from his adobe casita at sunset, watching the Sangre de Cristo Mountains turn blood red in one of New Mexico’s strangely transcendental landscapes.
That New Mexico was all about light was something he had discovered several years ago. Maybe it was why he had picked the location he did when he had started to buy up land in anticipation of the day he would retire from the business.
Mathis raised a can of ice-cold beer to his mouth and took a drink. There was no sense in getting maudlin about his past. No sense in brooding about it. The past was the past. His past was like anyone else’s in that it couldn’t be changed. And since no one was promised a future, that left only the present. So he concentrated on living in the here and now.
Besides, as he had reassured George Huxley during their meeting that afternoon, he had emerged from his past unscathed...or pretty damned close to it.
“Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades , son,” came the words of Argos Hazard, one-time rancher, one-time soldier and lawman, sometime husband and father.
Maybe his father had been right, after all.
There were certainly those who would say Mathis Hazard had always been a loner and that’s why he was so good at what he did. Mathis knew his past set him apart, made him different from other men, made him alone, made him a loner.
He hadn’t thought it odd to buy a ranch in the middle of New Mexico, located between a range of isolated mountains and a secluded lake, away from civilization, his nearest neighbors a good forty miles in any direction. Lord knows, he’d had enough of so-called civilization to last him a lifetime.
It wasn’t that he had been around too many people. It was the people he’d been around and the world he’d lived in, a world most people were unaware even existed.
It was a world where a man acquired eyes in the back of his head if he wanted to survive. It was a world where nothing was what it seemed to be, where no one was who they appeared to be. It was a world where a man learned to trust only one person—himself—where experience, gut instincts and sheer bravado sometimes saved a man when intelligence alone never would, never could.
He’d always essentially been alone, Mathis recognized. He always would be. At least in New Mexico there was no pretense about it.
He took another swig of his beer.
Female companionship...well, that, as they said, was another matter altogether.
Mathis rubbed the icy can across one cheek, along his jawline and halfway down his neck. He felt rather than heard someone come up behind him. He spoke without turning around: “Know anything about women, Beano?”
“They’re more trouble than they’re worth, boss.”
Beano should know. He’d been around the corral a few times in his day. He had married and divorced three women—maybe it was four—and had had a few flings in between that had never made it as far as the altar. He was currently footloose and fancy-free.
William “Beano” Jones had hired on at the old Circle H at the age of nine. He’d spent the next half-dozen years working on a chuck wagon for Mathis’s grandfather before being promoted to bunkhouse cook. Eventually he had been moved into the kitchen at the “big house.” Somewhere along the way he had started to keep an eye out for the “boy.” Now Beano was seventy if he was a day, and he still considered it his personal duty to look after Mathis.
Only the boy, of course, had become a man, a man who had been around the corral a few times himself. He’d never officially been roped, hog-tied and branded, Mathis mused, reflecting on his own marital state ... or the lack thereof.
He had imagined himself in love once, a long time ago. He’d been nineteen. She had been eighteen, pretty, blond, wild like the wind. It had been a typical summer romance—hot and fast and furious. And then it had been over just like that.
Mathis gazed out on what he knew was a sweltering Chicago night. “What about a lady from Boston?”
“Worst kind of all, boss.”
“Why?”
He could sense Beano shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “A woman like that can make a man feel dis-com-bob-u-lat-ed.” The word was broken up into its separate syllables. “A woman like that can make a man feel like he’s meetin’ himself comin’ and goin’. She can make him forget.”
Mathis was curious. He turned his head. “Make him forget what?”
Beano flashed his trademark grin, the one that drew his mouth up into a bow and sent sparks flying in his dark chocolate-brown eyes. “I’ve plumb forgot.”
Mathis laughed out loud, spilling cold beer onto his bare chest. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I?”
“You always were easy pickin’s, boy.” It was a minute or two before Beano added another pearl of masculine wisdom. “Women,” he muttered under his breath, “can’t live with them...”
“Yes...?”
Beano left it at that.
Mathis couldn’t have agreed more. Knowing that the older man wouldn’t ask, he volunteered where he had been that afternoon. “I interviewed a client today.”
“Did you?”
“George Huxley.”
Beano made a sound in the back of his throat. Mathis knew he wasn’t uninformed, just unimpressed that the security agency’s latest client was a well-known American diplomat.
“He wants me to look after his goddaughter.”
“She the lady from Boston?”
“Yes.”
“Smells like trouble to me.”
It smelled like trouble to Mathis, too.
“I have to take the case on behalf of Hazards, Inc.,” he said, reaching up with the T-shirt in his hand and wiping it across his chest. “I don’t have any choice.”
“S’pose not.”
Mathis put the can of beer down and tugged the damp T-shirt on over his head. He stood there staring out at the lake—was that mist or steam rising from its surface?—and blew- out his breath expressively. “She’s a real looker.”
“They always are.” Beano finally spoke up. “If you need any help...”
It was the opening Mathis had been waiting for. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
Apparently his cook-cum-self-appointed guardian angel was in his official mode. “What do want me to do, boss?”
“Tomorrow morning I’d like you to shave extra close and put on your best bib and tucker.”
Beano glanced down at his well-washed shirt and jeans, then lower to his well-worn everyday boots. “S’pose that means my best cowboy boots, too.”
“And your best hat.”
“The white Stetson?”
“Yup.”
“You wearing white, too?”
He nodded.
Beano raised one eyebrow. “Out to impress the lady.”
Mathis watched his own reflection in the wall of glass. There was a flash of white teeth against tanned skin. “We want to make sure she recognizes right off that we’re the good guys.”
Beano grinned from ear to ear. “We could just tell Miss—?”
“Stratford. Desiree Stratford.”
“We could just tell Miss Stratford that we’re the good guys;” he suggested.
Mathis absently rubbed his hand back and forth along his nape. “She might not believe us.”
The longtime cook made a face. “I said it once and I’ll say it again. It smells like trouble.”
He had and it did.
The old man’s weathered brow crinkled into a dozen distinct frown lines. “Where we goin’?”
Where were they going? How could he explain the situation to Beano without saying too much or too little? How could he make the other man understand?
Mathis raised the can to his mouth and finished off his beer. Hell, he wasn’t sure he understood himself.
Then the words of an old and familiar American folk song started running through Mathis Hazard’s head.
Froggy went a-courtin’, he did go.
Froggy went a-courtin’, he did go.
“We’re going a-courtin”’ was his answer.
Two
The siren awakened her from a dead sleep.
Desiree Stratford rolled over onto her side, reluctantly opened her eyes and squinted at the clock on the bedside table.
Three in the morning.
“Ohh,” she softly groaned, turning her head and burying her face in the goose-down pillow.
She didn’t want to be awake. In fact, she wanted desperately to be asleep.
After a day of seemingly endless meetings with lawyers and bankers, architects and contractors, even a delegation of longtime hotel guests, after a dinner of thoroughly atrocious and utterly cold food—Desiree vowed she would fire the temperamental and incompetent chef, Andre, just as soon as she had the time to hire a replacement—after an evening spent poring over papers in her great-grandfather’s study—had the dear, sweet man kept every scrap of correspondence he had received in his life?—it had been nearly one o’clock, a mere two hours ago, that she had finally crawled, exhausted, into bed.
Now she found herself awake again.
She had no one to blame but herself, Desiree acknowledged. She was the one who had insisted that she move into the oldest wing of the Stratford, into what used to be her great-grandparents’ living quarters, into the very bedroom where she had stayed as a child on her thrice-yearly visits to Chicago.
Apparently as a girl she had slept much more soundly than she did at the age of thirty. Now she heard the shrill, jarring, nerve-grating wail of every siren that passed on the street below between the hotel and the busy city hospital nearby.
There was no sense in crying over spilled milk, as her great-grandfather used to say.
It was too late.
It was done.
It was in the wee, small hours of the night and she was wide-awake.
Desiree turned onto her back and stared up at the ceiling overhead. A faint light was coming from the row of windows on the far side of the bedroom, just enough light so that she could make out the shapes and patterns of the mural painted on the ceiling decades earlier by a starving yet talented artist.
The images had faded somewhat with time and the inevitable layer of dust and grime that had accumulated, but they were still a magnificent rendering of the heavens, complete with sun and moon, stars and planets, clouds and constellations.
The images might have faded, but not her memories ... never her memories.
“I’m afraid of the dark, Great-Grandpapa,” she confessed one night as she was being tucked into bed.
“But only when it’s dark can we gaze up at the sky and see all the stars,” he pointed out to her.
Desiree had never thought of that.
“How many stars are there in the sky?” she asked, excited as only an eight-year-old can be excited.
“Thousands. Millions, ” her great-grandfather answered from his leather wing chair, the same leather wing chair that had always stood alongside the guest bed
“Can I count them?”
“Of course you can. You can do anything you put your mind to. Anything at all. Don’t ever forget that, Desiree.”
She gazed up at the painted mural. “But there are so very many stars, Great-Grandpapa.”
“Don’t worry, child. We’ll count them together.”
So she and her great-grandfather had counted aloud, her little girl’s half-whisper in unison with his great, booming baritone, until she couldn’t keep her eyes open no matter how hard she tried. Night after night she would fall asleep to the sound of his voice and dream about places she had never been and things she had never seen.
The decor of the guest room had been something out of a dream, as well. In fact, it still was. It had remained essentially unchanged over the years.
The furniture was delicately carved and inlaid with rare woods from the Jodhpur region of India. Above the bombe bureau were framed pictures of elephants with their trunks majestically raised skyward, mischievous monkeys at play, colorfully plumed birds perched on tree branches and king cobras, hooded, coiled, sinuous, deadly, yet worshiped by a segment of the Indian population as gods.
A large painting hung over the fireplace. It depicted a fierce Bengal tiger with a royal hunting party in pursuit On the opposite wall was a seventeenth-century embroidered tapestry, stitched with silk thread and illustrating the life of a maharajah, the beautiful ladies of his court, his grand palace and riches beyond imagination.
The family’s living quarters had always been filled with personal mementos, keepsakes and souvenirs of the Raj in India. For Desiree they had been a glimpse into her great-grandfather’s world, into a world that was gone and would not come again. Oh, how he had enjoyed telling her stories of his days on the Indian subcontinent and of the times when the sun had never set on the British Empire.
There had been a splendor and grandeur about the Hotel Stratford in those days, although if she hadn’t been an impressionable child infatuated with the place perhaps she would have noticed even back then that it was beginning to fade.
But as an eight-year-old she had seen only what she wanted to see. She had loved the hotel’s elegantly appointed lobby, its highly polished brass adornments, its marble floors underfoot and its crystal chandeliers high overhead, its sweeping staircase and claret-colored carpeting, its uniformed doorman and imposing majordomo.
Most of all Desiree had loved her great-grandfather, resplendent in a perfectly pressed Savile Row suit, starched white collar and old school tie. In a manner of speaking, the Colonel, as his staff had referred to him, had worn a kind of uniform, too. His closet had been filled with identical suits, collars and ties.
It had been her love for her great-grandfather, and for the Stratford with its rich history and traditions, that had eventually led Desiree to make preserving the past her life’s work. She believed that without the past there was no understanding of the present and precious little insight for the future.
She exhaled on a long, drawn-out sigh.
Unfortunately, sentimentality had cost her another good night’s sleep. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last. Not if she went ahead with her plans for renovating the hotel from the ground up.
In truth, the Stratford was a dowdy dowager duchess, a bit threadbare, a bit tattered, a bit—well, perhaps more than a bit—past her prime, but not beyond restoration, not beyond redemption. She could be saved. Desiree was certain of it.
But was she certain in her mind ... or only in her heart?
Desiree punched at the pillows behind her head—there were half a dozen of every size and shape, covered with the finest Egyptian cotton pillow slips—and stretched out, arms flung to either side, in the antique iron-frame bed.
She gazed up at the stars twinkling overhead on the ceiling and began to count in a whisper, “One. Two. Three. Four.” After some time she wetted her lips with her tongue and continued. “Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. One hundred.” She persisted. “One hundred and one. One hundred and two.”
Enough was enough.
“There’s no sense in pretending any longer,” Desiree muttered as she propped herself up against the mound of pillows. “You aren’t going back-to sleep any time soon.”
She was reaching for the lamp on the bedside table when she thought she heard something.
Her hand froze in midair.
She slowly took in her breath and held it. She wasn’t sure which came next: the odd, tingling sensation that raised the small hairs on the back of her neck or the soft pad of footsteps outside in the corridor.
There was no one else staying in this wing, no one else with a reason for being here.
Desiree gave herself a good shake. It was the dead of night. The Stratford was an old building. Old buildings went hand in hand with strange noises.
Or maybe it was no more than an overactive imagination on her part. Not that she was a woman prone to an overactive anything, but she was living alone in this section of the hotel.
Truth to tell, there had been more than one unexplained occurrence since her arrival at the Stratford several weeks ago. Furniture had been found mysteriously moved from one room to another. Everyone swore their innocence in the matter, and no one seemed to have any idea of who or why or when or even how this feat could have been accomplished.
Then there had been the glimpses of something—someone—just at the edge of Desiree’s peripheral vision, but nothing—and no one—was ever there.
Lastly were the inexplicable noises, always at night, always when she was alone.
Perhaps it was someone up to no good. Perhaps it was someone trying to frighten her. No doubt that’s what it was. That’s what it had to be.
Shenanigans.
Monkeyshines.
Tasteless practical jokes, in Desiree’s opinion.
There were stories, naturally. There were always stories about historic old buildings. She had heard the outlandish ghost stories about the Stratford her very first night back in Chicago. Her resident guests had seen to that.
One account; relayed with particular relish by Miss Molly Mays, had concerned the ill-fated workman who had fallen asleep during the renovation of the hotel. He had accidentally been buried alive inside a foot-thick brick wall. The poor devil had suffocated to death, of course, before his absence had been noted by his fellow workmen and the wall could be frantically torn down again.
Then there was the tale of the mobster and his moll, related with equal enthusiasm by Miss Maggie Mays. During the era of Prohibition, the couple had apparently been Chicago’s version of Bonnie and Clyde. The pair had come to an inglorious, although perhaps deserved, end when they were killed in a barrage of police bullets. Ever since, according to the elder Miss Mays, it had been rumored that the lovers’ spirits still roamed the corridors of the Stratford, phantom guns blazing.
Balderdash.
Poppycock.
Pure malarkey, as her great-grandfather would have said. She didn’t believe in ghosts. At least not those kind of ghosts, Desiree reminded herself.
Thump.
Thump.
The sound of footsteps came again.
Without switching on the bedside lamp, Desiree threw back the summer-weight covers and sat up. As a girl her feet had dangled over the edge of the high English-style bed. Now they were firmly planted on the cool hardwood floor.
Thump.
“Enough of this nonsense,” Desiree grumbled under her breath as she reached for her bathrobe and made a beeline for the door.
Despite the twenty years since her last visit, for she had stopped coming to the Stratford after the death of her great-grandfather, she knew the guest room, and the entire apartment, like the back of her hand.
Without a sound Desiree turned the knob, opened the door a crack and peered out into the corridor. Vintage lights, strategically spaced every ten or fifteen feet, cast a garish glow on the flowered wallpaper and claret-colored carpeting.
She stepped into the hallway and quietly slipped along in her bare feet, double-checking each juncture as she came to it.
There was nothing.
There was no one.
There was no sign of whoever had been there.
Not that Desiree was particularly surprised by the results of her impromptu investigation. She had scarcely expected to peer around the corner and catch the culprit red-handed.
“Utter nonsense,” she announced aloud, her voice echoing in the empty corridor. “I’m going to bed.”
It was at that moment that Desiree noticed the door to her great-grandfather’s study was ajar. Surely she had closed it when she’d finished working for the night.
Hadn’t she?
She made a split-second decision. Under the circumstances, she wasn’t going to take any chances. Reaching around the corner, Desiree grabbed one of Jules Stratford’s traditional English walking sticks from the brass umbrella stand. She firmly grasped the “weapon” in one hand and groped for the light switch with the other.
Flicking the switch, she blinked several times in rapid succession and gave her eyes a second or two to adjust to the change. Then she quickly looked around.
The room was filled with rich mahogany furniture and glass-fronted barrister bookcases, Edwardian-era oil paintings and mementos from her grandparents’ days in India, and shadows.
Thankfully, the room was also vacant.
Desiree quickly crossed to the opposite side of the spacious study and opened the door into the adjoining parlor. The formal room beyond was also unoccupied.
After closing the parlor door, she turned. At a glance the study appeared to be exactly as she had left it two hours before. She lowered the silver-tipped walking stick and approached the massive mahogany desk. That’s when she realized something was amiss.
Desiree spun on her heel and stared at the wall behind the desk where her great-grandfather’s sword and dagger, presented to him upon his retirement from active military duty, had been displayed for as long as she could remember.
The dagger was gone.
She was almost certain ... she was certain ... that the dagger had been there earlier that evening.
Who could have taken it?
Why take it?
Where was it now?
Then, out of the corner of her eye, something else caught Desiree’s attention. She slowly pivoted. As the object came into focus, a chill spiraled down her spine. For a moment she couldn’t think. She couldn’t move. She didn’t even breathe.
Finally collecting herself, she encircled the desk, all the while being very careful not to touch anything.
Perhaps Uncle George was right.
Perhaps it was a good idea for a security expert to inquire into the peculiar goings-on at the Stratford.
Admittedly, when her godfather had telephoned that afternoon to inform her that he had called in a “hired gun,” Desiree had argued the point with him. She had recited to him a dozen good reasons why she didn’t want and didn’t need extra security at the hotel.
Now she was relieved that she hadn’t managed to talk George Huxley out of his plan. As a matter of fact, it was of some consolation to her just knowing that the man was scheduled to show up first thing in the morning.
For there, directly in front of Desiree Stratford, firmly embedded in the top of the desk, its tip neatly slicing through a sheet of thick, cream-colored writing paper embossed with the family coat of arms and with the single word forewarned block-printed across its surface, was her great-grandfather’s dagger.
Three
Rashid Modi hovered in the doorway of what had once been the night manager’s office. He discreetly cleared his throat. “A thousand pardons, Ms. Stratford.”
Desiree looked up from the most recent financial statement submitted by her accountant—it was not good news—and said rather absently, “Yes, Mr. Modi?”
The hotel manager squared his shoulders. “There is someone here to see you.”
“Who is it?” she inquired of the capable young man who had been in charge of the day-to-day operation of the Stratford and its few remaining staff members since the death of her step-great-grandmother, Charlotte, last winter.
“He did not give his name.” Rashid Modi remained standing at attention. “He said you would know who he was.”
Desiree glanced at the antique cloisonné timepiece on the bookcase opposite the desk. It was precisely eight o’clock. Perhaps her caller was the security expert retained by George Huxley. The security expert she wasn’t supposed to mention to anyone, at least not by profession. If so, the man was punctual. First thing in the morning evidently meant first thing in the morning.
Rashid Modi lingered. “You are busy. Do you wish for me to send him away?”
Desiree tidied the stack of papers in front of her and slipped them back into the large official-looking envelope in which they had been delivered the day before. “Thank you, Mr. Modi, but that won’t be necessary,” she said as she stashed the envelope in her briefcase. “I’ll see the gentleman.”
“As you wish,” he acquiesced.
Desiree sensed a certain hesitation on the part of the Stratford’s manager. “What is it, Mr. Modi?”
Rashid Modi was the absolute soul of discretion. He was well-dressed, well-spoken, well trained and well liked. There was no doubt in Desiree’s mind that he would go far in his chosen career as a hotelier. In fact, the only surprise to her was that he had accepted a position with the Stratford which was, frankly, no longer on the “A” list of Chicago hotels. The man could have aimed higher, much higher: the Tremont or the Whitehall or even the Raphael, and he could certainly have commanded more money than Charlotte Stratford—and now Desiree—could afford to pay him.
Mr. Modi hemmed and hawed, and then, with a decided flair for understatement, disclosed, “The person waiting to see you isn’t exactly a gentleman.”
This unexpected announcement got Desiree’s attention. “What is he, then?”
The young man paused, brushed at a nonexistent speck of lint on his lapel and said, “A cowboy.”
“A cowboy?” Uncle George—as she had called George Huxley for as long as she could remember; he had been one of her father’s best friends since their undergraduate days at Harvard—hadn’t mentioned anything about a cowboy. Desiree was admittedly curious. “How do you know he’s a cowboy?”
Typically a man of few unnecessary words, Mr. Modi gave a succinct answer. “Cowboy boots. Cowboy hats.”
Hats?
Desiree frowned. “Is there more than one hat?”
He nodded.
Lack of sleep had finally caught up with her, Desiree realized as she pondered the problem of the hats. Why would a cowboy wear more than one hat? For that matter, how could a cowboy wear more than one hat at a time? Surely the man didn’t have two heads. A surreal Salvador Dali-like picture formed in her mind.
Aloud, she asked, “Why?”
It was the hotel manager’s turn to frown in puzzlement. “Why what, Ms. Stratford?”
She wasn’t making herself understood. “Why is there more than one cowboy hat?”
“Because there is more than one cowboy,” he said simply.
Her mouth formed a silent O.
Rashid Modi held up two long, elegant fingers. “In fact, there are two cowboys.”
“I see.” Desiree didn’t see, but she supposed that was beside the point.
During their telephone conversation yesterday, her godfather had clearly stated that the security expert’s name was Mathis Hazard, and that the well-respected security agency he represented was Hazards, Inc. She was quite certain that Uncle George hadn’t said anything about a cowboy or a sidekick.
Mr. Modi moved his head back and forth. With the tip of his tongue against the back of his front teeth, he began to make a small clicking noise. It was definitely a sound of disapproval. “I told the persons in question to go around to the delivery entrance and see Andre.” The young gentleman paused, raised his nose ever so slightly in the air and sniffed as only an Englishman can sniff. “But they, well, he, insisted on speaking to you personally.”
“He?”
“The formidable one.”
Mathis Hazard must be formidable, indeed. Rashid Modi was not a man easily impressed or intimidated, nor, for that matter, was he prone to exaggeration.
Desiree only hoped and prayed there weren’t going to be any unpleasantries between the very English hotel manager—Rashid Modi was of Indian ancestry, but he had been born, raised and educated in London—and a security agent from the American West, judging from the former’s description of the latter.
Frankly she had enough on her mind with the coterie of lawyers and accountants, contractors and architects constantly buzzing around her, not to mention the temperamental Andre and the trio of female guests in permanent residence who acted as though they were the ones who actually owned the Stratford.
If that wasn’t enough to drive a sane woman to the brink of insanity, there had been the incident of the night before. She had assumed that Mathis Hazard would want to examine the evidence for himself, so she had left her great-grandfather’s dagger exactly as she had found it: jeweled handle gleaming in the lamplight, razor-sharp tip embedded in the top of the mahogany desk.
Desiree brushed a hand across her eyes. After discovering the dagger and the note, she had made a thorough search of her great-grandparents’ former apartment. Whoever had been there seemed to have vanished into thin air.
Ninety-nine-point-nine percent certain that the culprit didn’t have any intentions of returning to the scene of the crime for a second time that night, Desiree had gone back to bed. First, however, she had securely wedged a sturdy chair under the brass doorknob, since there were no locks on the doors in the family wing. Despite this precaution, it had been nearly dawn before she had managed to fall asleep again.
Rashid Modi repeated his initial offer. “I can send the cowboys away, Ms. Stratford, if you don’t have time to see them.”
“I can spare a minute or two,” she said.
“Shall I show them in?” The manager indicated the confines of the small, once elegant and now somewhat threadbare, office.
Desiree politely shook her head and inquired, “Where are the two men?”
Another concise reply was supplied by Mr. Modi. “The lobby.”
Desiree pushed her chair back, reached for the tailored jacket to her suit and rose to her feet. “I’ll see them in the lobby, then.”
The heels of her pumps clicked on the marble floor as Desiree pulled on her jacket and started down the hallway. Once she reached the lobby she paused for a moment, put her head back and gazed up at the ornate ceiling high above her.
The lobby ceiling was done in the grand Victorian style, with intricately carved cornices and molding, and with a second mural by the same artist who had painted the guest room. This time he had chosen to depict mythical creatures of flight from the six-winged angels of the seraphim to round-cheeked cherubs, from exotic birdmen to a snow-white Pegasus.
The piece de resistance of the front lobby, however, was the chandelier. It was Austrian crystal, weighed more than a ton, dated from the turn of the century when it was originally a gaslight and, since its conversion to electricity, was said to be comprised of more than two thousand individual lightbulbs.
In the hotel’s heyday there had been a full-time employee whose job had been to clean and change the bulbs in the lighting fixtures, including the Stratford’s prized chandelier. There had also been an attendant who polished, on a daily basis, the brass balustrades on the staircase. And another whose sole duty was to set and wind the clocks, all ninety-seven of them.
That was no longer the case. The ninety-seven clocks were long gone, and the cleaning and polishing were done by a small, independent business firm that had won the job by quoting Charlotte Stratford the lowest bid.
Nevertheless, the myriad stories about the Stratford, its architectural and social history, its famous guests and its somewhat more humble yet interesting employees, had fascinated Desiree when she was a girl. They still did.
Her gaze returned to ground level. There were her early-morning visitors standing in the middle of the lobby. Mr. Rashid was correct, as he usually was. They were cowboys. Both of them.
The next thing Desiree noticed were the white hats. Not on their heads, thankfully, but held at their sides. At least they were gentlemen enough to remove them indoors.
The disparity between the two men was immediately apparent. One was quite short. The other was very tall. The smaller, slightly rotund cowboy was facing her. His features were craggy. His skin was wrinkled and leathery and tanned to the color of toast. Obviously he had spent a lifetime outdoors in the elements. In Desiree’s estimation he was the older by a good thirty or forty years, and he was also the more animated of the pair.
The second man was in profile. From this angle Desiree put his age as mid-thirties. He could have been younger or older. She decided he was probably older.
Her eyes swept his appearance from the ground up. He was dressed in cowboy boots, faded blue jeans, a Western-style leather coat and a white dress shirt. He had shunned a traditional tie, as had his sidekick, in favor of a bolo, complete with obligatory gold nugget.
Still, it wasn’t the man’s conspicuous bolo or his spit-polished cowboy boots or his pristine white cowboy hat that caught and held Desiree’s attention. It was something far less tangible. It was something in the way he stood there, motionless, quietly assessing the front entrance, the registration desk, the sweeping staircase, in fact, the entire lobby. It was almost as if he had eyes in the back of his head.
That’s when Desiree suddenly realized that he knew she was watching him.
A tingle of awareness tiptoed along her spine. She took in a sustaining breath and discreetly blew it out again. Now she understood why the hotel manager had referred to her visitor as intimidating. The man was more than intimidating. He was dangerous. In fact, he positively reeked of danger. It was tightly held-in-check, controlled danger, but it was danger, nevertheless.
Desiree didn’t doubt for a moment that this was a man who could take care of himself wherever he was, that this was a man who knew who his enemies were and who his friends were, and regarded both with equal suspicion. She found herself wondering where in the world Mathis Hazard had been and what he had been called upon to do.
Mr. Hazard was dangerous for another reason, as well, Desiree acknowledged to herself. With those broad shoulders, muscular arms and that chest, with that lean waistline and long legs, he was dangerous to women.
Even she wasn’t immune, Desiree recognized, although she had never been interested in the “man’s man” type before. Her personal preference in the opposite sex was a well-educated, erudite, witty and socially accomplished escort who would accompany her to concerts and plays, gallery showings and charity events.
Yet she couldn’t help but notice that Mathis Hazard’s hair was luxuriously thick and a rich dark brown in color, that it was a little too long in the back and around his ears, and that it bad a tendency to curl at his nape.
Even in profile she could see that his forehead was high and his dark eyebrows were arched. His nose bordered on the patrician, but a telltale bump on the bridge meant it had been broken at some point in his life. His mouth was taut, the lower lip was fuller than the upper. His chin was square and jutted with determination. His ears were slightly small, nicely shaped and tucked close to his head. His hands were large and masculine, yet graceful.
Then he turned his head—just his head, nothing more, nothing less—and she saw his eyes, dark, intelligent, somewhat mysterious, piercing and definitely predatory.
Desiree Stratford had met many men in her life, from temperamental artists to affluent collectors, from the homeless on the streets of Boston to wealthy philanthropists, from heads of state to leaders of industry, even those who claimed royal blood or who were, indeed, royalty. She had known men with that implacable air of self-confidence, men who wore the mantle of power as though they were born with it, men with a core of inner strength that seemed to defy logic.
This was one of those men.
She was suddenly tempted to turn tail and run just as fast and just as far as she could.
“Don’t let your imagination run away with itself, Desiree Marie Stratford,” she chided herself under her breath.
She was no lily-livered female, no fainthearted damsel in distress. She was a modern woman with her own career, her own money, her own apartment and her own life.
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Suzanne Simms
THE MAN: Rugged private investigator Mathis Hazard.THE MISSION: Pose as the estranged spouse of beautiful hotel owner Desiree Stratford - for investigative purposes only, of course.POSSIBLE COMPLICATION: Inability to keep his mind - not to mention his hands - off said Desiree.As soon as the once-reluctant detective Mathis Hazard got a look at lovely Desiree Stratford, he suddenly became a lot more eager to get to the bottom of all the weird goings-on at her hotel. And what better way to proceed than to pretend to be Desiree's husband?Yes, he knew what a tough job it would be - t would probably take twenty-four-hour-a-day, one-on-one surveillance. But hey, a man had to do what a man had to do… .
“Wife?” (#u93ba7261-df57-524c-81e8-85329779a454)Letter to Reader (#u587347e7-e6a4-5a41-b0e8-a8c25b4f28d4)Title Page (#u58f62101-ce89-540e-bb0b-df942faf58c8)About the Author (#ue9503cde-dd2e-5c41-8a31-78bf620c3384)Chapter One (#u938b8303-a374-5f60-bdbf-9c4e8077816e)Chapter Two (#u78f0e6ba-2e30-5e06-a865-d45f25b86170)Chapter Three (#u2ca0d1fa-fa45-54b2-b348-a99910b430e3)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)A Word About Sapphires (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“Wife?”
Desiree choked out, as she speared the man with her eyes.
Mathis Hazard didn’t even have the good grace to appear sheepish or apologetic. “Ex-wife,” he corrected. “Well, almost.”
Her voice rose half an octave. “Almost?”
“We’ve been separated.”
Desiree continued to stare at him. “Have we?”
Mathis was, apparently, a teller of tall tales. “But the divorce hasn’t gone through yet.” He grinned at her. “We’re still hoping to work it out.”
As Desiree looked at him in unrestrained wonder, she heard the voice of Miss Mays, one of her guests.
“We’re all rooting for you, Miss Stratford. Or should I say...Mrs. Hazard?”
Dear Reader,
Why not sit back and relax this summer with Silhouette Desire? As always, our six June Desire books feature strong heroes and spirited heroines who come together in a highly passionate, emotionally powerful and provocative read.
Anne McAllister kicks off June with a wonderful new MAN OF THE MONTH title, The Stardust Cowboy Strong, silent Riley Stratton brings hope and love into the life of a single mother.
The fabulous minisenes FORTUNE’S CHILDREN: THE BRIDES concludes with Undercover Groom by Merline Lovelace, in which a sexy secret agent rescues an amnesiac runaway bride. And Silhouette Books has more Fortunes to come, starting this August with a new twelvebook continuity series, THE FORTUNES OF TEXAS
Meanwhile, Alexandra Sellers continues her exotic SONS OF THE DESERT series with Beloved Sheikh, in which a to-die-for sheikh rescues an American beauty-in-jeopardy. One Small Secret by Meagan McKinney is a reunion romance with a surprise for a former summer flame. Popular Joan Elliott Pickart begins her new miniseries, THE BACHELOR BET, with Taming Tall Dark Brandon. And there’s a pretend marriage between an Alpha male hero and blue-blooded heroine in Suzanne Simms’s The Willful Wife.
So hit the beach this summer with any of these sensuous Silhouette Desire titles...or take all six along!
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Please address questions and book requests to:
Silhouette Reader Service
U.S. 3010 Walden Ave , P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
Canadian PO. Box 609, Fort Ene, Ont L2A 5X3
The Willful Wife
Suzanne Simms
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
SUZANNE SIMMS had her first romance novel published fourteen years ago and is “thrilled” to be writing again for Silhouette Desire. Suzanne has traveled extensively, including a memorable trip to the Philippines, which, she says, “changed my life.” She also writes historical romance as Suzanne Simmons. She currently lives with her husband, her son and her cat, Merlin, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
One
She was a looker.
Mathis Hazard handed the photograph back to the gentleman on the other side of the desk and told him as much. “She’s a good-looking woman.”
“Desiree is beautiful and we both know it,” George Huxley stated as he leaned back in his executive-style, ergonomically-correct leather chair. He steepled his fingers under his chin and studied the picture that occupied one corner of his desk.
No doubt former Ambassador Huxley saw in the black-and-white studio portrait what Mathis had seen: a young Grace Kelly type, right down to the long, lithe legs, the patrician features, the flawless complexion and the shoulder-length blond hair.
Yup, she was a looker, all right.
Mathis decided to concede the point. “She is beautiful.”
“To tell you the truth the photograph doesn’t do Desiree justice,” the older man claimed, running his hand back and forth along his chiseled jawline. It was some time before he added, almost as an afterthought, “She’s a Brahmin.”
Mathis managed to keep a straight face. “As in bull?”
“As in Bostonian.” George Huxley went on to explain. “Desiree was born and bred in Boston. She has the right pedigree. She attended all the right schools. She traveled in all the right circles. She traveled to all the right destinations—Paris, Florence, Venice, Rome. Naturally she studied all the right subjects.”
“Naturally,” Mathis echoed. He wondered exactly what constituted the “right” subjects for a Boston blue blood.
His companion turned out to be a mind reader. “Art history, classical music, foreign languages.”
Mathis grunted.
George Huxley continued. “Desiree lives at the right address, works at the right place, even wears the right designers. Nothing flashy, of course. Mostly Chanel or Armani.” The distinguished sexagenarian behind the rosewood-inlaid desk paused and drew a breath. Then he shook his head from side to side and admitted, “Damned, if she doesn’t do all the right things.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“According to her parents—and it’s her parents who contacted me—my goddaughter did all the right things.”
Mathis couldn’t help but notice the use of the past tense. “I repeat, what’s the problem?”
“The Hotel Stratford.”
His brow crinkled into a studied frown. “The Hotel Stratford here in Chicago?”
“The very one.”
Mathis had .only been in town a week but he’d heard of the Stratford. “It’s a landmark.”
“More like an albatross,” his client confessed. “The founder was Desiree’s great-grandfather, Colonel Jules Stratford, late of His Majesty’s Bengal Lancers. Colonel Stratford served King and country in India well over half a century ago. Apparently the gentleman felt if he could command a regiment, he could run a hotel. He retired from the military, emigrated to this country, bought an old hotel, which he refurbished, and named it the Stratford.”
“After himself?”
“Yes. Anyway, the Stratford was once the premier small hotel in Chicago. Then the Colonel got older and began to fade, as we all do, and the hotel did likewise. The gentleman passed away some twenty years ago. His widow—she was his second wife, his first preceded him in death—tried to keep up with the business, but it became more difficult with each passing year.” George Huxley paused for perhaps a quarter of a minute. “Anyway, Charlotte died a few months ago and Desiree inherited the Hotel Stratford, lock, stock and dilapidated barrel.”
Mathis waited. He was good at waiting.
“Desiree is an adult. She can spend her time and money any way she wishes to,” Ambassador Huxley declared. “That is her prerogative.”
Mathis agreed.
“However, her parents are concerned that she is allowing sentiment to override her usual practical nature. I’ve reminded them that their daughter is not only beautiful, but amply endowed with brams.” In an aside, the man said, “She graduated magna cum laude from my own alma mater, Harvard.”
Mathis was suitably impressed.
George Huxley picked up the thread of his conversation. “I have also pointed out to her mother and father that Desiree’s whole life has been spent preserving the past.” The one-time ambassador stroked his chin as if he were tugging on an invisible beard. “It’s no doubt the reason Desiree is so good at what she does.”
“Which is?”
“She’s a curator for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Her specialty is document preservation.”
Mathis stared at the black-and-white photograph again. Strange, the woman didn’t look boring.
“Anyway, my goddaughter has taken a leave of absence from the museum and is now here in Chicago, trying to find a way to restore the Stratford to its former glory. Frankly, none of us believes Desiree realizes what she’s let herself in for. That’s why I called on Jonathan and Hazards, Inc. for help.” It was another minute or two before the former diplomat said, “Your cousin once did me a great favor.”
“Jonathan was the special agent who smuggled you out of Beirut,” Mathis stated matter-of-factly.
That brought a raised eyebrow from the man behind the desk. “Yes.” It was no more than ten seconds before George August Huxley’s curiosity obviously got the better of him. “Although it was a long time ago, I can’t imagine Jonathan telling anyone, not even his own family, about the mission.”
“He didn’t.”
“Then how did you know?”
Mathis shrugged his shoulders. “I used to know a lot of things back in the old days.”
His companion thumped his knee and laughed out loud. “Back in the old days?” Robust laughter filled the office. “How old are you? Thirty-five? Thirty-six?”
Mathis gave a semblance of a nod. The renowned emissary to several of the world’s trouble spots had hit the nail neatly on the head. Mathis had turned thirty-six on his last birthday.
“You Hazards are all alike.” Despite his many years of diplomatic experience, and nearly as many as the driving force behind the Kemet Museum in Chicago, George Huxley evidently couldn’t make heads or tails of the Hazard clan.
The ambassador wouldn’t be the first person who had found his family, with its assortment of brothers, half brothers, cousins and nephews confusing, Mathis acknowledged. Confusing and intimidating, if the truth be known.
“I assume that’s a compliment,” he said.
The white-haired gentleman came forward in his chair and rested his elbows on the edge of the desk. “Of course it is. There isn’t a man I admire, or trust, more than Jonathan Hazard. Hell, if push comes to shove, I want Jonathan on my side.”
“He was.” Mathis absently brushed at the brim of the hat he was holding in his left hand. “He still is. But I’m sure he considers the debt long repaid, especially since the ‘situation’ involving the Egyptologist and the Egyptian antiquities.”
“Marryng Samantha Wainwright was an added benefit of that assignment,” the older man offered up with a delighted smile. “I understand that Jonathan is on paternity leave.”
Mathis returned the smile. “He’s taken several months off to spend with Samantha and their new baby.”
“Where’s Nick?”
“On his honeymoon with Melina.”
“And Simon?”
“Simon was never really part of the agency. Besides, he just got back from Thailand.”
“With a wife, I hear.”
“He married Sunday Harrington.”
George Huxley leaned back again, raised his eyes toward the ceiling and drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, keeping tempo with his own words. “Sunday Harrington? Sunday Harrington? The name sounds familiar.”
“Sunday was a model. Sports Illustrated. Now she’s a successful fashion designer.”
“So while the others are out of the office, you’ve been left in charge of Hazards, Inc.?”
“Let’s just say I agreed to come to Chicago for a couple of months and keep an eye on things,” Mathis said, crossing one leg over the other and plucking a nonexistent speck of lint off his jeans. His jacket was weathered brown leather. His shirt was starched and white. His tie was a southwestern bolo with a gold nugget the size of a thumbnail. His cowboy boots were polished to a mirror sheen.
All dressed up and no place to go.
“I hear you’re pretty good.”
Mathis shrugged his shoulders and made a noncommittal sound. Since his reputation always seemed to precede him, he rarely found it necessary to mention his credentials..
The former ambassador sought confirmation of his facts. “Army Rangers.”
Mathis nodded.
“Border patrol.”
He nodded a second time.
“A few covert operations for the government.”
Mathis lifted his shoulders and then lowered them again. Appropriately, it was neither a confirmation nor a denial of the gentleman’s statement.
“Then private surveillance and security for some of the leading heads of state.”
Another movement of his head.
“You get around.”
“I get around.”
“You’re still alive.”
“I’m still alive.”
“Unscathed?”
There was a moment of hesitation. That was inevitably the question. Had he come out of it unscathed?
Mathis decided to give the socially acceptable answer. It was the only thing he could do. “Unscathed.”
Shrewd gunmetal gray eyes assessed him from beneath snowy-white eyebrows. “Good.”
It was time to get down to business. “What do you want me to do, Ambassador?” he inquired.
“I want you to check it out,” he replied.
“The hotel or your goddaughter?”
George Huxley was blunt. “Both. I hear you’re a pretty good businessman as well as an ex—” one hand drew random circles in the air “—whatever-you-are. I want you to find out if Desiree is getting in over her head, if she knows what she’s doing.”
There was more. Mathis could hear it in the cultured voice. “And...?”
The retired diplomat took in a deep breath and then slowly released it. “And...”
The infinitesimal hairs on the back of Mathis Hazard’s neck stood straight up on end. “And what?” he inquired, almost certain he didn’t really want to hear the answer.
There was another moment of hesitation, this time on the part of George Huxley. “There have been several incidents.”
“Incidents?”
“Unexplained occurrences.”
“Such as?” Mathis prodded.
The distinguished-looking man appeared almost embarrassed to say. “Furniture moving.”
“Furniture moving?”
“By itself.” He continued, albeit reluctantly. “Strange noises in the night. Glimpses of someone—something—but nothing is ever there.”
Mathis was amused. “Are you trying to tell me that the Hotel Stratford is haunted?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“That makes two of us, because neither do I.”
“Then you’re just the man for the job. You’ll be a sane voice in an otherwise insane world.”
“Is there anything else?”
Huxley squirmed in his seat. “Well, now that you mention it, there is one more thing.”
Somehow Mathis had known there would be.
“My gut instincts tell me that this is an inside job,” the older man confided to him. “No one other than my goddaughter must know who and what you actually are. Otherwise, I’m afraid that we’ll never get to the bottom of it.”
He waited for George Huxley to get to the point.
“You’ll have to go undercover.”
Mathis made certain his voice was devoid of any inflection. “You want me to go in disguise.”
“Something like that.”
He arched a quizzical brow. “Any suggestions?”
Observant eyes glanced from the expensive black Stetson, with its hammered-silver hatband, resting on Mathis’s right knee down to his highly polished, hand-tooled black leather boots. “You could always go as a cowboy.”
Mathis didn’t crack a smile. “What would a cowboy be doing at the Stratford?”
“We’ll think of something.”
“We?”
“I’m certain that between the two of us we can come up with a suitable cover story.”
Mathis was certain they could, too. “When would you like me to start?”
“Today.”
Mathis gazed out the expanse of office windows toward downtown Chicago. He wanted—no, he needed—some information on the Hotel Stratford and its former and current owners before he presented himself to the lady from Boston.
“Tomorrow,” he finally proposed to his distinguished client. “There are a few details I want to check out before I drop in on Ms. Desiree Stratford.”
“Tomorrow, then,” the other man agreed.
Some fifteen minutes later they concluded their conversation and Mathis was personally escorted to the door of the elegant office.
George Huxley shook his hand in parting. “Good luck, Hazard,” the ambassador said to him.
The unspoken words hung in the air between the two men. You’ll need it.
The penthouse he was living in for the summer, courtesy of Hazards, Inc., was on the forty-second floor of a Chicago high-rise. It was glass on three sides and had a panoramic view of Lake Michigan.
The evening light was stealing across the unusually placid surface of the great lake. As far as the eye could see it was dark blue water dotted with white sailboats.
The scene somehow reminded Mathis of the view from his adobe casita at sunset, watching the Sangre de Cristo Mountains turn blood red in one of New Mexico’s strangely transcendental landscapes.
That New Mexico was all about light was something he had discovered several years ago. Maybe it was why he had picked the location he did when he had started to buy up land in anticipation of the day he would retire from the business.
Mathis raised a can of ice-cold beer to his mouth and took a drink. There was no sense in getting maudlin about his past. No sense in brooding about it. The past was the past. His past was like anyone else’s in that it couldn’t be changed. And since no one was promised a future, that left only the present. So he concentrated on living in the here and now.
Besides, as he had reassured George Huxley during their meeting that afternoon, he had emerged from his past unscathed...or pretty damned close to it.
“Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades , son,” came the words of Argos Hazard, one-time rancher, one-time soldier and lawman, sometime husband and father.
Maybe his father had been right, after all.
There were certainly those who would say Mathis Hazard had always been a loner and that’s why he was so good at what he did. Mathis knew his past set him apart, made him different from other men, made him alone, made him a loner.
He hadn’t thought it odd to buy a ranch in the middle of New Mexico, located between a range of isolated mountains and a secluded lake, away from civilization, his nearest neighbors a good forty miles in any direction. Lord knows, he’d had enough of so-called civilization to last him a lifetime.
It wasn’t that he had been around too many people. It was the people he’d been around and the world he’d lived in, a world most people were unaware even existed.
It was a world where a man acquired eyes in the back of his head if he wanted to survive. It was a world where nothing was what it seemed to be, where no one was who they appeared to be. It was a world where a man learned to trust only one person—himself—where experience, gut instincts and sheer bravado sometimes saved a man when intelligence alone never would, never could.
He’d always essentially been alone, Mathis recognized. He always would be. At least in New Mexico there was no pretense about it.
He took another swig of his beer.
Female companionship...well, that, as they said, was another matter altogether.
Mathis rubbed the icy can across one cheek, along his jawline and halfway down his neck. He felt rather than heard someone come up behind him. He spoke without turning around: “Know anything about women, Beano?”
“They’re more trouble than they’re worth, boss.”
Beano should know. He’d been around the corral a few times in his day. He had married and divorced three women—maybe it was four—and had had a few flings in between that had never made it as far as the altar. He was currently footloose and fancy-free.
William “Beano” Jones had hired on at the old Circle H at the age of nine. He’d spent the next half-dozen years working on a chuck wagon for Mathis’s grandfather before being promoted to bunkhouse cook. Eventually he had been moved into the kitchen at the “big house.” Somewhere along the way he had started to keep an eye out for the “boy.” Now Beano was seventy if he was a day, and he still considered it his personal duty to look after Mathis.
Only the boy, of course, had become a man, a man who had been around the corral a few times himself. He’d never officially been roped, hog-tied and branded, Mathis mused, reflecting on his own marital state ... or the lack thereof.
He had imagined himself in love once, a long time ago. He’d been nineteen. She had been eighteen, pretty, blond, wild like the wind. It had been a typical summer romance—hot and fast and furious. And then it had been over just like that.
Mathis gazed out on what he knew was a sweltering Chicago night. “What about a lady from Boston?”
“Worst kind of all, boss.”
“Why?”
He could sense Beano shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “A woman like that can make a man feel dis-com-bob-u-lat-ed.” The word was broken up into its separate syllables. “A woman like that can make a man feel like he’s meetin’ himself comin’ and goin’. She can make him forget.”
Mathis was curious. He turned his head. “Make him forget what?”
Beano flashed his trademark grin, the one that drew his mouth up into a bow and sent sparks flying in his dark chocolate-brown eyes. “I’ve plumb forgot.”
Mathis laughed out loud, spilling cold beer onto his bare chest. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I?”
“You always were easy pickin’s, boy.” It was a minute or two before Beano added another pearl of masculine wisdom. “Women,” he muttered under his breath, “can’t live with them...”
“Yes...?”
Beano left it at that.
Mathis couldn’t have agreed more. Knowing that the older man wouldn’t ask, he volunteered where he had been that afternoon. “I interviewed a client today.”
“Did you?”
“George Huxley.”
Beano made a sound in the back of his throat. Mathis knew he wasn’t uninformed, just unimpressed that the security agency’s latest client was a well-known American diplomat.
“He wants me to look after his goddaughter.”
“She the lady from Boston?”
“Yes.”
“Smells like trouble to me.”
It smelled like trouble to Mathis, too.
“I have to take the case on behalf of Hazards, Inc.,” he said, reaching up with the T-shirt in his hand and wiping it across his chest. “I don’t have any choice.”
“S’pose not.”
Mathis put the can of beer down and tugged the damp T-shirt on over his head. He stood there staring out at the lake—was that mist or steam rising from its surface?—and blew- out his breath expressively. “She’s a real looker.”
“They always are.” Beano finally spoke up. “If you need any help...”
It was the opening Mathis had been waiting for. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
Apparently his cook-cum-self-appointed guardian angel was in his official mode. “What do want me to do, boss?”
“Tomorrow morning I’d like you to shave extra close and put on your best bib and tucker.”
Beano glanced down at his well-washed shirt and jeans, then lower to his well-worn everyday boots. “S’pose that means my best cowboy boots, too.”
“And your best hat.”
“The white Stetson?”
“Yup.”
“You wearing white, too?”
He nodded.
Beano raised one eyebrow. “Out to impress the lady.”
Mathis watched his own reflection in the wall of glass. There was a flash of white teeth against tanned skin. “We want to make sure she recognizes right off that we’re the good guys.”
Beano grinned from ear to ear. “We could just tell Miss—?”
“Stratford. Desiree Stratford.”
“We could just tell Miss Stratford that we’re the good guys;” he suggested.
Mathis absently rubbed his hand back and forth along his nape. “She might not believe us.”
The longtime cook made a face. “I said it once and I’ll say it again. It smells like trouble.”
He had and it did.
The old man’s weathered brow crinkled into a dozen distinct frown lines. “Where we goin’?”
Where were they going? How could he explain the situation to Beano without saying too much or too little? How could he make the other man understand?
Mathis raised the can to his mouth and finished off his beer. Hell, he wasn’t sure he understood himself.
Then the words of an old and familiar American folk song started running through Mathis Hazard’s head.
Froggy went a-courtin’, he did go.
Froggy went a-courtin’, he did go.
“We’re going a-courtin”’ was his answer.
Two
The siren awakened her from a dead sleep.
Desiree Stratford rolled over onto her side, reluctantly opened her eyes and squinted at the clock on the bedside table.
Three in the morning.
“Ohh,” she softly groaned, turning her head and burying her face in the goose-down pillow.
She didn’t want to be awake. In fact, she wanted desperately to be asleep.
After a day of seemingly endless meetings with lawyers and bankers, architects and contractors, even a delegation of longtime hotel guests, after a dinner of thoroughly atrocious and utterly cold food—Desiree vowed she would fire the temperamental and incompetent chef, Andre, just as soon as she had the time to hire a replacement—after an evening spent poring over papers in her great-grandfather’s study—had the dear, sweet man kept every scrap of correspondence he had received in his life?—it had been nearly one o’clock, a mere two hours ago, that she had finally crawled, exhausted, into bed.
Now she found herself awake again.
She had no one to blame but herself, Desiree acknowledged. She was the one who had insisted that she move into the oldest wing of the Stratford, into what used to be her great-grandparents’ living quarters, into the very bedroom where she had stayed as a child on her thrice-yearly visits to Chicago.
Apparently as a girl she had slept much more soundly than she did at the age of thirty. Now she heard the shrill, jarring, nerve-grating wail of every siren that passed on the street below between the hotel and the busy city hospital nearby.
There was no sense in crying over spilled milk, as her great-grandfather used to say.
It was too late.
It was done.
It was in the wee, small hours of the night and she was wide-awake.
Desiree turned onto her back and stared up at the ceiling overhead. A faint light was coming from the row of windows on the far side of the bedroom, just enough light so that she could make out the shapes and patterns of the mural painted on the ceiling decades earlier by a starving yet talented artist.
The images had faded somewhat with time and the inevitable layer of dust and grime that had accumulated, but they were still a magnificent rendering of the heavens, complete with sun and moon, stars and planets, clouds and constellations.
The images might have faded, but not her memories ... never her memories.
“I’m afraid of the dark, Great-Grandpapa,” she confessed one night as she was being tucked into bed.
“But only when it’s dark can we gaze up at the sky and see all the stars,” he pointed out to her.
Desiree had never thought of that.
“How many stars are there in the sky?” she asked, excited as only an eight-year-old can be excited.
“Thousands. Millions, ” her great-grandfather answered from his leather wing chair, the same leather wing chair that had always stood alongside the guest bed
“Can I count them?”
“Of course you can. You can do anything you put your mind to. Anything at all. Don’t ever forget that, Desiree.”
She gazed up at the painted mural. “But there are so very many stars, Great-Grandpapa.”
“Don’t worry, child. We’ll count them together.”
So she and her great-grandfather had counted aloud, her little girl’s half-whisper in unison with his great, booming baritone, until she couldn’t keep her eyes open no matter how hard she tried. Night after night she would fall asleep to the sound of his voice and dream about places she had never been and things she had never seen.
The decor of the guest room had been something out of a dream, as well. In fact, it still was. It had remained essentially unchanged over the years.
The furniture was delicately carved and inlaid with rare woods from the Jodhpur region of India. Above the bombe bureau were framed pictures of elephants with their trunks majestically raised skyward, mischievous monkeys at play, colorfully plumed birds perched on tree branches and king cobras, hooded, coiled, sinuous, deadly, yet worshiped by a segment of the Indian population as gods.
A large painting hung over the fireplace. It depicted a fierce Bengal tiger with a royal hunting party in pursuit On the opposite wall was a seventeenth-century embroidered tapestry, stitched with silk thread and illustrating the life of a maharajah, the beautiful ladies of his court, his grand palace and riches beyond imagination.
The family’s living quarters had always been filled with personal mementos, keepsakes and souvenirs of the Raj in India. For Desiree they had been a glimpse into her great-grandfather’s world, into a world that was gone and would not come again. Oh, how he had enjoyed telling her stories of his days on the Indian subcontinent and of the times when the sun had never set on the British Empire.
There had been a splendor and grandeur about the Hotel Stratford in those days, although if she hadn’t been an impressionable child infatuated with the place perhaps she would have noticed even back then that it was beginning to fade.
But as an eight-year-old she had seen only what she wanted to see. She had loved the hotel’s elegantly appointed lobby, its highly polished brass adornments, its marble floors underfoot and its crystal chandeliers high overhead, its sweeping staircase and claret-colored carpeting, its uniformed doorman and imposing majordomo.
Most of all Desiree had loved her great-grandfather, resplendent in a perfectly pressed Savile Row suit, starched white collar and old school tie. In a manner of speaking, the Colonel, as his staff had referred to him, had worn a kind of uniform, too. His closet had been filled with identical suits, collars and ties.
It had been her love for her great-grandfather, and for the Stratford with its rich history and traditions, that had eventually led Desiree to make preserving the past her life’s work. She believed that without the past there was no understanding of the present and precious little insight for the future.
She exhaled on a long, drawn-out sigh.
Unfortunately, sentimentality had cost her another good night’s sleep. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last. Not if she went ahead with her plans for renovating the hotel from the ground up.
In truth, the Stratford was a dowdy dowager duchess, a bit threadbare, a bit tattered, a bit—well, perhaps more than a bit—past her prime, but not beyond restoration, not beyond redemption. She could be saved. Desiree was certain of it.
But was she certain in her mind ... or only in her heart?
Desiree punched at the pillows behind her head—there were half a dozen of every size and shape, covered with the finest Egyptian cotton pillow slips—and stretched out, arms flung to either side, in the antique iron-frame bed.
She gazed up at the stars twinkling overhead on the ceiling and began to count in a whisper, “One. Two. Three. Four.” After some time she wetted her lips with her tongue and continued. “Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. One hundred.” She persisted. “One hundred and one. One hundred and two.”
Enough was enough.
“There’s no sense in pretending any longer,” Desiree muttered as she propped herself up against the mound of pillows. “You aren’t going back-to sleep any time soon.”
She was reaching for the lamp on the bedside table when she thought she heard something.
Her hand froze in midair.
She slowly took in her breath and held it. She wasn’t sure which came next: the odd, tingling sensation that raised the small hairs on the back of her neck or the soft pad of footsteps outside in the corridor.
There was no one else staying in this wing, no one else with a reason for being here.
Desiree gave herself a good shake. It was the dead of night. The Stratford was an old building. Old buildings went hand in hand with strange noises.
Or maybe it was no more than an overactive imagination on her part. Not that she was a woman prone to an overactive anything, but she was living alone in this section of the hotel.
Truth to tell, there had been more than one unexplained occurrence since her arrival at the Stratford several weeks ago. Furniture had been found mysteriously moved from one room to another. Everyone swore their innocence in the matter, and no one seemed to have any idea of who or why or when or even how this feat could have been accomplished.
Then there had been the glimpses of something—someone—just at the edge of Desiree’s peripheral vision, but nothing—and no one—was ever there.
Lastly were the inexplicable noises, always at night, always when she was alone.
Perhaps it was someone up to no good. Perhaps it was someone trying to frighten her. No doubt that’s what it was. That’s what it had to be.
Shenanigans.
Monkeyshines.
Tasteless practical jokes, in Desiree’s opinion.
There were stories, naturally. There were always stories about historic old buildings. She had heard the outlandish ghost stories about the Stratford her very first night back in Chicago. Her resident guests had seen to that.
One account; relayed with particular relish by Miss Molly Mays, had concerned the ill-fated workman who had fallen asleep during the renovation of the hotel. He had accidentally been buried alive inside a foot-thick brick wall. The poor devil had suffocated to death, of course, before his absence had been noted by his fellow workmen and the wall could be frantically torn down again.
Then there was the tale of the mobster and his moll, related with equal enthusiasm by Miss Maggie Mays. During the era of Prohibition, the couple had apparently been Chicago’s version of Bonnie and Clyde. The pair had come to an inglorious, although perhaps deserved, end when they were killed in a barrage of police bullets. Ever since, according to the elder Miss Mays, it had been rumored that the lovers’ spirits still roamed the corridors of the Stratford, phantom guns blazing.
Balderdash.
Poppycock.
Pure malarkey, as her great-grandfather would have said. She didn’t believe in ghosts. At least not those kind of ghosts, Desiree reminded herself.
Thump.
Thump.
The sound of footsteps came again.
Without switching on the bedside lamp, Desiree threw back the summer-weight covers and sat up. As a girl her feet had dangled over the edge of the high English-style bed. Now they were firmly planted on the cool hardwood floor.
Thump.
“Enough of this nonsense,” Desiree grumbled under her breath as she reached for her bathrobe and made a beeline for the door.
Despite the twenty years since her last visit, for she had stopped coming to the Stratford after the death of her great-grandfather, she knew the guest room, and the entire apartment, like the back of her hand.
Without a sound Desiree turned the knob, opened the door a crack and peered out into the corridor. Vintage lights, strategically spaced every ten or fifteen feet, cast a garish glow on the flowered wallpaper and claret-colored carpeting.
She stepped into the hallway and quietly slipped along in her bare feet, double-checking each juncture as she came to it.
There was nothing.
There was no one.
There was no sign of whoever had been there.
Not that Desiree was particularly surprised by the results of her impromptu investigation. She had scarcely expected to peer around the corner and catch the culprit red-handed.
“Utter nonsense,” she announced aloud, her voice echoing in the empty corridor. “I’m going to bed.”
It was at that moment that Desiree noticed the door to her great-grandfather’s study was ajar. Surely she had closed it when she’d finished working for the night.
Hadn’t she?
She made a split-second decision. Under the circumstances, she wasn’t going to take any chances. Reaching around the corner, Desiree grabbed one of Jules Stratford’s traditional English walking sticks from the brass umbrella stand. She firmly grasped the “weapon” in one hand and groped for the light switch with the other.
Flicking the switch, she blinked several times in rapid succession and gave her eyes a second or two to adjust to the change. Then she quickly looked around.
The room was filled with rich mahogany furniture and glass-fronted barrister bookcases, Edwardian-era oil paintings and mementos from her grandparents’ days in India, and shadows.
Thankfully, the room was also vacant.
Desiree quickly crossed to the opposite side of the spacious study and opened the door into the adjoining parlor. The formal room beyond was also unoccupied.
After closing the parlor door, she turned. At a glance the study appeared to be exactly as she had left it two hours before. She lowered the silver-tipped walking stick and approached the massive mahogany desk. That’s when she realized something was amiss.
Desiree spun on her heel and stared at the wall behind the desk where her great-grandfather’s sword and dagger, presented to him upon his retirement from active military duty, had been displayed for as long as she could remember.
The dagger was gone.
She was almost certain ... she was certain ... that the dagger had been there earlier that evening.
Who could have taken it?
Why take it?
Where was it now?
Then, out of the corner of her eye, something else caught Desiree’s attention. She slowly pivoted. As the object came into focus, a chill spiraled down her spine. For a moment she couldn’t think. She couldn’t move. She didn’t even breathe.
Finally collecting herself, she encircled the desk, all the while being very careful not to touch anything.
Perhaps Uncle George was right.
Perhaps it was a good idea for a security expert to inquire into the peculiar goings-on at the Stratford.
Admittedly, when her godfather had telephoned that afternoon to inform her that he had called in a “hired gun,” Desiree had argued the point with him. She had recited to him a dozen good reasons why she didn’t want and didn’t need extra security at the hotel.
Now she was relieved that she hadn’t managed to talk George Huxley out of his plan. As a matter of fact, it was of some consolation to her just knowing that the man was scheduled to show up first thing in the morning.
For there, directly in front of Desiree Stratford, firmly embedded in the top of the desk, its tip neatly slicing through a sheet of thick, cream-colored writing paper embossed with the family coat of arms and with the single word forewarned block-printed across its surface, was her great-grandfather’s dagger.
Three
Rashid Modi hovered in the doorway of what had once been the night manager’s office. He discreetly cleared his throat. “A thousand pardons, Ms. Stratford.”
Desiree looked up from the most recent financial statement submitted by her accountant—it was not good news—and said rather absently, “Yes, Mr. Modi?”
The hotel manager squared his shoulders. “There is someone here to see you.”
“Who is it?” she inquired of the capable young man who had been in charge of the day-to-day operation of the Stratford and its few remaining staff members since the death of her step-great-grandmother, Charlotte, last winter.
“He did not give his name.” Rashid Modi remained standing at attention. “He said you would know who he was.”
Desiree glanced at the antique cloisonné timepiece on the bookcase opposite the desk. It was precisely eight o’clock. Perhaps her caller was the security expert retained by George Huxley. The security expert she wasn’t supposed to mention to anyone, at least not by profession. If so, the man was punctual. First thing in the morning evidently meant first thing in the morning.
Rashid Modi lingered. “You are busy. Do you wish for me to send him away?”
Desiree tidied the stack of papers in front of her and slipped them back into the large official-looking envelope in which they had been delivered the day before. “Thank you, Mr. Modi, but that won’t be necessary,” she said as she stashed the envelope in her briefcase. “I’ll see the gentleman.”
“As you wish,” he acquiesced.
Desiree sensed a certain hesitation on the part of the Stratford’s manager. “What is it, Mr. Modi?”
Rashid Modi was the absolute soul of discretion. He was well-dressed, well-spoken, well trained and well liked. There was no doubt in Desiree’s mind that he would go far in his chosen career as a hotelier. In fact, the only surprise to her was that he had accepted a position with the Stratford which was, frankly, no longer on the “A” list of Chicago hotels. The man could have aimed higher, much higher: the Tremont or the Whitehall or even the Raphael, and he could certainly have commanded more money than Charlotte Stratford—and now Desiree—could afford to pay him.
Mr. Modi hemmed and hawed, and then, with a decided flair for understatement, disclosed, “The person waiting to see you isn’t exactly a gentleman.”
This unexpected announcement got Desiree’s attention. “What is he, then?”
The young man paused, brushed at a nonexistent speck of lint on his lapel and said, “A cowboy.”
“A cowboy?” Uncle George—as she had called George Huxley for as long as she could remember; he had been one of her father’s best friends since their undergraduate days at Harvard—hadn’t mentioned anything about a cowboy. Desiree was admittedly curious. “How do you know he’s a cowboy?”
Typically a man of few unnecessary words, Mr. Modi gave a succinct answer. “Cowboy boots. Cowboy hats.”
Hats?
Desiree frowned. “Is there more than one hat?”
He nodded.
Lack of sleep had finally caught up with her, Desiree realized as she pondered the problem of the hats. Why would a cowboy wear more than one hat? For that matter, how could a cowboy wear more than one hat at a time? Surely the man didn’t have two heads. A surreal Salvador Dali-like picture formed in her mind.
Aloud, she asked, “Why?”
It was the hotel manager’s turn to frown in puzzlement. “Why what, Ms. Stratford?”
She wasn’t making herself understood. “Why is there more than one cowboy hat?”
“Because there is more than one cowboy,” he said simply.
Her mouth formed a silent O.
Rashid Modi held up two long, elegant fingers. “In fact, there are two cowboys.”
“I see.” Desiree didn’t see, but she supposed that was beside the point.
During their telephone conversation yesterday, her godfather had clearly stated that the security expert’s name was Mathis Hazard, and that the well-respected security agency he represented was Hazards, Inc. She was quite certain that Uncle George hadn’t said anything about a cowboy or a sidekick.
Mr. Modi moved his head back and forth. With the tip of his tongue against the back of his front teeth, he began to make a small clicking noise. It was definitely a sound of disapproval. “I told the persons in question to go around to the delivery entrance and see Andre.” The young gentleman paused, raised his nose ever so slightly in the air and sniffed as only an Englishman can sniff. “But they, well, he, insisted on speaking to you personally.”
“He?”
“The formidable one.”
Mathis Hazard must be formidable, indeed. Rashid Modi was not a man easily impressed or intimidated, nor, for that matter, was he prone to exaggeration.
Desiree only hoped and prayed there weren’t going to be any unpleasantries between the very English hotel manager—Rashid Modi was of Indian ancestry, but he had been born, raised and educated in London—and a security agent from the American West, judging from the former’s description of the latter.
Frankly she had enough on her mind with the coterie of lawyers and accountants, contractors and architects constantly buzzing around her, not to mention the temperamental Andre and the trio of female guests in permanent residence who acted as though they were the ones who actually owned the Stratford.
If that wasn’t enough to drive a sane woman to the brink of insanity, there had been the incident of the night before. She had assumed that Mathis Hazard would want to examine the evidence for himself, so she had left her great-grandfather’s dagger exactly as she had found it: jeweled handle gleaming in the lamplight, razor-sharp tip embedded in the top of the mahogany desk.
Desiree brushed a hand across her eyes. After discovering the dagger and the note, she had made a thorough search of her great-grandparents’ former apartment. Whoever had been there seemed to have vanished into thin air.
Ninety-nine-point-nine percent certain that the culprit didn’t have any intentions of returning to the scene of the crime for a second time that night, Desiree had gone back to bed. First, however, she had securely wedged a sturdy chair under the brass doorknob, since there were no locks on the doors in the family wing. Despite this precaution, it had been nearly dawn before she had managed to fall asleep again.
Rashid Modi repeated his initial offer. “I can send the cowboys away, Ms. Stratford, if you don’t have time to see them.”
“I can spare a minute or two,” she said.
“Shall I show them in?” The manager indicated the confines of the small, once elegant and now somewhat threadbare, office.
Desiree politely shook her head and inquired, “Where are the two men?”
Another concise reply was supplied by Mr. Modi. “The lobby.”
Desiree pushed her chair back, reached for the tailored jacket to her suit and rose to her feet. “I’ll see them in the lobby, then.”
The heels of her pumps clicked on the marble floor as Desiree pulled on her jacket and started down the hallway. Once she reached the lobby she paused for a moment, put her head back and gazed up at the ornate ceiling high above her.
The lobby ceiling was done in the grand Victorian style, with intricately carved cornices and molding, and with a second mural by the same artist who had painted the guest room. This time he had chosen to depict mythical creatures of flight from the six-winged angels of the seraphim to round-cheeked cherubs, from exotic birdmen to a snow-white Pegasus.
The piece de resistance of the front lobby, however, was the chandelier. It was Austrian crystal, weighed more than a ton, dated from the turn of the century when it was originally a gaslight and, since its conversion to electricity, was said to be comprised of more than two thousand individual lightbulbs.
In the hotel’s heyday there had been a full-time employee whose job had been to clean and change the bulbs in the lighting fixtures, including the Stratford’s prized chandelier. There had also been an attendant who polished, on a daily basis, the brass balustrades on the staircase. And another whose sole duty was to set and wind the clocks, all ninety-seven of them.
That was no longer the case. The ninety-seven clocks were long gone, and the cleaning and polishing were done by a small, independent business firm that had won the job by quoting Charlotte Stratford the lowest bid.
Nevertheless, the myriad stories about the Stratford, its architectural and social history, its famous guests and its somewhat more humble yet interesting employees, had fascinated Desiree when she was a girl. They still did.
Her gaze returned to ground level. There were her early-morning visitors standing in the middle of the lobby. Mr. Rashid was correct, as he usually was. They were cowboys. Both of them.
The next thing Desiree noticed were the white hats. Not on their heads, thankfully, but held at their sides. At least they were gentlemen enough to remove them indoors.
The disparity between the two men was immediately apparent. One was quite short. The other was very tall. The smaller, slightly rotund cowboy was facing her. His features were craggy. His skin was wrinkled and leathery and tanned to the color of toast. Obviously he had spent a lifetime outdoors in the elements. In Desiree’s estimation he was the older by a good thirty or forty years, and he was also the more animated of the pair.
The second man was in profile. From this angle Desiree put his age as mid-thirties. He could have been younger or older. She decided he was probably older.
Her eyes swept his appearance from the ground up. He was dressed in cowboy boots, faded blue jeans, a Western-style leather coat and a white dress shirt. He had shunned a traditional tie, as had his sidekick, in favor of a bolo, complete with obligatory gold nugget.
Still, it wasn’t the man’s conspicuous bolo or his spit-polished cowboy boots or his pristine white cowboy hat that caught and held Desiree’s attention. It was something far less tangible. It was something in the way he stood there, motionless, quietly assessing the front entrance, the registration desk, the sweeping staircase, in fact, the entire lobby. It was almost as if he had eyes in the back of his head.
That’s when Desiree suddenly realized that he knew she was watching him.
A tingle of awareness tiptoed along her spine. She took in a sustaining breath and discreetly blew it out again. Now she understood why the hotel manager had referred to her visitor as intimidating. The man was more than intimidating. He was dangerous. In fact, he positively reeked of danger. It was tightly held-in-check, controlled danger, but it was danger, nevertheless.
Desiree didn’t doubt for a moment that this was a man who could take care of himself wherever he was, that this was a man who knew who his enemies were and who his friends were, and regarded both with equal suspicion. She found herself wondering where in the world Mathis Hazard had been and what he had been called upon to do.
Mr. Hazard was dangerous for another reason, as well, Desiree acknowledged to herself. With those broad shoulders, muscular arms and that chest, with that lean waistline and long legs, he was dangerous to women.
Even she wasn’t immune, Desiree recognized, although she had never been interested in the “man’s man” type before. Her personal preference in the opposite sex was a well-educated, erudite, witty and socially accomplished escort who would accompany her to concerts and plays, gallery showings and charity events.
Yet she couldn’t help but notice that Mathis Hazard’s hair was luxuriously thick and a rich dark brown in color, that it was a little too long in the back and around his ears, and that it bad a tendency to curl at his nape.
Even in profile she could see that his forehead was high and his dark eyebrows were arched. His nose bordered on the patrician, but a telltale bump on the bridge meant it had been broken at some point in his life. His mouth was taut, the lower lip was fuller than the upper. His chin was square and jutted with determination. His ears were slightly small, nicely shaped and tucked close to his head. His hands were large and masculine, yet graceful.
Then he turned his head—just his head, nothing more, nothing less—and she saw his eyes, dark, intelligent, somewhat mysterious, piercing and definitely predatory.
Desiree Stratford had met many men in her life, from temperamental artists to affluent collectors, from the homeless on the streets of Boston to wealthy philanthropists, from heads of state to leaders of industry, even those who claimed royal blood or who were, indeed, royalty. She had known men with that implacable air of self-confidence, men who wore the mantle of power as though they were born with it, men with a core of inner strength that seemed to defy logic.
This was one of those men.
She was suddenly tempted to turn tail and run just as fast and just as far as she could.
“Don’t let your imagination run away with itself, Desiree Marie Stratford,” she chided herself under her breath.
She was no lily-livered female, no fainthearted damsel in distress. She was a modern woman with her own career, her own money, her own apartment and her own life.
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