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She swallowed. Hard. “Dollars?”
“Pounds.”
“Oh, God.”
She’d rescued Gina from more scrapes than she could count. But this... She almost yanked out one of the chairs and collapsed in a boneless heap. The iron will she’d inherited from Grandmama kept her spine straight and her chin up.
“There’s obviously a logical explanation for this, Mr. Hunter.”
“I very much hope so, Ms. St. Sebastian.”
She wanted to smack him. Calm, refined, always polite Sarah had to curl her hands into fists to keep from slapping that sneer off his too-handsome face.
He must have guessed her savagely suppressed urge. His jaw squared and his blue eyes took on a challenging glint, as if daring her to give it her best shot. When she didn’t, he picked up where they’d left off.
“I’m very interested in hearing that explanation before I refer the matter to the police.”
The police! Sarah felt a chill wash through her. Whatever predicament Gina had landed herself in suddenly assumed a very ominous tone. She struggled to keep the shock and worry out of her voice.
“Let me get in touch with my sister, Mr. Hunter. It may...it may take a while. She’s not always prompt about returning calls or answering emails right away.”
“Yeah, I found that out. I’ve been trying to reach her for several days.”
He shot back a cuff and glanced at his watch.
“I’ve got meetings scheduled that will keep me tied up for the rest of this afternoon and well into the night. I’ll make dinner reservations for tomorrow evening. Seven o’clock. Avery’s, Upper West Side.” He turned that hard blue gaze on her. “I assume you know the address. It’s only a few blocks from the Dakota.”
Still stunned by what she’d seen in the surveillance clip, Sarah almost missed his last comment. When it penetrated, her eyes widened in shock. “You know where I live?”
“Yes, Lady Sarah, I do.” He tipped two fingers to his brow in a mock salute and strode for the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
* * *
Lady Sarah.
Coming on top of everything else, the use of her empty title shouldn’t have bothered her. Her boss trotted it out frequently at cocktail parties and business meetings. Sarah had stopped being embarrassed by Alexis’s shameless peddling of a royal title that had long since ceased to have any relevance.
Unfortunately, Alexis wanted to do more than peddle the heritage associated with the St. Sebastian name. Sarah had threatened to quit—twice!—if her boss went ahead with the feature she wanted to on Beguile’s own Lady Sarah Elizabeth Marie-Adele St. Sebastian, granddaughter to Charlotte, the Destitute Duchess.
God! Sarah shuddered every time she remembered the slant Alexis had wanted to give the story. That destitute tag, as accurate as it was, would have shattered Grandmama’s pride.
Having her younger granddaughter arrested for grand larceny wouldn’t do a whole lot for it, either.
Jolted back to the issue at hand, Sarah rushed out of the conference room. She had to get hold of Gina. Find out if she’d really lifted that medallion. She was making a dash for her workstation when she saw her boss striding toward her.
“What’s this I just heard?”
Alexis’s deep, guttural smoker’s rasp was always a shock to people meeting her for the first time. Beguile’s executive editor was paper-clip thin and always gorgeously dressed. But she would rather take her chances with cancer than quit smoking and risk ballooning up to a size four.
“Is it true?” she growled. “Devon Hunter was here?”
“Yes, he...”
“Why didn’t you buzz me?”
“I didn’t have time.”
“What did he want? He’s not going to sue us, is he? Dammit, I told you to crop that locker-room shot above the waist.”
“No, Alexis. You told me to make sure it showed his butt crack. And I told you I didn’t think we should pay some smarmy gym employee to sneak pictures of the man without his knowledge or consent.”
The executive editor waved that minor difference of editorial opinion aside. “So what did he want?”
“He’s, uh, a friend of Gina’s.”
Or was, Sarah thought grimly, until the small matter of a twelfth-century medallion had come between them. She had to get to a phone. Had to call Gina.
“Another one of your sister’s trophies?” Alexis asked sarcastically.
“I didn’t have time to get all the details. Just that he’s in town for some business meetings and wants to get together for dinner tomorrow.”
The executive editor cocked her head. An all-too-familiar gleam entered her eyes, one that made Sarah swallow a groan. Pit bulls had nothing on Alexis when she locked her jaws on a story.
“We could do a follow-up,” she said. “How making Beguile’s Top Ten list has impacted our sexy single’s life. Hunter’s pretty much a workaholic, isn’t he?”
Frantic to get to the phone, Sarah gave a distracted nod. “That’s how we portrayed him.”
“I’m guessing he can’t take a step now without tripping over a half-dozen panting females. Gina certainly smoked him out fast enough. I want details, Sarah. Details!”
She did her best to hide her agitation behind her usual calm facade. “Let me talk to my sister first. See what’s going on.”
“Do that. And get me details!”
Alexis strode off and Sarah barely reached the chair at her worktable before her knees gave out. She snatched up her iPhone and hit the speed-dial number for her sister. Of course, the call went to voice mail.
“Gina! I need to talk to you! Call me.”
She also tapped out a text message and zinged off an email. None of which would do any good if her sister had forgotten to turn on her phone. Again. Knowing the odds of that were better than fifty-fifty, she tried Gina’s current place of employment. She was put through to her sister’s distinctly irate boss, who informed her that Gina hadn’t shown up for work. Again.
“She called in yesterday morning. We’d catered a business dinner at the home of one our most important clients the night before. She said she was tired and was taking the day off. I haven’t heard from her since.”
Sarah had to ask. “Was that client Devon Hunter, by any chance?”
“Yes, it was. Look, Ms. St. Sebastian, your sister has a flair for presentation but she’s completely unreliable. If you speak to her before I do, tell her not to bother coming in at all.”
Despite the other, far more pressing problem that needed to be dealt with, Sarah hated that Gina had lost yet another job. She’d really seemed to enjoy this one.
“I’ll tell her,” she promised the irate supervisor. “And if she contacts you first, please tell her to call me.”
* * *
She got through the working lunch somehow. Alexis, of course, demanded a laundry list of changes to the ski-resort layout. Drop shadows on the headline font. Less white space between the photos. Ascenders, not descenders, for the first letter of each lead paragraph.
Sarah made the fixes and shot the new layout from her computer to Alexis’s for review. She then tried to frame another article describing the latest body-toning techniques. In between, she made repeated calls to Gina. They went unanswered, as did her emails and text messages.
Her concentration in shreds, she quit earlier than usual and hurried out into the April evening. A half block away, Times Square glowed in a rainbow of white, blue and brilliant-red lights. Tourists were out in full force, crowding the sidewalks and snapping pictures. Ordinarily Sarah took the subway to and from work, but a driving sense of urgency made her decide to splurge on a cab. Unbelievably, one cruised up just when she hit the curb. She slid in as soon as the previous passenger climbed out.
“The Dakota, please.”
The turbaned driver nodded and gave her an assessing glance in the rearview mirror. Whatever their nationality, New York cabbies were every bit as savvy as any of Beguile’s fashion-conscious editors. This one might not get the label on Sarah’s suit jacket exactly right but he knew quality when he saw it. He also knew a drop-off at one of New York City’s most famous landmarks spelled big tips.
Usually. Sarah tried not to think how little of this month’s check would be left after paying the utilities and maintenance fees for the seven-room apartment she shared with her grandmother. She also tried not to cringe when the cabbie scowled at the tip she gave him. Muttering something in his native language, he shoved his cab in gear.
Sarah hurried toward the entrance to the domed and turreted apartment building constructed in the 1880s and nodded to the doorman who stepped out of his niche to greet her.
“Good evening, Jerome.”
“Good evening, Lady Sarah.”
She’d long ago given up trying to get him to drop the empty title. Jerome felt it added to the luster of “his” building.
Not that the Dakota needed additional burnishing. Now a National Historic Landmark, its ornate exterior had been featured in dozens of films. Fictional characters in a host of novels claimed the Dakota as home. Real-life celebrities like Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall and Leonard Bernstein had lived there. And, sadly, John Lennon. He’d been shot just a short distance away. His widow, Yoko Ono, still owned several apartments in the building.
“The Duchess returned from her afternoon constitutional about an hour ago,” Jerome volunteered. The merest hint of a shadow crossed his lean face. “She was leaning rather heavily on her cane.”
Sharp, swift fear pushed aside Sarah’s worry about her sister. “She didn’t overdo it, did she?”
“She said not. But then, she wouldn’t say otherwise, would she?”
“No,” Sarah agreed in a hollow voice, “she wouldn’t.
Charlotte St. Sebastian had witnessed the brutal execution of her husband and endured near-starvation before she’d escaped her war-ravaged country with her baby in her arms and a king’s ransom in jewels hidden inside her daughter’s teddy bear. She’d fled first to Vienna, then New York, where she’d slipped easily into the city’s intellectual and social elite. The discreet, carefully timed sale of her jewels had allowed her to purchase an apartment at the Dakota and maintain a gracious lifestyle.
Tragedy struck again when she lost both her daughter and son-in-law in a boating accident. Sarah was just four and Gina still in diapers at the time. Not long after that, an unscrupulous Wall Street type sank the savings the duchess had managed to accrue into a Ponzi scheme that blew up in his and his clients’ faces.
Those horrific events might have crushed a lesser woman. With two small girls to raise, Charlotte St. Sebastian wasted little time on self-pity. Once again she was forced to sell her heritage. The remaining jewels were discreetly disposed of over the years to provide her granddaughters with the education and lifestyle she insisted was their birthright. Private schools. Music tutors. Coming-out balls at the Waldorf. Smith College and a year at the Sorbonne for Sarah, Barnard for Gina.
Neither sister had a clue how desperate the financial situation had become, however, until Grandmama’s heart attack. It was a mild one, quickly dismissed by the iron-spined duchess as a trifling bout of angina. The hospital charges weren’t trifling, though. Nor was the stack of bills Sarah had found stuffed in Grandmama’s desk when she sat down to pay what she’d thought were merely recurring monthly expenses. She’d nearly had a heart attack herself when she’d totaled up the amount.
Sarah had depleted her own savings account to pay that daunting stack of bills. Most of them, anyway. She still had to settle the charges for Grandmama’s last echocardiogram. In the meantime, her single most important goal in life was to avoid stressing out the woman she loved with all her heart.
She let herself into their fifth-floor apartment, as shaken by Jerome’s disclosure as by her earlier meeting with Devon Hunter. The comfortably padded Ecuadoran who served as maid, companion to Charlotte and friend to both Sarah and her sister for more than a decade was just preparing to leave.
“Hola, Sarah.”
“Hola, Maria. How was your day?”
“Good. We walked, la duquesa and me, and shopped a little.” She shouldered her hefty tote bag. “I go to catch my bus now. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Good night.”
When the door closed behind her, a rich soprano voice only slightly dimmed by age called out, “Sarah? Is that you?”
“Yes, Grandmama.”
She deposited her purse on the gilt-edged rococo sideboard gracing the entryway and made her way down a hall tiled in pale pink Carrara marble. The duchess hadn’t been reduced to selling the furniture and artwork she’d acquired when she’d first arrived in New York, although Sarah now knew how desperately close she’d come to it.
“You’re home early.”
Charlotte sat in her favorite chair, the single aperitif she allowed herself despite the doctor’s warning close at hand. The sight of her faded blue eyes and aristocratic nose brought a rush of emotion so strong Sarah had to swallow before she could a reply past the lump in her throat.
“Yes, I am.”
She should have known Charlotte would pick up on the slightest nuance in her granddaughter’s voice.
“You sound upset,” she said with a small frown. “Did something happen at work?”
“Nothing more than the usual.” Sarah forced a wry smile and went to pour herself a glass of white wine. “Alexis was on a tear about the ski-resort mock-up. I had to rework everything but the page count.”
The duchess sniffed. “I don’t know why you work for that woman.”
“Mostly because she was the only one who would hire me.”
“She didn’t hire you. She hired your title.”
Sarah winced, knowing it was true, and her grandmother instantly shifted gears.
“Lucky for Alexis the title came with an unerring eye for form, shape and spatial dimension,” she huffed.
“Lucky for me,” Sarah countered with a laugh. “Not everyone can parlay a degree in Renaissance-era art into a job at one of the country’s leading fashion magazines.”
“Or work her way from junior assistant to senior editor in just three years,” Charlotte retorted. Her face softened into an expression that played on Sarah’s heartstrings like a finely tuned Stradivarius. “Have I told you how proud I am of you?”
“Only about a thousand times, Grandmama.”
They spent another half hour together before Charlotte decided she would rest a little before dinner. Sarah knew better than to offer to help her out of her chair, but she wanted to. God, she wanted to! When her grandmother’s cane had thumped slowly down the hall to her bedroom, Sarah fixed a spinach salad and added a bit more liquid to the chicken Maria had begun baking in the oven. Then she washed her hands, detoured into the cavernous sitting room that served as a study and booted up her laptop.
She remembered the basics from the article Beguile had run on Devon Hunter. She wanted to dig deeper, uncover every minute detail she could about the man before she crossed swords with him again tomorrow evening.
Two
Seated at a linen-draped table by the window, Dev watched Sarah St. Sebastian approach the restaurant’s entrance. Tall and slender, she moved with restrained grace. No swinging hips, no ground-eating strides, just a smooth symmetry of motion and dignity.
She wore her hair down tonight. He liked the way the mink-dark waves framed her face and brushed the shoulders of her suit jacket. The boxy jacket was a sort of pale purple. His sisters would probably call that color lilac or heliotrope or something equally girlie. The skirt was black and just swished her boot tops as she walked.
Despite growing up with four sisters, Dev’s fashion sense could be summed up in a single word. A woman either looked good, or she didn’t. This one looked good. Very good.
He wasn’t the only one who thought so. When she entered the restaurant and the greeter escorted her to the table by the window, every head in the room turned. Males without female companions were openly admiring. Those with women at their tables were more discreet but no less appreciative. Many of the women, too, slanted those seemingly casual, careless glances that instantly catalogued every detail of hair, dress, jewelry and shoes.
