Dangerous Ladies (6 page)

A
s the cab drove Brandi deeper into Kenilworth’s wooded streets, a pang of guilt struck her. With its old-fashioned lampposts, its huge estates, and the mansions set back among the trees, Kenilworth was the epitome of the classic old-money neighborhood. “Wow,” she murmured. “Mother would love this.”

“What?” As he’d been doing since he picked her up from the Tirra Spa on West Erie, the driver glanced in his rearview mirror, then apparently decided he didn’t care about restraint or public safety, and stared.

Not that she didn’t appreciate the proof that the spa makeup artist and hairstylist had both been brilliant, but she truly didn’t want to hike the miles to Uncle Charles’s house because the driver had hit a lamppost. Not in stiletto heels. “Look out!” she said.

He whipped his head around and stared into the evening shadows. “What?”

“Oh. I thought I saw a dog.” Not true, but at least he was peering forward again.

“A . . . dog?” He swerved, his already awful driving exacerbated by her warning. “These people in here are so rich they’ll get your license taken away for hitting their dog. Can you imagine?”

Yes, she could imagine very easily. To take her mind off the peril
she faced with every screeching turn, she took out her phone and cradled it in her hand.

She still hadn’t called her father. And she had to. And if she did it right now, he would probably be at dinner and wouldn’t answer, and if by bad luck he did, she could be on the phone only until she got to the party.

Part of any plan for calling her father always included an impending reason to hang up and the good possibility that she could leave a message.

“Are you warm enough?” The cabby’s hand crept toward the heat to turn it off.

“Barely.” Tiny gold straps curled around her feet and up her ankles, and she used her bare, red-polished toes as the excuse to demand warmth. Actually, with her London Fog buttoned and belted, she was comfortable, but she wasn’t about to admit that. The heater had two speeds, full-blast and off, and when it was off the windows frosted over so quickly the driver couldn’t see.

Not that that seemed to worry him.

Closing her eyes for a moment, she took a few calming breaths and punched Daddy’s number.

He answered.
Bad luck.

“Daddy, it’s Brandi.” She kept her voice cheerful and warm, a direct contrast to the cold roiling in her belly.

“Oh. Brandi. What do you need?”

She’d obviously caught him in the middle of something. He had that I’m-too-busy-to-bother tone going. “I don’t need anything, Daddy. I called to wish you happy birthday.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Keep the conversation rolling, Brandi.
“What are you doing to celebrate?”

“I’m working.”

“Oh. Well.” What a surprise. When she was a kid, he’d missed more birthday parties—hers, his, Tiffany’s—than he’d made. “I arrived in Chicago safely.”

“You did, huh?” She heard him shuffling papers. “How’s the job going?”

“I haven’t started yet. I start on Monday.”

He grunted. “That’ll be interesting. I’ll bet they’ve never had a ballerina working at McGrath and Lindoberth before.”

“I haven’t taken ballet lessons since I was thirteen.” When Tiffany had run out of the alimony money and they’d had to make a choice between ballet and eating.

“Bullshit. You took it in college. Stupid thing to do. Why didn’t you take a sport? That would have taught you some backbone, some competitive spirit.”

“Dance isn’t stupid, Daddy.” Of course, it wasn’t dance that he considered stupid. It was her, and he took every chance to make sure she knew it.

She didn’t know why she cared; she knew it wasn’t true. Yet when he used that cold, lashing tone, he took her back to that moment fourteen years ago when he’d walked out on her and her mother, and all the anguish she’d felt rushed back and she shivered with the pain of an abandoned child.

“Yeah. How’s McGrath?”

“I’ll see Uncle Charles tonight. Shall I give him your regards?”

“Sure. The old coot doesn’t like me, but what the hell. It’s always good to keep up connections.” Someone spoke to him. A woman. His secretary, maybe, or his newest lover, or both. “Listen, Brandi, I’m busy. Call me back after you’ve started the job and let me know whether you’re putting that damned expensive law degree to use.”

Sometimes she just wanted to wring his fat neck. “Daddy,
you
convinced me to borrow the money from you rather than use a student loan. You said it made sense because you wouldn’t charge me interest.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to get paid,” he shot back.

“I’ll pay you,” she said softly.

“You bet you will.”

The driver said, “Hey, is this where I turn in?”

He veered so suddenly that her shoulder hit the door. “I hope to God.” She had never meant anything so devoutly. She wanted out of this cab. She wanted off this phone call. And not necessarily in that order. She spoke into the receiver. “Daddy, I have to go. Talk to you later.”

But he’d already hung up.

The cab passed through the open iron gate and tore up Uncle Charles’s long, softly lit driveway at thirty miles an hour.

Viciously she shoved her phone into her bag. She could feel her cheeks burning. Damn her father. He always made her feel like some kind of shiftless no-account mooch. She should never have borrowed the law school money from him. Even when she’d done it, she knew it was the wrong thing, that he had offered it only so he would keep the power to manipulate her. But like the sucker she always was about him, she hoped that this time he’d offered because he’d realized, at last, that he cared about her.

The driver slammed on his brakes ten feet past the wide, curving stairway that led to the front door. “Thirty-seven twenty-five,” he said, pointing at the meter.

“Back up to the door.” She articulated each word in tones so clear they rang like struck lead crystal. She was in no mood to take shit from any man, much less a cabdriver who tried to cheat her by going the wrong way and then kill her with his ineptitude.

He started to object, but he looked in the rearview mirror one last time, and something of her simmering rage must have shown through her still mask, for he slammed it in reverse and got her to the right spot.

A man in a long, dark coat and dark hat decorated with an escutcheon waited to assist her. Was he . . . a footman?

He was.

He opened the door.

A blast of cold air hit her.

He extended his gloved hand. “Welcome, Miss . . . ?”

“Miss Michaels. Miss Brandi Michaels.”

He touched his gloved hand to his hat. “Miss Michaels, Mr. McGrath asked that I extend a special welcome to you. He’s looking forward to seeing you.”

“Thank you.” Oh, yes, Tiffany would
definitely
enjoy this.

Brandi handed him her brand-new Louis Vuitton duffel bag and shoved two twenties at the cabdriver. “Keep the change.”

“Hey, that’s only three bucks tip. I got you here in a hurry!”

“And I wanted to be late.” Taking the footman’s hand, she lifted herself out of the warm cab and into the frigid Chicago winter.

In these shoes she was over six feet tall—five inches taller than the footman and two inches taller than Alan. Not that she cared about
that
, but for the first time in four years she didn’t have to cater to some man’s ego.

She looked up at the well-lit exterior of the stone English Tudor home.

The house spread its wings wide in both directions. Its conical towers rose four stories, and the stones were arranged in fantastic patterns, with half-timber work and roofs and gables that swooped and rose to delight her eyes.

She knew Uncle Charles’s history; he’d bought the house for his wife—they’d delighted in decorating and entertaining—and when she’d passed away over ten years ago, he’d mourned sincerely. He’d called to talk to Tiffany occasionally; he seemed to feel she understood, and in some ways Brandi supposed she did. After all, death was a kind of abandonment, too.

“Go on in, Miss Michaels,” the footman advised. “It’s thirty below and the wind’s starting to kick up.”

She shuddered at the report and hurried up the steps. A tall, burly man with a shaved head and frosty blue eyes surrounded by pale eyelashes held the wide door open for her. She sighed in delight as the heat of the foyer enveloped her.

“May I see your invitation, please?”

Brandi glanced at his name tag. Jerry. Security. And everything a
security man should be: He was muscled, his suit was black, his shirt was white, his tie was gray. Two black men and one Asian woman, all dressed precisely like him and with similar impassive expressions, stood in the foyer waiting to welcome other guests.

That, more than anything, told Brandi how many important people were attending this event to raise money for the Art Institute of Chicago. Uncle Charles feared party crashers, and wanted no violent incidents involving his very wealthy clients and friends.

Brandi stood, poised and calm, while Jerry examined her invitation, the guest list, and her face.

Behind her, a well-groomed older Hispanic couple stepped into the door and were treated to the same scrutiny by another security man.

“Miss Michaels, would you mind if I went through your, er, satchel?” Jerry indicated her bag.

“Feel free.” She handed him her duffel.

The other couple shed their coats and watched curiously as her guard placed her bag on the elegantly fragile Queen Anne table against the wall and popped the latch.

This place was beautiful. Everything was big, tall, expansive—the shining parquet floor, the Old World portraits of stiffly posed, bewigged nobles, the wood-paneled walls. As she admired the newly discovered mahogany on the curved stairway, the crystal chandelier sparkling two stories above her head, and the carved Chinese rugs, her toes curled. The house was as glamorous as Tiffany had hoped.

She made note of the details to tell her mother—the mother she had yet to inform of her broken engagement.

Of course, Brandi had spent the day luxuriating in a much-needed bath, massage, manicure and pedicure, spray tan, haircut and -style, the biggest shopping spree in which she’d ever indulged. . . . It was amazing how quickly one could spend seven thousand dollars when one was determined.

Oh, and she’d spent time arguing with Kim about the execution
of her plan. Kim, who’d become surprisingly stodgy when it came to her younger sister’s morals.

Who’d had time to call Tiffany?

The faint sound of choking brought her attention back to Jerry.

His broad shoulders stiffened. A slow, bright red crept up his pale skin from his necktie to his receding hairline.

Good. She hoped he was embarrassed. She understood the need for him to search her bag, but she didn’t have to like it.

He swallowed as he lifted the brief, thin scrap of silk and lace that would cover her breasts so erotically. She knew it would; she’d tried it on in the shop, as well as the other various sheer undergarments and bits of hedonistic sleepwear.

He tried to refrain from looking at her, but he lost the battle. His brown gaze darted over her bosom.

He saw nothing but a woman huddled in her black London Fog. As much as she would have liked to appear swathed in a gossamer cape, she refused to go out in this godforsaken Chicago deep freeze without her heaviest coat—and even it wasn’t heavy enough.

He pulled his hand free of the bag as if escaping some fatally baited trap. “Okay. Do you want to, um, check the bag? I mean, do you want to check it so you don’t have to carry it? You know, get a check tag so you can have it when you leave?”

“That would be delightful.” She kept her voice pitched at that tone she’d heard her mother use so many times when she wanted a man to do something for her. “Jerry, would you take care of that for me?”

“Yeah.” He pulled at the collar that circled his linebacker-size neck.

“And my coat, too?” She fluttered her eyelashes, the ones with the mascara the makeup artist had promised was like tar.

“Oh, yeah,” he said.

When the other guards coughed and shuffled, he realized how he’d been manipulated. Looking stern, he said, “The checkroom is right over there. . . .”

She smiled into his eyes.

In disgust he said, “Oh, never mind. Just give me the coat. I’ll do it.”

She unbelted the coat. Unbuttoned it. Taking a deep breath, she slid it off her shoulders and down her arms.

The silence in the foyer was profound.

She looked around. Jerry’s mouth was hanging open. One black security guy had his arm braced against the wall. The other had taken a step forward. The Asian security guard was smiling as if she’d just had a vision—Brandi hadn’t realized she was a lesbian, but obviously she was. And of the Hispanic guests, the husband looked enthralled and the wife furious.

So Mother was right. A red dress worked.

A long, silk, sleeveless scarlet dress with, as Mr. Arturo said, “Two really elegant design features, darling, and both of them hold up the bodice.”

Of course she was wearing underwear—a thong—and her stiletto heels, and a crystal blue bracelet and those sapphire earrings, those great sapphire earrings. But she hadn’t been absolutely sure whether she’d achieved the effect she sought.

Until now.

Yes, it appeared this dress, this body, and these shoes could stun every race, every economic strata, and both sexes. In any language, she called that success.

Unfortunately none of these men were candidates for her plan.

She’d made a list of her requirements.

She wanted a man who was handsome, mature, rich, discreet, and most important of all, from out of town. That way, with any luck, she would never see him again.