Ally had worked at the club as a hostess in her early twenties, and had foolishly let herself be drawn into a destructive relationship with its owner, Jason Aragon. She’d barely escaped Aragon with her life. This e-mail suggested that she may not have escaped him after all. She had little doubt that he was trying to lure her back, using her sister as bait—and her sister was much too young, naive and rebellious to resist the pressures and temptations of such a place.
Just as Ally had been.
She tugged at her skirt, but the hem kept crawling up her thighs and making her feel naked—a nagging reminder of the mistakes of her past. Perhaps her fall had been preordained, given her childhood. Overprotected from the cradle, her life choices rigidly controlled, supposedly for her own good, but she’d felt confined, suffocated. It hadn’t been quite so bad for Vix, but almost.
Ally still went to great effort to keep everything about her past secret, mostly to protect her aristocratic family from any more embarrassment. She and her sister were heirs to a throne that no longer existed. Their mother had been a sitting queen, strange as that seemed in today’s world, and her arranged marriage to their father had been a happy one until the royal couple had been deposed and exiled from the small European monarchy where Ally’s mother’s family had reigned for over a century.
Ally had been thirteen when the family had fled to London. Soon after, she had been sent to America to an exclusive all-girls’ boarding school, but it turned out not to be the move toward independence Ally had hoped for. The bodyguards her family had hired to protect her made her already lonely and isolated life seem like a prison. The last straw had come when she’d graduated Alderwood Academy and learned that her parents were intent on marrying her off to a man she’d never met, a wealthy German industrialist.
That had been when Ally had discovered she had a will of her own—and a wild streak, which Jason Aragon had been happy to help her explore.
A sigh of regret escaped her. There really hadn’t been any other men in her life except a couple of fleeting summer romances with prep school boys. But she’d made up for it with Jason. She’d gone wild, reveling in everything that had been forbidden to someone of her background, and then some. It had been a temporary lapse, but bad enough that she’d disgraced the family name. Now Vix seemed ready to take up where Ally had left off. And Ally felt responsible.
Her sister had lived with their parents in London until four years ago when they’d decided to send Vix to Alderwood, too. The school had a sterling reputation, and Ally had begged her parents to let Vix attend, promising to keep a close eye on her. Ally had seen it as a chance to redeem herself in her family’s eyes and to renew the bond with her younger sister.
Vix had lived at Alderwood, spending weekends and holidays with Ally in her Georgetown apartment in Washington, D.C. If anything, Ally had been overly strict. However, a few months ago she’d snagged a promotion that had made it impossible to keep such close tabs on her sister. About that same time Vix had begun missing classes and staying out after curfew with her latest boyfriend, whom Ally didn’t approve of.
A revving car engine jerked Ally out of her reflections. She peeked around the crypt, reminding herself to keep an eye on the club’s entrance. She’d already used up three days of her personal leave, and she only had a week in total. Her new position as director of development at the Smithsonian involved finding deep-pocketed donors for the institute’s conservation projects. The job was high-profile, as well as high-pressure, but luckily, she’d been there several years and had taken off so little time that her boss approved her request for leave without question. Ally had been on a flight out of Dulles within hours of receiving Vix’s e-mail.
She’d debated calling the New Orleans police, not sure they would investigate based on one vague e-mail. In any case, Vix’s e-mail had asked her not to involve the police. So Ally was on her own.
Her first task had been to set up a surveillance plan. Now she needed to get inside the club. For that she had to have an escort, a member of the male-only kind. Women were welcome, only as guests of members or as club employees. That was the tricky part. If she approached the wrong man in the wrong way, both she and Vix might be put in grave danger.
She continued to peer around the crypt watching cars pull into the club’s crescent driveway. She was looking for one in particular, and hoped she hadn’t missed the mystery man who drove the sleek black Porsche Targa.
Ally glanced at the luminous dial of her watch—8:58 p.m. If he kept to his routine, he should arrive in the next two or three minutes. When it came to punctuality, he was as reliable as a Swiss timepiece. Still, over the course of the last seventy-two hours—long, exhausting hours in which she had attempted to stalk his every move—she’d become convinced that he wasn’t just another member of the club. He was up to something clandestine.
She’d singled him out the very first night, after watching dozens of men arrive and leave. It didn’t hurt that he was tall and ruggedly built. She’d had a gut feeling about him, and that was as precisely as she could define it for now. That was when she’d begun tailing him as he went through his daily routine, which was anything but routine.
Twice a day he’d left his hotel to take walks, and his destination was always a different pay phone where he would place a brief call. Obviously he didn’t feel safe using the phone in his room. Who was he calling? He could be a private investigator, an undercover cop or an FBI or CIA agent, calling in from the field. He might even be a master thief planning a heist of the club’s valuable art collection.
How would a master thief make love to a woman?
The thought came from out of nowhere. She tried to force her attention back to the cars pulling into the club, but it refused to stay there. Apparently it still craved the thrill a man like that could give her, pleasure at any cost. That alone should have appalled her. One silly second of fantasizing about a gorgeous man’s hands wandering like a thief’s over her body, stealing her will to resist—to deny him anything—and she was on the brink of losing it.
Pathetic. She had clearly gone way too long without sex. But Ally Danner didn’t do those things anymore. She didn’t lust after inappropriate men, and this guy couldn’t be more inappropriate. Cop? FBI or CIA agent? Thief? Probably he was a straying husband. The possibilities were endless, and she had to know exactly what he was up to before she made her move.
She crouched even lower, moving clear of the crypt for a better view. He’s clever and dangerous, she told herself. Don’t forget that. And you—
You haven’t had sex in a very long time.
Ignoring the hot little tingle in her gut, she moved on. Last night he’d left the club at eleven, and she’d followed him in her rental car to the oak forest behind the club. She’d lost him though when she had to turn off the car lights to avoid being spotted. He and his black Targa had melted into the moss-draped trees, and she’d held back, fearing a trap. Instead she’d returned the next day, and searched the area on foot.
She’d been ready to give up when she came across a path of beaten-down underbrush leading to an abandoned car in a clearing. She’d searched the interior and found nothing. When she opened the hood though, she’d discovered the car had no engine. The space was filled with surveillance equipment that looked designed to pick up long-range audio signals, possibly through the spiral rod that emerged from the opening where the radio antenna should have been.
At that point she’d made a decision. If he were trying to infiltrate the club, that might mean they could help each other. She needed an escort—and she had insider information that could be useful to him. If he were acting privately, she had a better chance of striking a bargain with him than if he were law enforcement, but she had to know which it was, and that