never seen her before in her life.
‘I don’t know. I’m … looking for Ella,’ she said, peering over the woman’s shoulder into the recesses of the apartment. ‘Is she home? I’m an old friend.’
The woman frowned, confused. ‘Ella?’ Then it dawned on her. ‘Oh! You must mean the owner. Ms Praeger?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Ella Praeger.’
‘She doesn’t live here, dear.’
Christine blinked stupidly for a moment. ‘Ella doesn’t live here?’
‘No. She’s the landlady. She lets the place out,’ the woman explained kindly. She sensed that the pretty girl on her doorstep might possibly be a few sandwiches short of a picnic. ‘This is my apartment now. I signed a year’s lease last month.’
Christine looked pained. ‘I see. Well, do you have an address for her? For Ella?’
The woman shook her head. ‘Sorry. Everything’s done through the accountants. You could try them, I suppose. But I believe Ms Praeger’s out of the country at the moment. Europe, I think.’
‘All right Christine. Well, thank you for trying. I’ll take it from here.’
Katherine MacAvoy hung up the phone, a feeling of apprehension rising in her stomach, like foul water in a flooded drain.
Mark Redmayne had told her to act quickly. To get Ella safely distracted with another assignment before any more questions about Athena or her mother occurred to her. Or worse, before she figured out a way to make contact with Gabriel. They both agreed that that man had become a dangerously loose cannon. His feelings for Ella, and hers for him, now posed the biggest threat to The Group’s ability to hold on to Ella as their ‘secret weapon’.
The plan had been to distract Ella by pairing her with another suave, attractive agent who could seduce her, getting Gabriel out of her head. Katherine had found the perfect candidate. But it had taken her a couple of weeks to convince him, bring him back from Tokyo, and brief him fully on Ella Praeger’s history and special ‘gifts’.
A couple of weeks too long, it now turned out.
Oh God. Katherine MacAvoy put her head in her hands.
Ella Praeger had slipped through their fingers. Again.
How the hell was she going to explain this to the boss?
CHAPTER THIRTY
Gabriel stood beneath a lamppost, waving as the black cab pulled away.
He felt good.
Content. Satisfied. At peace.
There was something almost postcard romantic about the scene. The moonlit Mayfair street, on the corner of a cobbled mews. Gabriel’s Savile Row suit. Even the light drizzle helped with the general atmosphere of a classic London romance. And then of course there was the poignant look of farewell on Daisy’s pretty, wholesome, girl-next-door features as she looked through the rear window of the taxi, waving goodbye.
Ah, Daisy. Twenty-eight, an officer’s daughter with a degree from the Courtauld and a job at Christie’s, she was the sort of girl featured on the engagement pages of Tatler magazine. The sort of girl that an upper-class English boy should bring home to mother, marry at an ancient village church in Hampshire, and go on to produce a large family of children with names like Torquil and Hermione.
If Gabriel, in the guise of ‘Jeff Mason’, an American businessman, had been a blip in Daisy’s perfect English dating CV, then she had been a refreshing interlude in his jaded, world-weary womanizing. They’d met at Annabel’s one Saturday night, and enjoyed a passionate two-week fling that both of them knew couldn’t last. Tomorrow ‘Jeff’ left London for the States. But their brief affair had been enough to give Daisy a taste of an exotic ‘other’ world she would never again experience. And for Gabriel, it had achieved the minor miracle of banishing thoughts of Ella Praeger from his head, at least temporarily, and putting a dent in an obsession that was bordering on seriously problematic.
The taxi turned out of sight. Time for bed. It was only a few blocks to Gabriel’s hotel and the rain was light, so he decided to walk. He did, in fact, have a flight back to the States tomorrow, his first trip home in almost four months. It was hard to believe he’d already completed two missions since Mykonos – since Ella. At first he’d resisted Redmayne’s decision to get him ‘out of sight, out of mind’. He’d refused to accept that his closeness to Ella had somehow endangered her safety, or her efficacy as an agent.
‘You could easily have let something slip, going rogue the way you did,’ the boss yelled at him.
‘Yes, but I didn’t,’ Gabriel yelled back. ‘We got Athena, for God’s sake. Isn’t that what you wanted?’
‘It was the first thing I wanted,’ Redmayne growled. ‘But not the only thing. It wasn’t worth the risk you took, Gabriel.’
‘So much for gratitude,’ Gabriel seethed.
‘What did you expect? A medal?’