Chapter Seventeen
Fin couldn’t get enough of the view. Meadow Lane sounded like the kind of street where you’d find a row of cute wooden houses with white picket fences and neatly kept gardens. There’d be a blue bike with a basket up front dropped on the path and a swing seat on the porch. A snoozing dog would thump his tail on the boards when you walked by. The mailman would whistle a tune. Neighbors would borrow a cup of sugar, support Little League, buy Girl Scout cookies, and no one would ever walk into you, shout disturbing things out of an open window, tempt you into thinking you could win a shell game, or honk a horn in anger.
But Southhampton’s Meadow Lane was full of castles and mansions and estates with their own pools, bowling alleys, cinemas and ballrooms, worth billions and billions of dollars, all fronting the beach.
The house Cal pulled into was part of a compound that included three other mansions. Estimated to be worth forty-two million dollars. It was owned by Conrad Astor, who’d made so much money from mortgage brokering, he could afford his own postcode.
The brief said Conrad laundered his profits through a complicated arrangement of banks in places like the Bahamas and the Cook Islands. He didn’t believe in paying his taxes. And he ran a side business helping other billionaires do the same. The brief also said he had wandering hands, and Fin was never to be alone with him or his son, Alex, or any of Alex’s friends who were named. It was a long list and meant she would have to be on guard and keep Cal in sight the whole weekend.
No hardship—she’d been sneaking looks at him for the last hour in the car, and they’d be sharing a room for two nights to celebrate Alex’s engagement to a woman called Paris Prosper.
Hoh boy, wasn’t that a name you read twice to be sure it was real. Paris was her main target this weekend because she was the heiress to the Prosper Dog Food empire and a big charity supporter, though mostly animal charities, and that was the leverage point. Fin had to convince Paris to spend some of her inheritance on people.
All Cal’s whales were expected to be here as guests as well. Cal was going to be busy.
Once he got out of the car.
“How much of the weekend are we going to spend sitting here?” she asked, when they’d been parked for a while, and he’d made no attempt to move. “I like this car, but I’d like to see inside the castle.”
He pointed at the building they were parked in front of. It was a Norman French manse according to Google, bordered by the beach on one side, the bay on the other. “Everything about this place is beautiful, stylish, the absolute best quality, except half the people who will be here are trash. They’ll look good, sound good, have impressive resumes, but they have the morals of seagulls and the wiles of foxes. It’s more fun standing on the sidewalk outside your place making you mad at me and going home to a sleepless night than it will be in there.”
God baking cookies. That almost topped him saying he was scared of her.
“We don’t have to go.” D4D would get by. If she’d known how little Cal wanted to do this, she’d never have agreed to come. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
He unlatched his door. “Because grown-ups do stuff they don’t want to do all the time.”
Well hell, he didn’t have to be such a martyr. She put her hand over his. “Don’t do this for me.”
He flipped his hand to grasp hers and gave her a rueful smile. “It’s stage fright. Once I’m in there, I’ll be fine.” Up went his brows. He was sorry for the grown-up crack, and she was sorry he hated this part of his job. “It might even be fun.”
Paulette Astor met them in the airy foyer and explained they’d be sleeping in the pool house with the young people, meaning the rest of Alex and Paris’s friends.
In Fin’s version of a pool house there were a couple of rusty sun lounges, a stack of blow-up tires, and assorted bright colored floats. The whole place would smell of rubber, tanning lotion, chlorine, and ill-fated sexual dalliances. But what would she know? She’d never been in a pool house. She’d only rarely visited
the beach as a child, so the pool house, which was a whole mansion as big as the one they’d driven over from in a golf cart, blew her tiny mind.
There was more mind-expanding awesomeness when she saw their bedroom. “It’s bigger than my apartment.” It had its own deck looking out toward the beach, and its own sitting room and a Jacuzzi that made her shriek with excitement. It also had one bed that Cal sat on while she explored.
“What if we stay in here all weekend?” she said. “We could sneak out in the dead of night and raid the kitchen for food.”
“We’re supposed to be raiding the billionaires for cash.”
“True, and I have some fabulous clothes to wear while we do it.”
“Wouldn’t want them to go to waste.”
Unless she could miraculously persuade him to become a pool-house-bedroom shut-in, then she’d happily spend the weekend naked.
The first event that night was a cocktail party. It required Fin to don a slinky, champagne-colored, sequined mini dress held up by dental-floss-thin straps, and to-die-for gold sandals and to do her hair in that half-up, half-tumble-down style that required a lot of fiddling to get right. A big part of her would have enjoyed walking on the beach more than going to a party.
It required Cal to wear a suit she hadn’t seen him in, charcoal, with a crisp white shirt that he wore without a tie, the first couple of buttons undone. They’d carved out private space to get ready, Fin commandeering the enormous bathroom and Cal sticking to the bedroom.
She couldn’t be entirely sure she didn’t drool when she saw him. He gave her a sardonic grin. He knew he looked good, but the jerk was going to make her fish for compliments before they went out to noodle whales together. She desperately wanted to hear him tell her she was beautiful like he’d done many times already. It never got tired. “Well?”
He turned away. “I can hardly stand to look at you.”
Her breath snagged. She looked down at herself. “Oh my God. Did I get it wrong? Should I wear something else?”