Hard Liquor: Runaway Billionaires: Arthur Duet #2 Page 5

  “What the fuck, you crazy cunt!” he grated out.

  Gen ran backward three paces, keeping her hands up and near her face. The guy stayed on the ground, kneeling on his other leg.

  He panted, “What the hell did you do that for? I just wanted to offer you money!”

  “I don’t know you. There is no conceivable reason why you should offer me money or grab me like that.” She kept her fists up, ready to punch him again.

  “My client would like you to drop the Finch-Hatten case, to rescuze yourself.”

  “Why on Earth would I recuse myself?” Asshole couldn’t even pronounce words correctly.

  “Because I’ll give you twenty thousand pounds, that’s why, you crazy bitch.”

  Her brain did the math for how many months that would “top up” her mother’s care. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, dipshit.”

  Bribery offended Gen’s inner Texan.

  “Are you refusing outright, or are we haggling about price?” the guy asked, his ruddy cheeks blowing as he talked. “I’m authorized to offer more.”

  Gen stepped forward to sock him again right in his ugly mouth in the middle of his stupid, graying beard. Her teeth ground in her mouth.

  Arthur rounded the corner of the truck. He grabbed the guy by one arm, twisted it, and brought it up behind the guy’s back. He snarled, his voice low and dangerous, “I told you to leave her alone, or I would give you a good kicking.”

  Recognition snapped through Gen’s brain.

  Yes, this was the same stalker with the faded red Saab whom Arthur had grabbed outside of Lincoln’s Inn.

  “It’s none of your business who I am,” the guy said to Arthur. “I have business with the lady.”

  “Fuck you,” Gen told the guy.

  Arthur said, “The lady disagrees.”

  “I have business,” the guy repeated.

  “I should sort you out right proper,” Gen told that jerk.

  Arthur grinned at her above the jerk’s head. “Now that’s the British way to say it. Slightly Cockney, but definitely British.”

  Adrenaline seared her body. Jitters ran through her. She wanted to kick that guy’s ass so much. “I will kick the shit out of him.”

  Arthur shook his head. “No back-peddling.”

  “Still.”

  The guy struggled, trying to break Arthur’s grip.

  Arthur said, “Now, now. Can’t have that. Pippa is calling the police, and you can explain to them why you grabbed this young woman in a car park.”

  “She punched me!”

  “Self defense,” Gen sneered at him. “Besides, you going to advertise that you got punched by a girl? And got kicked in the nuts?” She drew her leg back to make good on that promise.

  “Now, Gen,” Arthur said. “The bobbies will arrive in just a moment. It might look bad if I were restraining him while you dusted him up.”

  Gen backed off. “Just giving him something to think about if he wants to insult me again.”

  Arthur shoved the guy’s arm higher up his back. “You wouldn’t insult the lady again, would you?”

  The guy growled in response.

  The police arrived a few minutes later to take the guy into custody and record Gen’s complaint. She made an appointment to give her statement that afternoon.

  Arthur escorted her to his car, his hand on her lower back, and watched the parking lot around them the whole way.

  Inside the car, he gathered her into his arms and told Pippa to get them out of there.

  Serle's Court Barristers' Clients

  AFTER visiting her mother, Gen and Arthur breezed into the chambers of Serle’s Court Barristers.

  Though the building of Lincoln’s Inn was centuries old, older than Spencer House by almost a hundred years, the law chambers had been refurbished to look like every modern minimalist office space anywhere in the world. The Serle’s Court lobby had beige couches, cream chairs, and muted wood tables. The monochrome was sucking the color out of the one dying plant in the corner, its leaves browning on the edges.

  Arthur walked Gen all the way to her tiny closet-office next to Octavia’s huge senior-barrister office, which he rarely did, and he squeezed her hand before he left. “See you tonight.”

  “Yeah, tonight.” She needed to check that night’s schedule. Mr. Fothergill’s app would tell her what to wear.

  Tomorrow afternoon, they would be flying to that wedding in Paris, and Arthur had mentioned something about meeting people later on the night they arrived for dinner, too.

  Right after Arthur had gone, Octavia breezed into Gen’s office and chattered at her, “I’ve got three cases for you as soon as you finish the arguments in front of the House of Lords Committee. One asked for you by name. I’m spreading that around chambers. Bringing in work rather than being assigned cases looks good for your tenancy decision, and I think that it’s someone you met at one of those upscale events with Finch-Hatten. Baroness Phyllis Waddington said that Lady Dorothy Hart recommended you.”

  Countess Dorothy Hart was on the House of Lords Committee, and she had been at the dinner at Spencer House the night before, sitting down near Arthur. She and Gen had chatted over cocktails after dinner. “I’m acquainted with Lady Hart.”

  “Excellent. Baroness Waddington is just the sort of client we prefer, refined, compliant, and rich. Meeting in my office in fifteen minutes.”

  In her tiny closet-office, Gen flipped open her laptop and went to her email. Rose and Lee, in separate emails, demanded lunch and details about where Gen had disappeared to the last few weeks.

  Gen replied that lunch was on.

  These times in the office seemed so normal, being guided by Octavia and going to lunch with the girls. Even the morning sun outside assumed its usual grayed appearance, a trace of London fog dampening even the spring sunshine.

  Everything reverted to its normal, muted shade of gray when Arthur left.

  But when Arthur was around, everything was so different.

  Vibrant.

  Alive.

  Gen grabbed her files and ran to meet Octavia. They went over all the papers for the House of Lords Committee on Privileges one more time, smoothed out the language a little more, and discussed tactics.

  “But you’re going to be in there with me, right?” Gen asked her. “I’m not going in alone, right?”

  “I’ll be there, but you’ll do the speaking,” Octavia said.

  Octavia might not be Atticus fucking Finch, but she did have a strong streak of fairness in her. Other pupil masters might have let Gen take all the risks and then snatched the chance to argue the case in front of the House of Lords committee, but not Octavia.

  Octavia said, “I shall shove notes and precedent at you, should you need it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh, don’t thank me yet. This is still the most risky maneuver that I’ve ever seen a pupil barrister try to pull off. Most of them just go around begging for extra work from all the senior barristers in chambers, trying to make themselves look frightfully efficient and ingratiating themselves. Arguing a case in front of the House of Lords that will surely be on the front page of every newspaper in the Empire is a dangerous tactic. I hope you win.”

  Gen swallowed hard so she wouldn’t barf on Octavia’s imposing mahogany desk.

  Octavia continued, “And you know this is going to come down soon, right? The House of Lords doesn’t fuck around. They don’t put cases on dockets and hear them next season when they get around to them. They slap it right on the agenda for the next meeting. We could begin the hearings in a month, perhaps less. ‘What is essential in war is victory, not prolonged operations.’”

  Gen swallowed hard, then harder, so that she wouldn’t bring up her breakfast because that was a distinct possibility. “Yeah, well, ‘Action is eloquence.’”

  Octavia dipped one eyebrow at her, a little. “That’s not Sun Tzu or Machiavelli.”

  “It’s Shakespeare, Coriolanus.”

>   Octavia sniffed. “I never read Shakespeare anymore. Everyone dies. Too defeatist. I read about winning.”

  Lunch with the Girls

  SOON afterward, Lee and Rose arrived at Gen’s tiny office, shuffled in sideways to grab Gen by the arms, and hauled her into a cab to go to lunch. She allowed herself to be led away, laughing with them, even though she wanted to sprint to the cab, jump in without them, and ride back to Arthur.

  Dammit, she missed that drunken degenerate. Lately, he’d been less drunk and more degenerate, and she sure as hell hoped that he kept that up.

  Lunch was quick, as always for three young, ambitious women, and they tucked in salads in the crowded cafe while catching up. Chattering clamor kicked around the concrete beams and plastic skylights, a sea of voices flavored with different accents and languages and music.

  Gen ate her salad and watched the two other women, who were obviously plotting something.

  Lee started the assault. “So you’re sleeping with The Earl of Sexy Arse of the county of Hotness, now, are you?”

  Rose pursed her lips and straightened in her chair while picking at her salad. “Lee, she’s American. You know what prudes they are about,” she stage-whispered, “sexual intercourse.”

  “I’m not a prude,” Gen insisted. Or at least, she suspected that she wouldn’t be after a few more weeks of hanging around Arthur.

  Gen really shouldn’t tell them. She could trust her girls not to blab, she knew, but dang, you never knew what insinuations people could accidentally let slip. Admitting to them that she was shagging a client was a spectacularly bad idea. “Yeah, I banged him.”

  “No way!” Lee yelled.

  Rose looked around. “Keep your voice down.”

  The restaurant that they were at wasn’t one of the usual ones that people from Lincoln’s Inn went to, but you never knew who was listening.

  Lee whispered, “What’s he like? All the details, right now. All of them. Every single one. Is his ass as spectacular as it looks under those suits?”

  “He’s a nice guy,” Gen told them.

  “No, he’s not,” Lee said, grinning and wiggling in her chair. “He’s a bad boy. He’s a dirty, dirty boy. Tell me how dirty he is.”

  “All right, I’m a prude,” Gen said.

  Lee flopped back in her chair. “Bollocks. No deets?”

  “I can tell you that he’s six-four and his shoes look like liferafts, but he’s not proportional.”

  Lee smashed her face against the table, devastated. Rose allowed herself half a smile of her perfectly glossed lips.

  “Nope,” Gen said. “Bigger.”

  “No way!” Lee yelled. Rose shushed her.

  Gen said, “Way.”

  They were all giggling their heads off at this point.

  “Does ‘e have a brother?” Lee asked.

  “Just the one who’s suing him,” Gen said, forking her vegetarian curry Buddha bowl. “I can’t recommend Christopher. He’s married and yet tried to pick me up at a party.”

  “Cheater. Shite. Does ‘e have any hot friends?” Lee asked.

  “He keeps talking about these two guys, Caz and Max. I know Casimir is already married—”

  “Happily?” Lee asked.

  “I wouldn’t know, but let’s assume yes. He hasn’t said anything about Max, however.”

  “Tell me about Max,” Lee pressed.

  “I know his name is Max.”

  “Seems legit. How soon can you set me up with him?”

  “I’m having dinner with him tomorrow night, probably. I’ll send you a picture.”

  “He’s coming into town?” Lee asked, sitting up straight and fluffing her scarlet hair.

  Oh, sweet baby Jesus. Gen had opened up a big can of ugly, ugly worms. “Um, well, not exactly.”

  “Then how are you going to meet this Max?”

  “He’s not coming here. I think we’re going to Paris tomorrow—”

  Lee and Rose stared at her, their eyes widening.

  Rose asked, “What have you not told us?”

  Gen cringed. “—for a wedding.”

  Rose asked, “You’re attending a wedding with Arthur Finch-Hatten? An actual wedding? As his date at a wedding?”

  “A high-society wedding,” Gen confessed.

  Lee and Rose dropped their silverware, and it clattered to the table with a metallic klaxon. Rose exclaimed, “I beg your pardon!”

  “—and he says that it’s kind of a big deal.”

  Lee was scrolling on her phone. “It’s the Grimaldi wedding, isn’t it?”

  “Um, yeah,” Gen said, confused at how Lee had found it.

  “Not a high-society wedding. It’s a royal wedding. You’re going to the wedding of Pierre fucking Grimaldi in Paris.”

  Gen shrank in her chair. “Yeah, I think I am. Why is it royal?”

  All of them were so engrossed in Gen’s revelation that she was boinking Arthur and the magnitude of a wedding date that they never did properly look around the restaurant.

  Dieter Schwarz, Commando-in-Chief

  DIETER Schwarz’s phone vibrated in the thigh pocket on the side of his black fatigues.

  His sidearm, a Beretta 92FS, lay in four pieces plus a scattering of parts on the hotel coffee table, and Dieter himself was planted on the couch, bending over as he finished wiping the blued steel extractor. The dirty cotton patches piled on the coffee table corner fumed sulfur and fouled oil, but the gun’s steel parts gleamed, perfectly clean.

  Dieter clicked the pieces back together, reassembling the weapon in under half a minute.

  The longer initial trigger pull of a Beretta was safer than something like a short-action Glock, so Dieter equipped the people he managed with Berettas. The double-action trigger pull for the first shot meant there would be fewer accidents due to operator error, adrenaline, or twitchy fingers. It meant that the operators had to be more familiar with the feel of their weapons, so they spent more time on the range and were better shots overall. Plus, the dark matte finish didn’t shine in the night.

  His phone buzzed another time, and he dug it out of his pocket. It was probably that pain-in-the-arse Wulfram von Hannover calling yet again. Do we have snipers for the perimeter around the church? What are their scores? Have they been allowed access to the site to calibrate their tactical computers?

  And, of course, What is the weather for Saturday?

  Not because Wulfram was worried about rain on his younger sister’s wedding day, but because humidity and temperature affect bullet trajectory and would change the calculations for the sniper shots. Even though everyone used guntop tactical computers these days, Wulfram would want to check the math.

  Without looking, Dieter answered his cell phone, “Ja, Durchlaucht?”

  “I’m sorry,” the low, very British voice said in English on the phone, a voice that was not Wulfram von Hannover, who would have spoken Alemannic German with Dieter. “Is this Dieter Schwarz?”

  Dieter switched to English. “Yes, sorry. Didn’t check the phone screen. How can I help you?”

  “Wulfram von Hannover said that I should call you with a security problem for the weekend.”

  Speak of the Devil.

  Though Dieter had been running Wulfram von Hannover’s security operation for almost a decade, Wulfram had encouraged Dieter to begin contracting and managing small additional jobs in preparation for launching his private security company.

  Dieter asked, “Name, please?”

  “Arthur Finch-Hatten,” the man said.

  “Nationality?”

  “British.”

  Dieter would ask Wulfram about Finch-Hatten later, maybe after the wedding. “And your concern is?”

  “I’m having some problems with surveillance that I think may turn violent,” the man said.

  Dieter swiped a notepad off the desk and a pen. The name of the hotel he was staying in was etched on the pen, King George V. He wrote the man’s name and nationality and asked, “Amateur surveill
ance or professional?”

  “Both,” Finch-Hatten said.

  He stopped writing. “You have more than one party following you?”

  “It seems that way. The amateur one is getting quite aggressive. He’s a private investigator for an opponent in a lawsuit. The others have kept their distance.”

  “Are the professionals state-sponsored?” Dieter asked.

  “Probably.”

  “Which states?”

  “Could be any number of them.”

  Dieter straightened and looked out of the window, past the balcony, and over the closely clustered buildings of Paris. “Why do you have several intelligence agencies watching you?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, you don’t. You could have contacted Scotland Yard.”

  “I’d rather this was handled privately.”

  “There are other British institutions.”

  “Again, I would prefer to handle it privately. There may be other, friendly parties involved, but I’d like someone who answers to me in the mix.”

  Yeah, Dieter would definitely talk to Wulfram about Finch-Hatten.

  Dieter said, “Our current project requires extensive security. After this project has concluded, we can discuss whether I can spare a few operators for your case.”

  “Conveniently,” Finch-Hatten said, “I’ll be attending Pierre Grimaldi’s reception Saturday evening. We’ll be arriving Friday.”

  Elands. Amateur detectives and international intelligence services would be descending on von Hannover’s wedding in addition to the jackals and random political psychos Dieter had expected.

  Dieter said, “We can pull you under our umbrella for that weekend if Mr. von Hannover approves it.”

  Finch-Hatten said, “I’ll be traveling with Maxence Grimaldi. His security should be integrated with yours, too.”

  Dieter winced. He didn’t like to speak badly of other people, especially other security services, but the Grimaldi team was unprofessional and damn near amateurs. “The Grimaldi security team is overextended. We’ll pick you up at the airport and pull you in for the weekend.”