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I clicked on the call button.
Joe picked up instantly. ‘How’s the game going?’ he asked without preamble.
‘I won ten minutes ago, why?’
Joe cursed, the Irish slang he never used unless he was rattled.
‘Is Edie Spencer still with you?’ he asked.
‘She’s freshening up,’ I said, but already the hairs on the back of my neck were going haywire.
‘So she’s not actually in the room with you?’
‘No... What’s going on, Joe?’ I asked, but I already knew something was very wrong, the twisting pain in my gut one I recognised from a very long time ago.
‘The bank draft she paid us with—it’s forged. And so is her ID. The accounting department figured it out ten minutes ago, when they noticed a shortfall in the night’s takings in the casino’s accounts.’
The pain sharpened, turning into the hollow ache that had crippled me as a kid. She wasn’t coming back.
‘The good news is we think we might have figured out who she really is.’ Joe was still talking but I could barely grasp the meaning of the words, the blood rushing in my ears, the tremble of reaction in my fingers a combination of fury and something far, far worse. Helplessness.
‘Who is she?’ I asked, fury burning in my gut now, obliterating the distant echo of an anguish I had once been unable to control.
‘Ever heard of Madeleine Trouvé?’ Joe asked.
‘No,’ I said, resisting the urge to shout at my friend as my head began to pound. ‘Is that her real name?’ I said, keeping my voice low and even, although it was the opposite of how I felt. Edie Spencer had tricked me, made a fool of me. Made me relive a moment in my life I had spent a lifetime overcoming. And she would pay for that. As well as the money she’d just swindled me out of. ‘We need to track her down,’ I said.
Something I intended to do personally. She owed me a million euros. But I knew it wasn’t just the money. My fingers clutched so hard on the whisky tumbler it shattered in my fingers.
‘Madeleine Trouvé was the French It girl of the nineties,’ Joe continued. ‘Famous for the high-profile affairs she had with a string of rich, powerful and mostly married men. Seriously, you’ve never heard of her?’ Joe asked, sounding incredulous.
‘I don’t have time for twenty questions,’ I shouted, losing the tenuous grip I had on my temper as I wrapped a napkin around my bleeding fingers. The sting of expensive liquor in the cuts grounded me, turning the emotion churning in my belly into a cold, hard knot of anger. ‘How the hell can Edie Spencer be her—the woman I just played can’t be more than early twenties...’
Dewy soft skin, artless kisses, wide guileless eyes filled with passion and then devastation. How could all of that have been a lie too?
You didn’t play her—she played you...
I sucked in a shattered breath, disgusted by the wave of lust that still accompanied the memory of her. The anger spiked.
‘She would barely have been born in the nineties,’ I finished, my voice rising as my fevered mind tried to get a grip on the sense of betrayal, the shot of confusion, tangling with the whirlwind of anger and lust still burning in my gut.
‘Yeah, I know. She’s not Madeleine Trouvé. Madeleine died in a helicopter crash four years ago with one of her lovers. Some Spanish nobleman. We think she may be the younger of Madeleine’s two daughters. Edie Trouvé.’
‘How sure are you?’ I asked, the tangle of lust and anger and loss muted by the fierce jolt of determination. I would find Edie and teach her a lesson she wouldn’t soon forget about trying to play the wrong guy.
I wasn’t some spoilt, pampered, inbred aristocrat like the men her mother had obviously favoured. I had dragged myself up—literally—from the back streets of Naples. I’d run away from a series of foster families and group homes, lived on the streets as a teenager, worked like a dog in a series of dead end jobs to earn my stake, even been left beaten and bloody in an alleyway in Paris at the age of seventeen when I’d made a miscalculation on my rise to the top. No one got the better of me. And certainly not a slip of a girl with big green eyes and a sprinkle of freckles across her pert nose...
‘Pretty sure,’ Joe replied, thankfully interrupting the renewed wave of longing.
Which made no sense at all.
I didn’t want Edie Spencer... No, Edie Trouvé. Not any more. The heat I couldn’t seem to control was just the residual effect of temper and too many hours of sexual frustration. Frustration which I could see clearly now Edie had started and then stoked every chance she got. Culminating in that blasted kiss.
Basta.
What was it they said about the apple not falling far from the tree? The girl had learned how to tempt and tantalise men from a woman who had spent a lifetime using sex, and the promise of sex, like a weapon. Her own mother.
A woman who, for all intents and purposes, was no better than my own mother.
