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The answer is no. But just like when he informed me he’d kill me if I screwed up, I don’t tell her.
“I don’t know. And I don’t care.” I slide on my shoes. “Wish me luck, Harry.”
“Not to sound like a broken record, but don’t get dead.”
* * *
The ride to the gala is one of the expenses that Jac Miller’s going to foot. In my bag are my tools, a burner phone, and Hendrick’s wallet.
Along with my invitation.
It took me a while, but I’m going tonight in Walter Vern’s place. Walter’s away on a last minute business trip, draping his twenty-year-old sugar baby in stolen diamonds. I got him the sugar baby, and the diamonds. For a sixty-year-old banker, he’s living it up and more than happy to let me go to this gala in his stead.
Money doesn’t talk.
Desires, secrets, and wants do.
The mansion is spectacular. Big, sitting on a hill on the edge of the park in one of the richest hoods in Delacroix, just over the river from the glittering city center. The big stone gates have guards I’m sure are armed to the teeth, but I don’t see any weapons as my invitation is checked. The long drive up to the monolithic mansion is lit with shimmery lights, and the gardens glow too.
When the car pulls up, my invitation’s checked a second time as I get out.
Inside is like something from the bucket list of every rich person with something to prove.
Immediately I know while Hendrick might have grown up here, might work from here, sleep here on numerous occasions, this isn’t where he calls home.
The necklace?
I won’t know until I know.
There’s live music and laughter in the marbled foyer and the second floor is being used, too, as people come and go on the stairs. I look higher, but the lights aren’t lit on the third floor, where the office is. Where I put the safe to be.
To the right of the foyer is a great room, to the left, a ball room of all things. The fourth floor is where the bedrooms are, and the second floor holds living rooms, drawing rooms, a library, a small alcove for drinking and eating.
I know because I got the blueprints—which took some time getting—so I have everything memorized. And the office is where he’d have his safe.
My spine tingles, and heat washes through me as a voice like velvet sandpaper whispers down in my blood. “And you are?”
Hendrick Agnossio.
“Elena Jones,” I say, turning. “You must be the host?”
My heart beats hard and fast as I look up into the smoke eyes of Hendrick. Christ, how can he be even better looking than I remember?
That scent of him, spicy, earthy, and delicious weakens all the parts of me, and I swoon in, hand slipping over him as I return the wallet. He doesn’t notice a thing.
Easy as pie.
“I am.” He raises a brow. “Who are you with, Elena? I’d remember inviting a beautiful woman like you.”
This isn’t the man I met at the bar two weeks ago. This is the deadlier version, one cloaked in a veneer of seemingly innocuous charm. I can’t read him. Not the tone or his expression or the look in his eyes.
“Walter Vern invited me but had to drop out at the last minute.” I fumble with my bag and reach in to pull out the folded check. “He gave me this to make up for his absence. To give to you?”
He doesn’t take it, and behind that polite veneer an animal stirs, one that calls to me, and I throb deep inside.
“You smell very familiar,” he murmurs. “Just can’t quite place it.”
I shiver at that. Smell. Not seem or look, but smell, like we’ve been intimate. “Must be my shampoo.”
