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Chapter One
He noticed her legs first and the wig second.
Playing his part, Adam had wandered into the elegant ballroom, tuxedo-clad and with a champagne flute in hand. Tickets to the Ignatius University annual ball cost a pretty penny, but at least part of the proceeds would go to charity. He’d scanned the room with lazy eyes, identifying his quarry at a table in the northeast corner of the room almost immediately.
Then he spotted the blonde.
She stood facing the arched windows that overlooked the lights of Michigan Avenue, wearing a sleeveless gown made entirely of white sequins. A gown so short that its hem rested only about two inches south of her rear. Her limbs were golden, like she’d just returned from a month in the Caribbean. An active month, if the long, lean muscles on her arms and legs were any indication.
Probably a rich socialite who spent her days playing tennis, he decided, already bored. She might have had the best pins he’d ever seen, but he had only one use for self-involved members of the one percent, and he had a different target tonight.
He’d been about to turn away when she swiveled to face the ballroom and he noticed her hair. It was blown out in smooth butter-colored waves that framed her face and had wispy ends that curled just under her breasts. Long, sleek bangs brushed the tops of her thick black eyelashes. He recognized the manufactured perfection instantly—he’d bought the exact same wig for an accomplice in a New Orleans job last year.
It had been a great wig for his accomplice. The color was so yellow, and the bangs and length were so striking that witnesses had very little to remember about her except that she had “long, blond hair.” Which, of course, was the entire point.
But this particular wig made no sense for the woman in white sequins. Plenty of rich people wore wigs. Even money couldn’t prevent thinning hair or baldness. But a rich socialite wearing a $5,000 Armani dress wouldn’t wear a cheap wig made of synthetic hair. A rich woman would splurge on one made of actual human hair.
In another setting, he might have offered to get her a drink. Adam liked the challenge of figuring out anomalies. But tonight, he needed to work.
Adam refocused on tonight’s goal: surveillance of Maurice Knoll. True, there wasn’t much he didn’t know about the man already. Along with his cache of childhood memories, he’d spent years tracking the man. He’d followed Knoll’s rise to prominence as the owner of transportation companies. Knew he’d sold the last one, a competitor to Uber, a year ago. He’d also paid handsomely for Knoll’s personal and business financial records, in search of more than what could be found on Google. Which confirmed some of his suspicions about the man’s recent activities.
He still had one open question, however, and that’s what he was hoping to answer tonight. The banquet dinner was about to be served, so he ambled over to the round table next to Knoll’s. He wasn’t worried about Knoll recognizing him; the man had always been too self-involved to look at other people very closely. Besides, it had been almost a decade since they’d actually been in the same room together, and Adam had been little more than a teenager then. Snagging a seat within hearing distance, he settled in for a couple hours of listening. Not the most exciting part of his chosen profession, but absolutely critical to its success.
Knoll had been quite handsome as a younger man, Adam recalled. But in his mid-fifties now, his face and physique were starting to reflect decades of red meat and booze. Still, he didn’t lack for admirers. Adam watched in amusement as a parade of Botox’d women stopped by Knoll’s table to congratulate him on his recent appointment to the school’s Board of Trustees.
Clearly, the women were aware of Knoll’s recent divorce. But they were probably not aware of how much that divorce cost him. Or the extreme lengths he was willing to go to recoup his fortune.
As the waiters carried out plates of salmon and pork tenderloin, Adam automatically filed away his observations: the make and model of Knoll’s phone, as well as how many times the man looked at it in the space of an hour; his approximate height and weight; the brand of his tux, shoes, and watch.
As with all his potential targets, he watched Knoll’s interactions with other people. To his fellow Board members, he was attentive and thoughtful, speaking in a deep, authoritative tone. To the women who stopped by to flatter him, he was complimentary. At least until they walked away. At that point, he tended to make crude comments about their looks or bank accounts to a crony sitting next to him. And to the wait staff, he was downright rude. He berated a teenage waitress for the quality of the wine and backed his chair into a busboy without apologizing.
Adam took note of it all while making light conversation with the other men and women seated at his table. The woman to his left, a busty brunette in a purple lace gown, batted her eyelashes harder at him with every sip of her Chardonnay. But he was able to handle her less-than-witty repartee with bland responses and smiles.
By the end of dinner, Adam’s memory of Knoll had been confirmed. Maurice Knoll was still an asshole. Good. Knoll had cemented his fate with Adam years before; he was going to lose and lose big. Because he liked to stick to the few rules he lived by, Adam was glad that Knoll hadn’t reformed in some way, glad that he was still the same bully and prick he remembered from childhood. Adam had few virtues, but he truly preferred to steal from assholes. He couldn’t wait to liberate Knoll of his impending diamond shipment.
As the staff cleared the dessert plates, many diners migrated to the dance floor where a ten-piece orchestra played “As Time Goes By.” Knoll and a couple of other Board members clustered in a corner of the room discussing University business. He hadn’t answered his question, but he wouldn’t be able to learn anything more tonight. Time to go home.
“Would you like to dance?” The well-endowed woman in the purple dress hiccupped and looked up at him with bleary eyes.
“Oh.” He looked at the crowded dance floor, intending to make an excuse to get the hell out of there.
But then he saw the blonde in the white sequins dancing. The flawless legs, the inexplicable wig. He just couldn’t stop the flare of interest. Or the desire to get a closer look at her face.
He grinned down at the brunette. “Why not?”
* * *
Jessica Hughes couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so physically uncomfortable. The wig from hell was so itchy her eyes were watering with the effort not to scratch her head. The sequins from the stupid dress were poking her in the armpit like tiny little daggers. None of the reviews on Rent the Runway had mentioned that fun detail. The sexy pink pumps that RTR recommended as an accompaniment to the dress looked great, but they also pinched her toes and heels. She was going to have feet full of blisters tomorrow.
And maintaining a British accent was a lot more difficult than she expected.
Luckily, the idiot she was dancing with had quite a bit to drink with dinner and didn’t seem to notice how she kept repeating words like “brilliant” and “fancy” and “fortnight” in their conversation.
Now if only she could distract him enough to get his keycard out of his pocket.
She glanced over his shoulder at the clock on the wall. In five minutes the speeches would begin and he would be up on the stage for a half hour. That was her window. Unfortunately, she was running out of ideas on how to pull the keycard out of his front pocket without getting grabby. Uck.
He picked just that moment to run his sweaty hands down her mostly bare back and pat her on the bottom. She was lucky that her face was over his shoulder so he couldn’t see her suppress a gag. Luckily, she recovered quickly and gave an approving squeak. So gross. I just let Jerome Taft touch my ass.
