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But despite my growing feelings for the pretty little maid, I let her climb out of the car and rush into her rundown apartment building. I had a mission, and we both had a part to play. And nothing, not even sweet, sexy, eminently fuckable Adele Bernard was going to stop me from killing Giorgio Bianchi.
Adele
Inside my apartment, which felt even dingier after having spent a night in the lap of luxury, I pulled my phone from my purse and hit the one number I had programmed into the speed dial.
Voicemail.
“Goddammit.” Hitting the button to end the call, I tossed the phone on the bed and pulled my dress up over my head.
Where the hell was Pierce? It wasn’t unusual for us to go for weeks at a time without speaking, but he had never failed to answer when I’d called him. And this was the second time in less than twenty-four hours I’d called without a response.
Something was wrong. Whether that something had anything to do with Cole Porter, I wasn’t sure. Which was exactly why I needed to get in touch with Pierce, so I could get some damn intel.
It was entirely possible we’d met because Cole had decided to go slumming and get a drink in a dive bar. But the timing of it didn’t sit right with me. The same day I overhear Giorgio making plans for a major weapons deal with the Russians, I get picked up in a bar by a ridiculously rich American?
It was too big of a coincidence.
Plopping onto my bed, I pulled my computer onto my lap and opened the lid. A basic internet search shouldn’t send up too many red flags, and even if it did, I could easily play it off as just wanting to know more about him. Doing my due diligence. After all, as a single woman living in one of the largest cities in Europe, didn’t I owe it to myself to know more about this man if I was going to be spending time with him?
The internet, however, proved to be rather unhelpful. Cole Porter, thirty-six, born and raised in Chicago, was as squeaky clean as they came. No criminal record, without so much as a hint of impropriety even during his college years. His money was family money, but he’d managed to grow the family fortune through some kind of financial voodoo. Again, without even a whisper of scandal or anything nefarious.
Which still didn’t explain what he’d been doing in a seedy bar in Paris, picking up a maid. Men like him generally had no problem finding women more suited to their lifestyle. So, why me? Was it simply a desire to go slumming with a woman beneath his station?
Or did he know more than he was letting on, and I was simply a pawn in a larger, more dangerous game?
Frustrated by the utter lack of anything to explain his presence, I dug deeper. It wasn’t until I branched out on the family tree that I hit gold.
Drive by shooting. Nearly a dozen dead, including a girl who hadn’t even seen her sixteenth birthday. Suspected gang violence, an innocent family caught in the crosshairs of America’s war on drugs and poverty.
There was nothing in the news to even hint that the family was involved in any kind of criminal enterprise. But there was a connection. The owner of the restaurant, the father of the girl who was murdered, had a sister. And the sister had a son.
And that son happened to be in Paris, hitting on a woman investigating a mafia enterprise with bases around the world. Including a chapter in Chicago.
Coincidences, my ass.
Picking up my phone, I called Pierce again, but still there was no answer. “Call me,” I barked into the phone when his voicemail answered. It went against protocol, but so did leaving me high and dry in the middle of a goddamn operation.
If Cole was in Paris for revenge, Giorgio would know soon enough, if he didn’t already. And if Cole’s presence spooked him and he went underground again, the last three years of my life were for nothing. Weighing my options carefully, I hit enter on the newest entry in my phone.
“Cole? It’s Adele.”
