He had turned his swaying into dancing. Not ambitious dancing. Not yet. But dancing all the same.
“So that’s what love is,” he concluded. “Or at least that’s what love is to me. Now, as for this supposed boyfriend of yours,” Storm said, nodding in the direction of the small jeweled purse where she kept her phone, “how is he supposed to hold the door for you if he doesn’t even show up?”
He gave her a quick twirl, expertly rejoining her at the end in perfect step.
“I think maybe he shouldn’t be my boyfriend anymore,” she said.
“I think that’s wise.”
“You’re a very good dancer.”
“Oh, we haven’t even started dancing yet,” he said, and then began in earnest.
They spun around the marble balcony, Storm confident in his lead, the woman sufficiently tutored by her finishing school or boarding school or debutante lessons — or wherever it was modern young women of a certain class learned such things — that she was a more-than-proficient follower. It took perhaps a song or two for them to learn to anticipate one another’s movements, but then they settled into a marvelous synchronicity, to the point where he barely had to signify his intent and she barely felt her feet touching the floor.
Lost in the music and the movement, they did not speak for a while. When she finally opened her mouth to say something, it was not what Storm was expecting.
It was, “Jacque!”
A young man, his face bloated, his eyes glassy and red, his nose running, had stumbled out on the balcony. He had on what was easily a five-thousand-dollar tuxedo, but he wore it sloppily, with disregard for its splendor. The bow tie was askew. The shirt was loosely bloused over his midsection, which was also sloppy. The young man had a slender build but was already working on the beginnings of what would someday become a champion beer gut.
Fair or unfair, Storm immediately had the young man pegged. He was a common species here in Monaco and other places where the idle rich tended to congregate: he had been given a world-class education and every opportunity to succeed but was not availing himself of it; rather, he contented himself with spending money for which his great grandfather had worked very hard, making much of it disappear up his nose or down his throat.
“There you are, you whore,” Jacque said in slurring French.
Storm started to reply in his own French. “Ease off on the name-calling my—”
“I’ll handle this,” Storm’s dancing partner said quietly before squaring to face her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. “Jacque, you were supposed to be here more than two hours ago. I got tired of waiting for you here, just like I’ve gotten tired of waiting for you to grow up. We’re through, Jacque.”
“What, because of this dumb piece of meat?” Jacque said, not even looking at Storm. “How much did he cost you?”
Storm moved closer, ready to signify his displeasure with some pointed commentary, when the woman replied: “No, not because of this extraordinary gentleman. You want to know why? Because the only time you’re ever nice to me is when you want to have sex or you want me to pick up the check. Because you talk about all these big ideas that you’re going to accomplish but you never make a single move to do any of them. And because the only place you ever seem to be in a hurry is in bed.”
“How dare you, you slut,” Jacque said.
He brought his hands up. He reared back, fist balled, loading his weight onto his back foot. But he never got the chance to transfer it to his front foot and deliver the blow. Storm hit him with a sweeping kick to the midsection. He felt it compress several ribs, more than likely cracking them, and it sent Jacque reeling backward into the outer wall of the casino. His head slammed against the stone and his body crumpled.
Storm closed in and had to restrain himself from lifting the man up and throwing him over the balcony. It would have been fun, yes; but if the young man really was from a prominent family, it would have caused trouble for Jean-François. And Storm didn’t want that.
So, instead, Storm lifted the man’s arm and checked his pulse.
“Darn it. Still beating,” he said, then let the arm fall back to the man’s side. “Shall we dance?”
“No, no,” she said, still flushed. “We have to go.”
“Why? This set probably has at least two or three more songs in—”
“You don’t understand. Jacque’s family, they keep a large security force. Well, they call it a security force, but they’re really just thugs. When they find out what has happened—”
“I can handle myself.”
“I’m sure you can,” she said, and again slid close to him, filling his nose with her lavender scent. “But I don’t want to waste this evening watching you fight every goon that comes out here. There are better ways to spend our time.”
Storm did his best to keep his smile inward. “Yes, yes I suppose there are. We can retire to my suite at the Hôtel de Paris, if you wish.”
“No. No. They might look for you in the hotel. And we can’t go to my place, either. But my family has a little pied-à-terre not far from here that Jacque does not know about. It is small, but there is room enough for two, if you like.”
“I like,” he confirmed. “I like.”
He was careful to hold every door for her on their way out.
HER FAMILY’S “LITTLE” PIED-À-TERRE turned out to be a magnif-icent early-eighteenth-century baroque town house jutting out over a cliff that plunged into the sea. Its exterior offered an exuberant demonstration of that ornate style, its curvilinear shapes and dramatic forms suggesting both movement and sensuality.
It reminded Storm of one of his favorite bits of architectural advice: if it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it.
The inside was expensively decorated, though perhaps more rococo than baroque. It had an impersonal air to it and lacked a lived-in feel. This, truly, was just a rich family’s crash pad, exhaustively maintained but seldom used.
The redhead, whose name he still did not know, gave Storm instructions to retire to the rooftop patio while she took care of a few things down below. From his perch, Storm could hear the Mediterranean crashing into the sheer cliff face several hundred feet below. It had a magical, almost hypnotic rhythm to it.
He peered across the sea, turning himself to face Africa and — if his sense of direction was right — the city of Tangier, in Morocco. For a while, that had been the place listed on the death certificate that Jedediah Jones had sent him. The document had been Jones’s idea of a joke. Storm thought of the mission that had led him there and nearly killed him for real. He had gone to capture an operative named the Viper, only to be ambushed, betrayed by one of his own men. He wound up lying in a pool of his own blood on a cold tile floor, his guts riddled with bullets.
He had recuperated in the care of a man named Thami “Tommy” Harif, a salty U.S. Navy veteran who had dual American/Moroccan citizenship. His assistance — and his silence — had been bought by Jones in an exchange, the details of which Storm was glad to be ignorant. Storm had also learned not to ask questions about Tommy’s other income streams, which supported his rather grand lifestyle. There had been one point during his convalescence that Storm had mistakenly stumbled upon a warehouse filled with ordnance. When he inquired its purpose, Tommy had piously said, “Why, it’s for the cause of righteousness, of course.” Storm decided at that moment he didn’t want to know more.
Storm put Tommy out of his mind. He tried to put everything out of his mind. From up here, the worries of the world — terrible men with terrible weapons, airplanes falling from flight, whatever horrible secret Ingrid Karlsson was going to share — felt remote. He wished he could pretend they would stay that way, but he knew come morning he would have to face them again.