Page 23 of Carnal Wagers

“I don’t like this,” Erel grumbled.

“Naturally. You didn’t plan this down to the smallest nut and bolt. Must be driving you crazy.” I tied up my thick ash-brown hair in a sleek twist and pinned it with a clip. Tugging down a few bangs to frame my face completed the look. I flipped the visor up.

“Making you a widow would be simpler and quicker.”

I scoffed. “He’d already have a hole burning through his skull if that were true.”

“There’s still time.” His phone chirped, and he groaned as he glanced down at it. “I’m already getting an earful from your brother.”

I grinned with a shrug.

“You shouldn’t have told him.”

Tessa laughed. “That would have gone so well.”

The trip my brother had approved for his wife was a visit to see her incarcerated brother in California—Don Renzo Iannelli, head of the Californian Cosa Nostra—not this pitstop in Boston. He hadn’t known I planned to tag along. Not that I was close to Tessa’s brother—quite the opposite, actually—but I’d wanted to know whether he had any extra insight into the man Cillian O’Leary was and any suggestions on how to handle him. In the end, I decided I’d rather get my own take on husband dearest first and gauge how accurate the compiled reports from my three private investigators were.

Adrien never would have agreed to this. Not that Tessa and I gave him much of a choice. It’d been a last-minute change in the flight itinerary, with my sister-in-law’s full support. Erel zonked out from the sedative I slipped into his drink before we took off from the airstrip back in France, and Adrien was none the wiser until after we landed and disembarked.

Erel groaned. “You should give Adrien more time.”

“I’m done with patience. All his posturing has gotten me nowhere. So now it’s time for a female touch.”

“This is going to cause us all problems.”

“Go on. Tell me how you really feel.”

He groaned a sigh and laid his head back. “That’s not how I meant it.”

“Isn’t it? Just because I recused myself from the family business and chose to make something for myself doesn’t mean I’m incompetent.”

“Alizé…”

“This is probably where you zip it, Erel,” Tessa suggested sweetly.

“You and my brother have no problem asking me to schmooze business partners and the elite. You love it when I work donors and whales and bring in new legitimate business. You take and use the explosives and chemical agents I make without issue. So what exactly is the problem?”

He banged his head against the headrest with a growl. He never did like to lose.

I dipped my glasses down my nose and poked his shoulder. “All you underworld men are the same. Stubborn as rocks and your moods as mercurial as the weather. Maybe the reason this hasn’t moved forward is that this situation needs the finesse of someone with metaphorical balls instead of real ones.”

“And how are you going to do that?”

“No dick-swaying, that’s for sure.”

Tessa squeezed my shoulder, her silent support worth more than a thousand words. Hyped up on that touch, I tugged the door handle, shoved the door open, threw the tote over my shoulder, and snapped the umbrella open. The air was redolent of salt-laced wet stone with undertones of malt and coffee beans. It wasn’t a bad mix. With a few tweaks, it could even make a halfway decent cologne.

Nose in the air, I splashed through a puddle in my high-heeled ankle boots. Dirty water splattered against my stockings. My toes squelched inside, and the boots no longer shone. My body locked up, and I swallowed down a deep breath to shove down my sudden discomfort. It was just some water. It didn’t look that bad. Just a new fashion statement, like watered-down polka dots. It wasn’t a setback.

I forced one foot in front of the other, each one loosening the tension cramping my legs. My phone buzzed, and I took it out, swiping aside the rain droplets.

Maeve

Break a leg, babe. Show him who’s the man!

That was exactly what I planned to do.

I needed to take the good with the bad and move forward, one step at a time, with calm and poise, no vulnerability. It took me years to accept I didn’t need to please anyone but myself to be happy. The more I believed in myself, the more others did too. That was always the case, whether it was convincing tycoons to invest, promoting my perfumes to an oversaturated market, or dealing with my estranged husband.