Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

In Albany he’d rent a car or get a cab for the thirty-mile drive to Saratoga Springs. After that, he didn’t know what he’d do.

He had no trouble getting a flight east and, slinging his beat-up old bag onto his shoulder, he boarded the plane.

Saratoga, he thought. It had been so long.

Did the gold key mean Lilli had been on the rocks on the Pembroke estate the night she disappeared? Was it stolen to keep that from coming out?

John suddenly felt colder than he’d felt in weeks.

Don’t jump ahead. One step at a time.

Settling back in his seat, he shut his eyes and tried not to think about how different he was from the corporate executive he’d once been, from the optimistic boy determined not to repeat the mistakes the Pembroke men always seemed to make. Who’d wanted desperately to be something other than Nicholas Pembroke and Mattie Witt’s son. He’d loved being the cog in the wheel at Chandler Hotels his wife had accused him of being. He’d loved that anonymity.

Oh, Lilli…

He hadn’t made the same mistakes as the Pembroke scoundrels who’d come before him. He’d made his own mistakes, more egregious, more unforgivable.

Dani, however, was different.

She had to be.

And this time John was determined not to fail her.

Dani spent most of Friday with her nose to the grindstone. Work helped keep her mind off her ransacked bedroom, her stolen things, her scrapes and bruises. She was more upset than she’d first realized over losing her two gate keys. Ulysses’s gold keys-made famous in The Gamblers -had always seemed just another of the legends surrounding him. Now one had surfaced, and it was gone.

Losing it was preferable to being killed, Dani thought, but she still wished she had it.

And work kept her mind off what day it was. That tonight was the annual Chandler lawn party.

She’d had her dress cleaned, and carted it and the ostrich plume and her red shoes up to the Pembroke salon, located in the estate’s former bathhouse, for some pampering and advice. It was getting close to seven. Time to put herself together.

She passed Zeke Cutler sitting on a stone bench in the shade of a sugar maple. He had his arms hooked on the back of the bench and his legs stretched out, his ankles crossed. He looked relaxed, confident.

“Afternoon, Ms. Pembroke,” he said in an exaggerated southern drawl, designed, no doubt, to undermine her sense of professionalism.

She didn’t let it, although she’d changed from her business clothes into shorts and a Saratoga T-shirt and had Mattie’s dress hanging over her arm in its plastic cleaner’s bag. She nodded briskly. “Mr. Cutler.”

“Nice day.”

That it was. Dry, clear, warm. But, of course, it would be. In its hundred-year history, the Chandler lawn party had enjoyed remarkably good weather. Someone had once figured out that it would have rained on the historic party the few Augusts that the Saratoga racing season had been canceled, in the early 1900s and during World War II.

“Have you been keeping busy?” she asked, trying to treat him as she would any other guest, regardless of his profession or how they’d met. What questions she still had about him. How physically attractive she found him.

“More or less. Right now I’m debating between tubing down the Batten Kill and weeding tomatoes. Which do you think?”

His sarcasm-or humor-was nearly, but not quite, undetectable. Dani said coolly, “It doesn’t seem to me you’re seriously considering either one.”

He almost smiled. “Maybe I should take a mud bath?”

“You’d find it refreshing, I’m sure.”

Dropping one hand, he picked up a bottle of Pembroke Springs Mineral Water he had beside him on the bench. “Nice package. I tried your orange soda-haven’t worked up the nerve to try this stuff yet.” He unscrewed the top. “I usually get my water from the tap.”

“It’s not the same.”

“That’s what scares me.” He took a sip and paused a moment, seeming to contemplate the taste. “I suppose it could grow on you.”

For some reason, Dani wasn’t offended. “It’s milder than a lot of the mineral waters around here. My grandmother-”

“Mattie Witt.”

She nodded but noticed the slight darkening of Zeke Cutler’s already dark eyes. “She knows-or used to know-the properties of a hundred different springs in the region, which ones would bind you up, which ones would unbind you, which were more suited to bathing. She claims there’s a spring that’ll cure virtually any intestinal ailment. She’s not as rabid as she used to be-I understand she used to pump my father full of various waters when he was a boy.”

“That was after she retired from Hollywood?”

“Oh, yes.”

Zeke Cutler drank more of his water, and this time Dani felt he was contemplating her. His eyes darkened even more, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. The effect on her was more unnerving than she would ever want to admit. “Tell me,” he said, “do you take such a personal interest in all your guests or only the ones you’ve assaulted with iron skillets?”

The humor was back in his eyes. It softened them, made them a little less intense. Dani felt a rush of warmth and might have fled without answering, pretending she hadn’t heard him. But she said, “I’m keeping my eye on you, Zeke Cutler.”

He raised his bottle to her. “Ditto.”

The rush of warmth turned hot, and she got out of there, heading along a brick walk in the sun, which was nowhere near as broiling as she was.

Magda Roskov, who presided over the salon, and who was even tinier than her boss, shook her head in despair when she saw Dani. “But you give me just an hour! I need at least a week to work on you.”

Dani had thought an hour was a lot. “Well, just help me figure out how to get this feather to stay in my hair.”

Magda inspected the red ostrich plume. “This has possibilities.”

Coming from her, that was a major vote of confidence.

She worked on Dani for her allotted hour, lecturing her on leg waxing, manicures, pedicures, the right cosmetics. She signed her up for an herbal facial next week and insisted on setting Dani’s hair in pin curls. Magda examined her cuts and bruises with clinical objectivity and sighed loudly. “You want to climb rocks, you suffer the consequences.” Dani didn’t tell her she’d surprised a burglar.

The results-the pin curls, the dramatic makeup, the perfectly placed feather-were, she had to admit, far superior to anything she could have accomplished on her own. If not transformed, Dani felt downright glamorous. She wondered if Zeke Cutler would have been so sarcastic and controlled if he’d caught her in the garden looking like this.

Dangerous thinking. She had to stop it.

“Well,” Magda said, appraising her handiwork, “you’ll do.”

It was the best Dani would ever get from her by way of a compliment.

“You will put on your shoes?”

Dani grinned. She’d kept on her beat-up sneakers. “When I get there. Those three-inch heels are killers.”

“If you’d practice wearing them-”

“Bye, Magda. Thanks for everything.”

Watching Dani glide past him in a sexy retro dress, ratty sneakers and an ostrich feather in her shining dark hair, Zeke concluded the woman was pretty muddy on the subject of how heiresses were supposed to act.

He’d rejected tubing on the Batten Kill, weeding tomatoes and anything else the Pembroke had to offer early on a Friday evening, and he’d dumped the rest of his designer water in the grass.

Ms. Danielle Chandler Pembroke, he observed, really wasn’t very big.

He didn’t know why her feather didn’t fall off. “Got that thing stuck on with Krazy Glue?”