Elizabeth Lowell - Innocent as Sin

Reluctantly Hamm stepped back from the Explorer. He leaned inside the guard-shack door and triggered the gate mechanism.

Kayla shifted into gear and rolled through, both amused and irritated by Hamm’s persistent interest in her and his employers. She could handle the smiling come-ons, but the Bertones put a high value on their physical and fiscal privacy. Wealthy families were targets for everyone from civic and political fund-raisers to thieves and kidnappers. The wealthy kept the world at bay with gates and security cameras and a thick layer of servants, lawyers, and bankers.

In the Bertones’ shoes, she would have done the same. Especially as they had three young children to protect from the world’s predators.

Mentally going over the final details of the Bertones’ big art party tomorrow, Kayla pulled into the car park behind the five-car garage. She turned off the engine and automatically gathered her leather valise and purse. She hesitated, put the escrow envelope in the valise, and headed for the back of the house, where Elena had her office. Along the way Kayla waved to the Brazilian chauffeur, Antonio, who was washing a massive black Hummer. Head-high lilies bloomed along the flagstone path to the house. Everything looked and smelled green.

Money green.

“Down here,” Elena called.

Kayla swerved without breaking rhythm. Apparently Elena was on the terrace between the Olympic-size pool and the children’s splash pool.

“You’re late,” Elena said. “But I saved you some brunch.”

Kayla slid onto a chair beneath the sunshade and dropped her leather bag on the flagstone.

“I’m a minute off, by my clock,” she said cheerfully, “and you can blame that on your gate guard, who keeps trying to charm me out of my tiny little mind every time I come by.”

“Of course he does.” Elena gave her the million-candle-power smile of the international beauty queen she’d once been. “You’re an attractive young thing who makes a good living and he’s a former athlete who doesn’t like working for his bread and butter.”

The cool social calculation in the words was pure Elena. She was a stunningly beautiful woman whose figure had only been improved by having three children. She was shrewd, opinionated, socially ambitious, and arrogant in the way that only a gorgeous woman with a few hundred million in the bank could be.

In the quiet of her own mind, Kayla admitted that she would never like Elena, didn’t really trust her, but was fascinated by her just the same.

Then there was the fact that Elena was a loving mother to three energetic, utterly confident children. Raised just short of the Brazilian slums herself, Elena had a gut-deep understanding of the difference between poverty and wealth, family and standing alone against the world. The children were home-schooled, as the public schools in America simply weren’t equipped to handle kidnap targets.

No matter what Kayla might think of Elena as a person, she respected her client’s dedication to her children.

“Where are the kids?” Kayla asked.

She looked around the grounds, half expecting to see Miranda or Xavier or Jonathan peering out from behind one of the marble columns in front of the pool house. In truth, she visited Elena more often than business required because she enjoyed the children.

“I asked Maria to keep them in the house for a few minutes, while we conduct my business,” Elena said.

Oooookay, Kayla thought. No small talk.

“What do you need?” she asked, pulling out a small digital recorder. Elena’s directives rarely came in twos or threes.

“Several things.” Elena lowered her chin and looked at Kayla over the top of her sexy Italian sunglasses. “Are the finances all in order for the Desert Art Week?”

“I don’t know about the rest of the festival, but everything is ready for your event. I wish we could call it something besides ‘The Fast Draw.’” Kayla kept her voice neutral, but it was an effort. If I was a self-respecting painter, I’d sharpen the end of a brush and fall on it before I entered that contest. I don’t care if first prize is twenty-five grand. There’s something belittling about the whole thing.

Elena shrugged. “I didn’t choose the name. I simply supplied the money and the place. The arts are very important.”

Especially for the socially ambitious, Kayla thought sourly. Social climbing was one of Elena’s less charming traits.

Hey, if you’d been raised next door to a slum, you’d want to be accepted by the high and mighty, too, Kayla told herself. You’re just jealous of her looks.

They’re worth being jealous of.

With an effort Kayla dragged her mind back to the Fast Draw event, which was part of an annual art festival conducted to raise funds for the Scottsdale Desert Museum. Thirty landscape painters had been invited to paint the same subject in a two-hour timed contest. This year the Bertones had made quite an impression by offering their estate as the painting site and promising to purchase the top three canvases. Then they had doubled the total prize money to fifty thousand.

The local press had gone gaga. Not only was Elena Bertone ravishing and intelligent and a sublime hostess, she was incredibly generous too. Definitely the best thing to happen to Scottsdale since reliable tap water.

“The Fast Draw is the name they’ve used for years,” Elena continued. “I’m not ready to change that tradition yet. Have you done everything I required?”

Kayla didn’t have to check her notes. The Bertones were far and away her most important client. The fact that her boss, Steve Foley, had given the Bertones exclusively to her a few months ago still amazed her. Maybe he’d guessed that she was mentally packing up and heading out for greener employment pastures.

“The funds are all in the prize account,” Kayla said. “I’ve arranged for a commercial sign painter to do the presentation checks so that they’ll show up in the press photos.”

“Good.” Elena made no secret of the fact that she wanted her face and discreetly presented cleavage on the society pages at least once a week. “The caterer has given me a price of two hundred dollars a head for the Fast Draw party, but he demands a cashier’s check before he serves a single canapé.”

He must have worked for the superrich before, Kayla thought. People who spent lavishly didn’t always pay on time. In fact, they rarely did. “If you want to pay the wine bills and the rest of the party expenses when you pay the caterer, you’ll have to top up the entertainment account. I can pull it from the household account as usual.”

Elena removed her sunglasses and looked at Kayla like she was interviewing for a job rather than already an employee. “No.”

The tone and the cool appraisal in the wide brown eyes made Kayla’s neck tingle.

“Deposit this in the entertainment account,” Elena said, taking a cream-colored vellum envelope from beneath her plate. “It should settle all bills.”

Kayla took the envelope. The heavy paper flap wasn’t sealed. She lifted it and removed a single handwritten check. It was drawn on a foreign bank she’d never heard of. Her eyes widened.

“Twenty-two million dollars,” she said. “Holy-there must be some mistake. Even you couldn’t spend that much on a party.”

“Your job isn’t to judge my expenditures.” Elena’s voice was as cold as her eyes. Her faint exotic accent deepened. “Your job is to deposit and withdraw money at my desire.”

Kayla’s stomach knotted. The words compliant and complicit were part of any private banker’s training. Compliant and complicit bankers were no longer legally immune from the implications of their acts. Or as Kayla thought of it: Launder money and go to jail.