Sylvie Kurtz - Ms. Longshot

“I’ve got an umbrella.” Nat grinned and tugged on the minicompact, red-plaid Burberry umbrella tucked in her bag.

I made a quick calculation. With two weeks left to the semester before the Christmas break, I could afford another warning on my record before someone notified my parents they had a delinquent daughter. Besides, Daddy had promised to pick me up right after school today so we could get to the Ridgefield Winter Dressage Show early. If I was already standing outside, he wouldn’t have to wait for me.

I slung my Coach bag over my shoulder. “I’m in. Let’s go.”

Traffic honked up and down Ninety-third Street. Breathing in that exhaust had to fry our lungs more than any cigarette could. Nat popped open the umbrella and passed it to me. I angled it to shield us from most of the rain. Cold wind pried apart the blue cashmere Marc Jacobs coat I’d pulled from my bag, but I didn’t care. I hated stuffy English almost as much as Nat hated algebra. Shivering outside was a small price to pay to miss the dreaded class.

I untucked my boring white Calvin Klein button-down shirt, rolled the waist of my gray uniform skirt and leaned back against the cold stone wall. What was the point of having great legs if you couldn’t show them off? And what idiot had come up with gray as the uniform color in the first place? No one I knew looked good in gray.

Nat passed a coffin stick. “I can’t wait for break.”

I lit it with the gold lighter I’d pilfered from my mother’s purse and puffed out a geyser of smoke. “Me either.”

“Sucks that I’ll be stuck going skiing with my dad in Aspen again, though.” Nat made a face. “He’s bringing his new girlfriend.” A gold-digging bimbo only seven years older than Nat.

“Maybe you’ll get lucky and she’ll run into a tree,” I sympathized.

“She’s more into the après than the ski, if you know what I mean.” Nat took a long drag on her cigarette. “What are you going to wear to the Black-and-White Ball?”

“Ralph sent over a black number that’s so hot,” I said, practically purring. My long legs had caught Ralph Lauren’s attention when I was thirteen, and he’d tried to get me to pose for one of his ads ever since. Naturally my mother had nixed the idea. Modeling is apparently beneath the station of Lady Cheltingham’s daughter. I secretly believed that my stiff-upper-lip mother just didn’t want me to have any kind of fun. Still, for every major event, a dress appeared at our Park Avenue penthouse, and even my mother wasn’t too proud to accept the gift of couture.

“It’s cut down to here.” I twisted my body around without moving my feet and dragged a hand down to the small of my back.

At that moment, someone leaned on a horn and didn’t let go. Tires screeched and a yellow taxi hopped the curb, trying to avoid a collision with a town car zigzagging like crazy through traffic.

He’s not going to stop, I realized as the taxi charged toward us.

The world slowed around me as I untwisted my feet. My heart pounded a ragged beat against my eardrums. A gust of wind wrenched the umbrella from my hand. Nat’s screams echoed as if she were in a tunnel. Too late, I lifted a leg to bolt out of the way. The thud of metal against stone and bone registered as something foreign and far away—like it was all happening to someone else—pinning me to the wall like a butterfly.

The taxi recoiled. I fell and I could tell you every second of the trip to the pavement. Inanely what floated through my mind was Newton’s First Law I’d learned in Mrs. Collin’s science class: “For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.” And the weirdest thing of all was the way my head bounced sideways against the wet concrete like a tennis ball, splashing dirty puddle water into my eyes. When my vision cleared, what filled my sight was the perfectly whole cigarette, end glowing red, between my fingers.

Well, crap, I thought as pain screamed through my body and pierced my brain. Daddy was right. Cigarettes were going to kill me.

New York City Late April. Present.

I was probably the only undercover agent in history who’d get fired for removing her prosthesis in an airport and pissing off a French gendarme. But the hyper frog barking at me in French at the security checkpoint at Charles de Gaulle had far exceeded my limit of patience when he refused to understand that my leg was setting off the alarm, not a hidden weapon.

Ever since the accident, I’d been sensitive about my leg. So when my cell phone rang shortly after my flight touched down in New York and I was summoned to tea at the Gotham Rose Club, I was sure the ax was about to fall and I was going to get booted out of their secret agency.

The car service dropped me off in front of the gray cut-stone townhouse that housed the Gotham Rose Club on Sixty-eighth Street between Park and Madison on the Upper East Side. I stood outside the black wrought-iron security grate over the carved wood front door with its rose design and pretended to admire the architecture. Mostly I was composing myself.

Renee Dalton-Sinclair ran the Gotham Rose Club, an elite, members-only club intended to attract young, wealthy New York women like me to fund-raise and volunteer their time for charity. I was doing both for the Horses of Hope Foundation long before Renee asked me to join. But Renee also had another use for the club—taking down high-society criminals. And that’s why I was here today, and why I couldn’t decide if the nerves jumping around like fleas on a barn dog were from anger or anxiety.

I tugged at the hem of the silver-leaf sleeveless V-neck top and smoothed the ivory Vera Wang cotton-tulle skirt with my sweaty palms, then pressed the doorbell. Olivia Hayworth’s voice sang across the intercom. “Welcome, Alexa. Come on in.”

A security buzzer released the latch and I walked into a white Italian marble foyer that reminded me of a gilded cage. The place smelled of old money and older traditions. And despite my background, I never felt like I quite fit in.

Olivia, Renee’s assistant, greeted me with an extended hand and a bright smile that eased some of my anxiety. Okay, so maybe I’d just get a warning.

“Hello, Alexa, how was your trip to Paris?”

“Nonstop crazy.”

Olivia chuckled. “With Nathalie Huston, what else did you expect?”

I winced. Maybe this was about the incident with the gendarme.

My silver Delman ballet flats echoed against the marble as Olivia led me back to the Irish tearoom, one of the many that served as meeting rooms. Renee sat alone at the table. That couldn’t be good. My stomach took a sharp dive south.

Renee’s hair was pulled into a French twist. The hint of gray snaking through her auburn locks here and there merely added to the air of dignity that surrounded her. The winter white of her Chanel suit complemented her creamy complexion. As always, her smile was warm and welcoming and her striking royal blue eyes assessing.

The reason I’d joined Renee’s secret agency was to prove to myself that I could do anything I wanted—even catch bad guys. Not to mention the promise of excitement—which, I should mention, had failed to materialize. Unless you counted poring through piles of business reports as exciting—which I did not. For some reason, Renee insisted on treating me as if I were Swarovski crystal.

Frankly, I don’t know why Renee asked me to join the Gotham Rose Club when she barely made use of my skills. My guess was that it was some sort of employer requirement—round out the roll call with a token cripple and get patted on the head for following all the equal-employment opportunity rules. She knew how I felt, and that didn’t make me one of her favorite agents.