“You bet,” Yardley said with a shiny smile as she climbed out of the car, drawing her voice into her nose as she tapped on her comm. “Don’t you fucking take a break.” She slammed the door shut, startling a woman with an oversized fuzzy scarf, and minced to the Starbucks entrance, cleavage bouncing.
Atlas’s voice came into her ear. “He’s by the merch. Black suit. Tabasco’s standing by, monitoring your front-facing video and audio. They’ll let you know what you can do for them.”
Yardley met Devon Mirabel’s eyes while wealthy mothers and college students looked on in ill-concealed shock. She gave him a sharky smile and a brusque wave, obviously unbothered by the attention. “I like a man in a suit,” she said by way of greeting, reaching her arms out and stepping into a New Yorker’s version of a Continental embrace, which involved a lot of personal-space-bubble violation. “And you wear it well, buddy. I’m Ashley. Feels like I’m meeting a celebrity.”
He wrapped his hands around her forearms a smidge too tight. She forced herself to relax into his grip like she enjoyed the threat of his dominance. “Ashley. We’ve managed to catch each other. I wasn’t sure this could happen.”
He meant that he’d never heard of her before this morning and therefore was suspicious, but his entire world was suspicious, and he liked money, power, and drama, so here they were. Also, it would be hard for her to plunge the business end of ahypodermic full of poison into his neck in the middle of Starbucks.
Not impossible. Just hard. She’d once had a shoulder cannon pointed at her in the middle of a market in Marrakesh, so anything was possible.
“Oh, I can make whatever I want happen, Dev. Hey, you there!” Yardley lifted a hand into the air, addressing the startled barista, who was steaming milk. “What does it take to get a coffee? Do I have to hike up a mountain in Jamaica, what?”
The barista stared at her, but she slowly moved away from the steamer and grabbed two paper cups.
“All right,” Yardley said. “Let’s sit. Turbulence was a fucking nightmare out of LaGuardia.”
Mirabel gave her a reserved smile that nonetheless made his veneers glint. He was attractive in person, which caused Yardley to doubt he was all that smart. She could count the number of attractive, smart evildoers she’d encountered in her career on one hand with fingers left over.
“I must say, Ms. Thompson—”
“Mrs. Thompson. I don’t send Marshall’s shirts out and lie awake listening to his CPAP machine at midnight to lose my honorific to political correctness.”
Someone snorted with laughter in her ear. Not Atlas. They never betrayed their feelings about Yardley’s performance in the field.Tabasco.
Yardley felt her chest puff out. It surprised her, the little jolt of validation that Tabasco’s laugh had given her. She hadn’t felt little jolts in a long time.
“Pardon. Mrs. Thompson. I was surprised to hear from ourmutual friend that you’d like to discuss business.” Mirabel said this lazily. “I believe—”
The barista knocked into his elbow, interrupting him to put two coffees on the table with a look Yardley translated asMa’am, this is a Starbucks.Yardley opened her Chanel chain bag, pulled out a twenty, and slid it in the barista’s direction. “That’s not a tip. We need some of that lemon pound cake.” She blew on her coffee and took a sip. “You were saying?” she asked.
“I was saying I’m surprised I don’t know anyone who’s met you.”
“I’m not.” This was the part of the encounter where she would figure out if it was an audition to make another meeting or the meeting itself—the only aspect of these things that could get tricky, primarily because the men Yardley met with usually had a business agenda, a paranoia agenda, and a seduction agenda. It was easy to misinterpret the cues. Yardley leaned in and gave Mirabel a smile. “I like things to happen when I say they happen, I’m not a fucking Amtrak. It turns out you have something to keep me on schedule.”
“That’s another thing.” Mirabel picked up his coffee, took a sip, and winced. “What’s your plan, precisely?”
She brayed out a laugh. “I like a sense of humor. I sure as fuck have your number, so I assume you have mine. Look.” The barista appeared to put the paper bags with pound cake on the table. Yardley opened her palm, and the woman huffed and shoved the dollar and change in it before flouncing off. “I’m young, but my money’s not, and the way things went in Toronto, I should be doubting you, not the other way around. I’ve talked to people who say that was all you had and all you’ve got. So far, I’m the only buyer young, cracked, and rich enough willing to risk a lemon.”
Mirabel’s eyes widened only slightly. “Perhaps we should have dinner,” he said.
Dang it. This was an audition.
“I’m having dinner with Daddy in New York, and I don’t stand the man up.”
Mirabel’s eyes darted around the Starbucks. The tables were mostly full. The laughter, conversation, and kids begging for cake pops provided plenty of camouflage for their conversation, but they also made Yardley aware that her work was the only thing keeping these people safe right now. If she had backup, so did Mirabel. “My sources tell me your interest is impulsive.”
Yardley smiled, opened up her body language, and channeled every bit of Cyndi Lauper’s easy authenticity with her accent. “So was the Boston Tea Party.”
Another abrupt laugh from Tabasco over the comm—thrilling, and too fleeting—but Mirabel’s expression had soured.
“You’re losing him,” Atlas said in her ear. “Tabasco’s picking up something. Stay—”
Yardley had to keep smiling past the sharp prick of feedback against her eardrum.
Seriously?What she didn’t need was a comm issue. Again. She scooted her chair closer to the table so she could lean her spy bra into Mirabel’s arm. Gazing into his eyes, she cocked an eyebrow like the daughter of a mobster. “Another time, hon, I’m more than happy to split a good bottle of merlot with you and yak over a steak, but that’s not why you set this up, and I don’t see any other American citizens with barrels of cash taking a meeting. Like I said, Toronto was cute, but not cute enough that I have more time to give you than it takes to finish my coffee.” This kind of bluff, inher experience, usually worked. Yardley felt Mirabel’s hand on her thigh. Good sign. She inched closer. “What have you got for me?”
Another knifelike squeal attacked her eardrum, followed by an exclamation that sounded either likebad intelorbombshell—neither option good—and then Mirabel’s hand was replaced by the very distinctive sensation of the business end of a gun.
