Authors: M. J. Lawless
Knaves
© M. J. Lawless 2014
The right of M. J. Lawless to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted in accordance the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Copying of this manuscript, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the author and her publisher is strictly prohibited.
All sexually active characters in this work are 18 years of age or older.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by Black Orion Press, 2014.
Cover design by Arkangel Media.
All rights reserved.
Other books by M.J. Lawless
The Crystal Fragments Trilogy
Fractured Crystal: Sapphires and Submission
Fragile Crystal: Rubies and Rivalries
Refracted Crystal: Diamonds and Desire
Orfeo
Rocks
As Miriam Lawless
The Long Last Summer
To Danny – for being a hero when I needed you.
The Queen of Hearts
She made some tarts,
All on a summer
’s day;
The Knave of Hearts
He stole those tarts,
And took them clean away.
Anonymous
Quit while you’re ahead. All the best gamblers do.
Baltasar Gracián y Morales
For a man who had just lost more than a hundred thousand Euros, Hayden Carter was in a surprisingly good mood.
The sun had not long risen above the eastern rim of the Mediterranean, turning the deep blues of sea and sky a subtle rose, beams of light picking out the tops of the buildings in Monte Carlo. As he took the steps that led from the casino to the old city two at a time, his white silk jacket flapping in the sweet, western breeze and his unravelled bow tie swaying about his neck, Hayden felt as though he could burst into song with joy.
That would be a bit weird, so instead he paused on the topmost step, gazing down over the built up conurbation of modern Monaco. Blocks of cool high rise buildings stretched out into the placid waters of the sea where they encountered a man-made forest of gently swaying masts. There were two conditions, Hayden decided, for an object to exist in Monaco. It had to be white and it had to be expensive. Very expensive.
“
God! I forgot how much I miss Europe!” he enthused to no-one in particular. His words attracted the attention of two women who were about to descend to the lower city. One, the nearer of the two, was an attractive woman with the kind of easygoing lightened hair and darkened skin familiar to these regions, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses. She looked about forty, but Hayden knew from experience that the wealth dripping from her clothes could easily disguise someone older. Slightly behind her followed a young woman, perhaps in her late teens, a pretty youth though lacking the sexy, self-confidence of the other woman who, Hayden perceived, must be her mother.
While the younger girl glanced at him shyly, her eyes following the firm contours of his chest visible beneath his white shirt, only occasionally rising to the strong lines of his face, the mother was much more assured in her appraisal of him. Though her eyes were hidden from him, Hayden couldn
’t help but smile as the direction of her gaze clearly measured his worth, her own slight smirk indicating that she was very pleased with what she saw. The fact that she lingered a little longer than was strictly necessary on his crotch made him raise one eyebrow.
“
Have you been to Monte Carlo before?” she asked in a velvet-rich French accent, not minding in the slightest that he caught the direction in which she was looking. Instead, her smile became broader, an indication that she wouldn’t mind looking some more—ideally without the added inconvenience of clothes. “Perhaps you would like a guide.”
Overcome with his own ebullience, Hayden gave a mock-serious bow.
“Madame,” he said with genuine pleasure, “and mademoiselle—under different circumstances nothing could give me greater pleasure. Unfortunately, I have an assignation that will not wait.”
The older woman sighed and, for the first time, lowered her glasses slightly so that he could see her dark eyes. She was truly beautiful, he thought, and the frankness of her expression
—a mixture of regret and contemplation that perhaps she could dissuade him from his appointment—almost took his breath away. God! He loved French women! Behind her, the girl was blushing slightly, which nearly made Hayden laugh out loud. How much longer, he wondered, before the daughter learned everything she needed to know from her mother’s example?
“
A shame,” the mother said at last, her lips pursing slightly. “Madeline and I are in Monte Carlo for another week. Her father... my husband... is away for a while. Perhaps...” She left the rest of her sentence unspoken.
Wishing neither to appear ungallant, nor seeking to omit a small opportunity to flirt, Hayden took a step forward and grasped the mother
’s hand gently between his own fingers. “In another life, perhaps,” he said quietly. “In the meantime, I shall take the greatest pleasure in knowing that Monte Carlo is home to women as beautiful as the city itself.”
“
We’re not from Monaco!” the young woman blurted out in heavily accented English. “We live just outside Nice.”
For a second, the mother glanced in irritation at her daughter but then sighed: she was smart enough to realise that the moment when the dice could be cast in her favour had passed. Returning her gaze to Hayden, she smiled warmly and gave a small shrug.
“Children,” she said. “When will they ever learn?”
“
With you as her mentor, I’m sure Madeline has a great deal to learn,” Hayden replied. Not giving her a chance to consider the ambiguities of his statement, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her gently before blowing another kiss in the daughter’s direction. The glimmer of lust the younger woman was unable to hide before dipping her head made Hayden laugh. He bowed in a slightly melodramatic fashion and continued his climb.
Another Hayden, in another time, would have gladly taken advantage of the chance presented by mother
—and daughter too. It wouldn’t have been the first time that a ménage with two members of the same family had been on the cards, though in the last instance the inopportune return of the husband to one and father to the other had involved Hayden racing across a forgotten field of the English home counties, sans clothes, while a red-faced country gent attempted to load his shotgun as quickly as possible. If said gent had spent more time loading something else, he would have probably encountered fewer difficulties at home.
But that all seemed a world away now. That incident, like so many others, had been before Karla.
Karla Steel. The beautiful, the inimitable, the perfect Karla.
The indomitable Karla who was also going to kill him when she found out what he
’d done.
They had been together for a year now, a fact that caused Hayden to pause almost as much as the thought of how much pain Karla was going to inflict when she discovered the amount he
’d lost at the tables. Had it really been so long? Damn! That was almost like matrimony—monogamy being something Hayden had always considered detrimental to his health. Like tobacco and saturated fats, too frequent sex with the same, single woman had always been something the sporty dilettante avoided.
But Karla wasn
’t single. She was singular. There was only one Karla Steel.
It wasn
’t her beauty that attracted Hayden so intensely—though there was no doubt that Karla was quite simply one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. The world, after all, was full of beautiful women.
Brains helped, of course, but then again Hayden had often found that a pedantic, querulous intelligence was as often a hindrance to pleasure as a help, quick as it was to develop into the kind of paranoid questing that would never give a man any peace. No: Karla wasn
’t like that at all. Her mind was as sharp and incisive as Hayden’s, able to measure a situation in the blink of an eye and turn it to her advantage.
In the end, perhaps that was what attracted Hayden so deeply to Karla, that he had never met another person so like himself. If he had been a woman, he would have been proud to be Karla Steel.
The warm, slightly fuzzy (and, to his shame, ever so slightly sentimental) feeling he got in the pit of his stomach whenever he thought about Karla became cold and a little sick at the thought of her reaction in the next fifteen minutes. With any luck, she would be just waking from sleep. He could pick up a coffee from the concierge and slide beside her lithe, lissom body in bed, whisper sweet nothings into her ear while he caressed her, stroked her back and tickled and teased her earlobes as he built up slowly to his revelation...
Fat chance.
When he had first met Karla, she’d been attempting to steal the very same diamond, the perfect Wallenstein, that he’d set his sights on. He’d never met anyone as ruthless as himself, and had it not been for the attempts of a very determined—if somewhat incompetent—Scandinavian hit man hired to kill the pair of them, Karla’s and Hayden’s natural antagonisms would probably never have been reconciled.
Karla Steel wasn
’t her real name, of course, but a carefully nurtured sense of self-preservation had worked itself to such a pitch that Hayden censored himself automatically whenever it began to float up from the depths of his unconscious. Not that her “real” name mattered, just as none of her “real” past mattered. Karla and Hayden were con-artists, with an emphasis on the art of their craft. Both knew that character certainly wasn’t destiny, and all that mattered was the personality that each of them created for the task at hand—even if that task was the especially thorny issue of loving Karla Steel (or Hayden Carter for that matter).
After the theft of the Wallenstein, fenced for them by Karla
’s legally-minded and immensely crooked Uncle Coilin, they had spent their time in South America and Asia, living life to the full. After nine months, a botched attempt to assassinate the pair of them brought with it the realisation that they were living a fool’s dream, that they could never settle into a stable life no matter how far they were from the original owners of the Wallenstein who, it seemed, remained as pissed off as ever at their activities. In any case, the money was running out. What would have lasted a normal couple several lifetimes, Karla and Hayden had burned through in a year.
But what a year it had been! That was why they were back in Europe now. Perhaps it was a degree of sentimentalism on both their parts, but they had decided on a new job and new identities. He was Sebastian Rider, a somewhat incompetent if oh-so-dashing English playboy living it up on the French Riviera, accompanied by the mysterious brunette beauty, Jeanne Duval. Personally, Hayden preferred Karla
’s natural auburn locks, but he understood entirely the importance of disguise.
They had made their way to Monaco on the wave of a series of casual hustles, usually leaving behind a broken heart and a lighter wallet of whichever rich man or woman had crossed their path, but the big chance had eluded them so far. Until now, thought Hayden.
He was walking slowly, rehearsing the argument that he was going to use on Karla. His apparent loss at the tables the night before wasn’t so much a loss as an investment. His kid brother (as crooked in his own way though clever enough to evade those financial authorities who were meant to oversee his activities in the City) was always telling Hayden that you needed to speculate to accumulate, and that was what Hayden had been doing. Speculating. The fact that it involved an extremely pleasurable evening gambling did not at all undermine the seriousness of the activity.
Hayden
’s self-assurance had almost girded his not inconsiderable loins to a sufficient extent—for if Hayden didn’t lack one thing, it was balls. And so when he entered the hotel where he and Karla—no, Jeanne—were staying he almost believed his own bullshit. Then he saw her, and for a second he saw his reassurances for the paper-thin lies they were.
She was sitting in the lobby, her long, thick black hair cascading in careful ringlets across the crisp collar of her pale blouse, one trousered leg crossed elegantly across the other. She was reading a newspaper, its folds held carefully apart in her elegant fingers, her lips parted ever so slightly in a fashion that made him gasp when he saw her, as though secret whispers of the delights only she could bring him were being breathed out on the air. Beneath the cool cotton whimsy of her clothes, he could almost see those contours of her body which he knew so well and his resolve almost deserted him. Almost. If any man were a match for Karla, it was him.
“Darling,” she said in a thrilling voice, rolling her r’s ever so slightly in a fashion that would have been a match for Zsa Zsa Gabor. “I missed you.” Though she had changed the colour of her hair, her eyes were still a brilliant, glittering green as she looked up at him, and the warmth of her voice made him relax as he bent down to kiss her, breathing in the scent of her body mingling with her perfume. Now all he needed to complete his satisfaction for the evening was to take her upstairs and see if they could break another bed. Her voice was gentle, soft. Everything was going to be alright.
It was only as he kissed her that he noticed her eyes once more. That glittering hardness made her look like a viper. His back stiffened and he cut short his kiss.
“I missed you too, darling,” he said, the words almost catching in his throat.
“
Did you enjoy yourself last night?” she asked. There was the faintest undercurrent to her words, a menace that would have been missed by anyone else and Hayden almost laughed out loud.
That
was what the problem was: she thought he’d been up to his old tricks. She was jealous! Well, at least he wouldn’t have to lie about something.
“
So-so,” he replied, noncommittally. “Why don’t we go and have breakfast in our room and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“
My thoughts precisely,” she said, standing and extending a hand to him. Her own head came to just above his broad shoulders, her high-heeled Versace shoes adding surprising height. That didn’t bode well. Karla always tried to match him in stature when she was gearing up to a fight.
Yet while they made their way to the elevator and meandered to their room, the conversation of Jeanne Duval
—if not the thoughts of Karla Steel—was as placid and as balmy as the summer morning sun rising over Monte Carlo. That put Hayden on his guard and, as she entered their apartment ahead of him—a delightful, spacious set of rooms that would have cost the pair of them a pretty penny if they had actually been paying for them—he decided to get his explanation in first.