Closer Than She Thinks

by Meryl Sawyer

  “Since I came to Florence twelve years ago.”

  “Before that what did you do?”

  The question set her teeth on edge. Before that she’d been living in New Orleans—her life set on a much different course. She wondered if he knew anything about her past. He wore a gambler’s neutral expression. He could have been holding a winning or a losing hand, and no one would have been able to tell which.

  “Before I came here, I was in school in the States.”

  He dipped his biscotti in the latte he hadn’t touched and gazed at her with assessing eyes that missed little. She stared right back, barely suppressing a fresh current of irritation. The silence seemed to echo between them as if he expected her to say something more. The underlying tension that had been there since he’d appeared kicked up a notch.

  Jake waited for her to continue, thinking he should have ordered an espresso. He needed a major hit of caffeine to handle this woman. Actually, two fingers of sour mash would be even better.

  How in hell had he mistaken Alyssa for Phoebe? Alyssa was taller with wickedly long legs and hazel, not blue, eyes. She had a shuttered, distant attitude. Phoebe was the opposite. She would openly and unabashedly flirt with any man even when her husband was nearby.

  Of the two, most men would have said Phoebe was prettier, and she probably was if you judged by looks alone. There seemed to be so much more to Alyssa. She had an edge to her or maybe she was just driven to succeed.

  He had the unmistakable impression she’d despised him on sight. There must be something about him that brought out the worst in women. They either crawled all over him like minks in heat or took one look and told him to take a hike.

  He should get up and make tracks for the limo waiting to transport him to the villa in Tuscany, where he was sure to find a woman who went for him big-time, but TriTech had purchased Rossi Designs. He was going to have to learn to deal with this woman.

  “Where were you born, Alyssa?”

  She gazed at him as if he were nuts for asking. He couldn’t deny having a few loose screws. But he’d asked for a specific reason. He wanted to know her connection to the Duvalls, and he wanted her to tell him.

  “Slidell, Louisiana,” was all she said.

  “Across Lake Ponchatrain from New Orleans.”

  “You sure know your lakes.”

  He gazed at her for a moment and spotted the glimmer in her eyes. He got it. She was teasing him. He chuckled a couple of seconds too late.

  “Do you have relatives in New Orleans?”

  “Just cousins.”

  Christ! This sucked. She had to be related to Phoebe. Why hide it? “Really?”

  She smiled with feline inscrutability and dipped the stub of her biscotti into her cup. “You know how New Orleans is.”

  Indeed he did. Everyone in the city seemed to be related some way or another to everyone else. That explained her resemblance to Phoebe. For all he knew, Clay Duvall’s wife had a hundred cousins who could be mistaken for his wife’s twin. But he doubted it.

  Almost twins. Jewelry-stringing nuns. A business that appeared to be little more than a storefront. What else could go wrong?

  Don’t ask.

  He would have to thoroughly investigate Rossi Designs. He suspected this might be some sort of a scam to bilk TriTech out of money. Was Clay Duvall in on it?

  It was two in the morning before Jake could gracefully leave his host and return to the guest suite he’d been given when he’d been chauffeured to the villa from Florence. He hadn’t gotten a damn thing more out of Alyssa Rossi and had given up trying. He knew he should go to sleep, but he couldn’t resist calling Troy Chevalier in New Orleans to see if their investigator had a report on Alyssa. Troy answered Jake’s private line on the first ring.

  “Anything going on?” Jake reminded himself that he had a huge company to run. Rossi Designs wasn’t his biggest problem.

  “Nothing important. The guys are bouncing off the walls about the deal you negotiated in Monte Carlo.”

  Jake had been excited, too—until he’d met Alyssa. Now he was royally pissed. Something was wrong, and he wasn’t going to rest until he knew the whole truth.

  “Did Sanchez file a report?”

  “Yes, it’s here. Want me to read it to you?”

  He knew Troy must have looked at the private investigator’s report, but as always, he played his hand close to his chest. “Just give me the highlights.”

  “Maybe I’d better tell you the whole story.”

  Uuh-ooh. “I’m listening.”

  “Alyssa Rossi is Phoebe Duvall’s first cousin.”

  “Bingo! I’d have bet the farm on it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Troy asked, and Jake told him about his visit to Rossi Designs. Jake knew the women had to be related.

  “Weird,” was all Troy said. A team player to the end, Troy wouldn’t make any negative remarks about Clay Duvall. Instead, he continued telling Jake what was in the report. “Alyssa’s parents were killed in a small plane crash. She went to live with Phoebe’s family.”

  “You’re saying they were raised together?”

  “Not together exactly. Phoebe went to an exclusive private school while Wyatt, her brother, attended a military academy. Alyssa went to public schools and seems to have been raised by the housekeeper. From what Sanchez found out, the family treated her like a poor relative, barely tolerating her presence.”

  Jake’s impression of Alyssa softened a bit as he imagined her growing up in Phoebe’s shadow. A Cinderella story—only Phoebe got the Prince—if your idea of a prince was Clay Duvall. Okay, okay. Duvall probably was an American prince.

  Jake realized Troy was waiting for him to respond and asked, “Where does Clay Duvall fit in?”

  “That’s the interesting part.”

  “Define interesting.”

  Troy laughed, then continued, “Alyssa and Clay were college sweethearts.”

  “What? You’re kidding.” Duvall had bought his old girlfriend’s company. Maybe they still had a relationship.

  “I’m not joking. I’m reading this from the report, and it gets better.”

  Yeah, right.

  “Alyssa and Clay were hot and heavy when Phoebe became pregnant with Clay’s baby. They had to get married.”

  Something in his chest cinched tight as he imagined Phoebe stealing Alyssa’s boyfriend. Phoebe was rich and beautiful. She had it all, but she wasn’t satisfied. She coveted Alyssa’s boyfriend, too.

  “The shotgun wedding didn’t bother the two families since they were old friends. Phoebe’s mother, Hattie LeCroix, had wanted her to marry Clay since they were children.”

  But he fell for the poor cousin. Interesting. Jake wondered what Alyssa had been like back then. He tried to picture her as a young girl, but kept seeing the attractive woman who had sat across the small table from him, seeming to answer his questions, yet evading any real discussion.

  “Their parents threw Clay and Phoebe a big New Orleans-style wedding with everything but the parade.”

  Jake couldn’t help chuckling. Troy hadn’t been in New Orleans long, but he was a quick study. Just about anything was an excuse for a parade.

  “Five months later, Phoebe delivered a little boy.”

  “What happened to him? The Duvalls don’t have any children now.”

  “This is the weird part. The baby was in the nursery at St. Jude’s and Alyssa came to visit. Minutes later, when the night nurse checked the cribs, little Patrick was gone.”

  “Are you saying—”

  “It’s a strange case. Everyone thought Alyssa took the baby since she was the last one seen near the infant.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “The police turned the town inside out, but couldn’t find a trace of the baby.”

  “Helpless newborns don’t vanish into thin air.”

  “Phoebe insisted Alyssa was jealous and had taken the baby and tossed it in the bayou, where it would be eate
n by alligators.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Jake had been put off by Alyssa. There was something too reserved, too remote about her, but he couldn’t imagine Alyssa killing a child. “What did Clay think?”

  “I don’t know. The report doesn’t say.”

  Why in hell would Clay buy Rossi Designs? It didn’t make any sense at all. The minute he returned, Jake was going to demand an explanation from Duvall.

  “Alyssa was arrested, but they had to let her go for lack of evidence,” Troy added. “Everyone in town turned their back on her. Theodora Rossi Canali, her aunt, flew in from Florence and took Alyssa away.”

  “And now she’s walking back into the lion’s den. Why?”

  CHAPTER 4

  New Orleans

  “You wanted to see me?” Clay Duvall asked without turning to face his wife.

  “It’s important,” Phoebe replied in a voice that was slightly breathless as usual. He knew it was a calculated ploy to enhance her sex appeal, a trick that worked on most men. It had fooled him once, but now it merely annoyed him.

  Clay stood at the office window and stared down at the wide, yellowish brown expanse of the Mississippi River many stories below the office tower. The clanging of the streetcars disoriented him for a moment. He had to remind himself that he was in his new office near the waterfront in the Central Business District.

  “Why didn’t you catch me before I left home?” he asked, knowing full well Phoebe never lifted her beautiful blond head off the satin pillow in her suite until after eleven. He was on the jogging track at Tulane each morning at six.

  “I was curious to see your new office.”

  Phoebe stopped beside him, but he didn’t glance at her. A flash of warm apricot color told him she was dressed in a vibrant peach outfit with a designer label.

  “This isn’t anything like the genteel suite of offices overlooking Lafayette Square, is it?”

  “No, TriTech is too big for that stodgy old building.”

  The Duvall family had conducted business on Lafayette Square since 1805 when Adam Rollins had flat-boated down the river, among the first Americans to arrive after the Louisiana Purchase. Back then, the French Quarter had been New Orleans. The clannish Creoles who lived in “the quarter” had created Faubourg Sainte-Marie for the upstart Americans. Rollins had been enterprising enough to open an exporting company and marry his only daughter to Claude Duvall, a wealthy man in the highest echelons of Creole society.

  “You sold the family business to a hick,” Phoebe said out loud, echoing what his parents kept saying.

  Of course, Marie-Claire and Nelson Duvall hadn’t been too proud to accept their share of the money. Undoubtedly, Phoebe was spending his portion as fast as she could. She’d just come back from a trip to Paris. He could hardly wait to get his American Express bill.

  “Selling to TriTech was a brilliant move,” he replied, the words low, yet emphatic. “This is a new century, a new economy. We can’t rest on past glory.”

  “I know you did what you thought best …,” she said as he faced her for the first time.

  He refused to let her widening blue eyes move him. He knew all her tricks. This time he was the one with an ace up his sleeve. “You didn’t come here to see my new office. What do you really want?”

  He strolled around the Picasso-inspired furniture he’d just ordered. Its stark lines were echoed in charcoal Berber and black suede with sloping touches of stainless steel, the opposite of the antiques he’d inherited from the succession of Duvalls who’d inhabited his old office on Lafayette Square.

  “It’s about Maxmilian,” she told him, her voice off a note.

  He glanced across his glass-topped desk at her. As usual, Phoebe was strikingly lovely in a peach-colored suit and the string of priceless pearls her daddy had given her when she’d been chosen to be the Orion krewe’s Mardi Gras queen. She was classy, yet sexy, an alluring mix, but she didn’t appeal to Clay the way she did to most men.

  His heart belonged to another woman who looked remarkably like Phoebe except Alyssa’s eyes appeared gray in some lights and green in others.

  “What about Max?” Clay refused to add to Max Williams’s larger-than-life persona by calling him Maxmilian, as if he bad been born to some Roman emperor instead of Okies with prairie dirt under their nails. Williams was plain old Max to Clay, a warehouse owner with a knack for making millions.

  “I understand Max’s name is going to be put into the hopper at the Orion krewe meeting tonight.”

  “U-u-um,” he muttered, his mind on Alyssa Rossi, not on the activities at his Mardi Gras parade club known locally as a krewe. Alyssa was finally home where she belonged. She’d arrived yesterday and was sharing an elegant town house in the French Quarter with her aunt.

  “I told you that if you sponsored that lowlife into the Mayfair Club, Max would angle his way to the top of its krewe.”

  “The captain has the most power in the krewe, and you know it.”

  The krewe’s captain assigned jobs, decided who rode on their float, and in general, greatly influenced every decision the krewe made. Perhaps the captain’s most important job was announcing the krewe’s king. The vote was taken well in advance, but the king’s name wasn’t formally announced until the day before Mardi Gras.

  “What do you care if Max is lobbying to become king?” Clay turned away from the face he dreamed about at night. That Alyssa looked so much like Phoebe disgusted him. How could anyone confuse the two women? “Max has been in Mayfair Club for less than five years. It takes years of social service to build up a base of support.”

  The Mayfair Club along with its rivals the Pickwick and Boston Clubs sponsored krewes or chapters of their clubs whose responsibility it was to finance and design their Mardi Gras floats for the annual parade. The Mayfair Club owned a historical building with a private restaurant where members gathered for lunch and backrooms devoted to their krewe’s Mardi Gras activities.

  “Max didn’t think twice about spending fifty thousand dollars to be on the royal court last year, did he?” Phoebe adjusted the pearl necklace at her throat, angling it to one side so the diamond and ruby clasp, which was almost as valuable as the entire set of pearls, could be seen and admired.

  “True,” Clay reluctantly admitted.

  Designing and building a float and costuming the krewe members cost more and more each year. To offset the expense krewes encouraged their members to donate money. Often those donors were named to the royal court. Last year, Max Williams had given so much money that the krewe had no choice but to make him a duke.

  “For as much money as he donated last year, Max should have been chosen king.”

  “Is there a point to this?” Clay asked, cutting his gaze in the other direction so he wouldn’t have to meet her eyes and be reminded of Alyssa. “If it had been anyone else but Max, everyone in the Mayfair Club would have been thrilled to appoint him duke.”

  “Max has doubled his donation this year because he wants to be king.”

  “You’re joking.” Clay didn’t bother to ask Phoebe how she knew this. Like her mother, Hattie LeCroix, his wife thrived on Mardi Gras intrigue. At eighteen, Phoebe had been selected queen of the Orion krewe. She had been a freshman at Old Miss, one of the youngest queens ever chosen, bucking the tradition of crowning debutantes in their junior year of college. No doubt, Hattie LeCroix’s scheming had led to Phoebe’s crown. Since that time, Phoebe lived on her past glory, scheming and manipulating Mayfield Club members and its Orion krewe like Lucretia Borgia.

  She’d played him for a fool once. He’d learned his lesson.

  “With enough white marbles in the hopper, Max will be elected king, right?”

  “The result of the vote is kept secret for months. We won’t know until then.”

  She sidled closer, a provocative two-step movement intended to be sexy. It merely reminded him of Alyssa’s precise, almost athletic way of moving. “Slip in a black marble.”

  “Blac
kball Max Williams? Why?”

  “Who would ever know?”

  True, he silently conceded. The krewe had been created over one hundred years ago in the social upheaval after the Civil War. Under a facade of philanthropy and social consciousness, Orion was elitist to the core—and political. No one got anywhere in city politics without the backing of the Mayfair Club and its Orion krewe.

  At the krewe’s meeting tonight when the members voted, Clay would be given a packet of black and white marbles. As each name was presented, members dropped a marble in the voting box that had been hand-hewn by a slave in the final days of the Civil War. No one could see how anyone voted, but with the appearance of a single black marble—you were blackballed. One, anonymous vote could keep a man from being king.

  “Why would I?” Clay asked. “I sold the family business to Max. I don’t want to embarrass myself.”

  Phoebe dropped her eyes, but not before Clay caught a glimpse of something he couldn’t quite name. “Max has political ambitions.”

  “He doesn’t bother to hide it.” Anyone who’d suffered through dinner with Max knew this much. The man was currently serving on several local committees—just for political exposure—gearing up for the race for senator. The less time Max spent at TriTech, the better Clay liked it.

  Clay had plans for himself at TriTech. It was a conglomeration of entrepreneurial businesses like Hydra, the multiheaded snake. The deadly viper would bite you, if you didn’t outsmart it. Max was a natural. Even without education or connections he managed to have a feel for winners.

  Jackson “Jake” Williams was a different story.

  Max had dredged his son out of some fishing boat along the Redneck Riviera. For reasons no one understood, Max took in Jake even though they hadn’t seen each other in years. Over the next—what was it now?—eight or so years, Max had taught Jake the business.

  Or so the old man thought.

  TriTech was too complex with so much happening at once that even a top-notch hired gun like Troy Chevalier couldn’t properly guide Jake. Clay was counting on the loose management style at TriTech to get what he wanted. Having Max involved in local politics and working hard to be named king suited Clay’s plans.