Neck & Neck (35 page)

Natalie thought fast. The party was only five days away. If she was going to pull this off—and after everything Clementine had just told her, she was damned well going to pull it off, if she had to resort to duct tape and a burlap sack to ensure Russell Mulholland’s appearance at the party—she was going to have to do it
tonight
. Before the eleven o’clock news. Tomorrow morning at the absolute latest to make the noon newscast. She could call Angie Fenton at WAVE and give her an exclusive. She wrote for the
Courier
, too, and she knew everybody who was anybody in the Louisville social scene. And Tamara Ikenberg. She could get the word out, too.

She could do this, Natalie assured herself. She
would
do this. For Clementine. For the children of Kids, Inc., who would benefit financially. For herself. It was time for Natalie to take charge of this thing. All she had to do was wrangle one billionaire for the lesser part of an evening. And, okay, wrangle his head of security, too.

That last, actually, was what finally brought the enormity of her situation crashing down on her like two tons of absolutely hideous gardenia potpourri. Because it wasn’t Russell Mulholland Natalie was afraid to confront, and it wasn’t him she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to sway. It was Finn. Finn, who had kissed her so tenderly and made love to her with such passion. Finn, who had made her feel things she’d never felt before in her life.

Finn, who had pretty much told her he never wanted to see her again.

Well, that was just too damned bad. Because she
would
confront Finn and his employer. And she
would
sway both of them to her way of thinking.

She just wished she could sway Finn to a whole lot more.

“Within the next twenty-four hours,” she told Clementine fiercely. Because she
felt
fierce at the moment. Since, you know, Finn and his employer were nowhere around. “I just have a few more minor details to iron out. Time of arrival, how long he can stay, that kind of thing,” she added, mentally crossing her fingers over the lie. “I’m heading over to his hotel right after I leave here to do that. And then, Clementine, you are going to see a media blitz unlike anything you’ve ever seen in your life.”

She stood, straightening to her full height, feeling brave and militant, determined and strong. “By this time tomorrow,” she said as she slung her purse over her shoulder, “everyone in Louisville is going to be talking about your party. And your phone is going to be ringing off the hook with all those people who haven’t RSVPed yet with a whole mess of resounding yeses.” She grinned. “And then it’s going to be ringing off the hook with all those people who said they weren’t going to be able to make it yet have suddenly had a change in plans that will allow them to attend your party after all.

“Just you wait, Clementine,” Natalie concluded as she headed for the door. “Friday night, this house is going to be the place to be in Louisville for Derby Eve.”

JUST BEFORE ELEVEN O’CLOCK MONDAY NIGHT, Natalie was propped up in her bed with a stack of fat pillows behind her, wearing her usual springtime sleepwear of baggy striped boxer shorts and white undershirt, over which she’d thrown her usual pale blue silk kimono, currently unbelted. She was dividing her attention between the last few minutes of
CSI: Miami
and painting her toe-nails a color the bottle identified as Ocean Sunrise, but which looked more like the color of David Caruso’s hair. Oh, well, she thought as she brushed the last bit over her little toe and capped the bottle. With all due respect to Mr. Caruso, she’d just wear closed-toed shoes tomorrow morning when she went to see Russell Mulholland. Again.

She’d had no luck reaching him since talking to Clementine. And there was no way she’d call Finn to ask for his help after the way things had been left between them the last time she’d seen him. All she could think to do now was go back to the Brown around six in the morning and wait around until Russell Mulholland showed himself so she could confront him in person. She figured that if Finn’s job was to guard the billionaire’s body, then the two men’s rooms must be in close proximity, most likely right next door to or right across the hall from each other. Therefore she would simply park herself in the hallway outside Finn’s door, as close to his room as she dared, until one of them stuck their nose out the door long enough for her to grab it.

Hopefully, the first nose she snagged would be Russell’s. But if it was Finn’s, then so be it. She had ceased being worried about seeing him again roughly two seconds after the last time she’d tried to leave a message for Russell and been assured by the hotel receptionist that she had indeed delivered all of Natalie’s earlier messages to the billionaire. She still wasn’t sure what she would say to change his mind, or what she would do if she had to confront Finn.

Well, she would say or do
whatever
she had to say or do, she immediately decided. Because she’d made a promise to Clementine—and, in effect, to every child involved in Kids, Inc.—that she would deliver Russell to the Hotchkiss estate Friday night. So to the Hotchkiss estate Friday night Natalie would deliver him.

Once the killer and her motive were revealed on
CSI
—But c’mon, Horatio, what woman
wouldn’t
kill for a Hermès crocodile Birkin handbag?—Natalie stopped paying attention to the TV and turned her attention to her fingernails, this time opting for an old favorite from her manicure caddy. Until she heard the news anchor say the name “Russell Mulholland,” which was when she snapped her attention right back up to the screen.

“That’s right,” the sleekly dressed blonde announcer said, smiling into the camera. “We learned earlier today that billionaire Russell Mulholland, who’s in Louisville for Derby, but keeping a
very
low profile, will be attending one of this Friday’s myriad Derby Eve parties. This after assuring everyone who asked, including our reporters, that he would absolutely, unequivocally
not
be making any public appearances while in town. And the party he’s chosen to attend might just surprise you.”

What followed, as far as Natalie could tell with her brain jumping around in her head the way it was, was a film-at-eleven report filled with clips of Russell Mulholland ducking out of sight of cameras in a variety of local venues. There he was ducking out of sight at Fourth Street Live. And there he was ducking out of sight at Jack Fry’s. Then at Lynn’s Paradise Cafe. Then at Churchill Downs—there were two shots of him ducking out of sight there. Then at the Brown Hotel. In every image, he was covering his face with something—newspapers, menus, racing programs and, once, a Yorkshire terrier—and hurrying away in the opposite direction. One of his many bodyguards—usually Finn, Natalie couldn’t help noting . . . and sighing about, damn her—invariably bringing up the rear. Those shots were followed by photographs of him taken at various press conferences and personal appearances for the GameViper and finally, inescapably, the cover of the
People
magazine issue in which he’d been dubbed Sexiest Man Alive. And over all of it, the reporter’s voice yammering away about how reclusive he was, and what a hot prospect he was, and how
nobody
was supposed to land him for their Derby party and blah blah blah blah blah.

Somehow, in the far reaches of her brain, Natalie managed to translate all that blah blah blahing into a recognizable, if somewhat inconvenient, fact. The station—along with several other media outlets—had received word today that Russell Mulholland was scheduled to attend a by-invitation-only Derby Eve party hosted by local philan thropists Clementine and Edgar Hotchkiss, and—

And that was when Natalie’s brain stopped jumping around and focused entirely on the phrase
along with several other media outlets.
That meant . . .

She fumbled around in the sheets for the remote, and hastily changed the channel from WHAS to WLKY, just in time to catch the end of their report about how Russell Mulholland would be attending the Hotchkiss affair. She pushed the button a couple more times, taking her to WAVE. Yep, they, too, were reporting on the social coup of the season. It was fair to assume that it would also be the centerpiece story on all the morning shows in a matter of hours, which meant anyone who didn’t stay up late enough to watch the eleven o’clock news would be the early rising type who always caught the five a.m. news. It would doubtless make the front page of the Features section in the
Courier
tomorrow, too. Hell, they might already have the news up on their website.

By the time Natalie arrived at the Brown Hotel in the morning to beg Russell Mulholland to make an appearance at Clementine’s party, every freaking mouth in Louisville would be wagging about how Russell Mulholland was going to be making an appearance at Clementine’s party. There were only two words that could describe what was going through Natalie’s head after that, and they inescapably made their way out of her mouth.

“Oh. Crap.”

Instinctively, she yanked the phone from its charger on the nightstand, but when she went to punch the numbers, she realized she wasn’t sure who to call. The leak to the
several media outlets
must have originated with Clementine, because Natalie hadn’t breathed a word to another soul, outside Finn and Russell. There was no way either of them had alerted the media to something both swore wouldn’t happen. But Clementine wasn’t the type to break a promise or go blabbing about stuff she knew she shouldn’t.

Then again, Natalie thought, it hadn’t necessarily been Clementine who said anything to the news outlets. She may have told someone else in confidence—even though that, too, had violated the promise she made to Natalie—and that person had flapped their lips when they shouldn’t have. It may have even been an innocent slip of the tongue that Clementine uttered in her excitement before realizing what she was doing. Besides, even if Natalie did accuse her client of having broken her promise to keep the info about Russell confidential until further notice, Natalie hadn’t exactly been in a position to extract that promise in the first place, seeing as how she’d been lying through her teeth with that info about Russell.

When she looked down at the phone in her hand, though, she realized it hadn’t even been Clementine that her first impulse had dictated she call. It had been Finn. If she’d intended to call Clementine, her finger would have been on the two, which was the first digit of her client’s home phone number. Instead, her thumb was placed firmly on the nine. That was the first digit of Finn’s cell.

As if cued by that thought, someone—and she could just bet who—leaned against her front doorbell hard, punctuating the sound with a rapid
thumpthumpthump
against her front door. And then, as if that weren’t enough to rouse her—which it evidently wasn’t, because she still sat frozen on the bed, her phone clutched to her belly—she heard a male voice shout with all the anguish of Stanley Kowalski, “Natalieeee!”

“Oh. Crap.”

Not that she wanted to be redundant or anything, but really, what else was there to say?

She had two choices. Either she could stay here in her bed with the covers pulled up over her head and hope one of her neighbors called the police about Marlon Brando out there, or she could face the music, cacophonous though it may be, that she herself had written.

“Natalieeeee!”

If he kept this up, in that tone of voice, he was going to make every dog in the neighborhood go deaf.

With a heavy sigh, she dropped the phone back into its charger and made her way out of her bedroom, checking her appearance in the cheval mirror as she passed to make sure she didn’t look too—

She sighed again when she saw what she looked like. No makeup, her hair piled haphazardly atop her head with a loose clip, and the sleepwear of a thirteen-year-old boy. Then again, any woman who lounged around in the sort of stuff Victoria’s Secret models lounged around in was nuts. At least those women were paid big bucks for smiling seductively while a stocking garter bit into their flesh and all that lace made their boobs itch.

Besides, what did she care if Mr. Finn “Issues with Trust” Guthrie saw her looking like, well, herself? He didn’t have a very good opinion of her anyway.

Belting her robe over the ensemble and hoping it covered the battered boxer shorts, Natalie waved a defeated hand at her reflection and fled. She deserved this, she told herself as she padded barefoot down the steps. After the whopping fat lie she’d told Clementine, she’d just been begging karma to come dump something rancid on her. Not that Finn was rancid or anything, but the situation in which she found herself certainly was.

Your own fault,
Karma reminded her.

Yeah, yeah, yeah
.

He was still pounding on the door when she approached it, and leaning into the bell again for good measure. She paused for one more fortifying breath before gripping the knob, then, resigned to her fate, she turned the dead bolt and tugged the door open.

Forcing both a carefree smile and a breezy tone of voice—neither of which she felt, of course, but a big part of her job was spin, after all—she said, “Wow. That was fast. You must have slid right down the ratpole in the rat-cave and rushed over in your ratmobile. Did you wear the ratbelt filled with rattools to battle my untrustworthy, criminal mastermind self?”

One look at Finn, however, and her flippancy fled. He was furious. His hair looked as if he’d been running both hands through it with way more force than was necessary, his brows were arrowed downward over narrowed eyes, and his jaw—unshaven again, now there was a surprise—was clenched so tight, she could see a vein throbbing at his temple. He looked as if he’d thrown on clothes that had previously lain in a pile on the floor, so wrinkled were both the pinstriped, untucked oxford and faded jeans.

He dropped the hand he’d been using to pound on the door and withdrew the other from the doorbell, then stood with both hands settled menacingly on his hips. When he leaned forward, crowding himself into her space, Natalie took an involuntary step backward. But all that did was open up enough space for him to enter uninvited, slam the door behind him, and glower at her some more.