Chapter 2

"S orry, ma'am," the secretary said, a wiry older woman with a dour look, her hands folded defensively in front of her. "Mister Garcia isn't interested in seeing the Queen Pearl agents right now."

Strict woman. Tight body language, dark expression. Probably had to wear it as a defense—I'd seen it plenty in women who had spent a while in professional positions. Judging by her age and the number of odd idiosyncrasies she had around her desk, she'd probably been doing this longer than not—had installed herself into the position and it had installed itself into her. Had her identity bound up in the defensive posture. I'd have no luck leading her with an open posture.

I matched her body language, drawing myself up into a proper position, and I handed her a paper brochure. Furrowing her brow, she took it, and the moment her defensive posture was broken, I made my move. "Hello, ma'am, thank you for giving me some of your time. I am from Queen Pearl, but it's not about that. I was looking up some information on Mister Garcia's interests while we were looking for more options for him, and this meditation retreat came up. I know this is a little out there, but I wanted to ask him about it."

"About this?" She raised her eyebrows, looking it over. "Is this soliciting something?"

Well, technically yes. But nobody needed a technically . "Let's call it a social call."

She glanced down the program brochure. She'd probably been the one to book it for Mister Garcia to begin with, so she hardly needed to look at it, but I'd hardly needed to hand it over to begin with. I'd just been trying to break her little barrier. And she was just using it to occupy her eyes while she mulled it over.

She wasn't sold. She didn't seem the type to have patience for frivolities. Had to make yes the easier option. I glanced at my phone. "If now's not a good time, I can call back later."

Seemed to work. She sighed, dropping her shoulders, and she set the brochure down. "I'll ask him." She tapped a button on her desk, an intercom crackling loudly. "Mister Garcia, a different agent from Queen Pearl is here… she says she wants to discuss the Anima Libera summer retreat."

"Oh yes?" His voice, big and warm and rich with his Cuban accent, spilled through the speaker. "What's her name?"

"London Sinclair." The speaker crackled, and then with an ear-cracking pop , it went dead. The secretary flinched, and I sighed, my shoulders slumping. "Mister Garcia?" She tapped the button a few more times, but no use—the speaker had blown. She muttered a few choice words I probably wasn't supposed to hear, so I pretended I didn't.

"Technology's great while it holds up…" I said, and she gave me a frustrated look.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I'm afraid—"

But the door past her clicked and swung open, and Mister Garcia strolled out, a portly man with a neat pinstripe gray suit and a big, winning smile. "Intercom went down?" he said, looking at the secretary.

"It just blew up right in my face," she said. Mister Garcia sighed.

"Think we've had that system since the nineties. I'll talk to Tom and see about an upgrade." And he turned to me with a smile. "And you must be… what was it, London something? I didn't catch it."

"Sinclair. Please, just call me London. It's just personal business anyway." He looked like a cheerful person—I'd seen his type a few times, and they were always some of my favorites, where business was just socializing and striking deals with his buddies. The only people who could last long in the business world. Still, anyone like that who had made it more than a couple years had to be incredibly canny—I couldn't afford to sweep this one up with a couple easy lies.

There was a small something in his demeanor, though—a touch of something that said he had less of his guard up with a woman. I couldn't even place what it was, but I'd seen them a million times, less likely to perceive me as a threat if I was small and weak and feminine. I shrank my posture a little, tilted my shoulders to meet him at a slight angle, making myself look smaller, ducking my head and looking up through my lashes a little. Not far enough to be flirtatious or I'd never be able to get the topic to business, but enough to look like a harmless, demure woman. I put the finishing touch with a big, fat lie.

"I heard about this kind of meditation from my father, so… I was just curious."

Score—worked a charm. He softened into a big smile, and he gestured to the door behind him. "Well, step into my office, then, London. Your father—did he attend any retreats like these? I'm curious if I know the man."

"Ah… no. Always wanted to, but he was so busy, he never had the time."

He shook his head, shut the door behind me as I stepped into his office, a neat place filled with what looked like travel souvenirs, a few Buddhist symbols, and the heavy smell of a little too much lemon Pledge. "Isn't that always the way? Some people never make time until the world makes them." He gave me a big, warm smile. "Now, I see what this is about. You're trying to talk to me about the property, aren't you?"

I sighed, letting my shoulders sink. Playing the helpless woman card was working so far, and I had no intention of turning in a winning hand. I'd apologize to Mother Goose later. "My boss wanted somebody in the firm to take the case from Ruth, and they decided to send me. Commercial property isn't my specialty, though… if you want to talk about business, I might need to ask a lot of questions to figure out what you're looking for."

Bingo. He was the authority now, and it fell into place like clockwork. Little appeal to the personal and friendly side, little appeal to the traditional masculinity, and he was selling himself on a property with me there to watch. He rubbed his hands together, sitting behind the desk. "Sit, sit down," he said. "Maybe we'll get to business later, then. Maybe let's talk about your old man first."

Ah. Shit. That meant I had to make more things up. Doubted it would go well if he knew my actual father was a deadbeat and my mother threw me out for being gay.

Well, wasn't the first time I'd made things up whole cloth.

∞∞∞

Someone's shopping bag broke as I walked up the stairs to my apartment unit, spilling oranges all down the stairs. She cursed to herself, scrambling to pick them up, and I walked on by—I'd learned to tell when someone wanted my help dealing with the fallout of my curse and when someone wanted to be left alone.

I unlocked my front door at unit 616 and pushed inside, into where my cat was sprawled like a fistful of tangled spaghetti flung onto the back of my couch. I wasn't even sure where his limbs were going or how they were connected, but that was the venerable Earl of Westlake for you.

"Hey, Earl," I said, shutting the door behind me. He stretched, letting out a low yowl that said he was hungry—because of course he was. Delicate little princeling had missed his regular dinnertime by ten whole minutes. The poor thing. He'd live.

I was in the middle of filling his food bowl, though, when I noticed the paper slipped under my door— under the door, like a spy thriller or something. Who did that these days? Earl of Westlake wouldn't forgive me for taking too long, so I finished pouring his food and shaking it around so he didn't have to see the bottom of the bowl, and I slid up to a seat at the kitchen counter as I opened the letter, on a letterhead I didn't recognize, Leon Realty Group.

Dear sir or madam,

This is a friendly notice that your current lease has been taken over as we have purchased the company that issues your lease, ILA Property Management.

Friendly notice. That was never likely in a hostile takeover, and I knew how to spot a hostile takeover. It took until the second page to get to the important part.

They were hiking my rent. And by hiking they meant doubling.

"Jesus," I muttered, turning it over, scanning through it. It was lucky I still had two months left in the lease before it started its next term and started whatever they were doing trying to clear people out, but two months wasn't going to cut it. The leasing office had been dragging their feet on renewing my lease. Now it made sense why—Leon Realty was probably leaning on them to run out the clock on as many leases as possible so they could pull this.

I tossed the letter aside, my stomach churning as I looked at where Earl was still tucked happily, blissfully ignorant, into his food.

"Ready for a move, Earl?"

He ignored me. Typical.

Now was not the time to have to figure out a new place to live. Let alone actually moving…

This whole thing stank. My bad luck streak didn't extend far enough to explain my landlord getting taken over. I picked up the letter and glanced over it again, and I grabbed my laptop and scanned through the company's website until I found it with that sinking feeling in my gut.

His smarmy face was right there on the About Us page, along with the CEO and executives of Leon Realty Group. Special Contributor, Miguel Sanchez.

That little skank. I was going to get my hands around his neck. Just not where María could see.

∞∞∞

Which was a cruel kind of fate, because I marched into the office not fifteen minutes later and ran immediately into Miguel and María, side-by-side at the reception, María laughing brightly at something that rat was feeling smug about. He just looked so satisfied with himself right now, but I couldn't blow up at him in front of María.

"Back before a very late lunch, I see," María said. "Well, I guess it's no use staying out when your job's done for you anyway."

I paused. "Come again?"

"You didn't hear?" She went wide-eyed, and she stood up straighter. "Miguel closed things with Mister Garcia. Sold him on a more expensive one than the one we'd had in mind, to boot. That's a good seventeen million contract."

I felt like I'd swallowed something bad. I shot Miguel a horrified look, and he gave me that smug, smarmy-ass smile. "Hey, I can't take the credit," he said, which was rich. "I think London must have softened him up a bit. He was pretty easygoing when I went to see him."

That seventeen-million-dollar property was what I'd gotten him sold on. I'd spent the entire day with him, talking about his lucid dreaming explorations, and he'd eventually insisted we talk properties. I'd changed up some of the parameters based on what I'd figured out about him, and I'd called Genevieve Dupont to get a tour of her seventeen-million-dollar office space she was selling off, and we'd toured it just two hours ago. We talked about the ability to rotate the floor plan into different spaces and keep his staff sharp on fresh consciousness, and I'd even pitched one of the meeting rooms as a perfect space for a meditation and quiet room with just a few tweaks.

I knew that damn look in Miguel's eyes. He hadn't done a thing. He'd just walked in on Mister Garcia and been the one to put the papers down, and he'd had the snot-nosed audacity to tell María that he'd been the one to close the deal.

And I'd probably laid the groundwork playing myself up as a helpless woman who didn't know what she was doing. A strong, confident man coming in to finish the deal wouldn't even be unusual.

Christ, I was going to murder Miguel. Once María wasn't looking. She adored him, and there was no use trying to call him out like this. She'd take his side. Always had.

But I didn't take things lying down. So I put on my most subtly-venomous smile, and I said, "I don't know about that. I didn't make any headway. You've got quite a sharp eye, huh, Miguel? Picking out that property for him. What clued you in on it being the one?"

He narrowed his eyes just a touch, but he knew the hand he had. María doted on him while she thought he was the little sweetheart. Nothing openly hostile would fly in front of her. "Location, location, location," he said. "I did some digging on his employees' commutes and picked it out to make it most convenient for all his staff. All I had to do was sell him on the monetary value of a shorter commute, and he saw really it was like giving out even more than the price difference in raises."

"That much?" María gave him a look, one eyebrow arched. "Where did he have people commuting in from, Jupiter?"

"Over the long run. A simple ten-year calculation model showing his price breakdown. Well, money always wins in the end, right?"

I cut in with a polite smile. "Money and good business honesty. But I know you're nothing if not upstanding and charming with the clients, Miguel."

It was a dirty shot that didn't get me anything, but it did make his throat muscles bulge, and that was reward enough. Oblivious to the silent fight, María put a hand on my shoulder.

"Oh, London," she said. "Since that's freed up sooner than I thought, come to my office, okay? I have a job for you."

Miguel's eye twitched, but he leaned back against the reception desk, putting on a show of relaxing. "Oh, yeah? She gets the fancy new job? Where's mine?"

I'm sure you'll be trying to steal it before long. I managed to keep it on the inside. María waved him off.

"Olvídalo, hombre. You take a damn day off, you hear me?"

I couldn't get away from him fast enough. I gave María a quick smile. "Let's go. I'm listening."

She was uncharacteristically quiet along the walk down the hall, up to when she sat down with a heavy sigh, folding her hands on the desk.

"London. Look. Things aren't good."

I chewed my lip, sitting down across from her. "No good news from admin?"

"Nada. We need a miracle. And Miguel closing Garcia was good, but it won't be enough."

It felt like a vice clenching around my stomach, but I bit back the sick feeling in my mouth. "I don't have any great leads right now," I said, and she put a hand up.

"I trust you, London. More than anyone else in this place, but don't tell them I said that. More than Miguel, even. I know you would have closed Garcia in another day or two if he hadn't."

I let out a measured breath, letting the feelings cool off before I replied. "I'm glad you do, but I don't even have anywhere to start—"

"I have someone for you."

I paused. "A good client."

"Artist. Designer. Fashion icon, of a sort."

"In Miami? Do they need a flight to New York?"

She smiled drily. "She specializes in lighter clothing."

"All right, all right. She must be a big name, if you're being this serious about it."

"Cameron Mercier."

I blinked, once, slowly. "Like… that Cameron Mercier."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Uh, no, not just yes ma'am . What? I didn't even know Cameron Mercier was a real person. I thought it was just a name for the brand."

She laughed. "Not an enthusiast?"

"Er—María, if you are, I don't need to know."

Her expression turned more serious. "She's looking for a personal residence. Not typically where the money's at, but she's quite a big spender. We're looking at a budget of sixty million, and thinking we could get in on an even bigger budget for office space for her down the road if we did make this inroad."

I let out a long breath. "Make or break."

"Make or break, London. I don't know who else to ask. If you're up to it, I'm taking everything else off your case so you can work your magic and close this damn woman."