Barbara Dunlop - Millions To Spare

“Certainly. I’ll send out the invitations right away. By the way, the French ambassador accepted this morning, and so did Colonel Varisco.”

“That’s great. So are they back?”

“The horses are en route now. Ilithyia placed and Millions to Spare won.”

“Not bad,” said Harrison, nodding to himself.

“Brittany Livingston?” asked Darla, the lilt of her voice seeking confirmation, even though she knew full well what the invitation had to mean. In her midthirties, single, yet hopelessly romantic, Darla made no bones about the fact she thought Harrison should find a suitable wife.

“You think it’s a bad idea?” he asked, remembering Darla singing the praises of Yvette Gaston from the French embassy only last week.

“I think it’s an excellent idea,” said Darla with clear enthusiasm.

“Yes. Well. So will Grandmother.”

“And you?” Darla probed.

“How could I go wrong?”

“How, indeed. A beautiful hostess improves any party.”

Harrison’s stomach protested once again. But he supposed being his hostess was exactly what he was asking Brittany to do. “Millions to Spare won, you say?” He redirected Darla.

There was a trace of laughter in her voice when she answered. “The purse was six figures.”

“Tell Nuri to give that boy some oats.”

“Mr. Nuri!” The teenager’s round dark eyes fixed disbelievingly on Julia where she stood frozen in the corner of the horse trailer.

Sweat prickled her skin, and her heart threatened to beat its way out of her chest. With her back pressed against the warm metal wall, she attempted to swallow her fear, telling herself she should have made a run for it when they first arrived.

“Quiet down,” came a harsh, heavily accented voice from outside the near-empty horse trailer. Stern footsteps clomped up the ramp.

A tall, brawny, dark-haired man appeared. He wore a turban and a black robe, and he carried a riding crop. His piercing eyes took in Julia, and then shifted to the teenager. Then he was back to Julia before rattling something off in Arabic.

The teenage boy scuttled from the trailer.

“I’m sorry,” Julia rasped, straightening away from the wall, moving toward him, frantically scrambling for a cover story. “It’s just. Well. I was-”

The butt of his crop landed square in her chest, forcing a cry from her lips and sending her stumbling back.

“Save it for the authorities,” he grated.

“An intruder?” From behind the desk in his study at Cadair Racing, Harrison stared at Alex Lindley-lawyer and senior vice president of Cadair International.

“An American,” said Lindley, dropping down into the diamond-tuft leather chair, next to the potted palm trees and the bay window that looked out across Harrison’s lighted lawn. “The police have arrested her.”

“And she was hiding in my horse trailer?” The pieces of Alex’s story weren’t coming together in any sort of coherent order inside Harrison’s head.

The only thing certain was that he had trouble.

The United Nations International Economic Summit was only four days away, and Harrison was hosting the secretary-general’s reception here at Cadair. Surprises couldn’t happen at this stage of the game.

“Nuri thought she was stealing a horse,” said Alex. “But she insisted she was a reporter.”

“What? Was she interviewing Ilithyia?”

Alex choked out a laugh. “Didn’t seem likely. That’s why Nuri called the police.”

Good move on Nuri’s part. Reporters knocked on the front door. They didn’t sneak onto the estate in the back of a horse trailer. Unless they were from a tabloid. And since Harrison wasn’t a movie star, and there was nothing remotely salacious going on at Cadair Racing, this could hardly be an exposé.

Then Harrison’s brain hit on a worst-case scenario.

“Son of a bitch,” he all but shouted.

“She can’t be,” said Alex, correctly interpreting the outburst.

“Sure she can,” said Harrison.

There was no reason in the world the woman couldn’t be attached to a foreign spy agency or black-ops organization.

“A covert operative in a horse trailer?”

“It got her past security.”

“She’s an American,” Alex pointed out. “The CIA doesn’t have anything against the UN.”

“Yeah? Well, they’ve got something against the Syrians and the Iranians.”

“That’s a stretch.”

“Maybe. But that’s bizarre behavior for a horse thief, and she’s certainly not here to do a feature on my love life for the National Inquisitor.”

The grandfather clock ticked three times before Alex spoke. “You want me to head down to the lockup and sleuth around?”

Harrison pushed back on his chair and came to his feet. “No. I’ll get her. If she is an assassin, it’s my neck on the line.”

“We could leave her locked up until the reception’s over. She can’t hurt anyone from jail.”

“That only works if she’s acting alone.”

Alex went silent as Harrison stood up, pressing a hidden button to reveal a wall safe.

“Jobar’s on duty,” Alex warned.

“It figures,” Harrison grumbled. He spun the dial back and forth then clunked the lever. He pulled out three stacks of bills.

Jobar was usually expensive. If the woman was CIA, Harrison hoped the American government would consider reimbursing his bribe.

Julia had to get out of jail.

She had to get out of this cell, and then she had to pee.

Okay. Not necessarily in that order.

The need had been growing steadily worse for the past two hours, but neither of the hijab-clad women spoke English, Spanish or French, and her sign-language repertoire didn’t extend to urination.

There was a drain in the middle of the sloping stone floor. Crude. But it was looking better and better all the time.

She could be discreet.

She was alone in the cell. And it wasn’t as if she still had her underwear. And the voluminous gray dress they’d forced on her was essentially a tent with sleeves. It was drab and scratchy, with a musky smell that made her gag. But it would certainly hide her activities.

Of course, the drain might not be the toilet. In which case, she might be committing some horrible faux pas. She might even be breaking another law. They’d already added immodest dress to her charges of break-in and attempted theft.

And they hadn’t let her make a phone call. In fact, they’d confiscated her cell phone along with every other one of her possessions. She’d repeated the words American and embassy until she was nearly hoarse. She could only hope someone had called them.

If not…

She glanced around at the stained cement walls and the iron-barred door, shivering despite the close air. Voices shouted down the narrow hallway, and metal clanked in the distance. A centipede wriggled out from under the bare mattress laid across the floor.

Julia shuddered, swallowing a shriek.

Why had she thought she could be a real reporter? Why had she ever left Seattle? She should have taken that promotion to night-shift supervisor at Econo Foods instead of the scholarship to Cal State and the road that brought her to this.

She had to keep it together, she told herself firmly. Melanie and Robbie must be looking for her. They’d have talked to the authorities by now. Eventually, hopefully within the next few hours, they’d find her and contact the embassy. Surely getting trapped in a horse trailer wasn’t a heinous crime even in Dubai.

Oh, God. She had to pee.

She gritted her teeth, lowering herself onto one corner of the mattress then bending over to keep her muscles tight.

Footfalls sounded in the corridor. An Arabic voice again. But this time a man’s.

“Ms. Nash?”

She jerked her head up to see a tall man standing outside her cell door. He was Caucasian. And he spoke English. Thank goodness.

“Are you from the embassy?” she rasped.

He shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

Her need was humiliating. But she was past caring. She couldn’t even think about anything else for the moment. “Is there a bathroom?”

He searched her expression then said something in rapid Arabic to the matron beside him.

The matron unlocked the door, and Julia rushed to the opening. The woman then escorted Julia down the hall.

The restroom was a cramped, dingy stall with cracked porcelain and corrosion-encrusted plumbing that was a relic of the fifties. There was no seat, and toilet paper didn’t appear to be one of the amenities. But Julia had never seen anything so beautiful in her life.

Afterward, she thanked the stern, cold-eyed woman then walked back down the hall, pulling together the few shreds of dignity she could muster.

The man still stood outside her cell.

Her feet froze at the doorway, everything inside her screaming to break and run. But she knew that would only make matters worse. She forced her rational mind to override her primal instincts.

“You speak English,” she said, still hovering at the open doorway.

“I’m British,” he responded.

Of course. The accent was obvious. And there was a definite aristocratic look about him. He had a straight nose, a slight cleft to his square chin, and dark eyes that matched his neatly trimmed hair. His suit was Armani, the shirt and tie likely Richard James. Whoever he was, he had money and style.

She shifted, more conscious than ever of her drab dress. They’d scrubbed off all her makeup, and her hair had definitely suffered from the wind whipping through the openings in the horse trailer.

“The British embassy?” she asked. Perhaps the Americans were busy.

“Harrison Rochester.” His pause was definitely for effect, and he watched her closely as he delivered the next sentence. “I own Cadair Racing.”