Great Exploitations (Scandal in Seattle)
Copyright © 2013 Nicole Williams
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events of persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical without express permission from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes.
Cover Design by Sarah Hansen of Okay Creations
Editing by Cassie Robertson
Formatting by JT Formatting
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Beginning
The Meet
The Greet
The (Callahan) Greet
The Heat
The Sheets
The Sweet
LIFE IS CHANGE. Or is it, change is life?
For me, it’s the latter. Change has been the essence of my life. It is the origin of my present and the promise of my immediate future. One day, that’s going to change. One day, I’ll live a simple life where routine and normalcy are the agenda of my day. One day, change will by the exception, not the standard.
One day . . . isn’t today.
Last night I was in Miami. Tonight I’m in Seattle. Yesterday I was on the Silva Errand. Today I’m on the Callahan Errand. Twenty-four hours ago, my job was all business. Now, my job is all personal.
Because I’m in the business of Great Exploitations. And business is good.
“ARE YOU HERE for business or pleasure, ma’am?” the woman checking me in at the Four Seasons asked.
I clutched my briefcase a bit tighter and smiled. “Pleasure. All pleasure.”
She gave me that standard hospitality-industry smile. “Enjoy your stay.”
“Guaranteed,” I said as I headed for the elevators. There was nothing about my stay that I couldn’t enjoy. A five star hotel and a hefty dose of revenge? Nothing, not even the gray, constantly leaking skies, could tarnish that Errand.
Henry Callahan. Billionaire. IT business mogul. My Ten. My Errand.
My ex.
The man who’d upended my whole world.
The man I was going to repay in turn.
Of course, G could never know about Henry’s and my history. She would reassign an Errand if she knew the Eve had gone to preschool with the Target, let alone been engaged five years ago to the Target. So G would have to be left in the dark. Other than intermittent check-ins, I’d keep progress reports to a minimum. If the Errand was a normal Seven or Eight, check-ins would have been nothing more than a few one-lettered texts, but it was our Ten. That Errand was as much G’s baby as it was mine. She’d already warned me she’d expect regular status updates and would be less laissez-faire than she typically was.
I didn’t want to lie to G, but even more, I didn’t want to give up the Callahan Errand. I was good at keeping secrets. Obviously. That would translate into keeping some from G, I hoped.
After reading Mrs. Callahan’s file front to back, twice, on the plane, I’d started plotting how I’d go about the actual seduction and taking down of Henry Carter Callahan. As I made my way down the hall, I planned out how I’d orchestrate Henry’s and my happenstance meeting.
Other than being a hardcore workaholic, Henry’s file gave away nothing about vices. My personal experience with him knew better. The once a cheater, always a cheater proverb was true most of the time. Henry Callahan had been a cheater with me, so I could almost guarantee he was with his wife. That he had her fooled was a testimony to how sneaky he must have been.
That was okay. I was a pro at fleshing out a cheater.
I was still smiling when I stepped inside my room. After flipping on the lights, my smile stretched higher. G had gotten me a sprawling suite. Since I’d left Miami in such a rush, I didn’t have a suitcase to be carted up, so after dropping my purse and briefcase on the hall table, I wandered into the sitting area. From the corner of my eye, a flash of red caught my attention.
“Holy—” I hollered, freezing in my tracks.
“Why, yes. Yes, I am holy,” a familiar voice said. “Nice of you to finally recognize it.”
After restarting my heart, I shot the woman reclining in a chair in the corner a half-hearted glare. “Thanks for the mini-heart attack, G.”
She arched that sharp eyebrow of hers.
“Sorry . . . G the Holy,” I corrected, making a showy bow. She pursed her lips to keep from smiling. “How am I supposed to annihilate a Ten if I’m dead?”
“Your job isn’t to annihilate anything. Your job is to seduce.” G crossed her legs and gave me a look. “Annihilation is too personal. I thought I made that clear years ago.”
G had caught me by surprise, and I’d made a slip. It wouldn’t happen again. It couldn’t because G rarely missed a thing. If I didn’t act like the Errand was no more special than any other Errand, I would get pulled from it—best case. Worst case would be an immediate dismissal followed by rotting away in some nameless alley.
“Sorry. I’m just a little excited about this one,” I said, coming around the couch to sit across from her.
“What? You? Excited?” she said. “Can’t be.”
“Don’t tell.”
“I won’t if you won’t tell on me . . . but I might just be a little bit excited, too.” G’s green eyes flashed, and she almost, almost, smiled. I’d seen her smile a few times, but it had always been a bit more menacing. This smile was almost joyful. I guessed I’d been in my line of business too long when a joyful smile was more disturbing than a menacing one.
“So, other than to share in the once-every-few-years whim of excitement, to what do I owe the honor of a personal meeting?”
G only did private meetings with her Eves at the start of an Errand as the exception. In the course of a year, I might see her once or twice, and whenever I did, it was never to go grab a drink and catch up. G’s meetings were always important and always about business. She didn’t know anything about her Eves’ pasts, and we didn’t know anything about hers. None of us had families, or at least ones we kept in touch with; we didn’t have time for things like hobbies. All of that added up to make casual conversation a bit of a problem.
“There’s been a change in plans,” she started.
I stopped breathing. Did she know? How could she have figured it out?
“Mr. Ten is a bit of a world traveler. He’s out of the country half of the year from the sounds of it. A piece of information the Client forgot to mention.” G made that face that crippled me every time it was directed at me. To get a face as beautiful as hers to look so ugly must have taken years to perfect. “The Target’s in Seoul for the next week. Then he’s back for a week, then leaves for Bangkok for another week. So on and so forth.”
“O-kay.” I wondered why that was such a big deal she had to meet me in person. So he was gone a lot. Plenty of Targets were . . . so we did one of the things we Eves did best and adapted. I’d earned my patch in adaptation years ago.
“Since the Target’s out of the country as much as or more than he’s in it, and this Errand is going to take significantly longer to close, I don’t want one of my best Eves to get bored.”
Ah. I got it. When trying to understand where G’s train of thought was going, always think dollars and cents. “Or go to waste when she could be working an Errand within an Errand, right?”
G nodded. “Precisely. You have the fastest start to completion time of all of my Eves, so I’m sure you’ll have no problem juggling a few other Errands along the way. I won’t throw you anything too complex. A rock-and-ro
ller here, a pro-basketball player there. Errands you could close in twenty-four hours if need be.”
If I thought arguing would have gotten me anywhere, I would have. I didn’t want to work an Errand within an Errand. I wanted to keep my focus and attention on Callahan. I wanted to bring him to his knees before he saw it coming. I wanted him to curse the day he’d met me. I wanted him to curse my name until his dying day.
I wanted all of that, but I had to play nice. Especially when it came to G.
“And because you have that little glimmer in your eye, I’m guessing you already have an Errand for me to work while Mr. Callahan is away.” Saying his name was hard. I felt like I was giving away everything in my tone or expression. If I was, G seemed none the wiser.
“That glimmer always gives me away, doesn’t it?” She smiled again, her typical menacing one, and not a single wrinkle lined her skin. The Botox was good, or she’d found the fountain of youth somewhere along the way. Judging from the jaded look in G’s eyes, I’d say she was in her sixties, but judging from everything else, she looked twenty-eight. G was beautiful in a Venus flytrap kind of way. Admire her from afar, but don’t mess with her. “And the answer is yes. I’ve got a new Client here in Seattle and, gauging from what she told me on the phone, this Errand is your bread-and-butter variety.”
“My bread and butter?” I repeated. “Aren’t all of our Errands rich, cheating bastards?”
“They are,” G replied, “but some are bigger bastards than the rest. And you, my girl, have a special gift when it comes to the big bastards of the world.”
Was that a skill set I could list on my resume? It felt as much like a compliment as it felt like an insult. “When and where am I meeting the Client of this biggest bastard of the bunch?”
“Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock, at the Pike Street Gym. Ask for Mrs. Hendrik at the front desk.”
Ah, a gym. How refreshing. I didn’t think I could take another spa.
“Once you complete this Errand, I’m moving you. Don’t get too comfortable.” I never did. I moved every few weeks, so getting comfortable wasn’t an option. “Yet another little fact Mrs. Callahan forgot to mention was that she lives in their Seattle home, but Mr. Callahan spends most of his time at their beach home outside of San Francisco.”
I caught myself smiling. If any state had felt like home for the past five years, it was the Golden State. Lots of rich, cheating bastards in California. “Consider me on the first plane out of Seattle after I close the Hendrik Errand.” I was already eager to get started. The sooner I finished up, the sooner I got to work on the Errand I wanted to be working.
“Good.” G rose and adjusted her suit jacket. Business was done; she was out. G’s job and mine were different, but we followed the same rules. “If you need anything for the Callahan Errand, you let me know. I’ll be checking in more often than normal, so be expecting it.”
I nodded as I stood too.
“This one’s going to be hard. Impossibly difficult,” she said, inspecting me like she was determining whether or not I was up to the task. I’d never been so up to the task. “From the looks of it, we don’t have any dirt on Mr. Callahan. Nothing. You’re going to have your work cut out for you.”
Oh, there was plenty of dirt on Mr. Callahan. I had first-hand experience with that dirt. “There’s dirt on every Target, G,” I said, walking her to the door. “Sometimes it just takes a little more digging to find it.”
G’s face shadowed. Just barely, but I didn’t miss it. “Maybe. But if I’ve ever seen a Target who was dirt free, it would be this one. Dig fast. Dig hard. And if you don’t find any . . .”—G lifted a shoulder—“then we might have to create some.”
My eyebrows came together. G had trained me in all aspects of the business, but creating scandal when there wasn’t any was new to me.
“We’ll cross that bridge when and if we get there,” she said, pulling a plastic bag containing a couple of phones from her purse. “These are for the Hendrik Errand. I’ll have the Callahan phones waiting for you in the condo when you arrive.”
The crease between my eyebrows couldn’t seem to iron out. “Condo?” Eves did hotels. We didn’t do condos, apartments, or houses.
“You’re not going to finish the Callahan Errand in a couple of weeks. This one’s going to take months, if not years. I thought you’d be more comfortable in a condo.” G opened the door and glanced back at me over her shoulder. “Especially a beach front one.”
I COULD FEEL the calories being burned as soon as I entered the gym. After checking in at the front desk, I was told Mrs. Hendrik was in the middle of a private spinning class and to head on up. From the other side of the door to the spin room, I heard the whir of the spinning machine.
Burn, baby, burn.
I gave the door a quick knock before inviting myself in. A personal trainer rode beside Mrs. Hendrik who was, as suspected, going to town on that machine like she had a personal vendetta against it. Mrs. Hendrik used a spinning machine; I used a punching bag. They were healthier options than what we could have chosen after discovering we’d devoted our lives to men devoted to philandering.
I’d never met or seen Mrs. Hendrik, but I’d been in the business long enough to recognize a Client at the Meet. Since they were engrossed in their routine, I cleared my throat. “Mrs. Hendrik?” I waited for her to look up. “Is this a bad time?”
Her eyes widened for a moment as she took me in. She was pretty, of course—all Clients were—petite, young, with an Eve-esque body. If a woman like her couldn’t keep her husband’s dick from misbehaving, I realized something else about Mr. Hendrik: He was a prick.
“No,” she said, checking the clock on the opposite wall. “You’re right on time.”
I was always on time.
“I’ll finish this set on my own, Gina,” Mrs. Hendrik said to her trainer. “I’ll catch up with you in the Pilates room.”
I worked out religiously—it was just a reality of the job—but I had a feeling Mrs. Hendrik’s daily routine could put me to shame. After the trainer left, I approached Mrs. Hendrik, still whirring away. She wasn’t sweating, she was barely breathing hard, but her legs couldn’t have spun any faster.
“You know, I told G this, but maybe I need to tell you.” She scanned me up, down, around, and around. “Ian likes young girls. You look older than me.”
Mrs. Hendrik was leading with the claws-out introduction. Thirty percent of Clients did, and one hundred percent of Clients like Mrs. Hendrik did.
“I’m twenty-five. How old are you?” I asked, whipping out my own kitty claws. “Thirty? . . . Ish?” I added because her face went a special shade of pissed.
Insulting the Client wasn’t my preferred approach, but I had to fight fire with fire or I’d go up in flames. Sometimes we had to break someone to build them up, and Mrs. Hendrik looked as if she needed to take a topple from that glass house of hers.
I was there to help. She’d called us. I wasn’t the enemy. Her husband was.
Time to remind her of that.
“Don’t worry about my age, Mrs. Hendrik,” I said, stopping a few feet in front of her bike. If it had been real, I knew she wouldn’t have swerved to avoid plowing me over. “What I might lack in the just-legal department, I more than make up for in the skill department.”
She huffed, glaring at the handlebars of her bike. “Ian could give a shit about skill. All he cares about is screwing as many young model-sluts as he can.” She gave me that once-over again. I’d been once-over’d half a dozen times in less than five minutes. “You’re a few years older and a few pounds heavier, but you’ve got that general model-slut look. I’m sure it won’t take much convincing to get his snake out of its cage.”
If I had the model-slut look, then so did she. She was shorter and had smaller boobs, but we had pretty much the same “look.”
“He’s a cheater,” I said. I already knew that before I entered the gym. Probability and statistics, that’s the name of the
game.
“He redefined the word,” she said with another huff. “But the son of a bitch has made an art of keeping it hidden.”
“Then how do you know?” I asked, thankful we’d gotten past the “warm” welcome and moved on to the reason I was there.
“Women’s intuition. A gut feeling. An instinct.” She lifted a shoulder. “I just know.”
Worked for me. Most of the time, a woman’s intuition about their man cheating on them was infallible.
“Plus, he was kinda with someone else when he . . . met me.” For the first time, Mrs. Hendrik showed some emotion other than apathy or disdain.
“You mean, when he slept with you?” Some Clients made it easier to feel compassion for them than others. Mrs. Hendrik was in the others category. She’d played a part in the cheater’s game, then she went on to marry him. Drudging up sympathy for someone like that was difficult.
She rolled her eyes. “I just know he’s sleeping around, all right? He comes home late and smelling like other women. He hardly comes to me for sex anymore which means he’s getting it from someone else.”
True. A man’s sex drive didn’t change. It always stayed the same: full power ahead. If he wasn’t getting it from his wife, girlfriend, or lover, he was certainly getting it from someone else.
“And now it looks like he’s about to get some from you,” she added, taking a drink from her water bottle and trying not to look my way.
“If I do my job, and you’ve done yours.” I eyed the tote bag on the chair beside her. I guessed the overstuffed folder in it was what I went there for. I was really ready to get out of that Meet. “That’s the whole point, right?”
“If it means I get half of everything and I never have to smell some other skank on his dick again, then yeah, that’s the point.”
We’d pretty much flown through the emotional stages of the Meet. I guessed Mrs. Hendrik didn’t regularly show an impressive level of emotion, so I’d take her last statement as her show of acceptance. All I needed was the file, and I was hightailing it out of there.