The Willful Wife. Suzanne Simms

      “The hotel or your goddaughter?”

      George Huxley was blunt. “Both. I hear you’re a pretty good businessman as well as an ex—” one hand drew random circles in the air “—whatever-you-are. I want you to find out if Desiree is getting in over her head, if she knows what she’s doing.”

      There was more. Mathis could hear it in the cultured voice. “And...?”

      The retired diplomat took in a deep breath and then slowly released it. “And...”

      The infinitesimal hairs on the back of Mathis Hazard’s neck stood straight up on end. “And what?” he inquired, almost certain he didn’t really want to hear the answer.

      There was another moment of hesitation, this time on the part of George Huxley. “There have been several incidents.”

      “Incidents?”

      “Unexplained occurrences.”

      “Such as?” Mathis prodded.

      The distinguished-looking man appeared almost embarrassed to say. “Furniture moving.”

      “Furniture moving?”

      “By itself.” He continued, albeit reluctantly. “Strange noises in the night. Glimpses of someone—something—but nothing is ever there.”

      Mathis was amused. “Are you trying to tell me that the Hotel Stratford is haunted?”

      “I can’t.”

      “Why not?”

      “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

      “That makes two of us, because neither do I.”

      “Then you’re just the man for the job. You’ll be a sane voice in an otherwise insane world.”

      “Is there anything else?”

      Huxley squirmed in his seat. “Well, now that you mention it, there is one more thing.”

      Somehow Mathis had known there would be.

      “My gut instincts tell me that this is an inside job,” the older man confided to him. “No one other than my goddaughter must know who and what you actually are. Otherwise, I’m afraid that we’ll never get to the bottom of it.”

      He waited for George Huxley to get to the point.

      “You’ll have to go undercover.”

      Mathis made certain his voice was devoid of any inflection. “You want me to go in disguise.”

      “Something like that.”

      He arched a quizzical brow. “Any suggestions?”

      Observant eyes glanced from the expensive black Stetson, with its hammered-silver hatband, resting on Mathis’s right knee down to his highly polished, hand-tooled black leather boots. “You could always go as a cowboy.”

      Mathis didn’t crack a smile. “What would a cowboy be doing at the Stratford?”

      “We’ll think of something.”

      “We?”

      “I’m certain that between the two of us we can come up with a suitable cover story.”

      Mathis was certain they could, too. “When would you like me to start?”

      “Today.”

      Mathis gazed out the expanse of office windows toward downtown Chicago. He wanted—no, he needed—some information on the Hotel Stratford and its former and current owners before he presented himself to the lady from Boston.

      “Tomorrow,” he finally proposed to his distinguished client. “There are a few details I want to check out before I drop in on Ms. Desiree Stratford.”

      “Tomorrow, then,” the other man agreed.

      Some fifteen minutes later they concluded their conversation and Mathis was personally escorted to the door of the elegant office.

      George Huxley shook his hand in parting. “Good luck, Hazard,” the ambassador said to him.

      The unspoken words hung in the air between the two men. You’ll need it.

      

      The penthouse he was living in for the summer, courtesy of Hazards, Inc., was on the forty-second floor of a Chicago high-rise. It was glass on three sides and had a panoramic view of Lake Michigan.

      The evening light was stealing across the unusually placid surface of the great lake. As far as the eye could see it was dark blue water dotted with white sailboats.

      The scene somehow reminded Mathis of the view from his adobe casita at sunset, watching the Sangre de Cristo Mountains turn blood red in one of New Mexico’s strangely transcendental landscapes.

      That New Mexico was all about light was something he had discovered several years ago. Maybe it was why he had picked the location he did when he had started to buy up land in anticipation of the day he would retire from the business.

      Mathis raised a can of ice-cold beer to his mouth and took a drink. There was no sense in getting maudlin about his past. No sense in brooding about it. The past was the past. His past was like anyone else’s in that it couldn’t be changed. And since no one was promised a future, that left only the present. So he concentrated on living in the here and now.

      Besides, as he had reassured George Huxley during their meeting that afternoon, he had emerged from his past unscathed...or pretty damned close to it.

      “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades , son,” came the words of Argos Hazard, one-time rancher, one-time soldier and lawman, sometime husband and father.

      Maybe his father had been right, after all.

      There were certainly those who would say Mathis Hazard had always been a loner and that’s why he was so good at what he did. Mathis knew his past set him apart, made him different from other men, made him alone, made him a loner.

      He hadn’t thought it odd to buy a ranch in the middle of New Mexico, located between a range of isolated mountains and a secluded lake, away from civilization, his nearest neighbors a good forty miles in any direction. Lord knows, he’d had enough of so-called civilization to last him a lifetime.

      It wasn’t that he had been around too many people. It was the people he’d been around and the world he’d lived in, a world most people were unaware even existed.

      It was a world where a man acquired eyes in the back of his head if he wanted to survive. It was a world where nothing was what it seemed to be, where no one was who they appeared to be. It was a world where a man learned to trust only one person—himself—where experience, gut instincts and sheer bravado sometimes saved a man when intelligence alone never would, never could.

      He’d always essentially been alone, Mathis recognized. He always would be. At least in New Mexico there was no pretense about it.

      He took another swig of his beer.

      Female companionship...well, that, as they said, was another matter altogether.

      Mathis rubbed the icy can across one cheek, along his jawline and halfway down his neck. He felt rather than heard someone come up behind him. He spoke without turning around: “Know anything about women, Beano?”

      “They’re more trouble than they’re worth, boss.”

      Beano should know. He’d been around the corral a few times in his day. He had married and divorced three women—maybe it was four—and had had a few flings in between that had never made it as far as the altar. He was currently footloose and fancy-free.

      William “Beano” Jones had hired on at the old Circle H at the age of nine. He’d spent the next half-dozen years working on a chuck wagon for Mathis’s grandfather before being promoted to