The Willful Wife. Suzanne Simms

“Is there more than one hat?”

      He nodded.

      Lack of sleep had finally caught up with her, Desiree realized as she pondered the problem of the hats. Why would a cowboy wear more than one hat? For that matter, how could a cowboy wear more than one hat at a time? Surely the man didn’t have two heads. A surreal Salvador Dali-like picture formed in her mind.

      Aloud, she asked, “Why?”

      It was the hotel manager’s turn to frown in puzzlement. “Why what, Ms. Stratford?”

      She wasn’t making herself understood. “Why is there more than one cowboy hat?”

      “Because there is more than one cowboy,” he said simply.

      Her mouth formed a silent O.

      Rashid Modi held up two long, elegant fingers. “In fact, there are two cowboys.”

      “I see.” Desiree didn’t see, but she supposed that was beside the point.

      During their telephone conversation yesterday, her godfather had clearly stated that the security expert’s name was Mathis Hazard, and that the well-respected security agency he represented was Hazards, Inc. She was quite certain that Uncle George hadn’t said anything about a cowboy or a sidekick.

      Mr. Modi moved his head back and forth. With the tip of his tongue against the back of his front teeth, he began to make a small clicking noise. It was definitely a sound of disapproval. “I told the persons in question to go around to the delivery entrance and see Andre.” The young gentleman paused, raised his nose ever so slightly in the air and sniffed as only an Englishman can sniff. “But they, well, he, insisted on speaking to you personally.”

      “He?”

      “The formidable one.”

      Mathis Hazard must be formidable, indeed. Rashid Modi was not a man easily impressed or intimidated, nor, for that matter, was he prone to exaggeration.

      Desiree only hoped and prayed there weren’t going to be any unpleasantries between the very English hotel manager—Rashid Modi was of Indian ancestry, but he had been born, raised and educated in London—and a security agent from the American West, judging from the former’s description of the latter.

      Frankly she had enough on her mind with the coterie of lawyers and accountants, contractors and architects constantly buzzing around her, not to mention the temperamental Andre and the trio of female guests in permanent residence who acted as though they were the ones who actually owned the Stratford.

      If that wasn’t enough to drive a sane woman to the brink of insanity, there had been the incident of the night before. She had assumed that Mathis Hazard would want to examine the evidence for himself, so she had left her great-grandfather’s dagger exactly as she had found it: jeweled handle gleaming in the lamplight, razor-sharp tip embedded in the top of the mahogany desk.

      Desiree brushed a hand across her eyes. After discovering the dagger and the note, she had made a thorough search of her great-grandparents’ former apartment. Whoever had been there seemed to have vanished into thin air.

      Ninety-nine-point-nine percent certain that the culprit didn’t have any intentions of returning to the scene of the crime for a second time that night, Desiree had gone back to bed. First, however, she had securely wedged a sturdy chair under the brass doorknob, since there were no locks on the doors in the family wing. Despite this precaution, it had been nearly dawn before she had managed to fall asleep again.

      Rashid Modi repeated his initial offer. “I can send the cowboys away, Ms. Stratford, if you don’t have time to see them.”

      “I can spare a minute or two,” she said.

      “Shall I show them in?” The manager indicated the confines of the small, once elegant and now somewhat threadbare, office.

      Desiree politely shook her head and inquired, “Where are the two men?”

      Another concise reply was supplied by Mr. Modi. “The lobby.”

      Desiree pushed her chair back, reached for the tailored jacket to her suit and rose to her feet. “I’ll see them in the lobby, then.”

      The heels of her pumps clicked on the marble floor as Desiree pulled on her jacket and started down the hallway. Once she reached the lobby she paused for a moment, put her head back and gazed up at the ornate ceiling high above her.

      The lobby ceiling was done in the grand Victorian style, with intricately carved cornices and molding, and with a second mural by the same artist who had painted the guest room. This time he had chosen to depict mythical creatures of flight from the six-winged angels of the seraphim to round-cheeked cherubs, from exotic birdmen to a snow-white Pegasus.

      The piece de resistance of the front lobby, however, was the chandelier. It was Austrian crystal, weighed more than a ton, dated from the turn of the century when it was originally a gaslight and, since its conversion to electricity, was said to be comprised of more than two thousand individual lightbulbs.

      In the hotel’s heyday there had been a full-time employee whose job had been to clean and change the bulbs in the lighting fixtures, including the Stratford’s prized chandelier. There had also been an attendant who polished, on a daily basis, the brass balustrades on the staircase. And another whose sole duty was to set and wind the clocks, all ninety-seven of them.

      That was no longer the case. The ninety-seven clocks were long gone, and the cleaning and polishing were done by a small, independent business firm that had won the job by quoting Charlotte Stratford the lowest bid.

      Nevertheless, the myriad stories about the Stratford, its architectural and social history, its famous guests and its somewhat more humble yet interesting employees, had fascinated Desiree when she was a girl. They still did.

      Her gaze returned to ground level. There were her early-morning visitors standing in the middle of the lobby. Mr. Rashid was correct, as he usually was. They were cowboys. Both of them.

      The next thing Desiree noticed were the white hats. Not on their heads, thankfully, but held at their sides. At least they were gentlemen enough to remove them indoors.

      The disparity between the two men was immediately apparent. One was quite short. The other was very tall. The smaller, slightly rotund cowboy was facing her. His features were craggy. His skin was wrinkled and leathery and tanned to the color of toast. Obviously he had spent a lifetime outdoors in the elements. In Desiree’s estimation he was the older by a good thirty or forty years, and he was also the more animated of the pair.

      The second man was in profile. From this angle Desiree put his age as mid-thirties. He could have been younger or older. She decided he was probably older.

      Her eyes swept his appearance from the ground up. He was dressed in cowboy boots, faded blue jeans, a Western-style leather coat and a white dress shirt. He had shunned a traditional tie, as had his sidekick, in favor of a bolo, complete with obligatory gold nugget.

      Still, it wasn’t the man’s conspicuous bolo or his spit-polished cowboy boots or his pristine white cowboy hat that caught and held Desiree’s attention. It was something far less tangible. It was something in the way he stood there, motionless, quietly assessing the front entrance, the registration desk, the sweeping staircase, in fact, the entire lobby. It was almost as if he had eyes in the back of his head.

      That’s when Desiree suddenly realized that he knew she was watching him.

      A tingle of awareness tiptoed along her spine. She took in a sustaining breath and discreetly blew it out again. Now she understood why the hotel manager had referred to her visitor as intimidating. The man was more than intimidating. He was dangerous. In fact, he positively reeked of danger. It was tightly held-in-check, controlled danger, but it was danger, nevertheless.

      Desiree didn’t doubt for a moment that this was a man who could take care of himself wherever he was, that this was a man who knew who his enemies were and who his friends were, and regarded both with equal suspicion.