Page 4 of Breaking the Rules
“Don’t tell me you’re missing Penelope?” Waverly teased from the passenger seat.
“Haven’t you heard, Waverly darling? I only have eyes for you now,” he said, grinning over his Prada sunglasses.
“Oh, isthatwhere we stand? I can never remember whether we’re dating or broken up or secretly engaged—”
“Or having torrid love affairs with other people,” he filled in. “I just read the tabloids in the grocery store, and they tell me what our current status is.”
Waverly laughed. “You in a grocery store? Please, the day Dante Wrede shows his domestic side is the day snow cones go on sale in hell.” A very large population of women had succumbed to his British-accented charm.
Dante scoffed. “I fully intend to fall madly in love someday and spend the rest of my days spoiling the life out of the beautiful, lucky lady. What’s your excuse?”
“Why, Dante!” Waverly fluttered her lashes. “How could I possibly fall in love with someone else when I’m so enamored with you? At least for today.”
He stuck his tongue out at her.
“Very James Bond of you,” she snickered.
“Since you brought up work, Money Penny, let’s talk mission.”
Waverly studied Slide Mountain as it loomed in front of them, leaving Reno behind them. “You mean the oddly vague yet suddenly imperative mission to continue our blossoming friendship with Petra Stepanov?”
“That would be the one,” Dante said, accelerating down the highway looking every bit the careless playboy.
“You know something, don’t you?” Waverly accused him. “You think this job stinks, too.”
“I think there’s a possibility that there’s something rotten in Lake Tahoe,” he agreed.
“Aha! I knew it.” Waverly kicked back in her seat. Her gut had been telling her there was something wrong with this assignment from the start. Usually their jobs were straightforward. Get into this diplomat’s home office during the cocktail party and bug the phone, drag some information out of an under-the-influence, chatty son at the club regarding his father’s shady weapon dealings, put a tracker on so and so’s yacht while partying on it.
But the studio had remained tight lipped about the why of this particular assignment. Waverly had been tasked with establishing a relationship with the Russian billionaire’s daughter who had recently settled in Los Angeles in a cozy $20 million estate. Just Petra and her herd of tea cup Chihuahuas in a nine bedroom home with two tennis courts, a full-size movie theater, and one of the best views in Hollywood Hills.
She’d coordinated an introduction at a club a few weeks ago, and the two had hit it off, partying together, enjoying flashy shopping sprees that attracted every paparazzo in a ten-mile radius, showing up on red carpets as each other’s dates. Once the relationship was cemented—when Petra’s bodyguards felt comfortable leaving the two women alone—the studio insisted that Waverly and Dante resume their relationship charade to get his foot in the door. When Petra invited them both to Tahoe for a long weekend, the studio gave the trip the thumbs up with no added instructions.
“Which is precisely why you are to keep our little billionairess occupied while I do some recon around daddy’s lake house.”
“Don’t do anything stupid, Dante,” Waverly warned him. “With the bodyguards he’s got on her, I can only imagine what security is like in a house that he actually uses.”
Dante was technically her mentor. With the ink still hot on her diploma from Stanford, Dante had brought her on board to the dual purposed “studio,” making movies on the public side and running contract clandestine operations for government programs that needed the special access that celebrity afforded. She’d lost her green and found her groove quickly, becoming an effective agent. She was still playing a role, as the party girl or the spoiled celeb, but it was a role she chose. A role she controlled.
But sometimes Waverly felt as if she were the senior agent running herd on a bullheaded new recruit. Dante was impulsive and, on occasion, a little reckless. She worked hard to keep him in line.
She’d done some digging on the Stepanov family. Grigory, the father, was a billionaire several times over. His vast holdings included everything from real estate in seven countries, a football club, the majority stake of a very successful oil company, and, to further round out his investments, the patents on forty prescription drugs.
Petra’s mother was Mrs. Stepanov Number Two, and Grigory was now on Number Four. Nothing popped for any of the wives. In fact, besides being outrageously wealthy, nothing was ringing a bell for Waverly. No hints at tax evasion or drug running or weapons smuggling. Nothing their usual clients would be interested in.
The weekend needed to yield answers. Waverly wasn’t a fan of working blind.
But the weekend had only yielded more questions.
Perched on a bluff, the five acre-estate boasted a timber frame home that was filled with every kind of Americana luxury that reflected the Old West. A butler dressed in jeans and a pressed plaid shirt led them upstairs to a room with an unobstructed view of the lake. And for one second, Waverly recalled another room in another lake house. But she did what she always did when faced with an unbidden memory of Xavier. She ruthlessly shoved it aside.
This room wasn’t in a cozy family home in Idle Lake, Colorado. No, this timber behemoth included eight thousand square feet of living space including a basement bowling alley and nightclub and third floor cigar lounge. This particular bedroom could have shamed any five-star luxury resort in the country. The highlight, besides the wall of windows that peered over the rusts and oranges of fall foliage to the glistening lake below, was the bed. Hand-turned posts thick as tree trunks held up the metal scrollwork of the canopy.
There was a stone fireplace, less grand than the one downstairs but still impressive, with window seats tucked into each side.
Waverly wandered into the bathroom and raised eyebrows at the opulence. The entire room was done in floor to ceiling stone. The walk-in shower had enough square footage and jets for a modest party of six. The copper soaking tub was set against a window offering optimal views of forest and lake.
She was examining the heavy timber frame of the mirror that ran the length of the vanity when she heard a groan from Dante.
