It All Began in Monte Carlo
Read It All Began in Monte Carlo Online
Authors: Elizabeth Adler
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It All Began in Monte Carlo
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Also by Elizabeth Adler
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There's Something About St. Tropez
One of Those Malibu Nights
Meet Me in Venice
Sailing to Capri
The House in Amalfi
Invitation to Provence
The Hotel Riviera
Summer in Tuscany
The Last Time I Saw Paris
In a Heartbeat
Sooner or Later
All or Nothing
Now or Never
Fleeting Images
Indiscretions
The Heiresses
The Secret of the Villa Mimosa
Legacy of Secrets
Fortune Is a Woman
The Property of a Lady
The Rich Shall Inherit
Peach
Léonie
elizabeth adler
St. Martin's Press  
  New York
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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IT ALL BEGAN IN MONTE CARLO
. Copyright © 2010 by Elizabeth Adler. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Design by Patrice Sheridan
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
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Adler, Elizabeth (Elizabeth A.)
  It all began in Monte Carlo / Elizabeth Adler. â 1st ed.
      p. cm.
  ISBN 978-1-429-90017-1
1. AmericansâFranceâFiction. 2. France, SouthernâFiction. 3. Monte Carlo (Monaco)âFiction. 4. Jewelry theftâFiction. 5. ExtortionâFiction. I. Title.
  PR6051.D56I7 2010
  823'.914âdc22
2010013031
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First Edition: July 2010
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To Richard
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Thanks, as always, to my dedicated St. Martin's team, especially Sally Richardson and, of course, my editor, Jen Enderlinâsimply the best. And to my lovely agent, Anne Sibbald, and the wonderful team at Janklow & Nesbit Associates. And, of course, to those girlfriends who are always there when I need themâand always make me laugh. In strictly alphabetical order: Lynn Blackwell, Francesca Bowyer, Sandi Phillips, and Priscilla Rendino. Is there some reason we are all blondes!
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It All Began in Monte Carlo
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Trust is often a misplaced emotion.
Like love.
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Paris. December 24. A cold Christmas Eve. Lights sparkle in the leafless trees, the windows of expensive boutiques glow with treasures. It's almost closing time when the black Bentley pulls up outside the fashionable jeweler, La Fontaine. Three women step out, wrapped in furs, high boots, long blond hair flowing, dark glasses despite the fact that it's already gray dusk; Hermès totes, exclusive shopping bags.
Watching them walking across the sidewalk toward him the uniformed guard notes that the Bentley is already stuffed with more shopping bags. The women are laughing, heads together, faces hidden as they approach. He smiles as he opens the door for them.
A shiny steel gun with a silencer is jammed in his back. A woman's voice tells him to get inside, not to put up his hands. Swiftly the others remove weapons from inside their fur coats. The gun jams against his spine once more. “Walk normally,” the woman says. The guard does as he is told.
Inside the store the last three assistants are tidying up, checking the display cases, rainbows of lights sparking off the diamonds. They raise their heads as the guard comes in followed by the three women. They sigh, it's getting late, it's Christmas Eve and they want to be home with their families. But a sale is a sale and with women
like this, expensive, fur-wrapped women, it could be a big one. Women as rich as these buy on impulse. And after all, it
is
Christmas.
The manager raises his head, smiles. The assistants call a greeting,
“Bonsoir, mesdames. Bon Noël.”
Walking behind the guard, the other two women raise their guns. They swing back their long blond hair and expose bizarre Marilyn Monroe masks, red lips stretched in her famous smile. One shoots out the video security camera, another stands guard. The first instructs the manager, harshly, to open the display cases and the safe. And fast.
He hovers uncertainly. The woman's laugh is muffled by the mask. “Don't even think of the alarm,
monsieur.
You would be dead before a cop could even get here. And I'm sure you still want to see your children this Christmas Eve. After all, Santa has to bring presents for everyone, including us.”
The manager hurries to open the shop's display cases as well as the ones in the window. The first robber covers him with the gun while the two terrified female assistants hover behind, ghostlike, trembling. One's lips move in a prayer. The younger one buries her head in her hands, unable to look.
The second robber plucks the jewels from the window display, sweeping her hand through the case, shunting rings, earrings, bracelets, dazzling necklaces into a large Hermès tote. The third guides the manager, with her gun, to the safe. He opens it. She takes out the jewels, many unset diamonds of large carats. La Fontaine is famous for the quality of its diamonds.
Now all the jewels are in the Hermès tote or scooped into a Dior carrier, an Eres shopping bag.
The masked robbers line up the staff plus the guard behind a counter. Two walk backward to the door, guns drawn. The other woman, the one in charge, walks closer to the terrified staff. She points the gun at each one in turn. “Give me the store keys and your cell phones.” They comply. She pauses in front of the youngest
of the sales assistants. The masked robber stares at her for a long moment. The girl lifts her head, meets the eyes behind the mask. Swiftly, the woman raises the gun, brings it down with a crack of breaking bone on the assistant's cheek.
“Bitch,” she says as she walks away.
The three robbers, expensive in their furs and with their designer bags loaded with loot, walk out. The first woman locks the door behind them. The staff remain frozen, expecting their end to come.
There is no Bentley waiting outside. Instead, a gray van. The door slides open, the women climb in and the van speeds off into the Christmas Eve traffic.
The heist has taken maybe five minutes. The loot is worth many millions of dollars. It's the second time they've struck this month.
Los Angeles. Christmas Eve.
Sunny Alvarez boarded the Air France flight to Paris. It had taken all her precious air miles and a great deal of money but if she was going to be unhappy she was going to do it first class. In style. And alone.
She wore no makeup, not even her trademark brave red lipstick. Tinted frameless glasses helped disguise her eyes, swollen from crying. Tall, slender with a fall of dark hair that swung over her face, she looked younger than her thirty-six years and somehow vulnerable. She wore narrow jeans stuffed into tall black sheepskin UGGs, a black cashmere turtleneck, a black peacoat that she now flung off and handed to the waiting steward, before flinging herself into the comfortable leather seat that could be made to recline, so that later she might sleep stretched out full length. If she could ever find “sleep” again. The flight was a long one. Eleven hours.
Eleven hours without Mac Reilly.
Her fiancé was TV's famous detective with his own program,
Mac Reilly's Malibu Mysteries,
handsome in his own slightly worn, casual, confident, way. . . .
No
dammit! Mac was more than that. He was sexy, good looking, blue eyes that looked into hers with passion when he made love to herâ
No!
Change that to when they made love
together.
Because making love with Mac Reilly, the feel of his hands
on her body, the way his skin smoothed under her own hands, the way her own skin seemed to melt under his, the electric shock his lips on hers always gave her, hot-wiring her, sending tremors through her until all she could think about was sex, sex with him . . .
She had met Mac at a press party for his TV show. He'd told her he'd noticed her across the room. “How could I miss you, in that outfit?” was what he had actually said.
She had on a black turtleneck and a tiny white miniskirt and her tough-girl motorcycle boots because she'd ridden there on her Harley. Mac tapped her on her shoulder and she found herself looking at this rugged guy in jeans and a T-shirt, whose deep blue eyes were taking her in like she was the best thing he had seen all night.
He asked her name, she'd said she knew his. Neither was drinking because they were driving, but both had that elated feeling of being on another planet where even the noise of the party seemed suddenly muted. Later Mac told her he noticed her clunky boots first, and she told him she'd noticed his muscular arms and had wanted to be wrapped in them right there and then, she didn't care who saw.
Of course they were total opposites: Mac, dragged up by his bootstraps from the streets of Boston and the Miami crime scene to the Private Eye and TV personality he now was. And she, the half-Latina wild child brought up on a ranch, beautiful and brainy and ditzy, but with a business degree from Wharton and the determination to be her own woman.