Chapter One
CHAPTER ONE
When I get to the office that summer morning I am already grumpy, thanks to the usual vagaries of the New York City subway system, and it takes me a moment to realize that Tess is not just sitting at her desk, but is smiling .
Given that Tess Erdrich, my secretary and office manager, is what I can only call a battle-ax, this is surprising. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her smile before in our five years of working together. I’m not sure I like seeing it now.
That is not a sentence that makes any sense. I squint at her. “He who?”
“The only him,” she retorts, like I’m being coy. Or deliberately obtuse. Neither of which is in my wheelhouse and she should know that. “The big guy. The boss. Him .”
“Is this a religious thing?” I ask, lost. I’ve never pretended to speak Catholic and she’s always graciously pretended she doesn’t find that baffling.
“It’s the closest that I’ve personally come to God,” Tess throws back, and then gives me an exasperated look.
“You’re slow today, Annagret. I am referring to our boss, the head of the firm, who finally deigned to make an appearance this morning.
” She smiles then, very cat and canary, and this is no less terrifying.
“Mr. Luc Garnier himself has reported for duty.”
That name goes through me like an electric current.
Luc Garnier, the owner and much sought-after head investigator at Miravakia Investigations, is so constantly busy that he is never here.
Instead, he is forever caught up in the concerns of billionaires, kingdoms, and multinational corporations, dedicated to solving their problems with his keen eye and razor-sharp investigative abilities.
He is always rushing from one secret job to the next, too in demand from all quarters to do more than message his instructions from his private plane as he moves from the C?te d’Azur to Saint Barts to Brussels, and back again.
He does not come to New York City office buildings without warning. And he certainly does not appear in this one, no matter what.
Something I am absolutely, one hundred percent sure of.
Because I made him up.
Tess studies my face, her overly dramatic eyebrows rising at whatever look she sees there. I honestly can’t imagine what it might be as the shock of what she said still reverberates inside me.
“Well, well,” she says, drawing the syllables out. “And here I thought you were an ice queen through and through. Frozen solid, never to thaw. Turns out you do have a little spark in there after all. For the boss, no less.”
As I laugh that off, I realize I’m playing directly into whatever fantasy she has about me and the boss . Because I’m clearly awkward and flustered, but I can’t explain why . I can’t explain any of this, so I do the only thing available to me. I let her see me flustered.
But not too flustered, because even Tess, who is occasionally shockingly romantic beneath her tough Jersey veneer, would find it unbelievable to see me too flustered.
“About time he shows his face,” I say, because surely that’s what someone would say if this was a real boss turning up to his own firm like this. I turn and march past her desk, as if I’m off to slay the dragon in its lair, my mind spinning wildly with every step.
Truth is, the Luc Garnier lie is one that I never expected would or could come back to haunt me like this. Not once I put it into play and was able to see how well it works.
I’d had the best of intentions at the start. When I decided that I could use what my literal wicked stepmother liked to call my alarming nosiness to my advantage, and instead of ending up on the streets as I’m sure she intended, I became a full-fledged private investigator.
She always did underestimate me.
I’d thought it would be easy enough. Put up a shingle, get to gumshoeing, and call it a day. But the sad truth of the matter is that people didn’t want to entrust their dirty secrets, questionable obsessions, and darkest truths to the overly perky twenty-year-old blonde girl I’d been then.
Looking back from the vantage point of these eight years I’ve spent acquiring culture, sophistication, and my own sharp-edged veneer to rival anything Tess’s Jersey can throw up, I’m not sure I can blame them.
My first few months were dire.
But I was determined to get my footing—because the streets seemed like an upgrade over crawling back to my stepmother and I do not intend to live down to her low expectations in this lifetime, thank you—and so one day I took down the sign that hung outside my door with my name on it.
I put up a simple one that read private investigations instead.
I wanted to see if the immediate disconnect that happened when I told people I was said investigator, or possibly even as soon as they saw my name on my useless shingle, could be handled if I got them in the door first.
And when a man walked in, all furtive eyes and that seriousness about the mouth that indicates issues , I prepared to launch into my usual spiel.
I’m here for your boss, sweetheart, he said with curt dismissiveness, looking around like I might have stashed said boss in the requisite dinged-up filing cabinet that came with the rented space.
I didn’t mean to do it. But I had a client in the room at last and he wanted a boss. And the customer is always right, so I invented that boss on the spot.
I gave my pretend boss the name of the hero from the romance novel I was currently reading to while away the hours no one hired me, and when that worked—beyond my wildest expectations—I named my business after the made-up kingdom in that book, too.
My Luc Garnier is only partly the hero from the book, sure.
I refined him to suit my own purposes over the years.
He’s now a billionaire man of mystery himself, dedicated to ferreting out the truth no matter what it takes.
He is elegant yet masterful. Gloriously and unabashedly male yet always exquisitely dressed.
No shabbily dressed, seemingly hapless sleuth, our Luc Garnier.
Look closely, I always tell my more suspicious clients while brandishing society rag photographs in their direction. He is a master of hiding in plain sight.
Then I claim that we can almost see his ear in a paparazzi picture of the most famous person of the hour. Or perhaps we can glimpse his elbow , just there, at the sort of outrageously extravagant charity ball normal people can never dream of attending.
Luc Garnier never allows himself to be caught on camera, I tell everyone with great seriousness, and a bit of earnestness and awe, too, for effect. Such is his commitment to your privacy.
Thanks to Luc Garnier, I went from not being able to book a client to having too many clients to take on. I quickly elevated my office space from the sketchier outer boroughs into Manhattan itself, where I am currently sitting pretty on Fifth Avenue.
I did well, is what I did, and I do better now.
And these days I mostly find it funny—and only sometimes bittersweet—that I am just starting to be seen as an investigator on my own merits.
I have more than a few clients who tell me that if I wanted, I could step out from famous Luc Garnier’s shadow.
Though they whisper it, like they expect him to materialize from behind a potted plant and confront them for their daring in making such a suggestion.
Maybe one day , I like to tell them, trying to look grateful and deeply complimented. But I’m still learning so much from Mr. Garnier.
My favorites are the clients who condescend to me and tell me that they speak personally to Luc Garnier daily, when, obviously, I know they don’t. And then they like to argue that the instructions he never gave them contradict the ones I made up.
I thought that I’d seen it all.
But I did not expect that anyone would wander in the door and pretend to be the man himself.
I charge down the hallway, passing the actual office that I use and continuing on past the little conference room with its view of the city, then on to the grand corner office that stands mostly as a shrine to a man who does not exist. There are client photos on the wall and also, just to entertain myself, I like to frame photographs that seem to suggest that Luc Garnier attended this or that wildly exclusive event—without showing him, of course.
Today, something hitches inside of me as I pass the conference room and can see through the glass that there is, indeed, a man sitting there behind Luc’s desk.
My desk, I correct myself.
I stride to the door, throw it open—
And stop dead.
Because the man who sits— lounges is a better word—behind the desk I maintain for a completely fictional character of my own devising, looks…
Exactly the way that I imagine Luc Garnier himself would look.
If only he was real.
He is so tall that he even looks tall sitting down, and he commands the room somehow, even though all he does is glance up from his laptop—his own laptop, not the prop I leave on the desk, I note—seemingly taking very little notice of me as I stand there.
“Is it office protocol to simply throw open doors instead of waiting to be granted access?” he asks, and his voice is another problem.
I do a sweep of him like he’s someone I’m surveilling.
Tall. Commanding. Dark hair and eyes like steeped tea.
Chiseled jaw and acrobatic cheekbones. Sensual mouth that’s at complete odds with the austerity of the dark, bespoke suit that he wears.
That caresses his body as if silkworms and various sheep personally sacrificed themselves for his sartorial splendor.
All that and he sounds like poetry when he speaks.
A kind of distinctly European poetry, I think as I take it in. I can’t quite place that accent. His English is perfect, but it is clearly not his first language.
I am not a fan of the way I want to just stand here and stare at him.
“Who are you?” I ask.
I am staring at him, but now the staring is with intention, I assure myself.