Page 10 of Taming Achilles

The man flashed her a badge, and Pippa inspected it, and gave him a sweet smile. She was being a cunt to me on purpose.

“Well, person,” the man said, stretching a hand out to me, “do you have a name?”

“George Campbell of Caledonia Security.” The pissing contest began the moment our palms touched and we gripped harder than was needed, and shook longer than was appropriate.

The man wasn’t bad looking, but he would have benefited from a broken nose. Add a little asymmetry to that beach-tanned face.

“Are you Miss Fox’s security team?” The woman he was with had dark skin, and pursed lips. Her leather jacket gave her a hard edge, and her hair was in a severe ponytail.

I raised my brow to Pippa, wondering how she was going to play this.

“No!” Pippa crossed her arms and looked at me with a scowl.

“Do you mind if I ask what the nature of your relationship is?” I detected a slight Spanish accent in the woman’s voice, as she gestured between me and Pippa. “Were you here when the break in happened?”

“No,” I said, crossing my arms to mirror Pippa.

“Interesting,” the woman said with a strange scepticism as she sized me up.

“Your name?” I asked her, extending my hand.

“How rude of me,” she pulled out a leather pouch and flashed a police badge. “I’m Athanya Delgado, and this is my partner, Rhys Tanner.” She was obviously the lead in whatever partnership this was. I admired that. I nodded to her with professional respect as she got right down to business. “Can we have a look around?”

Chapter 4

Pippa

That bitch. Detective Delgado. She questioned me again and again, looking for some inconsistency in my story. I went from being a victim of a break in, to being a person calling in a supposed hoax.

She didn’t know who the fuck she was dealing with. I’m Dame Philippa Fox, model, philanthropist, fashion mogul and one of his Majesty’s greatest spies. I could have her cut into pieces and dumped over a school of sharks.

“Why were you in your closet?” Detective Delgado asked for the fifteenth time. “Do you frequently stay in there?”

“Madam,” I said it as if it was a curse word, “I assure you that a closet is a misnomer for what I have.” I arched my perfectly plucked brow. “Have you seen it?”

I bet she has nothing but one of those sliding door closets, where she kept her boxy suits and hideous, square-toed, brown shoes. I was well-aware that I was being petty, but I couldn’t help it. Not when Geordie looked at her with a nodding respect that should have been directed at me. But since I started my cover, his eyes only ever dulled with disappointment when I opened my mouth about clothes, and fashion.

He’d never see what I had going on underneath. How I was fighting the same fight he was. I always had been! I just had to do it alone.

“She’s right!” Detective Tanner answered from inside the bedroom. “My sister would kill for this closet.”

Detective Delgado put her hands in her leather jacket and strode into the bedroom, straight to the closet. Geordie watched her with a smirk of approval and I immediately wanted to get my gun and shoot her on the spot. How dare he look at anyone like that?

I gritted my teeth and watched as she took in my shoes and clothes, and rows of purses with a boredom that I was used to getting from people who considered themselves smart and serious. Above such petty, silly things as clothes.

She didn’t comment on the in-shelf lighting, or the organisation of my clothes by style and colour. She simply paced around the centre island where most of my purses and work out clothes and lingerie were kept and looked at me. “And you say nothing is missing in here?”

“As I said,” my teeth didn’t separate as I ground out the words again. “Not that I can see.”

A warm hand touched my lower back. I looked over my shoulder to see Geordie there, his eyes looking down at me with that patient, sagely look. He used to stare at me like that when we were lovers, and he was my protector. Like he was so much older and all-knowing than I was.

“So, you were in your closet where you hid, and the man was walking around out here?” Detective Delgado’s scepticism made my skin prickle in irritation. “But he didn’t come in or take anything. And you called your friend, Mr. Campbell, and he was gone before he arrived.”

“Yes.” I said, carefully, knowing that she was laying out a very reasonable trap to make me seem crazy.

“Mr. Campbell was at your ex-fiancé’s wedding, correct?”

“Yes.”

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