Free Paradise Burning by Blair Bancroft

bit
possessive—okay, jealous—she might get a good laugh out of this.
Amanda Armitage of the Boston Brahmin Kingsleys was about to have
lunch with a hooker. Eleanor would have a fit.
    “ How many?” she demanded.
    “ Today? Three. The girl off the
streets, a dancer from a topless club, and a girl from an Escort
Service who’ll probably be as mad as you are that I invited a
ho.”
    A topless dancer, a girl from an Escort
Service, and a street whore. For a moment Mandy pictured a hidden
camera video with tape she could send back to
headquarters . Look, mom, it’s me! She turned her face toward the passenger window to hide a
grin. “I’m not mad. Just . . . a bit surprised,” she told Peter,
making a valiant stab at nonchalance. “Actually, it’s considerably
more interesting than hovering over the interlibrary computer
screen with the reference librarian.”
     
    Mandy didn’t question how Peter was able to
produce the key for a spacious apartment above a downtown
restaurant whose food quality was attested to by the number of
lunch-hour patrons standing in line out on the street. Adventures
of this nature took plenty of know-how and bundles of cash, and
Peter Pennington had an ample supply of both.
    As they went through an anonymous door to the
left of the restaurant’s plate glass window and trudged up an
equally bland staircase, Mandy wondered what they would find at the
top. Somehow she had gotten the impression that living above a
business had gone out with black and white movies. Then again, what
did a girl raised in a brownstone across the street from Harvard
Yard and a sprawling estate in the Massachusetts countryside know
about the real world?
    Peter turned the key in the lock, threw
open the door. “ Voilà ,
Madame.” He waved her in ahead of him.
    Ah . . . nice .
Comfortable furniture in bright Florida colors. Ivy drooped from
white plastic pots hanging in front of two large southern windows.
An eclectic collection of posters splashed against cheerful yellow
walls in a surprisingly attractive mismatch of angles and colors.
At the far end of the room a dining table with a daffodil yellow
tablecloth was set for five. A centerpiece of fresh flowers—yellow,
gold, and white—hovered next to a cheeseboard barely visible under
a pristine white napkin. Two bottles of wine jutted up from a
silver bucket filled with ice.
    Once again, Peter Pennington at his adept and
tasteful best. The apartment was attractive, but not so elegant it
might intimidate the women who had been invited to lunch. It also
provided privacy far beyond anything offered by a restaurant or a
hotel suite. Mandy choked over a vision of a parade of hookers
wandering into the luxurious lobby of Manatee Bay’s internationally
famous waterfront resort hotel. She had to give Peter credit.
Although some of his plans tended toward the Machiavellian, this
time he had demonstrated sensitivity as well as good taste.
    He’d even remembered to bring along
protection. Namely, a wife.
    Was this, perhaps, why he had recalled that
he had one? How many interviews had he planned?
    Oh-oh . Mandy
stared at the pass-through into the kitchen. The empty, foodless
kitchen. “I see why you brought me,” she quipped. “Lunch for five
on the count of three. Sorry, I left my magic wand at
home.”
    Peter took his time getting his
state-of-the-art recorder out of its case. He had always enjoyed
bandying words with his Mandy Mouse. Flashing insights and ideas,
humorous one-liners, irreverent comments on everything from the
latest international debacle to why Danny and Lisa had never made
it legal. Brilliant words, silly words . . . sometimes just
treasured moments of nothing more than the companionable silence of
two people who were so perfectly attuned they didn’t need to fill
the void with static.
    But not this kind of sarcasm. The Mandy of
old hadn’t had a cynical bone in her body. Until she met Peter
Pennington. Until he’d tossed away everything AKA had