Free Ulterior Motives by Laura Leone

mistake in assuming that good language teachers who were willing to work for low wages at odd hours were in plentiful supply. What’s more, native speakers were particularly difficult to find in Cincinnati, a small Midwestern city with a limited foreign population.
    “I understand your position, Ute, and will try to influence my superiors at headquarters.” She smiled encouragingly but she was privately pessimistic about her chances. Headquarters maintained an inflexible policy about pay scales. “In the meantime, Ute, I have new clients that I’m sure you’ll enjoy teaching. They’re a group of engineers being transferred to West Germany, and they want to begin lessons soon and study as much as possible before their departure. I’m counting on you. I’m short two German teachers since the Schmidts went back to Munich last month.”  
    “You will tell me what headquarters says. Then I will tell you if I will be here any longer.”
    “All right, Ute.”
    The German woman shrugged in frustration. “I like you. I like the job, and the hours are convenient for me. But it is a question of respect and fairness, Shelley.”
    “I understand, Ute,” Shelley said, feeling caught in the middle.
    After Ute had left her office, Shelley looked at her watch and realized she only had a few minutes before her next appointment. She picked up a stone-cold cup of coffee, which had been sitting on her desk since Francesca had brought it to her ages ago, and stirred it around, feeling dispirited.
    Some days at this job were wonderful, and other days... “Well,” she said aloud.
    She was walking down the hallway to get a fresh cup of coffee when a spine-chilling, blood-curdling, ear-splitting noise erupted throughout the building.
    Wayne came charging into the hallway with his hands over his ears. All the doors along the hall opened as teachers and students peered down the corridor or cried out in alarm.
    “What the hell is that?” exclaimed Wayne.
    “Fire alarm,” Shelley said wearily.
    It just wasn’t her day.

 
     
    Chapter Four
     

     
    That evening Shelley sat curled up in an easy chair in her apartment with a big mug of coffee and the report on Ross Tanner. The report did indeed make interesting reading, particularly when coupled with notes Wayne had taken during his conversation with an informative friend in New York who had once worked for Elite.
    Shelley figured her mother would refer to Ross as a remittance man. Ross’ father was one of the five hundred richest men in America, a wealthy banker with international holdings. His mother came from an old family in Provence. He had two sisters, both of whom had married men of the same exalted social and financial status. Ross clearly made a good living at Elite but, as the family outcast, he had given up a birthright of vast wealth, power, and influence.
    His life until Elite seemed like a series of false starts. He had been thrown out of three expensive private schools during his youth. Jerome’s report offered no specific cause for those expulsions, though Wayne’s friend vaguely said it was because he’d been incorrigible. He had evidently wound up finishing his education in France before returning to the US for college.
    Wayne’s scrawled notes indicated that Ross’ family’s influence had overcome his erratic grades and terrible reputation, and he’d enrolled in the exclusive Ivy League college that his father and grandfather before him had attended. He had majored in medieval Middle Eastern philosophy, a major he’d invented himself and somehow talked his professors into accrediting. Shelley grinned, realizing that he must have done it just to foil another of his family’s attempts to make him fit the mold. That must be when he began learning Arabic, too.
    Predictably, he had been thrown out in the middle of his sophomore year. Shelley frowned as she sifted through the garbled information about his collegiate adventures. His family had initially been able