Free The Secret Agent by Francine Mathews

“but you
look
like Deer Valley.”
    Her lips curled in contempt. “Deer Valley’s
nice,
Max. They valet your skis when you come off the hill.”
    “They valet them here,” he replied, “if you pay them enough.”
    “Don’t let the skill level fool you.” She avoided his eye, staring instead at the ridgeline. “I’m relentlessly shallow. I like pretty houses and pretty bodies wherever I go.”
    “How honest of you to admit it. Most people profess the opposite—and live out their days as liars. There’s no Mr. Fogg, I gather?”
    She shook her head. “I buy my own mink, thank you very much. The one thing money
can
buy, you see, is freedom.”
    He thought of Suzanne Muldoon, and the sweeping silver fox. She’d loved furs as much as he hated them, and so the coat arrived in tribute to their three years. Two months after he’d bought the thing, she’d served him with a lawsuit.
    “Freedom,” he told Stefani, “can be quite solitary.”
    “But loneliness, in my book, is always preferable to dependence. All relationships require
someone
to dominate, and the other to submit. That ain’t gonna be me.”
    “Unless you pursue a man whose strength matches yours. An equal. What might happen then?”
    “A fight to the death.” She threw back her head and laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re a romantic, Max. I don’t believe in them anymore.”
    He stayed off her private terrain after that.
    She let him guide her through the bars and hostels of his adopted town; she drank Armagnac warmed over a candle flame and turned her toes toward the fire and paid lip service to his attempts to charm her. Max had been a celebrity for nearly twenty years. To be held at arm’s length—to be treated as though he were nothing more than a guide to the terrain—was disconcerting.
    What exactly did Stefani Fogg know about that moment in Geneva? The dead Thai stripper with her hair flung like raw silk across his pillow? What could—what
ought—he
to tell her?
    That the girl’s eyes had bulged obscenely in death? That as he emerged from the shower, he noticed first the way the early morning sun caressed her golden breast-how her fingers reached wantonly for air—and only a second later, the look of horror and denial in her face?
    He could not find the words to describe what hehad seen, nor the revulsion—the fascination—he still felt. He said nothing of the painfully young corpse or the red-sequined thong that left a raw band across her dead flesh or the flurried hotel manager or the correct little man with the Hitler mustache who interviewed him for the Geneva police, deferential as Stefani Fogg could never be.
    She had asked him nothing about the murder. This woman sent out from New York to walk with him through the wasteland was clearly waiting for further developments. She seemed content to let him size her up for a few days on the slopes. Max knew that she was assessing his qualities in turn. He didn’t stop to wonder how this test—for that was what it clearly was—might have been accomplished, if Stefani Fogg had never skied. She would not, then, have been Stefani Fogg. An entirely different set of assumptions would have applied.
    And so that third afternoon, when the light had flattened at the high elevations and clouds had converged on the lower
pistes,
he turned to her as they entered Courchevel 1850 and said: “Have dinner at my house tonight. It’s time we talked about Thailand.”
    “Then of course I’ll come.”
    “You can see the place from here, if you strain your eyes. There’s a platter lift to the top.”
    She followed the line of his hand, staring toward the lonely peak at the end of the ridge beyond the village and the stone house with its heavy cap of snow.
    “It’s exactly the sort of house you
should
have. Rooted to the earth. Beautiful in its simplicity. A house that knows who it is.”
    “The smaller building to the rear is my studio. You can come up now, if you want. It’d save you a