“Have you never made love in a pool of water?” he asked, his lips on my throat and moving lower.
“No—and I don’t plan to,” I assured him, feeling weak despite all effort. “I think it would be difficult, complicated, and uncomfortable. I might drown trying to figure out how.”
“You won’t drown, my dear,” he said. His hands and tongue were moving over me until I shuddered and grasped his hair with wet hands. “Believe me,” he murmured, “you were designed for it.”
As we walked back to the house, Tor’s shirt still unbuttoned and trouser legs rolled up, his coat tossed over a shoulder and his tie and socks stuffed in the pockets, he turned to me with a smile.
“Wet and disheveled and barefoot—who’d think a bank vice-president could look so ravishing?”
“Don’t you mean ravished?” I smiled back. I had never felt so drained and warm and peaceful in my life.
As we came to the house we could see Georgian, Lelia, and Pearl, all below us on the parapet. They were in bathing attire, sunning themselves and sipping Chartreuse. They rose as we came down the trail.
“All my little poulets have arrived—time for the déjeuner,” said Lelia, bringing out a big platter of sandwiches: long crusty baguettes stuffed with tuna, calamata olives, purple onions, sliced sweet and hot peppers. We helped ourselves to the sloppy fare, washed down with icy pitchers of beer.
“Lelia baked the bread herself,” Pearl told me, “in a stone oven we rigged from an old fire stove downstairs. She can do my cooking any day. But I’ll bet this little jaunt has already put ten pounds on me.”
“We do not talk of this—we talk of affaires now,” said Lelia, turning to Tor. “What of these men who are wishing to buy our business?”
Buy their business? So that was how they planned to win! They could pay off those loans and make a tidy profit—then return the stolen bonds with no one the wiser as to how they’d been used. In fact, they’d stolen nothing—just borrowed bank money and paid it back. No one need ever know that the collateral had been “borrowed” for three months from the Depository Trust. Any profit they made in the interim was like having a loan without using collateral at all.
“Who are the buyers?” I asked, when I understood what was afoot.
“Mystery candidates,” whispered Georgian. “No one but Thor knows who they are or where they’ve come from. Frankly—it’s scary. After all, there are loads of unsavory types out there who’d love to get their hands on a business like this. We might even be in their way!”
“May I join in this chat?” Tor asked irritably. “After all, I conducted this deal—the results are hardly a mystery to me.”
Georgian sat, duly chastened, as he went on: “I’ve been in negotiation with an international group of businessmen for quite some time,” he informed us.
“How much time?” I asked.
“Since I attended that meeting at the SEC—where the bankers refused to take stock of their own stocks. That’s when I started this plan—”
“But that was before you owned the island or even had the bonds,” I pointed out. “It was before you met Lelia or Georgian or Pearl.… It was before we had our bet!” I cried.
“Quite so,” he said with his dazzling smile. “But I believe in planning ahead, my dear—and I knew you’d come around.”
I was so infuriated, I felt my fists clenching. That bastard had won unfairly. He’d planned the whole thing and found buyers for the sale, before we’d even loaded the starting gun. If he thought I’d put myself in bondage to him for a year after that, he had another think coming!
“Who are these guys—and how did you find them?” asked Pearl, interrupting my thoughts.
“They’re well connected, with real estate holdings and plenty of financial clout. But that’s not all they have in common,” said Tor. “I found their names from the same place True found those on your list: Charles Babbage gave them to me!”
“Good Lord!” cried Pearl. I snapped around to stare at Tor as the realization struck me, too. “I know what those names have in common—not only their social rank. If I’m not mistaken, most were members of the Vagabond Club!”
“Bull’s-eye,” said Tor with a smile. “I thought you’d appreciate that.”
“That means Lawrence is in on this, too?” I asked.
“I’m afraid so,” Tor answered me. “And that’s the problem I encountered in Paris. You see, after four months of negotiation, these charming gentlemen don’t want to pay up.”
So that’s what that memo on parking was all about! That bastard Lawrence was getting the bank to park money—illegally—in a tax haven he planned to buy himself! Using the power of his position for personal financial gain was identical to insider trading! I had to laugh bitterly at the irony of it all. I’d chosen the sleaziest folks I knew—in a sort of private joke—as a place to tuck my illegally gotten cash. Now I learn they’d been plotting to do something even more nefarious themselves! What a thin line was walked by men of fine affairs, I thought.
But the worst irony of all was one that could be truly appreciated only by me: What Lawrence had done to Tor and the others was almost precisely what had happened to my grandfather nearly twenty years ago. Take someone’s brilliant idea, nurtured with sweat and tears, and rip it from under him like a rug, milking it for all it’s worth until you bleed it dry. There had to be a way to retaliate.
“That snake,” said Pearl when Tor had finished explaining where he’d left things with Lawrence. “If we don’t redeem those bonds within two weeks, he’ll redeem them for us—as our creditor—and then we’re really screwed.”
“Oui,” agreed Lelia, “they are making the screwings in us like a nail.”
“I don’t think that’s what she meant, Mother,” said Georgian.
“But it’s close enough,” Tor agreed.
“We’ve got to get those stolen bonds out of his hands,
