48. CARSON

One of the great things about Grand Cayman is that the sun sets between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. every day of the year.

And when the sun goes down, the party starts.

The club we’re in – it’s called JetStream – is all blue lights and bright whites, with electronica throbbing out of the speakers. But we’ve got a booth in the VIP section, and it’s low season for tourism, so we can actually hear each other. Sort of.

Cassie points to the dance floor and puts her lips to my ear.

“Look at them!” she says. “Who’d have thought?”

I know from experience that Maksim is a seriously good dancer – he literally lives in nightclubs, how could he not be – but Tricia is a surprise. She’s writhing and grinding with him like an old pro. All while holding a triple mojito.

If nothing else, the girl knows how to cut loose.

“I think Tricia likes him,” says Cassie.

“Are you kidding? He’s been talking to the hand since we took off from JFK.”

“She was just playing hard to get. She wants a guy to work for it.”

“That’s good,” I say. “It’s about time Maks had to work for something.”

We clink our glasses together and down some of the blue concoction inside. It’s sweet and coconut-y and totally unlike anything I usually drink. But hey, it’s Cayman. And what happens in Cayman…

I can tell by the look in her eyes that Cassie’s mind isn’t here in the club, though.

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s figure out how we’re going to tackle this when we get home.”

She grins like a kid who just got a parent to play Barbies with her. The fact that she gets so giddy about planning revenge disturbs me a little.

Not to mention the way it causes my shorts to fit more tightly.

“The woman in the red dress is key,” she says. “If we can find her, we can communicate with the organizers.”

“Agreed.”

Cassie pulls on her lower lip. It’s been a sign of deep thought since we were kids.

“Of course, that’s easier said than done,” she says. “They have plenty of kompromat on me and you – and the other contestants. But we have nothing on them. They like it that way.”

“Kompro-what, now?”

“Kompromat. It’s Russian for blackmail. Their intelligence community collects or manufactures compromising info on public figures, then uses it as leverage to ensure compliance. The US does it too, but the Russians are masters at it.”

Her competence turns me on. Is that wrong? I don’t know, but if this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

I slide my hand under the table and onto her bare thigh. She returns the favor, but her expression is still all business.

“We should operate under the assumption that this was deliberate,” she says. “But we need to make sure we don’t go in with guns blazing, just in case it wasn’t.”

“That’s what I was thinking. Diplomacy can work wonders when you give it a chance.”

“Unless you’re in a situation where someone is screwing with you,” she says. “Then you nail them to the wall with railroad spikes and pour battery acid into the wounds.”

I can’t help myself: I take her hand and lay it directly on my hard-on.

Cassie’s eyebrows go up.

“Easy, tiger,” she says, but gives me a friendly squeeze for my trouble. “We’ve got all night.”

“Believe me, it’s going to take all night.”

Her smile is so sexy it makes my heart stop.

“Promises, promises,” she purrs.

I knock back the rest of my drink in an attempt to steady myself. How was this girl possibly a virgin last week? She’s taken to sex like a fish to water.

I guess she has a lot of lost time to make up for.

“All right,” I say. “We agree that the first step is to find Red Dress and figure out what the situation is. If it’s innocuous, we settle it.”

She smiles. “I love it when you use $50 words like that.”

“It’s my milieu,” I say, buffing my fingernails on my Guayabera shirt.

“Oh my God,” she gasps. “It sounds so dirty when you use it the wrong way like that.”

She’s right, dammit, I did screw it up. I chuckle and shake my head.

“The question is what we do if it’s not innocuous,” she says. “If they’re trying to pull a fast one.”

That prompts an unpleasant idea that never occurred to me before. It should have, but it didn’t.

“What if the whole thing was a set-up to get kompromat on a group of wealthy men?” I ask. “Maybe you were meant to be collateral damage the whole time.”

Molten lava seethes behind her eyes. Apparently it never occurred to her, either. Now that is has…

“You’re obscenely rich,” she says. “So are the other contestants. That means you have resources.”

“What are you driving at?”

“Just like Liam Neeson, I’ve got a very particular set of skills.”

“Okay, you’ve got the skills, I’ve got the resources. What are we going to do with them?”

She raises her glass in salute and downs it in a gulp.

“We’re going to fuck them up,” she says. “Hard.”

“First things first,” I say. “We have to find Red Dress.”

Cassie rummages in her purse and pulls out her phone. She slides her finger along the screen for a moment, then turns it toward me. On it is a photo of a laptop screen, featuring a woman with long, golden curls.

“It’s not much,” she says. “But it’s a start. I wish I had full access to my agency computers. But then I’d have to explain what I was doing.”

A Cheshire cat grin threatens to circle all the way around my head as I picture the floor-to-ceiling screen in my computer room running through thousands of online photos per hour.

“I happen to have something back at my penthouse that may be of service,” I say.

Before I can elaborate, Maks and Tricia suddenly appear, sliding into their seats on the other side of the booth. They’re sweating freely and laughing like kids.

They see the looks on our faces and the laughter dries up.

“I am thinking you need drinks,” Maksim says.

Tricia’s eyebrows go up. “Quadruples, by the looks of things. Everything all right?”

I smile. Cassie follows suit.

“Nothing we can’t figure out,” I say. “Man, you guys were tearing it up out there!”

Maksim beams at Tricia.

“A dancer is only as good as his partner,” he says.

“You notice his English always gets better when he’s throwing out pick-up lines?” Tricia says, shaking her head.

Cassie giggles, and it’s almost as if our previous conversation never happened. She’s the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met.

She raises her hand to catch the server’s eyes. She twirls her index finger in a gesture to signal another round.

“All right,” she says. “Let’s kick this night into high gear!”

The waitress arrives with a tray of drinks and a shot of what smells like top-shelf Don Julio tequila for each of us.

“Compliments of the house,” she says with a practiced smile.

We each grab a glass and clink them together.

“To obscene riches,” I say.

We drink. The smooth liquor goes down like a fire in the walls, heat without flame. I highly recommend expensive tequila if you have the means. The cheap stuff is just rubbing alcohol in a fancier bottle, as far as I’m concerned.

Suddenly Cassie’s lips are at my ear. The scent of her shot fills my nostrils.

“Pace yourself,” she whispers. “We’ve got a long night ahead of us, remember?”

Under the table, her hand slides under the hem of my shorts and finds the delicate skin of my cock.

“Trust me,” I say. “It’s all I can think about.”