Page 4 of Under Her Protection

She put the thought away in the small locked place where she kept the things she had taught herself not to feel. She had been keeping things in that place for twenty-five years. One more fit.

She thought, briefly, of Blackthorn Security. Three years ago at a Monaco dinner she had stood across a room from one of their operatives, a very handsome female bodyguard who had been protecting the Queen of Monaco. She watched the exits and caught Vivienne watching her and had not looked away first. Vivienne had asked for her card then. She had not expected to need it.

She looked at her own face in the anteroom mirror. The light in here was low and gold and flattered no one, and what she saw was a woman whose face did not move much. Dark hair pulled into the low knot she had worn since her mid-thirties. Grey-blue eyes. The small line at the corner of her mouth she had earned from a decade of not smiling at men who expected her to. She looked, she thought, exactly like the woman she had spent her life building, and tonight that woman was being asked a question she was going to answer. She tilted her chin half a degree and her face assembled itself into what she needed. It was a small physical act, and it worked.

She dropped the phone back into her inner pocket. The fabric of the coat absorbed it without a sound.

When she walked back into the lounge her face was as it had been. Isabella was mid-story about a Milanese designer and a tax problem. Sienna was laughing. Helena was watching Vivienne across the rim of her glass, and Helena's eyes, which missed very little, asked a question.

Vivienne answered it with a small, practiced shake of her head. Not now. Not here.

Helena nodded.

Vivienne sat back down in the armchair that was hers, picked up her Armagnac, and drank it as though nothing had happened, because in this room nothing had. That was the contract. That was why the Velvet Circle existed.

The Velvet Circle: An exclusive group of some of the most powerful women in the world.

Isabella leaned across the small walnut table and touched the back of Vivienne's wrist once, briefly, as she sometimes did when she had read the room before Vivienne had finished arranging it. Her fingers were cool. She did not ask. Vivienne let the hand stay the two seconds Isabella wanted it there, then lifted her own to her glass, and the contact broke without ceremony. The tight place in her chest, the one she'd spent the last ten minutes keeping off her face, eased a fraction.

Sienna talked about her goalkeeper. Helena contributed observations about a newspaper column. Isabella ordered food without consulting anyone and the food arrived, and the conversation flowed around the small silence Vivienne had brought back with her, and covered it.

She laughed twice. She meant one of the laughs.

When she rose to leave it was earlier than usual, and only Helena noticed. Helena walked with her as far as the foyer, which was not where Helena had been going, and stopped at the door.

"Whatever it is," Helena said quietly, "if you need Zurich, Zurich is yours."

"Thank you."

"I am not asking."

"I know you are not."

Helena nodded once and returned to the lounge.

Colette had Vivienne's coat waiting. She slid it over Vivienne's shoulders the way a good tailor slid a jacket, no tugging, no ceremony. Her warm observant eyes rested on Vivienne's face for a breath longer than usual, and she said, "Drive carefully, Madame."

"Always."

"Until next time."

"Until next time."

Outside, the car was already at the kerb. The driver, who knew better, did not get out. Vivienne crossed the pavement in the light wet air, slid into the back seat, and closed the door herself.

She did not tell the driver to take her home.

She said to the driver, "The office. Quickly."

The car pulled away from the unmarked door, and Maison Noire sealed itself behind her, and Vivienne Strauss was working again before they had reached the end of the street.

2

Leo had her feet on the coffee table and a beer in her hand when her sister told her she was wrong about the movie.

"You are wrong," Avery said. "You are factually wrong. This is not an opinion."

"It is an opinion."