Ace in the Hole Read Online Free

blinked, startled at the senator’s crudeness. For his part, Christian’s gaze hardened into chips of blue ice, cold and hard. The man did not like his boss. At all. Stone couldn’t say he blamed the guy.
    Christian held out a stapled sheaf of papers, and Stone took it with a mumbled word of thanks while Senator Lacey wandered away and sat down on the sofa with a laptop computer.
    “If you have any questions or need me to walk you through the senator’s usual routine, let me know,” Christian said.
    “I will. Thanks.” Good God, the awkwardness of it. Last time he’d seen this man, he’d been half-crazed with lust, so hungry to have a lover with intelligence and breeding and class that he could hardly stop himself from coming all over the guy’s backside. Christian Chatsworth-Brandeis represented everything he’d ever craved in life and been denied by the circumstances of his birth.
    Farmers were not technically poor people. But all their wealth was tied up in land and equipment and animals. Success and failure were determined by the whims of global warming, and food on the table was often a direct result of grueling, backbreaking labor. He was glad for the work ethic and the physical strength his youth had given him, but he’d always wished for more.
    He’d wanted a college education at a top university. Travel. Worldliness. But there hadn’t been money for it. Instead he’d enlisted in the Army, seen the world from the back end of a Humvee, and put himself through college online. He secretly liked to watch Ivy League university lectures online when he wasn’t putting his body on the line to catch bullets for people with the cash to pay for his life.
    His boss, Peregrine Cardiffe, founder of Wild Cards, Inc., was upper-crust British all the way, and he had helped Stone file off a few of his rough edges. Taught him how to wear a well-fit suit. How to drink brandy. How to act like a gentleman. “Act” being the operative word, though. It was all learned behavior. A layer of silver over lead. Whereas a man like Christian Brandeis was a gentleman all the way down to his DNA.
    And now they worked for the same bastard. Which pretty much took a repeat of last night off the table. Goddamnit. He never mixed business and his personal life. No bodyguard did. It was impossible to achieve the cold, calculating focus necessary in his line of work if feelings of any kind intruded.
    Speaking of work, he asked the senator’s security chief, “Is there anything we can do to get cameras in the hotel stairwells on short notice? Anyone can get into or out of this place undetected using the fire exits. And while the hotel is installing cameras, the south end of the loading dock is camera blind also.”
    Tucker answered sourly, “I had to change floors when we got to the hotel to even get us hallway cameras. The hotel manager informed me that the Imperium caters to clients who value their privacy and do not want the kind of invasive security I was suggesting they install.”
    Great. Nothing like parking a high-profile and controversial politician with a lot of enemies in a hotel that prized secrecy for its customers above all else. Places like this were dens of drugs, wild parties, and underage groupies a certain clientele was willing to pay top dollar to hide from public scrutiny.
    “Who picked this hotel?” he asked.
    Christian answered that one, irony rich in his voice. “That would be the senator.”
    A world of information was packed into that dry answer. Lacey was a player. Had vices he needed to hide from the public. Was using the absence from Washington to indulge. Which geometrically increased his exposure to a would-be killer.
    “Poison of preference for the senator?” he asked quietly.
    “Arsenic, if I had to choose. But rat poison would be fine if it did the trick.”
    Stone grinned. Yeah. No love lost between this guy and his boss. “Does he know you’re plotting his demise? Should I be watching