The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) Read online

  The Second Lie

  By Anna Richland

  A businesswoman desperate to achieve her dream.

  Wine seller Christina Alvarez Mancini told one little lie—to reassure wealthy clients, she invented a suave British boss. With her ultimate dream, a winery of her own, close to becoming reality, she can’t allow irregularities at a high-end wine auction to jeopardize her reputation.

  A con man in love with a good plan.

  Stig needs money, fast. An immortal Viking thief who discovered the perfect role as a fictional wine merchant, he’s days away from the big payoff. Even if the California woman who created his character realizes a real person is conducting business in London, he’ll disappear. That’s what he does best.

  Secrets that turn deadly.

  Stig has success in his sights when Christina walks into his auction preview, ready to ruin his plan. Experience tells Stig to cut and run; a thousand years of boredom compel him to flirt. And when deadly Vikings from Stig’s past crash the party, Christina and Stig are forced to cooperate in order to escape. Yet everywhere they flee, it’s these two rivals’ own lies that set the greatest traps…

  Book two of The Immortal Vikings

  99,000 words

  Dear Reader,

  Happy New Year! As always, I’m eschewing any sort of formal resolution because I know it would be abandoned within a month (and probably by January 2nd). Instead, every year, I promise myself that I’ll continue to read widely and generously, across publishers, authors and genres, and that I’ll never apologize for either what I read, or how much time I spend doing it. I hope you’ll all join me in promising the same to yourself this and every year!

  This month, Washington, D.C., power couple Sam and Nick are back in Marie Force’s romantic suspense Fatal Scandal. This is a series it’s never too late to dive into and find out what thousands of readers rave about. Pick up Fatal Scandal today or go back to the beginning with Fatal Affair.

  Joining Marie in the D.C. setting is Emma Barry with Party Lines. In this contemporary romance, as a presidential campaign rages and a reckless affair becomes a relationship, a cynical Democrat and an ambitious Republican will have to choose between party loyalty and their hearts. Recommended for those who love Scandal, opposites-attract romances, or a book where a happy ever after seems impossible because the lives of our characters are just too different.

  Looking for a hot alpha male and a smart, self-sufficient heroine in a cracktastic contemporary romance read? Meet Metal: he’s trained to kill and to heal. So when a beautiful, wounded woman falls into his arms, he can save her and defend her against the ruthless enemies after the secrets in her head. Midnight Promises by Lisa Marie Rice delivers a sexy, page-turning read!

  Speaking of sexy, Jeffe Kennedy’s Under His Touch is sure to heat things up. Unable to resist each other, a reserved Brit and his much younger colleague defy common sense and convention to indulge in a very kinky secret affair in this erotic romance.

  For mystery fans, Shirley Wells is back with Dead Simple, which sees P.I. Dylan Scott put his personal problems aside to hunt down a killer and find justice for an old friend. See how the Dylan Scott Mysteries started in Presumed Dead.

  In Anna Richland’s paranormal romance The Second Lie, when an immortal Viking thief tries to scam a California wine merchant, he discovers he picked the wrong woman to rip off. Stig knows escaping their kidnappers won’t be easy, but gaining Christina’s trust is even harder.

  Also in paranormal romance this month is Broken Shadows by A.J. Larrieu, in which a telekinetic who’s lost her gift finds new purpose as a supernatural neutralizer—if only the man she loves wasn’t susceptible to her altered powers.

  Historical romance fans will be happy to see a new offering from Susanna Fraser. In Freedom to Love, a British officer wounded at the Battle of New Orleans is rescued by a mixed-race Creole beauty—and when he discovers she has dire troubles of her own, his honor as a gentleman demands he rescue her in turn.

  Last, we say goodbye to a beloved character and series in Transmuted, the last installment of Karina Cooper’s St. Croix Chronicles. She might have won the battle, but Cherry and her companions will risk it all to see the Karakash Veil’s threat finally ended. Don’t miss this wonderful conclusion, or start the journey now with Cherry and pick up Tarnished, available from Avon.

  Coming in February 2015: the first in a new erotic romance trilogy from Lynda Aicher, and three incredible new authors bring us Russian skaters, post-apocalyptic love and a fresh new adult mystery.

  Here’s wishing you a wonderful month—and a wonderful year—of books you love, remember and recommend.

  Happy reading!

  Angela James

  Editorial Director, Carina Press

  Dedication

  It’s time I thanked my children publicly for their support. They’ve endured many Shirtless Cover Dudes as well as a distracted mother on deadline telling them to pretend like they are orphans in a book and take care of themselves. Even if I don’t allow my son and daughter to read this story for several more years, I’m touched that they are as interested in and proud of my writing as I am of their accomplishments.

  This book is for my son and daughter. I love you and I’m proud of the hours of hard work you have dedicated to learning new skills such as trumpet and unicycling. As you grow older, I hope you both continue to work hard, be as creative as you are now with your magazines and art projects, and share your wonderful smiles with the world. As a romance reader and author, I promise not to criticize you for your choices in pleasure reading. Sports pages and graphic novels are fine. Only a lack of reading rots your brain. You have my permission to remind me of this in the years to come, but please note I did not include the internet in my list.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m not British, so Rebecca Vaux and Sarah Lang provided invaluable advice on slang, including my favorite new phrase flasher mac to describe what I would have innocently called a trench coat. Rebecca caught many errors, but I’ll always remember that Englishwomen carry handbags, not purses. Thanks also to Michelle Drew, a complete stranger I met at a conference and corralled into reading this, for catching other errors. Somehow in the credit card age I forgot that the actual British currency is pounds! Oops!

  I could always count on Liz Sloat and Leslie Axvig to cheer for me and answer questions. When I was stumped over winery names, the creative Fiona Cohen offered dozens of wonderful suggestions. Thanks to Liz Moynihan for reminding me of basic facts about vaccines vs. antimicrobials, and my doctor reader for emergency room advice. Althea Preston, automotive genius and romance writer, helped me with literary car theft.

  Even when I struggled, my friend Mary Downie was enthusiastic about Stig and Christina’s story. Finishing this book would have been much harder without her telling me to keep going. It feels redundant to thank her in every book, but she always deserves my gratitude.

  I doubt any husband could listen more patiently to descriptions of the Mail Rail and art thefts than the long-suffering Mr. Richland. Thank you for taking the whole family to London and Belgium, climbing many stairs despite sideways rain, herding chickens in Bruges, visiting out-of-the-way towns (and Waterloo!) and humoring my enthusiasm for underground spaces, cave systems and odd transportation. I look forward to more wrong turns lead
ing to France, as long as we’re together.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Author's Note

  Excerpt

  Chapter One

  Christina’s little black dress itched. When she’d folded it in her carry-on next to her better black heels and a pair of stockings, she’d forgotten how the unlined side-zipper irritated the skin immediately below her armpit, but the threshold of Bodeby’s London auction house was eight time zones too late to change her armor. The Bodeby’s foyer wasn’t half as large as the entrance hall at Uncle Robert’s California estate, but what the townhouse lacked in square footage, it compensated for with elegance her uncle would never understand how to mimic.

  “Madam?” The doorman glanced at her black rollie-suitcase, completely lacking in the designer touches that auction preview guests would have on anything they carried. She’d forgotten to remove the airline tag attached to the suitcase handle, and he probably suspected she’d changed clothes in a Heathrow Airport bathroom. From his completely blank expression, she could tell he didn’t think she belonged with the one percent upstairs. “May I be of assistance?”

  “Christina Mancini.” She offered a smile and one of the cream linen-paper stock business cards she reserved for first impressions. “I emailed Monday that I planned to attend tonight’s preview tasting. Several lots sourced by my firm Morrison and Mancini for Lord Seymour are in the catalog.”

  All true. Unsaid was that Bodeby’s catalog listed two times more wine brokered by her company than her private records corroborated. Until she met whoever represented the estate of her deceased client and examined the actual bottles, she wasn’t prepared to discuss her suspicions with the world’s dominant auctioneer of fine and rare wines.

  The indication to proceed to the coat check was a discreet backward step and abbreviated open-palm sweep low near the man’s leg. After six years sourcing thousand-dollar vintages for the rich, she knew his informality signaled equality among working peers. He would have offered a slight bow and a second extended greeting to a client.

  “Thank you.” She was inside, her suitcase whisked to a discreet closet by uniformed staff who ranked below the doorman. People in her position offering expert personal services to the wealthy fell into the same zone as old-fashioned companions or tutors in books. Not on an equal social level, at least not in most of her clients’ minds, but still experts who were respected. Establishing a connection with the staff manager of a client’s household was the best way to create a long relationship with the person who paid the bills, especially since the staff manager usually signed the checks. Bodeby’s was undoubtedly run much like a wealthy house, and the man who’d admitted her could be a future ally.

  She might need one.

  If the fluttering in her stomach as she ascended the stairs to the reception was any indication, the frowning old men in the gilt-framed portraits lining the stairwell already judged her guilty, perhaps of merely being a woman in the wine world. They wouldn’t be the first, so she focused on the careful placement of each foot to avoid snagging her heels on the patterned stair runner and modulated her breathing in preparation for entering the tasting. A pastry at the airport would have absorbed the acid in her stomach, but she’d hoped to arrive before the preview opened. Evening rush hour traffic, combined with March rain, had ruined that plan.

  “Miss Mancini.” With impeccable timing, the auction house employee reached past her for a doorknob, his words straightening her spine and pulling back her shoulders.

  Her entrance to the burgundy-and-gold decorated room passed unnoticed by the wine collectors mingling underneath the frescoed ceiling. The faded elegance of the overhead hunting scene also compared favorably to the Sistine Chapel reproduction crowning Uncle Robert’s powder room, but she wasn’t there to gawk at the trappings of good taste.

  Perhaps a hundred guests circulated between tables where wine stewards provided micro-sized tasting pours, one vintage per station. Elsewhere, people chatted while servers offered small bites and removed empty stemware. Patrons ebbed and flowed at the tasting stations, but they pooled deepest around a man stationed in front of a faux wine cellar installed in the middle of the room. That was a nice touch, filling a space that usually felt empty away from the pouring tables. It could have been tacky, but the warm-colored stone looked real and gave the man at the group’s center a superb backdrop. He appeared to be in his early forties, dark blond, with a black tuxedo to equal anyone’s in the room. She couldn’t place him, but the body language of the others indicated he was the person they jostled to meet.

  To her right, Bodeby’s head of wine sales huddled with a columnist for Wine Flight magazine and a third man. All three had forgotten to put on their party faces after their ties. She’d waffled for the plane ride from San Francisco over whether to approach the auction director. Her explanation would be concise. Two years ago she’d acquired six bottles of the 1991 Kingbird Estate Cabernet Sauvignon for Lord Seymour, who’d sent a fond note about how much he’d enjoyed two of them on the occasion of his eighty-first birthday. That wiggly script was framed over her desk, and simple subtraction yielded four remaining bottles. However, the Bodeby’s sale catalog listed a full case of 1991 Kingbird Cabernet, twelve bottles estimated at nine hundred euro each, for a lot price of 10,800 euro. The international nature of fine wine meant the estimate was also listed in pounds and dollars. Fourteen thousand dollars for the case, and she couldn’t verify more than four of the twelve bottles.

  She twisted her mother’s pearl ring until her thumb could press the little ball into her palm. Seventeen other auction lots had wines she had sourced, and each one had an inflated quantity. Copies of her sales receipts were in a folder in the coat check at this moment. Ethically, she had a duty to the wine community to report fraud, but any hint of irregularity, even a buzz as slight as a single fly at the next table, would kill her business.

  Pushing the pearl harder into her hand, she kept her fist low at her side and glided clockwise around the room’s perimeter, adding distance between herself and the wine director. Her height-challenged familiarity with heels enabled her to navigate without tottering like an intruder while her mind cataloged the faces she knew well, the ones she recognized and the ones that, in friendlier circumstances, she’d work to cultivate.

  Near the corner of the room, Elaine Johnson nibbled on a cracker.

  She could chat with the auburn-haired woman while looking engaged, rather than lurking. Bonus, she genuinely liked Elaine, one of the few first-wives in the room and a lady who’d introduced her to three valuable clients over the years.

  “Christina!” Elaine’s face lit up. “I had no idea you were coming over, or I would have told Jack to give you a ride.” She smushed Christina into her chest but stopped short of a kiss that would leave lipstick on Christina’s cheek.

  In the instant Elaine squished her, Christina let her gaze return to the center of t
he room. A couple, money oozing from every perfect highlight of the too-young woman’s tawny hair, approached the group in front of the mock cellar. The woman changed posture in a way that added a cup size she didn’t need, and the older man used one of those power handshakes, left hand grabbing the younger man’s arm with his right hand extended for the killer squeeze.

  “I didn’t know I was coming until two days ago myself.” She stuck close to the truth while she watched the interplay in front of the cave. The shake recipient was lean, either from good genes or a good trainer, but he didn’t crumple under the Masters of the Universe grip. Instead he grinned with the right amount of welcome and tilted his head to make a low comment. “Mr. Morrison broke his foot on the squash court—”

  “Oh hush. He did not!” Twenty years in San Diego hadn’t pruned the older woman’s Texas roots. “He’s teasing you.”

  The gripper and the grippee shared a chuckle at the same time as Elaine.

  He was good.

  She appreciated a good handler.

  “That’s why he sent me instead.” As Elaine rolled her eyes, Christina shifted to improve her view of the knot of people in the center of the room, which included her friend’s husband. “I’ve shown him how to use his digital assistant at least six times, but you know older men.”

  “He doesn’t tell you everything, honey.” Elaine’s gaze swiveled to the same group at the moment Lord Seymour’s daughter glided through the guests. “Haven’t you noticed who’s with Jack?”

  The man with Jack was exactly who Christina was studying. He pressed Lord Seymour’s daughter’s hands and they kissed each other’s cheeks, their body language signaling they knew each other well.

  A low anger filled her empty stomach as she realized he must be the man representing the Seymour estate. With a smile that offered just enough sin for a middle-aged heiress and shoulders that didn’t look too artificial, he’d easily convince a charity socialite that selling her father’s wine collection was better than insuring it.