Excerpt of Some Die Telling by Stella Cameron

"Goodbye."

He lowered the receiver thoughtfully and let it slide into the cradle. She had sounded worried, this Ellen Shaw, this woman from Boston he'd somehow allowed to become partly his responsibility for as long as she chose to stay here in London.

"Hugh," she had called him, quite naturally. "Yes, Hugh, of course I'll be there this afternoon." Odd how informal these Americans were. To an Englishwoman whose employer he was about to become he would automatically have been Mr. Weston.

He lifted a pile of books from the floor to his desk. The little office in his flat above the used-book store and wine bar he owned had become too small. He sat in the creaky oak chair and rested crossed feet on the desk, stretching his long legs and locking his hands behind his head. Ellen Shaw had a nice voice. But he should have expected that. Her twin sister also had a nice voice. Fiona Shaw herself was beautiful, too, and persuasive enough to have made him hire her to work part-time in the wine bar when he hadn't needed extra help. Not that she wasn't an asset. She might know nothing about wine — or books — but as an aspiring actress, she did know how to assume a role and was wonderful with customers.

Fiona. Hugh stared unseeingly at the heap of frayed leather book spines before him. Fiona, who had walked in from the street in the middle of a summer's afternoon and asked for employment. Chance or design?

There had been too much for him to absorb in the past few days. His mind probably wasn't connecting rationally. But the thoughts kept clicking over, a day-by-day, blow-by-blow sequence of events that had happened since Fiona Shaw breezed into his world. Many of those events had seemed unimportant — until now.

After only a few weeks of working for him, Fiona had asked if he was interested in sponsoring her sister for a work permit in England. Ellen, Fiona had assured him, was an expert on antique books, Hugh's own obsession, and Ellen also had the skills he needed in a bookstore manager. Ellen would slip easily into the nitty-gritty of running the business and give him all the time he needed for the main love of his life — hunting down the rare volumes his special clients paid him so well to find. Fiona herself, who had come to England with a touring theater company, had chosen to stay on in London and already had a small part in a new local production. The sisters would live together, but Ellen needed a sponsor who could offer her employment in her unusual field. Hugh was the perfect answer to the Shaws's problem. And they were perfect for him, Fiona had insisted.

And he'd bought the whole package, been convinced his so- called act of philanthropy would fill his own needs and realize the dream of a woman he didn't know but whose interests he understood because they were his own. Then in one week, the past seven days, the neat plan had begun to fall apart. A few minutes ago, when he'd placed the call to Fiona's flat in St. John's Wood, he hadn't really expected to discover that Ellen had arrived from America. But she had. So why couldn't he stuff his unfounded suspicions back into whatever hole they'd crawled from and be grateful?

Ellen was here. That had to prove that his doubts about Fiona were hogwash.

The tapping of his cat's claws on polished wooden floors distracted him. Vladimir leaped onto the desk, climbed on top of the pile of books and turned her marmalade back on Hugh. Her tail swung slowly to and fro, chopping the book titles into moving fragments.

Too many questions. He tried to will his mind into neutral and failed.

Surely the Shaw sisters would prove to be only minor pieces in the unwelcome chess game his life had just become. Currently the game seemed at stalemate.

"What are we going to do, old girl?" Hugh gripped the edge of the desk and pulled his chair closer until he could stroke Vladimir's thick fur. Hairs sprayed through a band of thin sunlight from the window. Winter might have been approaching, but this purring female who had, as a tiny kitten, been passed off as a male, managed to shed in all seasons.

"Do you think I'm making something out of nothing?" God, he wished someone could convince him he was on the wrong track.

The cat stood precariously on the books and arched her back. Casting Hugh a disdainful yellow-eyed glare, she leaped to the floor.

"You've got it, Vladimir," Hugh remarked. "That was a foolish question on my part. It's up to me to find out if I'm right. No one else gives a damn — yet."

* * *

Fiona had always been unpredictable, Ellen thought, but never this unpredictable. The crowd spewing from Hampstead underground station jostled her until she reached the steep High Street sidewalk. How could her sister have urged her to come to England, helped her to make all the arrangements, then simply not been there when she arrived or left any message at the flat they were to share? The sick dread that had been building approached panic for an instant. Fiona had made absolutely no contact in the two days since Ellen's plane touched down at Heathrow airport. Ellen had taken a cab to St. John's Wood and let herself into the flat with the key her sister had left under the doormat. In that two days her mood swang wildly between fear that something awful had happened to Fiona, and anger at the probability that her sister was repeating her old behavior patterns. Since they'd been children, Ellen had covered for Fiona's bizarre tendency to disappear, initially for hours and later for days. Usually she returned penitent, grateful for Ellen's loyalty and full of excuses for the sudden absence.

This time the excuse would have to be really something.

A chill wind sent a few yellowing leaves scurrying up from the ground, and she shivered. This threatened to be an October that single-mindedly heralded winter with no reminders of the summer past. Ellen took a calming breath and made her way to the curb to get her bearings. Where was Fiona? The last time she'd taken off, really taken off, had been after a scrape with the police. But she hadn't been guilty of anything, except knowing that her boyfriend was up to something illegal. Surely this absence wasn't anything like that one.

Wind, the wind that seemed to blow endlessly in this city of a thousand races, tossed Ellen's hair across her face and bore with it the sooty smell from the deep tube train shaft she'd just left.

Hugh Weston's place was on Flask Walk. "Left from the station, then first left," he'd said. "And we're on the left." She'd expected him to laugh at that, but he hadn't. He'd sounded a little somber on the phone but pleasant enough, very English in a clipped BBC announcer way. When he'd first identified himself she had asked tentatively if he was aware of any plans Fiona might have had to be away for a few days. He'd come back sharply with, "That was my main reason for calling. She hasn't been in for a week and she hasn't contacted me. I don't expect that kind of behavior from my staff. You're supposed to come to the shop this afternoon. May I expect you?"

She couldn't afford not to be expected by Hugh Weston. She'd given up her boring but steady job as a librarian in Boston, sold what furniture she had and backed out of the lease on her apartment to come here. And she could only stay in London if she was employed by this "perfect boss" Fiona had miraculously produced. But Fiona should be here to smooth the way, damn it.