A Dangerous Game: A Short Story

By Ella Monroe

In A Dangerous Game, an e-original by Ella Monroe, Taylor Cane is planning a dangerous game for tonight's over-the-top party for Washington DC's privileged crowd. Not even her three best friends know what she's going to do ... what she has to do. Because if Jackie Whitman, Laura Beth Ballou, or Lettie Velasquez ever found out they'd do absolutely anything to stop her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Feb 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466832749

Ella Monroe

ELLA MONROE is the pseudonym for the Washington, DC based, debut writing duo Marilyn Rauber and Amy Reingold. Maz Rauber is a former reporter who covered national politics—and all its scandals—for the New York Post. The Australian-born writer lives in the DC area with her husband and, on occasion, their two college-aged children. Amy Reingold is a writer, a textile artist, and a classically-trained Cordon Bleu chef. Raised in small-town Illinois, she has lived in London and Hong Kong. But her favorite by far is the nation’s capital, where she and her husband have raised two daughters and assorted pets.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Taylor Cane put the last dab of bright turquoise nail polish on her left big toe and screwed the cap back on the bottle. The fumes didn’t usually make her queasy but the mood she was in…everything was making her stomach churn. She wondered just how lethal this stuff was.

I definitely can’t afford to kill off any brain cells, she muttered to herself. Not tonight.

Taylor had big plans this evening. And nothing, nada, was going to wreck them.

She needed to not only be in super vamp mode for Phillip Morton’s party, but totally in control. Which meant not drinking anything stronger than water and definitely no smoking—even if Franklin Johnson had promised to bring back a stash of top-grade kootenay from his Canadian ski trip.

Sinking back into the pillows on her bed, Taylor stretched out her legs, wiggled her toes, and examined her painted fingernails for smudges.

She checked off her mental list.

Nails. Done.

Hair. Shampooed and blow-dried by Marcello into a smooth, shiny sheet of white-blond silk.

Brazilian bikini wax. Ouch! But thank you anyway, Jasmina.

There was always some fancy new salon or boutique opening in fashionable Georgetown, and Taylor loved to try each of them.

Perfume. Jean Patou Joy at $2,200 a bottle. Swiped from the drawer where her mom kept off-the-chart luxury gifts she got from her clients. It certainly paid to be known as Jennifer Cane, Washington, D.C.’s Fixer. The woman who politicians and influence-peddlers needed as much as they feared.

Underwear. Lace bra and thong. Taylor thought about going for red or black but decided white would be deliciously ironic.

There was a brisk rap on the door, a two-second pause, then Taylor’s mother appeared in the doorway.

I’m leaving now. I wanted to say good-bye, Jennifer Cane told her daughter. As she stood there, purse and keys in her hand, her eyes raked over the room and landed on the skimpy dress hanging on the closet door.

Please tell me that’s a slip and not your party dress, she said curtly.

Okay, Jennifer, I’ll tell you it’s a slip, Taylor answered. She’d been calling her parents by their first names almost since she first started talking.

Her mom frowned. As I’ve told you repeatedly, what you wear reflects who you are in this town.

She and Taylor stared each other down.

You seriously think I’d dress like you?

Jennifer was wearing her standard Washington, D.C. attire: a black suit and sensible black pumps, though she’d switched her trademark white blouse for one that had ruffles cascading down the front. She’d also added a lapis lazuli necklace that matched her dark blue eyes and she’d swept her light brown hair, usually in a ponytail, into a chignon. It was her definition of dressing up for an evening out.

As she did at least several nights a week, Jennifer was going to one of those boring cocktail parties where she’d spend all night schmoozing with lobbyists, K Street lawyers, and members of Congress as they made and broke deals and promises over too many glasses of scotch. This event was at the lavish Ronald Reagan Building,