The bats whirled up from the gloom of the distant gable, and thunder rolled softly in the distance.
“This way, please,” Sykes directed, turning to lead them up the carpeted stairs.
?
Five
Adam Bates staredup at the gilded facade of the Puri Beach Club.
Shit,he thought with a lurch of dismay.
He ought to have figured out what he was about to walk into back at the hotel.But when Mr.Chowdhury had tactfully suggested that Constance hang back from this particular mission, Adam had assumed the solicitor was showing additional concern for Constance’s safety because she was a member of his employer’s family.
He had been thinking of Constance as the charming heiress of a high-ranking civil servant or the firecracker partner-in-crime to the woman he loved.
The look the majordomo had just given her reminded him that she was something else as well.
The polished brass lanterns, the carpeted stairs, the manicured hedges—they all screamed of a world that Adam had lived in for years and neverwanted to go back to.Pulling on his impeccably tailored dinner jacket earlier that evening had felt like forcing himself into an old, half-rotted skin.
Adam hadn’t worn a dinner jacket since the day his father had disowned him.
He had never been to the Puri Beach Club before.That didn’t matter.He knew how places like this worked—places with great big walls to keep the wrong sort of people on the outside.
Which meant he knew exactly what was going to happen next.
The majordomo led the four of them into the club.Adam didn’t let that coax him into lowering his guard.The situation wasn’t over.It was just being passed on for someone else to handle.
Shit.
They climbed the stairs to the club’s public rooms, which were situated on the upper floor.More thick carpets muffled their footsteps as they passed walls of gleaming hardwood hung with dull landscape paintings.Potted palms softened the corners.The air rang with the clink of glass and a giggle of English laughter.
Waiters strode through the halls in picturesque uniforms, their white tunics and pressed trousers accented by bright red sashes.They were universally dark in complexion—but then they would be, wouldn’t they?
Adam felt sick.
Thirteen years fell away, and Adam was in a different hallway echoing with the same sounds of privileged chatter and brittle crystal, where silent men carrying trays of champagne moved aside like ghosts as the silk-clad and glittering elite swept past without so much as a glance.
He remembered sitting on velvet with brandy on his tongue, forcing a smile as he endured the luxury of a world built on exactly who it kept out.
The underhanded innuendos.The backhanded compliments.
The crushing, impossible weight of his father’s expectations.
Surely you can muster up enough intelligence to engage in a little polite conversation.
For a moment, it was hard to breathe.Sweat beaded on the back of Adam’s neck.The dinner jacket was a vise closing around his chest.
This wasn’t the same, Adam desperately reminded himself.He wasn’t walking into the prison of that old life.He hadn’t come here to try to force himself into a mold he would never fit—and to hear, over and over, how he was failing at it.
He would never do that again.
Adam tried to flash Ellie a reassuring smile.Her worried look lingered.
Well, maybe she should be worried, Adam reasoned grimly.This place was more threatening than the wilds of the Cayo.The opulence around him was its own sort of snake-infested jungle—one that Adam trusted far less than the kind he was used to, with actual snakes.
His hand twitched at his side, missing the reassuring feel of the hilt of his machete.
They passed a dining salon tastefully decked out with white linen and silver.Patrons in dinner gowns and jewels watched them pass, blatantly assessing.
