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He was glowering at her as though in disappointment or disapproval before his expression cleared and his black eyes were once again cool and all too familiar.
This wasn’t the Jerric Abbas she had known, but that look was definitely the cousin she had known as David Abijah, and the agent she had met in Atlanta, Micah Sloane.
The pieces were falling in place for her. Trent had become an international penny-ante broker, John Vincent, and built his reputation into that of one of the most trusted, reputable black-market brokers in the world.
Micah Sloane was fairly unknown, but Jerric Abbas wasn’t. This Jerric was making a name for himself, though. Travis Caine. She knew the man she had recently met as Travis Caine wasn’t the same one she’d met in England several years before.
They were all dead men reborn.
“Should I leave?” She rose slowly to her feet and jerked her jacket from the edge of the bench where she had laid it. Pulling it on, she suddenly felt less like a schoolgirl caught making out and more like a woman with a mind of her own.
Of course, David had always had way of making her feel like a child whenever he caught her in something she shouldn’t have been a part of. He had been a steadying influence in her life. He and his father Garren, before their deaths, had represented stability in a world that often hadn’t made sense to her.
“Miss Serborne.” He nodded his head to her before turning to John. “I hear we’re still in a bit of friendly competition.”
John rose slowly to his feet as Jerric and Catalina both remained still, too careful, too wary.
They had been followed or somehow suspected they were being spied upon. She could feel it. Had someone been watching them before Jerric and his rumored lover had come upon them?
“I trust we’ll both handle it like the professionals we are,” John drawled as Bailey watched Catalina closely.
“Always,” Micah stated, his expression hooded as he gave John another long, intent look. “Sorry to have interrupted you, but I do so enjoy getting my little pokes in where I can.”
Catalina’s laughter was silky and smooth. It was natural, though the look on her face was warning.
They were definitely being watched.
“Then Bailey and I will retire to our room, where your little pokes don’t matter,” John said mockingly as his hand settled at the back of her waist and he led her toward the doorway. “If you’ll excuse us.”
“Of course,” Jerric murmured, then his voice became a breath of sound as they moved past. “Be careful, my friends, you’ve picked up some attention.”
John and Bailey moved past them as though they hadn’t heard the brief warning. John’s arm wrapped around her waist, pulling her to him as though they had every intention of finishing what they had started as soon as they returned to their room.
Bailey would have loved to finish it. The need for it was burning through her system like a flame she couldn’t extinguish.
He had always done that to her. If he touched her, her response tormented her for days on end. When she had lost him, she had never forgotten that touch, never forgotten the man who had claimed her heart.
Glancing around, Bailey caught sight of movement in the edge of the shrubbery that led into another path of the maze. There, sheltered by the shadows, Ralph Stanford shifted back, almost hidden completely by the evergreens he was hiding within.
Bailey could feel the malevolence reaching out to her, the rage that filled the other man.
Bailey felt John’s hand at her back, a subtle warning to ignore the man as he watched them. She could ignore him for now, but she knew the time would come that ignoring him wouldn’t
be an option. Ralph hated to lose and he hated Bailey. It was a combination Bailey knew would soon strike out at her, and perhaps John as well.
CHAPTER 15
ON THE SURFACE, JOHN was the perfect businessman. He conversed with the elders of the society Bailey had been born into with a charisma and intelligence that over the next few days they would learn to respect.
Ford Grace, Samuel Waterstone, Stephen Menton-Squire, and Ronald Claymore were all on the board of directors of Serborne Enterprises, a vast umbrella of businesses and major shares in businesses that made up the Serborne fortune. It was these men who would lose a large source of income if Bailey died without an heir or changed her will to leave her fortune to a nonrelative rather than charity, as had been set up.
They were also the four men who had made the short list of suspects in the investigation she had been conducting herself for years, as well as the investigation John’s unit was involved in.
The four of them were her godfathers as well. Her father hadn’t picked one man, just as her mother hadn’t picked one woman. No, she had four sets of godparents, thank you very much.
They were also the men whom John had convinced that he was smart enough, savvy enough, and deceitful enough to help Bailey control her shares once she took them over. Not that any of them was happy that he would no longer be voting those shares. But at least they weren’t opposed to the man it seemed she was choosing to vote them.
“You’re making quite an impression,” she murmured to John as he returned to her several nights later in the ballroom after meeting the four men for drinks.
