“We’re ignoring Sloane but not your stalker.” His eyebrows rose as he thumbed through the messages and decided to speakwith Dean first. He worked with intel, saw the world in black and white, and only offered facts. Dean wouldn’t drop Romeo comments.
“The entire office is looking for you,” Dean said when he answered.
“Yeah, well. This assignment requires swimming. I didn’t have my phone on me.”
“Must be hard. Swimming with a movie star.”
Rhys had never been more thrilled to have a photographic memory. “Yup. Something like that. What did you find out?”
“That we’ve got a problem.”
“We have a lot of problems. Want to narrow it down?” He watched as Jules rubbed lotion over her long legs and realized he wasn’t breathing.
“Let’s start with the man who approached her this morning.”
Rhys squeezed the back of his neck. How had that been this morning? “What about him?”
“His payoff for doing that was upward of ten grand.”
“I’m sorry. What?” He straightened. “For that guy? What’d we miss? A hit job gone wrong? Christ.”
“That’s the thing,” Dean said. “We’ve both talked to Vincent Von Charles, and I had someone else sit down with him today. Von Charles is an attorney. He knows he didn’t do anything illegal, per se, but doesn’t want this to get around. So he’s talking to control the narrative and be done with it. He’s not going to lie, and he doesn’t have the skillset to do anything but chase ambulances and hunt for medical malpractice lawsuits.”
“Who would pay him that kind of money?” Rhys grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator.
“Exactly.”
“No, I’m serious, man. Who paid?”
“All I’ve got are my three least favorite words—”
“Fucking hell. Really?”
“Yeah. I don’t know,” Dean muttered. “Viv’s having a conniption.”
Rhys puffed his cheeks and blew out the air slowly. “I kinda feel like doing that right now, too, brother.”
“The payments are untraceable. That’s one thing. But the other is why.Why?Why do this? What was accomplished? Especially given how much money was spent. Then the flowers? Again, another untraceable transaction. With much lower stakes. Smaller buy-in. But still, why? Why does this dude want her to retire? Who wins?”
“I don’t have a clue. Some guy who wants her to be his very own stay-at-home puppet? There are a lot of delusional people out there.”
And if they had any idea how good Jules was with her mouth, they’d be even crazier. Hell. He was feeling pretty crazy at the moment. If this was what messing around was like, Rhys was crawling out of his skin for more. Though it wasn’t just her mouth and her pussy. The way she’d come for him, the empowered boldness that had blossomed when he came for her—it was more than he could fathom. Like…more.And he didn’t even know that was possible.
“You know what we’ve never looked at before?” Dean asked.
“We’ve covered everyone.”
“Not her colleagues. Her coworkers. The people she competes against at all those award shows you have to go to. The people who have thousands of dollars to blow on stupid stunts like this morning.”
His brow furrowed. “She’s America’s sweetheart. Everyone loves her.”
“Except Mason Marlow,” Dean tossed in.
“Yeah.” Rhys wandered to the sliding glass door in the living room that overlooked the pool and stepped onto the patio. “Except that dude.”
“We’re always on the lookout for typical unhinged fans who take it too far. For the obsessives who want to break into her car to leave their deranged poetry. But we’ve never considered who would benefit if she stepped out of the limelight.”
“We’re talking about a very small, very elite group of actors.”
