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“Yes, you do. You know I’m doing everything I can to shore things up for you until you get those products to market. But this will make a statement.”
The muscles in his head clenched like a vise, a deep throb radiating through his skull. “I’m ultra-clear on this, Sam. Mea culpa, my mess. We will win. Meanwhile, let me know if you’ve got anything on Gehrig. I have a week to pull them apart.”
“I’ll make some calls.”
“Thanks. Appreciate it.”
“Jared?”
“Mmm?”
“You created Stone Industries. You’re the only man who should be leading it. That’s all the focus you need.”
A smile curved his lips. “Thanks for having my back, Sam.”
He put the phone down. Wondered what he would have done if he hadn’t bumped into Sam at a start-up conference in the Valley and begun a lifelong friendship with the mentor who’d taken him under his wing when his father had gone AWOL. Who’d taught him that sometimes you could trust a person, that sometimes they were always there for you. And for a young, hotheaded Jared with an astronomically successful start-up on his hands, it had meant the difference between being a dot-com failure and the solid, profitable company Stone Industries was today.
An email brought his attention back to his computer screen. It was from his PI, Danny.
Bingo. Can I say, this one was my pleasure?
Why that made his insides twist, he didn’t know. He opened the report, printed it and threw it in a folder. He also didn’t know why he did that. Maybe he wanted to give Bailey a chance to tell him herself first. Maybe as he’d said from the beginning, trust was paramount to him. And maybe he knew what it was like to avoid the past because it only brought pain with it. And you couldn’t change it no matter how much you wanted to.
Maybe he liked Bailey St. John far more than he was willing to admit.
* * *
Bailey was bleary-eyed by the time she dragged herself away from her computer to join Jared for dinner on the intimate little seaside terrace of the villa that overlooked the Mediterranean Sea. Smaller and cozier than Davide Gagnon’s showpiece of a home, it was luxurious but understated. The kind of place you could hide away forever in.
If only she could.
She pushed her hair away from her face and took a long sip of the full-bodied red Jared had unearthed from the cellar. You didn’t actually relax when your boss looked as if he wanted to toss you off the cliff you were sitting on into the glorious azure water below. When decisions you’d made in the past suddenly seemed questionable when at the time, they’d seemed like the only way out.
Jared topped up her glass and stood up. “We’re taking a break from work tonight. Both our brains are fried.”
True. She stifled a surge of relief as she surveyed him in jeans and a navy T-shirt. Then thought maybe it was a bad idea because work had meant there was no space in her brain to remember that kiss.
“I think I might try to get some sleep,” she demurred. “I haven’t been doing so much of that.”
He stared her down. “I built a fire in the pit. Sky’s perfect for star spotting.”
“And here I did not figure you for a Boy Scout.”
“The wood was there,” he said drily. “I piled it up. Come.”
He picked up his glass and a blue folder he’d left on the chair and started walking down the hill. Hadn’t he said no business? Maybe there was a detail he wanted to chew over, and that was good because then they wouldn’t be diverging into the personal and Jared wouldn’t be prying for information on Alexander Gagnon.
She stood up and followed him down to the fire pit with her wine. A series of big boulders with flat surfaces had been positioned around the pit to sit on. She lowered herself on one and watched as Jared lit the paper and coaxed the fire into a steady flame. “My father loved fires,” he said. “Used to see how big he could make them go.”
“How old were you when your father embezzled the money?”
He glanced at her, his profile hard and unyielding in the firelight. “More questions while you remain a mystery?”
She lifted a shoulder. “You brought him up.”
“I was in my second year of university.”
“That’s why you dropped out?”
“Yes.” He walked around and agitated the logs with a stick. “My parents had been helping me. I couldn’t afford it after we lost everything.”
“What happened to your father when it was discovered he took the money?”
He put the stick down and came to sit beside her on a neighboring rock. “He went to jail for three years.”
Oh. She’d wondered if the more lenient laws on white-collar crime had kept him out of jail. “What does he do now?”
He stretched his long legs out in front of him and looked into the fire. “While he was in jail, my mother divorced him and married the head of the European Central Bank. When my father got out, he disappeared. I had him traced to the Caribbean, where he’s been living in a hut on the beach ever since.”
Wow. She tried to digest it all. “Do you have any idea why he did it?”
His lip curled, emphasizing the rather dangerous-looking, twisting white scar that ran across it. “Why he stole money from his employer and his closest friends? I’d have to be a psychologist to diagnose, but it might have something to do with my mother. She bled him dry every day of his life. And it was still never enough.”
She pulled in a breath. Well, there you go. When you had attitudes like his, they came from somewhere. “What do you mean, bled him dry?”
He looked back at the fire. “She didn’t know when to stop. My father made a fortune in investment banking, but you could tell in the later years, he was done. He needed a break. But she never let him back off. Their wealth defined her. When she couldn’t flash the latest hundred-thousand-dollar Maserati in front of her friends, when my father failed to provide, she left.” His jaw hardened as he turned to her. “And if you’re going to ask what happened then, my father lost the plot completely. As in his mind.”
She looked over at him in the silence that followed, as big as any she’d encountered. “Still? Is he still like that?”
He kept his gaze trained on the leaping flames. “I haven’t talked to him in a long time. I don’t know. I send him money every month and he takes it.”
She stared at him. How hard that must have been. How much it must have hurt. His manifesto made so much sense to her all of a sudden.
“Not all women are like your mother, Jared. I’m not.”
“See, here’s where I’m having a problem with that, Bailey.” His low, tight tone sent a frisson of warning dancing across her skin. “I don’t even know who you are. I have a multimillion-dollar deal tangled up in a woman with a past that could bring it crashing down around us. And you won’t talk.”
She flinched. “I’ve told you all that’s relevant.”
“Now you’re going to tell me the real story.” He picked up the folder sitting beside him and waved it at her. “This is where it ends.”
She stared at the folder, her heart speeding up. “What is that?”
“It’s your past, Bailey. In one convenient little package.”
He was holding it with his far hand, far enough out of her reach that she never could have gotten to it. But she realized that wasn’t the exercise.
“Who did it?” she demanded quietly.
“My PI. And trust me when I say he didn’t miss anything.”
Her blood pounded in her veins. Suddenly she felt very, very light-headed. “Jared. I can’t—”
“You can. I’ve just told you the whole sordid story of my family. Now it’s your turn. I haven’t read it, Bailey. This is your chance.”
She watched with big eyes as he stood up, walked to the fire and threw the folder into the flames. It sparked and licked up the paper until it turned gray and curled in on itself. Just like her stomach.
He turned back to her and stuck his hands in his pockets.
“Who is Alexander Gagnon to you, Bailey? What does he have on you?”
The flames licking the folder engulfed the remainder in a fiery glow. His gesture wasn’t lost on her. He was giving her a chance to tell her side of the story. To trust him as he’d trusted her from the beginning.
A clamminess invaded her palms, a by-product of her racing heart and the adrenaline surging through her. A million thoughts filled her head. But in the end it came down to the truth.
“I met Alexander Gagnon when he came to my show at the Red Room in Las Vegas.”
“The Red Room? Isn’t that a strip joint?”
“That’s right.” She met his gaze. “I was a high-class stripper, Jared. I made oodles of money taking off my clothes for men.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as if he was going to say something. His lips pursed as words formed, then he stopped, stared at her and waved a hand. “Go on.”
She let her lashes drift down over her eyes. “When I was seventeen, I snuck into Tampa with a girlfriend of mine. We were hanging out in the big city, loitering on the street with pretty much nothing in our pockets, when a girl came up to me, a dancer from the hottest nightclub in the city. She told me I should apply for a job there. That I could make good money.”
