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Wallace was waiting for her in the corridor. At her request, he had remained outside the boardroom because, with everything else going on, she didn’t feel like having to explain his presence to her father. Wallace had agreed only after he had checked out the boardroom and was satisfied that the large room was accessible only through one set of double doors.
The moment she emerged from the boardroom, he was right at her side.
Marlowe got right to what was on her mind. “Do you think your boss is out of his meeting yet?” she asked the bodyguard.
“You’re my boss,” he responded in his quiet, authoritative voice.
Marlowe sighed. “Your other boss, Wallace,” she specified.
Wallace looked at his watch. “Yes. Unless it ran over,” he qualified.
That was all she wanted to hear. “Thanks,” she murmured.
It amazed her how quickly she recalled Bowie’s cell number. She’d started dialing it before she realized that she hadn’t had to pull out Bowie’s business card this time.
He answered on the second ring. “Hello?”
She felt the hair on the back of her neck curling in response to the sound of his voice. This was getting worse, she thought, not better.
“Are you available?” she asked.
She heard him chuckle softly. “Well, you’ll have to buy me dinner first, but, yes, I’m available.”
“Very funny,” she said dismissively, then got down to the reason for her call. “I really need to follow Selina.”
“So you said.”
“I know,” she said impatiently, “but I think it might be more urgent than I initially thought. I’m fairly sure that she’s got something big on my father. Something that has him practically twisting in the wind and jumping to obey her slightest whim.” She paused, looking for the right way to phrase this. “I might be totally wrong about this, but I think that it might have something to do with Ace being switched with a healthy baby at birth.” She realized how that had to sound to Bowie. “According to my father, when Ace was born, he was really sickly. They didn’t think he’d even make it through the night, and suddenly, not only did he make it, but he was thriving.”
“And no one noticed?” he questioned.
“From what I gather, my dad and his wife at the time chalked it up to being a Christmas miracle,” Marlowe told him.
Bowie was quiet for a moment, thinking. “Well, best guess, Selina might be trying to bring down Colton Oil,” he suggested.
“No, that’s more your father’s style,” Marlowe said. Then, suddenly realizing what she had just said, she tried to backtrack and apologize. “Sorry, that just came out. But anyway, Selina would have no reason to bring down Colton Oil. It’s far more to her advantage to have the company bringing in money. That way, she gets to continue living in the lifestyle that she’s grown accustomed to enjoying. That woman will never have enough money.”
That made sense, but blackmail wasn’t always about making sense. “It could just be her way of getting revenge,” Bowie brought up. “You know, because your father divorced her all those years ago.”
“According to the story, the divorce was Selina’s idea. And even if it wasn’t, wouldn’t she have done something to undermine the company long ago, not waited all these years to make a move?” she asked Bowie. That only made sense to her.
“Ah, but revenge is a dish best served cold,” he said.
There was that, she supposed, but she wasn’t convinced. “Maybe,” she agreed. “But right now, I just want to be sure that the viper isn’t going to do something awful to foul up Ace’s life.”
“Which Ace?” Bowie asked.
“The Ace I know,” Marlowe snapped. The next second, she instantly regretted her reaction. “Sorry. My temper keeps spiking.” She blamed it on stress and the pregnancy. The latter was in part Bowie’s fault, but she couldn’t allow herself to go down that path. There was no future there.
Marlowe heard him chuckle again. The sound all but undulated through her, sending goose bumps all along her body.
“Yes, I noticed,” Bowie said. “Okay, I’ll be there in the next forty minutes.”
She sighed. Forty minutes might be too long to wait. She needed to be ready to take off at a moment’s notice. “That’s all right, I can just—”
“Okay, hold your horses. How does twenty minutes sound?”
“Better,” she told him. “Fifteen would sound even better than that.”
