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Sutton got up from the couch and went out to the garage to find Sunday’s paper in the recycling bin. There, he found a picture of his brother wearing his wolf mask and a caption with his name. He carried it back inside and tossed it into Sebastian’s lap. “That part could be true enough.”
Sebastian read over the paper and then put it on the coffee table. “All that article tells anyone is that I was at the party in a wolf mask. So were you. What of it? If she is the woman I was with, wouldn’t seeing that picture be enough to inspire her to track me down?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just my imagination making more of this than there really is. Perhaps she got carried away and had a fling with us both. Maybe two women were dressed similarly and I don’t know enough about fashion to tell them apart. But I think at the very least we should have Miles do a background check on Lauren. Make sure there isn’t more to this.”
“That’s not a bad idea. Just to make sure.” A muscle ticked in Sebastian’s jaw. “But the more we talk about it, the more I really think it’s just a case of chemistry gone awry. We’re going to go out again. Maybe things will finally click. I was going to take her up to Dallas.”
Sutton packed away his conspiracy theories and decided to call it a night. His team was losing, and, even with the lack of chemistry on Sebastian’s date, he wouldn’t be able to hide his jealousy of his brother for long. If it wasn’t all a setup, then fate had brought Sebastian his mystery woman, but not his.
He made noises about being tired and went up to his suite. There, he flopped down onto his bed and stared up at the ceiling for a moment. Then he rolled over and opened the bedside stand to pull out the black mask Red had left behind.
Sutton turned it over in his hands the way he had every night since the party. When he looked at it, he could see her beautiful brown eyes looking back at him. Those eyes had been so trusting. So open.
He didn’t want to believe those same trusting eyes ha
d an agenda and were just using him. He didn’t want that night’s memory to be tainted. It was his escape from the other problems in his life, not a part of them.
In that moment, he made a decision. If Red wasn’t going to track him down, then he was going to find her. Whether she was Lauren Roberts or a spy or some other person entirely, he was going to get to the bottom of it all.
Five
Sutton studied the list his sister Beth had given him. On it was every single person that bought or was given tickets to the gala. On his computer, he’d filtered out all the men and the women that had come with their husbands. He’d like to think a married woman couldn’t spend the whole night with him without her husband noticing. By the time he’d discarded family and all the women he knew from the club, he was left with a list of about ten women’s names.
One of which was Lauren Roberts.
He considered giving the list to Miles when he asked for the background check on Ms. Roberts. A little digging could help him pinpoint which, if any of them, might be the woman he met that night. Of course, he wasn’t sure how he’d explain to his younger brother that he wanted him to weed out any women without brown hair and eyes from the list. That would prompt a lot of questions he didn’t want to answer. How could he explain that he was obsessed with a woman but didn’t know who she was? Or that he couldn’t be sure she wasn’t some spy sent to help ruin the family?
No. He’d have Miles run the check for Sebastian, but he would keep the rest of the list to himself for now. Decision made, he sent the filtered list to his printer and looked over it again once he could hold it in his hands. One of these women was the one he was looking for. He knew it. His heart hammered in his chest as he read the list again and again. He was so close to finding her.
“I’ve got an idea.”
Sutton set aside the papers he was going through and looked at his brother, who had arrived suddenly in the doorway of their shared office. “Dare I ask?”
Sebastian came inside and settled down onto the overstuffed chair they’d moved in a few days before. “I told you that there’s something wrong about Lauren that I can’t put my finger on.”
“Yeah.” That was one way of saying it, although it was a lot more complicated than that.
“Well, I think I know what we should do to help us figure it all out. I think you should be the one to go on the date with her.”
That wasn’t what Sutton was expecting to hear. “Go on a date with her? I thought you were going to say something practical like ‘have her investigated,’ which I’m already doing. I emailed Miles this morning with her information.”
“Good. While he’s doing that, it can’t hurt for you to go out with Lauren.”
Sutton furrowed his brow in confusion. “I don’t understand. You mean you want me to go on the trip to Dallas you have planned for Saturday?”
“Exactly. She and I don’t have the chemistry we did before and I know in my gut she isn’t the one I spent the evening with. If you go and you two have chemistry, maybe that will help us get to the bottom of what’s going on. Maybe she’s your mystery gal in red, not mine, but we won’t know until you meet her.”
“You said she seemed very confident that you were the man she was looking for. She even went to the trouble of tracking you down at our rental house.”
“Yes,” Sebastian agreed, “but only because she saw my picture in the paper. But in that picture, I’m wearing my wolf mask.”
“So?”
“So...you and I ordered the same mask, remember. What if she just presumed I was the person she spent the night with because I was wearing the wolf mask, too.”
That was an intriguing thought. Twins in the same masks could confuse anybody that didn’t know them well enough. Or at all, like Lauren. “Perhaps she was confused and didn’t realize there were two of us in those masks. But don’t you think she’s going to wonder why I’m taking her out instead of you?”
Sebastian rolled his eyes. “Are you serious?”
