by BETH KERY
“There’s more about Fall, Alice. My father is a lot more familiar with the workings of Durand Enterprises than he’d let on before I came here,” Thad began, glancing around the large open entryway, his manner edgy. He referred to Judge Schaefer. From what Alice had gathered so far, Thad’s dad was a very influential and well-connected man. According to Thad, it was Judge Schaefer who had determined Thad would be a high-powered businessman, and not the teacher and coach that Thad himself aspired to be. In Alice’s opinion, Judge Schaefer sounded like an uptight tool.
“There’s more to Fall’s assuming leadership of Durand and the surrounding consequences than I realized when we talked before,” Thad said in a muted tone. “Sebastian Kehoe had a right to be sharp with us for assuming that Fall was made the head of Durand Enterprises because he was related to Alan or Lynn Durand. There were those on the Durand board at the time that felt that Fall had undue influence on Alan Durand, especially at the end of Durand’s life when he was so sick.”
“Who thought that? Kehoe, no doubt,” Alice said, rolling her eyes. “It’s pretty clear Kehoe is jealous of Dylan.”
“Not just Kehoe,” Thad whispered heatedly. “I saw you talking to Dr. Gates before dinner. Sidney Gates, the psychiatrist?”
“Yeah,” Alice said, shifting uneasily in her heels.
“Sidney Gates voiced his doubts about Fall’s fitness as CEO at the time, as well.”
Alice’s folded arms collapsed, falling at her sides. She couldn’t believe that. Weren’t Sidney and Dylan close? She shook her head.
“No. That can’t be right. Besides, even if Kehoe or Gates had doubts about Dylan’s worthiness to be the CEO after Alan Durand died, they’ve been proven wrong. In spades. You know as well as I do that Durand Enterprises is more diverse and financially robust under Dylan’s regime than it was under Durand’s management, which was brilliant in and of itself.”
“Maybe so, but there’s more, Alice,” Thad said, holding her stare. “There are those at Durand who feel that Dylan’s interest in you isn’t . . .”
Alice waited tensely, holding her breath when Thad trailed off. Her heart had sunk to the vicinity of her navel at the words those at Durand. Had Dylan’s and her secret been discovered and was now generally known? Or did Thad just mean that Dylan’s exclusive hiring of her, his high praise of her to people like Stalwalter, and his brief but notable attention toward her at the previous house party at Castle Durand had set some Durand higher-ups on edge? It was obvious Thad was struggling to be tactful, but Alice wasn’t all that sympathetic.
“Spit it out, Thad.”
“They feel his interest in you isn’t entirely honest. There’s something behind it,” he finished, his gaze running over her face.
“Who thinks that?” Alice demanded, her voice trembling with emotion. She took an aggressive step toward him. “Who is thinking about Dylan and me at all? You never did tell me how you even found out we were involved. No one is supposed to know about us!”
Thad grimaced. “It’s a reliable source, Alice. This person is concerned about Fall taking advantage of you.”
“Because I’m so far out of his league?” she asked, her voice shaking uncontrollably.
She was on high boil all of a sudden, and she hadn’t even realized she was growing hot. Everything in front of her eyes seemed to be cast in a red haze. “Because no one can figure out why he’d be interested in a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, a girl who comes from the wrong family, and the wrong school. The wrong fucking life,” she grated out between bared teeth. “Well, maybe Dylan knows more about my life than you think, Thad.”
He looked shocked by her sudden flare of temper. She wasn’t surprised. Alice herself was a little shocked.
“Jesus, Alice, I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to imply that you aren’t in Fall’s league. You know how I feel about you. If anything, I think the opposite.” He reached out and grasped her elbow, his expression fierce. “Fall doesn’t deserve you.”
She whipped her arm out, throwing Thad’s hold off her. “I don’t deserve this,” she hissed, only vaguely aware of what she meant. “I never thought I’d say this in a million years, but sometimes I wish my life could just go back to what it was before I ever set foot in this damn place.”
“Alice, what the hell—”
“Just leave me alone, Thad.”
She turned and made a beeline for the grand staircase.
WHEN Dylan stepped into the entry hall, the only person he saw standing there was Thad Schaefer, his back turned to him.
“Where’s Alice?”
Schaefer spun at his sharp question. The hair on the back of Dylan’s neck stood on end when he took in Schaefer’s stunned expression.
“What did you say to her?” he ground out, stepping toward him rapidly. Schaefer blanched beneath his tan.
“Nothing! I mean . . . I don’t know what I said,” Schaefer said, clearly at a loss. “She just got upset all of a sudden and told me off.”
“All of a sudden?” He suppressed a nearly overwhelming urge to wring the kid’s neck until his pretty-boy face turned beet red. “Where’d she go?” he demanded instead.
Thad pointed at the grand staircase. “She looked desperate. Like she was—”
“What?”
“Running from me, or from something. I don’t know what I said that upset her so much.”
“You made this mess, you can help clean it up. This is a big house. Come on,” Dylan ordered, his rapid stride fueled by rising alarm. Distantly, Dylan realized he’d been waiting for some kind of explosion on Alice’s part. He was afraid it had just occurred outside of his watch. From the edge of his attention, he noticed that Thad Schaefer was even further surprised by Dylan’s terse command to join him. But he came after a pause, jogging up the steps behind him.
“You continue up to the third floor and look for her,” Dylan said when they reached the second level. He started to stride down the hallway but paused. “Check every room. Come and find me the second—and I mean the second—you locate her. If you finish looking before I do and come up short, then go up to the fourth floor and start searching for her there. And keep your voice down,” he bit out quietly over his shoulder. Surely the kid wasn’t so insensitive or stupid that he’d send up an alarm with all these people in the house. “Let’s keep this simple, don’t talk at all unless you’ve found Alice and are calling out to me. Got it?”
Schaefer’s mouth slanted irritably, but he nodded.
Dylan’s own bedroom suite was empty. Skipping all the bedrooms in between, Dylan headed straight for the suite where he’d found Alice the other night: Addie Durand’s former one.
It, too, stood hushed and devoid of life.
“Alice,” he called out when he was in the hallway again, torn between wanting to bellow her name so that he could be heard in every corner of the mansion and muting his shout to prevent being overheard by someone at the cocktail party downstairs.
“Alice?” he called out a moment later, switching on a light. He stood at the entrance of Alan Durand’s suite. It had once been Alan and Lynn’s, before Lynn had passed. Dylan hadn’t been in the room since Alan had finally succumbed to cancer seven years ago. Most of the furniture was covered in dustcloths. It struck Dylan as empty as a tomb, and yet filled with memories: dead and alive at once.
He entered the room farther and stood stock still in the middle of it, listening. After a moment, he turned and shut off the light, closing the door behind him.
Part of Dylan still existed in that room, the memories of Alan Durand kept alive forever inside of him. Alice, however, wasn’t there. He’d bet his life on it. But being in that room reminded him of something Alan had told him in passing a few times.
He approached the back staircase, suddenly highly aware of the sound of his hard leather soles on the wood floor of the hall. He came to a halt at the side of the stair rising up to the third floor. He held his breath, listening. Unlike in Alan’s room, he expe
rienced a full, hushed sense of anxious anticipation.
He knelt by the wooden paneling beneath the stair. Recalling both Alan Durand’s references and something Deanna Shrevecraft had once shown him when she’d visited Castle Durand, he used his hands to pry back a portion of the wood paneling. The three-by-two-foot panel slid aside.
Peering into the black void, he heard slight rustling and then a barely audible sound like a gasp or a whimper.
“Alice?”
Silence.
He awkwardly tried to maneuver his large body partially into the opening, squinting his eyes. A whisper came from the darkness.
“Dylan.”
A shiver snaked under his skin. She’d sounded odd. Distant. Spooked.
“I’m right here, baby,” he said evenly, even though alarm had started to bubble in his veins. He backed out of the cramped opening in order to go back in a more navigable angle. “I’m coming in, Alice. Everything’s okay.”
“I know.”
He blinked.
“I remember Addie.”
His skin pulled tight at her whispering voice, the hairs on his arm and nape springing to attention.
“I mean . . . not everything,” she continued breathlessly.
Dylan barely contained a blistering curse because he couldn’t see even her shadow. She was a disembodied whisper in the darkness.
“I ran up here, and I wasn’t really thinking . . . just feeling cornered by everything, you know?” She continued in a tiny, shaking voice. “And I had this thought that I wished I could hide and stay there forever, but I needed a good spot. Then it just came to me in a rush, how she and I would play hide-and-seek. She knew all my spots, because she was the one who had shown me the good ones . . . all the secret, hidden places like this one. They were her hiding places, too. I’d hide and she’d look for me like she didn’t know where I was, but I knew she did. She’d call out to let me know where she was as she looked around in the area, to let me know when she was getting close. Aadddie, where are you?”
She made a sound like a choked laugh or a sob.
Dylan jerked at the eerie sound, banging the back of his head on the paneling.
“Dylan? Are you okay?”
He pried his eyes open from a wince of pain, because her voice sounded closer. Suddenly, her pale face emerged from the shadows. She was crawling toward him on her hands and knees. He reached for her single-mindedly and propelled himself back, as if he thought he could manually pull her out of her disturbing memory like he could haul her out of that secret compartment. They landed with a thud just outside of the opening, his body taking the impact of their fall.
“Dylan?”
He was on his ass, and she was sprawled on top of him. He was tensed somewhere between lying down on the floor and sitting up.
“Yeah,” he muttered, pulling her tighter against him. She put her hands on his shoulders. He rose to a sitting position. Alice was in his lap, her legs bent and sprawled on either side of his hips, her black cocktail dress ruched up to her thighs, her pearls flung behind her shoulder. Her fingertips touched his jaw.
“It wasn’t that bad. You don’t have to look like that,” she said feelingly, and he realized belatedly she’d witnessed his naked alarm. “I mean . . . I thought it was going to be bad, too, to remember something about Addie, and to know I was remembering while I did it. Addie Durand is a completely different person. I thought it’d be like being possessed by someone else or something. But it wasn’t. It was—”
“Stop, Alice.”
“What?” she asked, appearing incredulous and hurt by his abrupt interruption of something that was obviously new and amazing to her.
“If you so much as mention a word of this to your pillow, let alone another human being, I’ll make you pay,” Dylan promised.
Alice turned, her mouth hanging open in shock. She’d realized he wasn’t addressing her.
“Thad,” she gasped. She tugged on her hemline, trying to cover her exposed legs.
Schaefer stood there at the end of the hallway, looking bewildered. Who knew how long he’d been there, listening to them?
Shit.
“Alice, are you okay?” Schaefer asked.
“I’m fine.”
“What did you hear?” Dylan demanded.
“Nothing.”
“What did you hear?”
“I told you. Nothing! I just walked up.”
“You’ve given me no other choice. If you speak of anything you’ve seen here tonight or reveal to anyone what you know about Alice and me, I’ll be forced to send you home immediately from Camp Durand. Your father wouldn’t like that much, would he?”
“Dylan,” Alice gasped, staring at him like she’d never seen him before, her eyes enormous. “What—”
“Do you understand me, Schaefer?”
“I understand perfectly.” He took several steps back, his gaze darting to Alice’s face and then back to Dylan’s. “And my father might not like it if you sent me home, but he wouldn’t be surprised that you acted like a ruthless son of a bitch. I know I wouldn’t be.”
“I’m glad to hear you’re not entirely an idiot.”
Dylan willed him with his stare to turn and walk away. Schaefer complied, if reluctantly. Dylan watched him as he grew smaller down the hallway, turned, and disappeared.
He became uncomfortably aware of Alice’s disbelieving gaze on his face.
ONCE she’d scooted off him, Dylan sprung up from the floor. She refused to take his hand when he offered it. Instead, she pushed herself onto her hands and knees and stood gracelessly. Once she’d gained her balance in her pumps, she stepped into him aggressively.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“No. And I’m not going to apologize, either,” he said in a clipped tone, and she sensed the residue of his cold, furious blast of anger at Thad. He smoothed his hand over his silk tie, straightening it, and then he hitched his jaw slightly, like someone readjusting his face after a fight. Despite her stunned anger, she recognized his edge—the thrilling paradox of the sophisticated executive and the street tough she’d been undeniably attracted to from the very beginning. A thrill went through her, amplifying her confusion and anger.
“You shouldn’t have threatened him like that.”
“He could very well have overheard what we were talking about. Would you like him shooting his mouth off to the others?”
“He wouldn’t have said a word if I asked him not to! Besides, he probably didn’t hear, and certainly couldn’t have understood if he did. How could he understand it, when I’m so confused?”
He shook his head once, his thoughts clearly elsewhere. “That kid is trouble.”
“Thad is one of the best counselors at Camp Durand! He’s smart and funny and a natural leader,” she spat. “Everyone loves him.”
He stilled and met her stare slowly. A shiver rippled through her.
“Everyone?”
Despite the sudden glacial quality of his dark eyes, she couldn’t look away. She grasped wildly for her resolve.
“Everyone,” she managed in a choked voice before she broke his hold and followed Thad down the hallway.
NINE
Dylan stood at the opened French doors in his den looking out onto the gardens and yard. The unseasonably cool weather continued. A fog had begun to rise over the distant limestone bluff. It was just past midnight. All was hushed and quiet on the Durand Estate. He could just make out the muted sound of waves hitting the rocky beach below the drop-off at the end of his yard.
“I’ll have to bring in a couple other men from the security division, if you want Ms. Reed watched at night.”
“Only one for now,” Dylan replied. He turned and faced Sal Rigo, who stood in front of his desk. Like Dylan, he still wore his suit from the Alumni Dinner. “Bring in Janocek. I’ve already reviewed his file and he was on my original list before I narrowed it down to you and Peterson. I know I don’t need to emphasize again the importance of ab
solute discretion in regard to this.”
“Of course. I’ll see to it myself when I brief Janocek that he’s completely on board. No one will lay an eye on him.”
“Make sure of it,” Dylan said, giving the other man a pointed glance. Rigo looked a little abashed. Dylan hadn’t disguised his annoyance with Rigo and Peterson recently because they’d allowed Alice to see them during their surveillance of her. On one occasion in the woods, Peterson’s ineptitude had caused Alice considerable distress when she’d thought someone was following her with malicious intent.
“I will, sir. I know we disappointed before, but it’s fairly tight quarters there at the camp. Plus, as you know, watching over Ms. Reed isn’t our only responsibility. Kehoe keeps us pretty busy.”
“I realize that,” Dylan acknowledged. He’d originally directed Rigo and Peterson to observe Alice more than anything, not guard her. He needed to know if she was having any unusual or adverse reactions to the Durand Estate, any memories from her childhood. But he’d also wanted to be assured of her general safety. The problem was, despite his doubts about the direction of a threat, Dylan increasingly wanted Alice not just watched, but protected.
“Plus, Ms. Reed is very observant and . . . mobile,” Rigo added with a small smile.
“Are you calling her fast?” Dylan asked dryly.
Rigo shrugged. “She’s a good athlete. And she notices things. She’s more aware of her surroundings than most.”
“She had to be, where she grew up,” Dylan muttered. “I assume you and Peterson can trade off tonight until you bring Janocek in?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll take over for Peterson in a few hours, so he can get some rest.”
“And you? When will you get your rest?”
“After tomorrow is over. There were plenty of times in the Army I went two nights without sleep.”
Dylan nodded slowly, well aware of Rigo’s stellar Army special operations record before being hired in Durand’s security division. “Anything else significant happening at the camp?”