She nods. “Oh yeah. The school donation?”
“Yep. There will be cameras, handshakes. We’ll be going through the whole performance.”
She arches an eyebrow. “Performance?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?” She checks the time. “Shit. You should have waken me.” She pushes out of bed, and I watch her walk to the bathroom. Those linen trousers she favors are sitting on the chair by the window, and she grabs them on her way. The tank top she slept in barely covers her ass, and I catch a glimpse of her bare buttocks underneath.
My cock stirs yet again.
Stop!
“The donation is real,” I call after her. “The impact is real. But the timing is also about controlling the narrative before Xavier can spin it.”
She pauses in the doorway, looking back over her shoulder. “I know.”
I frown. “Does that bother you?”
She rubs one eye. “Ask me on the way. After I’ve had coffee.”
The bathroom door closes, and I’m left standing there like an idiot, wondering if I just failed some kind of test.
Probably did.
I head downstairs to find Keon already waiting in the kitchen, speaking quietly with Ysela about the convoy route.
He nods when he sees me. “Mr. Saelinger. The Vehicles are staged. Thorne is already at the venue doing his sweep.”
“Any sign of our friend?” I ask.
Keon knows exactly who I mean. “Laurent is still at The Cove. His people haven’t moved yet. Sable has eyes on the hotel.”
Good. The last thing I need is Xavier showing up at my carefully orchestrated PR moment and finding a way to twist it.
Amara comes downstairs a few minutes later, dressed in one of those cotton poplin dresses that make me want to peel her out of it with my teeth.
She’s covering the marks I left on her neck with makeup again.
I shouldn’t find leaving behind those marks as satisfying as I do.
“Ready?” I ask.
She grabs the waiting black coffee from the counter and downs a few sips. “Ready.”
The ride to the school is tense. Keon drives the primary SUV while Sable follows in the secondary vehicle. First time we’ve used the two-car protocol on Eleuthera, which tells me Thorne is taking Xavier’s presence seriously.
Amara is quiet beside me, her legal pad open on her lap. She’s been bringing documents home from the clinic’s storage area, old foundation files that might contain something useful. Last night she found that forged board memo in the accounting team’s emails. Tonight she’s planning to go through the paper records again.
I watch her make small annotations in the margins.
“You don’t have to come to this,” I say suddenly.
She looks up. “We discussed this.”
“I know. But if Xavier shows up, if the press starts asking questions about us specifically...”
“Then I’ll smile politely and refer them to your communications team.” She returns to her legal pad. “And if Xavier shows, your security team will deny him from the venue. Stop trying to protect me. We covered this.”
