They? Was he already thinking Stephanie was on his side?
He pulled himself up short. Take it a step at a time, he warned himself. You just met her. You can’t change her world in a couple of hours.
Still, he did feel a small measure of victory. Reynard had come running over to Stephanie’s house after the incident. Probably he’d thought he could comfort her—like in the bedroom. Now he was on his way out the front door. Hopefully because Stephanie hadn’t wanted him there.
How could she? After what had happened in the shop.
Reynard left the house, but before he drove away, he glanced toward two men sitting in a car across the street from her house.
The men who had attacked her in the shop?
What would it mean that Reynard knew they were here?
Craig waited with his heart pounding until the importer had finished his conversation and driven away. He ached to stride down the block and confront the watchers, but caution made him walk back in the other direction, then take the alley behind the houses across the street from Stephanie’s. They were typical French Quarter dwellings, many of them built butting up against each other or with enclosed courtyards, but there were passageways between some, and he took one that would bring him almost up to the car where the men were sitting.
He stayed in the shadows, noting that they were both turned toward Stephanie’s house. He recognized them. They weren’t the thugs who had come into her shop. They were the men who had followed him around at the charity reception. Reynard’s bodyguards. After the disturbing incident in the shop, he’d assigned them to watch over his fiancée.
In a way that was a good move on Reynard’s part. It argued that the man had nothing to do with the attack at the dress shop, but it created a problem for Craig. He needed to get close to her again, and he’d have to make sure the men didn’t spot him.For a couple of reasons—chief of which was that it would put Stephanie at risk.
He cursed under his breath, feeling like Reynard had won the first few moves in a chess game. Craig was going to have to rethink his strategy. But he’d better not do anything hasty.
Stephanie stood, too restless to simply sit and do nothing. Instead she went to the window and lifted one of the Venetian blind slats. She spotted the men in the car across the street immediately. As promised, they were keeping watch on her house. But she saw something else as well. A flicker of movement drew her attention to a passageway between two houses near the bodyguards’ car. A man was standing in the shadows, watching the watchers. For a moment she thought it might be one of the men who had come to the shop. But that was only until she saw his face.
It was Craig Branson. He must have followed her home, and now he was watching the two men in the car.
Were there more of John’s men guarding the rear of her house? She’d have to assume that was true, since she could leave that way and not be spotted from the street.
Feeling like a prisoner in her own home, she gritted her teeth. Maybe that was the way John wanted her to feel. He’d said he’d arranged protection, but knowing him, that probably wasn’t his only reason. He wanted her to understand that if she stepped out of line, he would know it.
She let the slat slip back into place, glad that the men out there couldn’t see through the walls of her house. Crossing to the kitchen, she got out a box of English Breakfast tea. After fillinga mug with water, she set it in the microwave and pressed the beverage button.
When the water was hot, she added a tea bag and let it steep while she paced back and forth along the length of the kitchen, waiting for the tea to be ready. After removing the tea bag, she carried the mug to the office, where she sat down at the computer and thought back over the details of her encounter with Craig Branson. From the mind-to-mind contact, she knew a lot about him already. Or maybe none of that was true.
She made a dismissive sound. How would it be possible to lie when you communicated mind to mind with someone? Maybe if you rehearsed a story and fixed it firmly in your thoughts. But if you weren’t expecting the contact, you’d be taken by surprise. That had been true of her and true of Branson as well. But there was one more possibility she had to consider. What if he was a lunatic who believed the story he’d given her?
She clenched her fists so hard that her nails dug into her palms. Deliberately, she relaxed. The encounter had knocked her off-kilter, but if she was trying to say he was insane, she was grasping at straws, probably because she didn’t want to deal with the shock of what happened when they’d touched each other.
That observation gave her pause. She’d been alone all her life, and wasn’t this what she’d been longing for—a soulmate?
But just at the wrong time. She had already committed herself to another man—a man who considered her his property. What could she hope for with Craig Branson? Or was this going to be like that old movie,The Graduate, where the guy comes charging down from San Francisco to stop the woman he loves from marrying the wrong guy? He’s too late to prevent the ceremony, but he takes the bride away anyway.
Was that the fantasy she was hoping for?
Unable to cope with her own muddled thoughts, she put the name Craig Branson into Google and got several hits. There wasmore than one man by that name, but she quickly zeroed in on the right one.
He owned a private security company, which meant he thought he could go up against John Reynard. But he didn’t know Reynard.
She’d assumed she knew the man, but she was becoming more and more shocked by the things she found out. Not dark facts, but his attitude of owning her—and having her father enslaved to his will.
With a shudder, she put Reynard out of her mind and returned to the information on Craig Branson.
Searching back, she found a newspaper article that made her chest go tight. It was an account of the incident that had killed Craig’s brother. There was a picture of a smiling little boy, obviously one of those school photos that they came around and took every year. He was what she’d imagine Craig would have looked like at the age of eight.
So it was true. He hadn’t made the story up. Her heart was pounding as she scanned the text, reading about the murder of a mob boss in a restaurant and how some of the innocent diners had gotten shot. Most had been wounded. The only fatality was Sam Branson.
The article told her something else. The target in the restaurant had been a mob boss. If John Reynard had something to do with his death, what did that make him? She pushed that question out of her mind because it was more than she could cope with. Which left her contemplating the tragedy.
She sat for a moment, imagining Craig’s reaction to the loss of his brother—and imagining what it must have been like for him to touch her and get back that kind of closeness. Lord, what would her life have been like if she’d had a brother or a sister she could communicate with that way? And what if she’d lost them?
