Secret Sisters(4)

She reached into her shoulder bag with her free hand and took out her cell phone.

“Let me out of this room now or I will call the police. That won’t be good for business, will it?”

For a second or two William just stared at her as if she had spoken in another language, one that was utterly incomprehensible to him. Then he glanced at the phone in her hand.

He released her and moved back a step.

“Get out,” he said.

She opened the door and walked into the outer room. The receptionist flushed and quickly became very busy on her computer. Madeline nodded at her politely. The woman did not look up.

Madeline went out into the hall and closed the door very calmly, very deliberately.





CHAPTER THREE


The name on his new business cards was John Santiago Rayner, but everyone called him Jack.

He was waiting for her, right where she had left him a short time earlier: one broad shoulder propped against the wall, his arms folded across his chest. He was dressed in dark trousers, a denim shirt that was open at the collar, a rumpled sport coat, and low boots. He was descended from an Arizona ranching family with a history in the state that stretched back several generations to the days when Arizona had been a territory.#p#分页标题#e#

Years ago the Rayners had traded the cattle business for commercial real estate development, but Jack was a throwback. He had the hard, unreadable eyes of an Old West lawman. In the mythic past that infused the modern Southwest, you gave a man like Jack a badge and sent him out into the dusty street at high noon to stop the bad guy.

Okay, so Jack had chosen a career in hotel security and he didn’t carry a gun on his hip. But those concessions to the modern age did not make him any less formidable. Even wearing the sport coat, he would not have looked out of place in Tombstone.

He glanced briefly at the door of William’s office.

“Any problem?” he asked in a voice that carried the deceptively laid-back cadence of an Arizona accent.

Some of the tension inside her dissipated at the sight of him. He was all the things William was not—too tall, too powerful in too many subtle ways, and his hazel eyes were too difficult to read. But at that particular moment, he looked good. Very good.

She reminded herself that he was a man of many layers. She’d had a glimpse of the hidden side of Jack Rayner the day she had attempted to fire him. It had not gone well. Jack was not the kind of employee you could counsel out. As it happened, he was not at all interested in pursuing other career opportunities. He wanted the Sanctuary Creek Inns account and he had been willing to fight for it.

The upshot was that Rayner Risk Management was still under contract with Sanctuary Creek Inns.

In the business world, a contract was a contract, and shortly before her death in a hotel fire, Edith Chase had signed one with Jack’s security firm. Madeline had argued against the move because Rayner Risk Management was a very new and very small player in the competitive world of corporate security.

Madeline had tried to talk her grandmother out of signing the contract, but Edith had dismissed her qualms with a few casual reassurances. I think we can assume he’s qualified, even if he lacks experience in the hotel business. He did some consulting work for the FBI. Madeline had responded with, That’s great, but we’re in the hospitality industry. We’re not dealing with serial killers or the mob. Edith had come back with, Rayner Risk Management is headquartered here in Sanctuary Creek. It’s always good to do business with a local firm whenever possible. Whereupon Madeline had pointed out that Jack probably wasn’t a very good businessman because his previous firm, a security agency located in Silicon Valley, had recently gone bankrupt in a rather spectacular fashion.

In the end, she had lost the battle and now she was stuck with Jack Rayner. It did not help that his social graces were minimal. The day they had met in her grandmother’s office, Madeline had offered her hand to him in an attempt to be professional, even in defeat. He’d stared at her for a couple of seconds and then looked down at her hand as though baffled about what to do with it. When his fingers had finally closed around hers, she had been intensely conscious of the heat and strength in the man. It had taken some effort to extricate her hand. She got the impression he had forgotten he was holding it.

Ever since that moment she had been telling herself that Jack was not her type. But he did have a few very important things going for him—he was on retainer, he was convenient, and he had signed a confidentiality agreement.

When her intuition warned her that there was something off about William, she had called Jack and commissioned the background check. He, in turn, had made it clear that the small, routine assignment irritated him. Why, she had no idea, because part of his job was to run background checks on prospective new hires. A background check was a background check, regardless of whether the subject was applying for a job in one of the hotels or dating the president and CEO of the chain.#p#分页标题#e#