She shook her head, in full denial. “I don’t know him.” And that was true. She didn’t know anything about him. Except he was now the key player who would decide their fate in the biggest deal of her life. Of Jared’s life.
Jared stepped closer to her. “Then why are you white as a ghost? Why have you been off since the moment you saw him?”
Her brain swirled in a desperate attempt to make this go away. Heart thumping painfully hard against her chest, she looked up at him. “He is an obnoxious jerk who has mistaken me for someone else. I am not good with boats, Jared. Never have been. And I don’t want to make it an issue for Davide, who has been kind enough to take us on this lovely sail. So I think we should get back to the others before he worries.”
She brushed past him before he could stop her and headed back to the table where dessert was being served. Somehow she managed to spoon a few mouthfuls of the undoubtedly delicious chocolate mousse into her mouth. But she tasted nothing. How could she when the world felt as if it was unraveling around her?
Alexander’s cool, unruffled composure across the table was utterly unnerving. As if they’d been trading old war stories rather than him throwing her past in her face.
The night thankfully ended an hour later when Davide, she figured, took pity on her and suggested they do a final nightcap back at the villa. He insisted she rest rather than join them, and Bailey didn’t protest. She brushed off Jared’s intention to walk her to her room. “I’m fine.”
He came anyway, wearing a frown.
“I’ll be back to check on you,” he said when they’d reached her room, planting a hand against the wall and looking her over. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.” She pressed a hand to her pounding head, which was making her feel distinctly nauseous now. “Don’t bother. I’ll be asleep.”
He stared her down. “I’ll be back in half an hour.”
Bailey forced some painkillers down her throat with a glass of water and paced her beautiful, airy suite. The more she paced, the more her head pounded. The two lives she’d so carefully kept light-years apart for so long had just crashed together with debilitating consequences. And the chances she was going to be able to keep them apart any longer were slim. Alexander Gagnon had offered her fifty thousand dollars to sleep with him almost ten years ago. And now she had to face him, to pitch to him over a boardroom table?
What if she had to work with him afterward?
The trails of perspiration rolling down her nape made her feel hot, feverish. She had not spent years of her life building her reputation in the business world to let a man like Alexander Gagnon destroy it. To assume he knew what she was when she wasn’t anything like that.
I remember every curve, every dip of your mind-blowing body. How you seduced every man in that room and left them begging for more…
Alexander’s words, cutting, accusatory, washed over her. Suddenly she felt dirty, so dirty. Hands shaking, she ripped off her jeans and tops. Found her bathing suit, threw it on and took the back stairs to the beach. The sea was dark and strewn with moonlight. The surf was up, eating into the sand with swift currents. She ignored how the darkness made it look dangerous, walked into it and struck out to a place unknown. To a place where the past couldn’t find her.
Jared knocked on Bailey’s door forty-five minutes later. He’d nursed a final brandy with Davide and the others, fought the urge to put his fist through Alexander Gagnon’s face and ultimately restrained himself. He didn’t believe Bailey for a second when she’d said she didn’t know him. She’d had a violent reaction the minute she’d seen him. He’d felt it.
They don’t know, do they? You’ve moved on. Gone to a great deal of trouble to put your past behind you.
What had Gagnon been talking about?
He knocked again on the door, his mouth tightening. Nothing. He waited five more seconds, knocked again and turned the knob. The door was open, a table lamp flooding the drawing room with light. No Bailey. He strode across the room, pushed her bedroom door open and saw the bed hadn’t been touched. Her clothes were lying in a heap on the floor, which raised his antennae because Bailey was obsessively, compulsively neat.
He walked out onto the floodlit terrace and found it empty. Scanning the grounds, he searched for her. On the beach below a flash of white in the water caught his eye. Bailey’s pale skin in the moonlight. There. He stripped off his shoes and socks and went after her.
She was so far out in the waves, he almost dived in fully clothed. But her pace was steady and her strokes sure, so he waited her out instead, his heels sinking into the sand. When she reached shore, she headed toward her towel, not fifteen feet from him, but she didn’t notice him at all.