Up Close and Dangerous (Page 2)

Bailey winced at the thought; if Tamzin had control of her inheritance, she would blow through the money within five years, tops. If Bailey herself didn’t control the funds, someone else would have to.

The phone rang just as she turned off the shower and reached for a champagne-colored towel to wrap around herself. Wrapping another around her wet hair, she stepped out and picked up the cordless phone in the dressing room, looked at the Caller ID, and set the unit back down without answering. The number had been blocked; she had registered all her numbers on the national do-not-call list, so the blocked number wasn’t likely to be a telemarketer. That meant Seth was probably up bright and early thinking of insults he could use, and she refused to deal with him before she had her coffee. Her sense of duty extended only so far, and this was beyond those boundaries.

On the other hand, what if something was wrong? Seth partied hard, seldom getting to bed before dawn—at least not his own bed. It wasn’t like him to be calling this early. Feeling her boundaries stretch a little, she grabbed the phone again, punching the “talk” button even though the answering machine would have already picked up and started its spiel.

“Hello,” she said over the recorded message made with the canned male voice that was the system’s default. She had kept it instead of recording a message of her own because the canned one was more impersonal.

The answering system halted in midsentence when she picked up, then beeped, and clicked off.

“Hi, Mom.”

Sarcasm was heavy in Seth’s voice. Mentally she sighed. Nothing was wrong; Seth was just trying out a new way of annoying her. Being called “mom” by a man who was older than she didn’t bother her, but dealing with him at all certainly did.

The best way to handle Seth was to show no reaction at all; eventually he’d get tired of his needling and hang up. “Seth. How are you?” she responded in the cool, even tone she’d perfected while working as Jim’s PA. Neither her tone nor her expression had ever given anything away.

“Things couldn’t be better,” he responded with false cheer, “considering my money-hungry whore of a stepmother is living large on my money, while I can’t touch it at all. But what’s a little theft between relatives, right?”

Usually she let the insults roll off her back. “Whore” was one he’d pulled out the second he’d heard the provisions of his father’s will. Seth had gone on to accuse her of having married his father for his money, and taken advantage of Jim’s illness to persuade him to leave even his children’s money in her control. He had also promised, threatened, to contest the will in court, at which time Jim’s lawyer had sighed heavily and advised against such action as a waste of time and money; Jim had capably handled the reins of his empire up until the last few weeks before his death, and the will had been signed almost a year before that—the day after his marriage to Bailey, in fact.

Learning that, Seth had turned dark red, said something so filthy to her that everyone else in the room had sucked in a breath, and then he’d stormed out. Bailey had schooled herself by then not to show any reaction, so a simple “whore” now wasn’t likely to get a rise out of her.

On the other hand, being called a thief was beginning to get under her skin.

“Speaking of your inheritance, there’s an investment opportunity I want to investigate,” she said smoothly. “In order to maximize the gain, I’ll need to put as much as possible into the venture. You won’t mind if your monthly allowance is cut in half, will you? Temporarily, of course. About a year should do it.”

A split second of silence greeted that proposal, then Seth growled in a voice thick with rage, “You bitch, I’ll kill you.”

This was the first time she had countered his insults with a threat of her own, shocking him out of his own set pattern. The threat didn’t alarm her. Seth was big at making threats he didn’t carry out.

“If you have other investment proposals you’d like me to consider I’ll be happy to look at them,” she said as politely as if he’d asked the particulars instead of threatening to kill her. “Just research them fully, and put your proposals in writing. I’ll get to them as soon as possible, but that will probably be a few weeks. I’m going on vacation day after tomorrow and expect to be gone for a couple of weeks.”

Her answer was a phone slammed down in her ear.

Not a great way to start the day, she thought, but at least her monthly encounter with Seth was now behind her.

Now, if she could just avoid Tamzin…

2

CAMERON JUSTICE GAVE THE SMALL AIRFIELD AND PARKING lot a swift, encompassing glance as he pulled his blue Suburban into his allotted slot. Though it wasn’t yet six-thirty in the morning, he wasn’t the first to arrive. The silver Corvette meant his friend and partner, Bret Larsen—the L of J&L Executive Air Limo—was already there, and the red Ford Focus signaled the presence of their secretary, Karen Kaminski. Bret was early, but Karen made a practice of getting into the office before anyone else; she said it was the only time she could get any work done without being constantly interrupted.

The morning was bright and clear, though the weather report called for increasing cloudiness during the day. Right this minute, though, the sun shone brightly on the four gleaming J&L planes, and Cam paused for a moment to enjoy the sight.

The custom paint job had been expensive, but worth the cost in the image presented by the shining black slashed by a thin line of white curving upward from the nose to the tail. The two Cessnas—a Skylane and a Skyhawk—were paid for, free and clear; he and Bret had busted their asses the first couple of years, working side jobs as well as flying, to get them paid off as fast as possible and to improve their debt ratio. The Piper Mirage was almost theirs, and after it was paid for they planned to double up on payments on the eight-seater Lear 45 XR, which was Cam’s baby.