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That didn’t mean photos of the DeWinters didn’t circulate. The paparazzi stalked Dirk relentlessly, and Mei-li was incredibly photogenic. But Dirk tried to minimize public access to his twin daughters, including a state-of-the-art security system surrounding his estate on Victoria Peak here on Hong Kong Island, and bodyguards who fiercely protected his little girls whenever they went out anywhere. Nevertheless, pictures surfaced occasionally. That was one of Alana’s more esoteric duties, too. To track the photos and figure out how, when and where they were taken, so Dirk could do his best to prevent others from being snapped in the future.
Even though Juliana had lived her entire adult life in the public eye, attention that had become even more rabid when she married the King of Zakhar, Alana had never understood just how little privacy celebrities had these days until she’d gone to work for Dirk. Until she’d experienced firsthand what almost amounted to harassment when a photographer had lain in wait and snapped pictures of Alana, the twins and their nanny outside the ladies’ room of the restaurant Dirk had taken them to her first week on the job. And she’d quickly realized the steep price Dirk and his family paid—would always pay—for his superstardom.
The morning passed in a busy blur. When she’d first started her new job she’d been overwhelmed by the barrage of incoming data. But she had a system now, so she quickly dealt with the backlog of fan communication, divvying them up into her little “buckets.” Adoring. Begging. Threatening. And the category that always made her laugh at how creative people could be: investment “opportunities.” Not a single one was anything other than a scam, but she’d shown a couple of them to Dirk to make him laugh, too.
Mostly the scam emails were deleted after reading the first couple of sentences, but not the threats. Dirk would have had Alana just delete them, too, but Mei-li had shaken her head, saying in her soft voice, “Don’t respond, but don’t delete. We need to keep a record, just in case...” And when the eyes of the two women had met, Alana had understood without another word being spoken.
Mei-li was a highly regarded private investigator and a ransom negotiator, and was unwaveringly protective of her beloved husband. She read every threatening communication, ranking them on a scale of one to five, with one being “no threat,” three being “credible threat,” and five being “imminent threat.” The “imminent threat” communications were turned over to the Hong Kong Police for investigation.
The begging requests were more problematic, because Dirk, Alana had soon learned, had a tender heart. Which meant another of Alana’s duties revolved around investigating the legitimacy of whatever the senders were asking Dirk to do. And on three separate occasions in the past month Dirk had quietly and without fanfare fulfilled a request—including sending money to the parents of a child with a severe form of spina bifida whose dying wish was to visit the Eiffel Tower, and a personal visit to the bedside of a longtime fan dying from cancer.
But the vast majority of the emails, tweets and posts were of the adoring variety. And Alana had a stock response she sent out on Dirk’s behalf, thanking the sender and promoting his latest movie, including links to positive reviews.
She’d just replied to the last email when Mei-li walked into the office. “Hannah said you needed to talk with me?”
It took Alana a moment to come out of the zone she’d been in. “Oh,” she said. “I wanted to ask you...” Her cheeks felt suddenly warm. “The man who rescued me last night. Do you know who he is?” When Mei-li didn’t immediately respond, Alana rushed to add, “You said he and the other men are with a group called RMM. I know you said they don’t look for thanks, but I...” She faltered. “I just wondered.”
An enigmatic expression crossed Mei-li’s face. “I know, but I can’t tell you.” She sat down in the chair in front of Alana’s desk. “I contacted RMM because they’re my last resort. But they operate in the shadows. And some of the things they do are illegal. Not bad, just illegal. So...”
Alana nodded. She wasn’t naive...not in that way anyway. She knew the difference. “Last night the driver and the man riding shotgun said I was abducted by members of a triad gang. That other women had disappeared in the same way, and they—RMM, I guess is what he meant—they’ve been after this gang for a couple of months. But...” She trailed off as another thought occurred to her, and she frowned. “How did they know where I was? I mean, I’m incredibly grateful someone figured it out and RMM rescued me, but...”
Mei-li’s lips quirked into a tiny smile. “Modern technology is wonderful...most of the time. You know those little lockets the twins wear, the ones with a picture of their mother?”
She wasn’t sure where the other woman was going with this. “Of course.”
“You probably thought they were a tad young for jewelry.”
“Well...yes,” she admitted. “But I just figured Dirk wanted the girls to know their mother loves them, even though she died when they were born.”
“You’re right, of course, but it’s more symbolic than you know. In Dirk’s mind Bree is protecting them from harm...but so is he. Those lockets contain tiny transmitters. Little beacons that can be remotely activated. The girls have worn them ever since they were rescued from their kidnappers. We were fortunate last time that they were sending Dirk pictures of his daughters that had been geotagged, but we can’t rely on that happening again.”
When Alana raised her brows in a question, Mei-li explained, “Geotagging just means the pictures have GPS coordinates embedded in them. Most people don’t realize this is enabled in their smartphones, and neither did the twins’ kidnappers. But that was a fluke. Dirk wanted to be sure we could track the girls if they’re kidnapped again, and the locket beacons were the best thing he and—that is, the best thing he could come up with.”
Alana wondered why Mei-li had hesitated, then said, “Okay, I get that. But...”
“But how did we know where you were?”
“Yes.”
“You carry the same beacon transmitter as the twins. Just as I do.”
Alana gawked at her. “What?”
Mei-li made a face. “I told Dirk he should tell you, but...”
“But what?”
“He didn’t tell you because he was afraid you’d think he was intruding on your privacy after he promised you he wouldn’t. And to be honest, he really didn’t think we’d need to activate it, so you’d never have to know.”
“Why didn’t he ask me? I’m not stupid. I wouldn’t have refused to carry something that would protect me.”
“I know, I know. But he didn’t know you when you first came to work for him, and he couldn’t take that chance. He’s hyper-concerned for the safety of everyone around him, not just his daughters. Not just me. And given what he suffered when Linden and Laurel were kidnapped, I can’t really blame him. I hope he never has to go through that again with anyone.”
“How...?”
Mei-li’s tiny smile returned. “Didn’t you ever wonder about the key fob on the key ring we gave you when you moved in last month? The one that looks like something you’d use to electronically open a car door...even though you don’t have a car here in Hong Kong?”
Alana opened her mouth, then closed it. She stared at the other woman for a moment before admitting, “I thought it was a key fob for one of the cars in the garage. Not that I would even think about driving here as a general rule, not where everyone drives on the opposite side of the street. But in an emergency...”
“They do operate as a car door key fob. But they also contain a transmitter beacon, which can be remotely as well as manually activated. They’re deliberately designed to look like something innocuous, so no one would suspect their true purpose. Even if the men who abducted you went through your purse, it’s highly unlikely they’d have been suspicious of that key fob.”
Alana struggled with conflicting emotions for a moment. On the one hand, Dirk should have told her. But on the other, she couldn’t be anything but grateful she had carried the beacon that had led to her rescue. And if she was honest with herself, even if she’d known about it, she’d been incapacitated too quickly. There was no way she would have had a chance to activate it manually, so the remote activation was actually a blessing.
But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t give Dirk a piece of her mind about keeping her in the dark.
* * *
Jason, known as J.C. by his board of directors and employees alike as a way of keeping his private life separate from his public persona, had muted his smartphone as he always did during board meetings, but he felt the vibration for an incoming text. He ignored it as his smiling board of directors filed out of the conference room, several of them stopping to shake his hand.
Another profitable quarter had gone into the record books for Wing Wah Enterprises, the electronics company his maternal grandfather had founded seventy years ago. The company was publicly traded, but his 51 percent stake meant that even without his mother’s and sister’s shares—whose proxies he held—he had a controlling interest. With their proxies, he was unassailably in command.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t answerable to the shareholders. He was. And he’d given them a more-than-respectable return on their investment every quarter since he’d taken the helm at the tender age of twenty-five upon the death of his grandfather, almost ten years ago. But running the company was just a job to him. One he was incredibly good at. One that supplemented the fortune he relied upon in his other life. But just a job. It wasn’t his life’s work.
That was RMM. Right Makes Might. “‘Let us have faith that right makes might,’” he murmured to himself in the now-empty conference room, “‘and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.’” His fingers subconsciously touched the gold medallion he wore beneath his dress shirt, an ever-present reminder of both RMM and the reason behind it.
Then he remembered the incoming text he’d received earlier. Fewer than a dozen people had his personal cell phone number, so it had to be important. When he pulled out his phone he saw the text was from Mei-li.
Alana was asking about you, he read. Should I tell her...anything?
He cursed under his breath, but lightly. Then he shook his head with rueful humor. Damn, but his sister knew him too well. How the hell had she picked up on his totally unanticipated attraction to Alana? And what was she expecting him to do about it?
He was torn. On the one hand, he wanted to see Alana again. Not as the man who’d rescued her—no way would he use that to his advantage. But he wanted to meet her in a social setting. Wanted to prove to himself that what he was feeling would quickly dissipate without the adrenaline rush engendered by their dangerous first encounter.
On the other hand, could he risk having Alana figure out who he was? He could count on the fingers of both hands the people who knew that J.C. Moore, CEO extraordinaire, and Jason Moore, the founder and driving force behind the highly secret RMM, were one and the same man.
He could go to jail for some of the things he and RMM had done. He’d accepted that risk long ago with a philosophical shrug. But he hadn’t been careless about the danger. Only three people who weren’t associated with RMM knew how far the organization was willing to go. And of those three, one was related to him by blood, one owed him his daughters’ lives and one...one had been the third Musketeer with Sean and him ever since they were toddlers together.
His sister and her husband knew enough of his clandestine activities that they could be a threat. But Mei-li would burn at the stake for him. And DeWinter? Expose the man who’d been instrumental in rescuing his beloved twin daughters last year? “Not bloody likely,” Jason told himself, laughing under his breath.
And the third person? They’d wept together at Sean’s grave. He wasn’t a member of RMM only because his job prevented him from taking the oath...but that didn’t mean he wasn’t bound by the oath the same way Jason was. That didn’t mean he wasn’t inextricably bound to the founding principles of RMM, either. Which meant Jason had nothing to fear where he was concerned.
That brought him right back around to the question he’d asked himself in the first place. So what are you going to do about Alana?
Making a decision, he hit speed dial to call his sister. “I thought that would pique your interest,” she said when she answered the phone.
“Stop reading my mind.”
She laughed softly. “So why don’t you just come for dinner?”
“What if she figures out who I am?”
“You saved her life and she knows it. You think she’d do anything to put you at risk?”
“When you put it that way...no, I don’t. But—”
“But you don’t want her to be attracted to you because you saved her life.”
“Damn you,” he said without heat. “I knew you were perceptive. Intuitive. But it’s as if you’re a witch now.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes, Mei-li, I’d love to come for dinner tomorrow night.’”
“Not tomorrow night. I have to fly to Bangkok on business. Then London. But I’ll be back on Friday. What about that Friday night?”
“Done,” she said promptly. “I’ll ask Hannah to prepare your favorite curried chicken.”
He made a teasing comment in Cantonese about the way to a man’s heart, but Mei-li didn’t rise to the bait. He was just about to disconnect when she said, “You never answered my question. Should I tell Alana anything?”
“That would be a big n-o.”
His sister laughed softly. Meaningfully. And Jason knew she’d correctly interpreted exactly what it meant.
* * *
The following Friday Jason drove his fire-engine-red Jaguar F-TYPE SVR Coupe up Mount Austin Road, effortlessly shifting gears as he darted between traffic. He was running late and had already texted his sister before he left—there’d been a customs holdup with his private jet at the airport. Nothing serious, just annoying and time-consuming. Then he’d stopped at a florist on the way, one he often used. He’d called ahead and placed his order, so his floral apology for being late was ready and waiting for him when he arrived. But it still ate up more precious minutes.
If any car could make up for lost time, though, it was his beloved Jag. He’d driven Jaguars since his first car at eighteen, a birthday present from his maternal grandfather over the protests of his parents. Unlike his private jet, which was a necessity for his business, and unlike his penthouse condo in an exclusive area of the island, which had been a gift from his grandfather when he graduated from Oxford with highest honors thirteen years ago, the Jag was his only self-indulgence. His only concession to an inheritance that sometimes seemed more of a curse than a blessing.
It had bothered him greatly when his grandfather’s will had been read, and he’d learned that not only had his old-school Chinese grandfather passed over his only child—the daughter who he’d never truly forgiven for marrying a foreigner against his wishes—he also hadn’t divided his vast wealth equally between his two grandchildren. Minor shares in the company had been bequeathed to Jason’s mother and sister, along with some personal effects, but the bulk of the estate had been left to Jason...the only male heir.
That’s not right, he’d furiously stated to his grandfather’s solicitor in the office where the will was being read.
He’d immediately offered to sign everything over to his mother, who’d only smiled and shook her head. I knew what I was doing when I married your father, she’d said in her gentle voice, turning her breathtaking smile on her husband, famed producer/director Sir Joshua Moore. I have no regrets.
And though Jason had still been angry over his grandfather’s actions, it had been impossible not to be moved by the loving, wordless exchange between his parents. He’d grown up seeing their devotion to each other all his life, of course. But in that moment he’d finally understood what it really meant. And for the first time in his life he’d actively prayed to find a woman like his mother. A woman who would sacrifice everything for him.
“Ten years,” he whispered now, shifting gears automatically as the traffic ahead of him slowed. “Ten years, and still...”
He’d never found her. Never found the woman who would look at him with that unmistakable expression in her eyes, the one that said the world was well lost if she had him. “Wishing for the moon,” he scoffed at himself. And yet...
Mei-li had found a man who looked at her that way. Not once, but twice. First Sean all those years ago, and now DeWinter. But then, his sister never had to worry about being loved for anything other than her wonderful self. Mei-li had turned him down when he’d offered to split the inheritance evenly between them. Had she somehow seen into the future and divined the price Jason would pay for that wealth...and wanted nothing to do with it?
He took the turn that would lead him to the DeWinter estate and drove nearly half a mile before pulling up in front of the gate, no closer to an answer than he was when he’d started his little soul-searching episode. He rolled down the window and touched the electronic key card that would open the gate against the card reader. His sister had given it to him when the DeWinters had moved up here. He hadn’t told her he already had one—he’d designed the estate’s security for his sister and brother-in-law, and his company had installed the entire system. And like some software designers, he’d made sure he had “backdoor” access.
He tapped his fingers impatiently against the steering wheel, waiting for the gate to swing open, then drove through. The Jag passed through an electronic beam, and the gate automatically shut behind him.
A minute later Jason pulled up to the main house, but to his surprise there was a police car parked in front of it. Perturbed, he grabbed the flowers off the seat next to him and headed for the front door, which swung open before he could ring the bell. “Sorry I’m late,” he told his sister, holding the flowers out in front of him, but hooking a finger over his shoulder at the police car. “What are the po—” He stopped abruptly, because the somber expression on Mei-li’s face warned him. “What’s wrong?”
“The police are here to question Alana again,” she said. “It hasn’t hit the news yet, but it will soon. There was another abduction while you were gone. Almost the exact same MO as the way she was snatched. On a crowded street. In broad daylight.”
Chapter 4
“I really can’t tell you anything more about the men who grabbed me,” Alana was saying when Jason approached the family room. “I wish I could.” From her voice Jason could tell she was practically in tears. “Especially now that another woman—” She broke off abruptly, then continued. “But they were wearing masks that completely covered their heads and faces except for their eyes. Then I was unconscious when they transported me to...wherever. I already told you they were speaking Cantonese when I could hear them, but they kept me blindfolded the entire time. I have no idea what they look like or where they were holding me, or anything.”
Both policemen turned when Jason and Mei-li walked into the room, and his sister quickly said, “You know Detective Inspector Lam, of course, of the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau. And this is Sergeant Wo of the same unit. Sergeant, this is my brother, Jason Moore. We were expecting him for dinner.” She turned to Alana and added smoothly, with almost no hesitation, “And this is Alana Richardson, Dirk’s executive assistant. She was abducted last Sunday and miraculously rescued. I told you about it, remember? The police are here trying to learn what they can.”
“Unnecessary to introduce me to either gentleman,” Jason said. He shook hands with the two policemen, addressing them formally. “Detective Inspector. Sergeant. Good to see you again, although not under these circumstances.” Then he turned to Alana, who had risen to greet him when the policemen did, and took her hand. “Miss Richardson. Glad to make your acquaintance. I was very sorry to hear from Mei-li what you had to go through, but needless to say I’m happy you suffered no permanent injury.”
Alana’s eyes widened as he spoke, and Jason cursed internally. Although he allowed nothing but polite interest to reflect in his expression, he realized she’d made the connection. She knew who he was. There was no way she recognized his face, so it had to be his voice.
She didn’t blurt it out, however, and Jason gave her bonus points for quick thinking and effective dissimulation. “I’m glad to meet you, too, Mr. Moore. Your sister has told me a lot about you. And Linden and Laurel are full of their ‘Unca Jason,’” she said. “You’re quite a favorite with them.”
Jason let himself smile in response. “And they’re quite the favorites with me, too.” Then he glanced at the policemen. “But don’t let me interrupt. You were in the middle of an interrogation, yes?”
“Not an interrogation,” the detective inspector was quick to point out, his face impassive. “Miss Richardson is a victim, not a suspect. But we were hoping she could shed some light on the men who abducted her.” His dark eyes met Jason’s. “Or on her miraculous rescue,” he added drily. “We received an anonymous tip the night she was rescued.” A muscle twitched in his cheek. “And we did a thorough forensics analysis of the crime scene. DNA results on the man she scratched aren’t back yet, so if we knew who rescued her and how she was located, that could yield important information.”
When Jason’s expression betokened nothing but bland interest, the detective inspector went on. “We have reason to believe Miss Richardson’s abduction is related to a string of similar ones, most recently one that occurred yesterday.”
“That is unfortunate,” Jason agreed. Not by the tiniest flicker did he let on he knew anything more than he’d just been told. But his mind was working feverishly. He couldn’t reveal he knew exactly where Alana had been held or how she’d been tracked to that apartment. Nor could he reveal how she’d been rescued, not without putting himself and his men in an untenable position. Not without putting RMM itself at risk.
“What ties them all together?” To Jason’s surprise, it wasn’t his sister asking the question; it was Alana.
The two policemen exchanged glances, then the detective inspector said, “The MO, for one thing—modus operandi. We’re not at liberty to discuss anything more than that, Miss Richardson. Suffice it to say we have overwhelming evidence they are connected.”
Which made Jason wonder if the crime scene had yielded any clues. He hadn’t followed up on the police investigation the way he usually did, and he wondered about that, as well. Was it because he was trying not to be too involved? Because of the attraction he felt toward Alana that he didn’t want to feel? If so, it was a mistake, because now another woman had been abducted, and RMM needed to add that to its own investigation.
No one spoke for the space of five heartbeats, then the detective inspector said to Mei-li, “We should be going.” He turned to Alana. “You have my card, Miss Richardson. If you remember something—anything—please don’t hesitate to call that number. If I’m not there, you can leave a message with the desk sergeant.”
Mei-li walked the policemen out, but Jason stayed where he was. He glanced at Alana, noting she looked much better than the last time he’d seen her, her tear-stained face pale in the moonlight. But one thing hadn’t changed at all...he was still attracted to her. And that disconcerted him.
He was even more disconcerted when she said softly, “You look different from how I remember you.” He raised a questioning eyebrow as if he had no idea what she was talking about, but she wasn’t fooled. “Oh, don’t worry,” she reassured him. “I have no intention of revealing who you are to anyone, especially the police. Mei-li wouldn’t tell me anything about you, not even your first name. Not surprising, now that I know you’re her brother. But she did say sometimes RMM breaks the law.”