Page 13 of Masquerade

“What gave me away?” she whispered.

He was drowning in her gaze. The ground shifted, leaving them isolated as space and time cracked open. This time, sucked into a swirling vortex where her fear touched him, and it made no sense.

“I’m not sure. Something about your eyes.” He wasn’t going to make himself look more of an idiot by saying her smile had bewitched him.

She let out a breath on a long, low whistle, and they were no longer alone.

“I asked her to help,” Anna insisted. “Found I couldn’t orchestrate what I wanted by being in the shot.”

Another lie. Liam knew it. Equally he knew he was facing a loyalty he couldn’t shake. He and Niall had it once. His glance flicked to his brother; the condemnation in his twin’s eyes cut to the bone.

“Are you saying Niall has no right to his own image?” Kate asked.

Liam had been wilfully kidding himself that his intervention would change anything. Still, part of him was pissed off it had come to this.

“Unlike you”—his hand lifted of its own volition to push a loose strand of her hair off her face. He snatched his hand back before he crossed a line he couldn’t pull back from. Her hair would have a glossy weight and slip like silk between his fingers—“dyeing my hair won’t be enough. You’ve used every female artifice available to disguise your looks so you can keep your privacy. I don’t have as many options.”

The billboard campaign would escalate as soon as Niall’s face was fully revealed. Niall would get good publicity, while people who remembered the Futureproof Mining fiasco would remember Liam Quinn. He’d be noticed if he revisited the area, and the project he’d picked from Kate’s list was in the next valley.

“I came here to find out the extent of the campaign. Now I know. That’s all we have to discuss. I won’t keep you any longer.” He tasted bitter disappointment and blamed himself for the sin of hope.

Heading back across town, Liam flipped up the collar of his coat, the cold snap carrying the sting of an Antarctic breeze. His mind filled and emptied with what-ifs.

I made a bloody mess of that!He recalled George’s response when he’d offered to withdraw from the project. There was no choice now. Pride demanded he submit a proposal, but he owed his boss too much to compromise what George wanted to do for his daughters.

“Think of the bright side,” he muttered. “You won’t need to see Kate Turner again. Right. And that’s going to work.” Seeing her made no difference to having her in his head.

* * *

Kate hesitated withher hand on the boardroom door. George had told her he’d received four proposals, but the conviction Liam would disqualify himself was a splinter she couldn’t budge. He didn’t need to disqualify himself. George was a big boy. This was his pet project. Even if Liam was his first choice, he’d make pragmatic decisions before he’d see it fail. Why would Liam rule himself out of the game before the cards were dealt? Kate remembered the moment of silent communication between George and Liam, the empathy she’d picked up on. Insight hit.

Liam was putting George’s interests above his own promotion. In short, he was behaving honourably.

Liam had left Anna’s office quietly the other day, but there’d been a tidal wave of emotion in his wake. She was still trying to unravel the threads. Anger, frustration, but also self-disgust and disillusion had been in the mix. Liam was a complex and contradictory man.

Niall had mumbled an apology and taken off shortly after his brother. The sharp-edged wariness between the two had been hard to watch. Anna didn’t know what had caused the rift between the two brothers, except Niall believed Liam had closed down and locked him out.

She shivered, remembering Liam’s hand near her hair. She’d held her breath, imaging a light pull against her scalp, his strong fingers rolling over a strand as if absorbing its texture. An intimate touch, and they didn’t have that kind of relationship. Yet, his hesitation had triggered a deep yearning in her, and his isolation tugged at her in ways she didn’t fully understand. She’d been close enough to step into his space, to inhale his spicy cologne, to fight the urge to lose herself in him.

He saw her, Kate Turner, not half of Kate and Anna Turner, and his recognition made her heart stumble. A photo on a billboard and a single meeting and he’d been able to distinguish between Anna and herself. Goosebumps rose as they did when a story caught her by the throat. A visceral sensation carrying its own power. A seduction of knowing. Liam Quinn made her yearn for possibilities squashed by Andrew.

In the seventy-two hours since she’d been in this boardroom, the world had turned. For starters, she’d attached names to the faces of Liam’s three competitors.

“Hey, Liam,”—Atticus Ioannou, the youngest and closest in age to George’s daughters, grinned slyly—“been freelancing as a model?”

As if on cue, the power-dressed, meticulously made up brunette, Helen Browning laughed. “You could be a double for the Genosearch face.”

Liam’s gaze danced over Kate before he smiled neutrally at his colleagues. “My brother.”

Overnight, the outline of Niall’s face had been sketched onto the billboard image. His mouth—Liam’s full, firm lips—had appeared. Until she’d met Liam, she hadn’t thought the brothers resembled Greek gods. Men so disinterested in their looks shouldn’t have been granted such perfection.

Take that back.She hadn’t rated Niall as handsome, although bare-chested during the photo shoot, he’d displayed the muscles expected of a man who hauled and hewed wood. Imagining what lay beneath Liam’s fine wool jacket rocketed her pulse into the stratosphere.

“His face is about to make me briefly famous.” Liam’s mouth twisted wryly.

Disqualifying himself would be an overreaction to Niall’s instant, brief celebrity. A nuclear warhead to Niall’s slingshot. Niall would be devastated if he knew.

“Do you get mixed up a lot?” Amira Kolan asked. Her suit would flash a warning like a beacon on storm-tossed seas if she ever got near an anti-logging campsite. “How does that feel?”

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