Page 59 of The Hawthorne Legacy
Grayson didn’t rise to the bait. “We’ll need to make sure Constantine stays clear, too.”
“I, too, excel at the art of distraction,” Max volunteered. “I attribute it to my ability to channel any or all of my favorite fictional spies on cue.”
“Grayson and Max can set up a perimeter.” Xander’s voice was uncharacteristically muted. “Jameson, Avery, and I will do a sweep of the wing.”
Rebecca had split the moment the plane landed. Thea hadn’t lingered long once Rebecca was gone. Xander’s team had abandoned him, but he wasn’t backing down.
He wasn’t about to let Jameson and me search for the ring on our own.
“This is a very bad idea.” Eli didn’t even pretend that he hadn’t been eavesdropping.
That’s why we waited until Oren was off duty to do it, I thought.
The door to Zara’s wing was at least ten feet tall—and locked.
“Do you want to pick it?” Jameson asked Xander. “Or should I?”
Two minutes later, the three of us were in. Grayson and Max stayed behind and took up posts at the far ends on the hall. Eli grumbled as he followed me into the belly of the beast.
A quick inspection told me there were seven doors lining the main hall in Zara’s wing. Behind three of them we found bedrooms, each one the equivalent of an entire suite. Two of the three suites were clearly in use.
“Do Zara and her husband sleep in different rooms?” I asked Jameson.
“Don’t know,” he replied.
“Don’t want to know,” Xander added cheerily.
I saw men’s shoes in one room. The other was immaculate. Zara’s. There was a marble fireplace near the back of the room. Built-in shelves lined the wall to the left. There were books on the shelves, large, leather-bound volumes. The kind of books a person displayed, not the kind they read.
“If I were a person whose bookshelves looked like that,” I murmured, “where would I keep my jewelry?”
“A safe,” Xander answered, probing a molding on the wall.
Jameson stepped past me, letting his body brush mine. “And that safe,” Jameson told me, “is assuredly hidden.”
It took ten minutes for our search to hit pay dirt: a remote control taped to the bookshelf, behind one of the leather-bound books. I peeled off the tape and got a better look at the remote, which had only one button.
“Well, Heiress…” Jameson flashed me a smile. “Will you do the honors?”
Looking at that smile, I flashed back to the hot tub. There was no reason for me to be thinking about it. No reason for me to be thinking about Jameson that way right now.
I pushed the button.
As the massive built-in shelves began to move, slowly disappearing into the wall, I stared at what had been hidden behind them. “More shelves,” I said, dumbfounded. “And… more books?”
Rows of paperbacks were stacked two deep. Romance. Science fiction. Cozy mysteries and paranormal. I tried to picture Zara reading a romance novel, or a space opera, or the type of mystery that had a cat and a ball of yarn on the cover—and couldn’t.
“If we take the books off these shelves, will we find another remote?” Xander postulated. “And more shelves? And another remote? And—” Xander cut off.
It took me a second to realize what he’d heard: the sound of high heels clicking against the wood floor.
Zara.
Jameson pulled me into the closet. If it had been hard not to think of the hot tub before, it was impossible now.
“So much for Gray’s distraction,” he murmured into my neck as he pulled me close, and we disappeared back into the seemingly endless racks of clothes. I stood still, barely breathing and all too aware that he was doing the same behind me.
Xander must have hidden, too, because for several seconds, the only sound in the bedroom was the clicking of Zara’s heels. I willed my heart to stop beating so hard and tried to stay focused on tracking Zara’s movements—not on the way my body fit against Jameson’s.
