Beauty and the Bodyguard Page 18
“I should have gone out to New Mexico,” she muttered irritably. “I need to see for myself that Allie’s all right.”
“She’s fine.”
“I also want to check out this Rafe Stone.”
“He’s a good man. A strong one, from what I could ascertain during the brief time I spent with him.”
“He’d better be,” Kate replied, her aristocratic features softening. “Allie’s my granddaughter, after all.”
Foster hesitated, reluctant to add to the burden his client already carried.
“Stone isn’t satisfied that he has the answers behind what drove Jerry Philips to fixate on Allie,” he said slowly. “He said…”
Kate pinned him with a sharp stare. “He said what?”
“He said it doesn’t feel right.”
Her swift, indrawn breath stabbed through the silence. Gripping the head of her cane with both hands, she stared at him.
“Sterling…”
She swallowed, then forced herself to voice the awful suspicion he saw forming in her eyes.
“What if all the setbacks Fortune Cosmetics has experienced lately are related? What if they’re not isolated events?”
Slowly, deliberately, she recounted the string of misfortunes that had plagued her family.
“We still don’t know who hired the man who tried to kill me. Or why the Immigration Service gave Nick and Caroline so much trouble suddenly. Then there was the fire at the lab, and now, this attack on Allie.” Her grip tightened on the cane until her knuckles showed white. “What if one person is behind all this?”
Although the same suspicion had begun to wrap its tentacles around his own mind, the lawyer in Sterling was moved to protest.
“We don’t have any proof, anything concrete to link these events.”
Kate’s chin lifted. Despite her cane and the streaks of silver threading her red hair, she looked so much like the determined young businesswoman who’d hired him as Fortune Cosmetics’s first corporate attorney that he blinked.
“We’ll get the proof,” she said, her eyes gleaming with the light of battle. “If there’s a link, we’ll find it!”
Foster barely suppressed a groan. When Kate got that look on her face, she was unstoppable. The next few months, he suspected, were going to prove both exciting and highly hazardous.
BEAUTY AND THE BODYGUARD
Copyright © 1996 by Harlequin Books S.A.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-7317-1
Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Merline Lovelace for her contribution to the Fortune’s Children series.
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