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
