“I found our guests wandering around upstairs, Jaxon, but they are going to act like gentlemen callers and visit with us in the sitting room. I am rather old-fashioned in some ways. The casual American style of allowing guests access to their entire homes is beyond my scope of entertaining. You gentlemen do not mind, do you?” His voice was very soft, very pleasant.
All three shook their heads, murmuring various agreements to his suggestion. Jaxon studied them for a moment suspiciously, but when they appeared normal, she preceded them down the stairs and led the way to the small cozy room off the foyer. The three men waited politely for her to be seated first. At once Lucian sat beside her, his fingers curling around hers.
“Perhaps you would like to introduce yourselves,” Lucian invited softly.
Jaxon glanced at him nervously. The men were sitting calmly, not in the least disturbed by the fact that they had been caught outright trespassing. They were all in suits, and, if she wasn’t mistaken, all three were armed.
The man in the dark blue suit appeared to be the spokesperson. “I’m Hal Barton. This is Harry Timms and Denny Sheldon.”
Lucian nodded politely, as if people prowled around his home uninvited every day. “This is my fiancee, Jaxon Montgomery. Jaxon, these gentlemen are here from Florida and have an interesting business proposal for me.”
Jaxon arched an eyebrow, her expression frankly skeptical. “You came all the way across the United States to break into Lucian’s house to make him a business offer?”
Lucian sat back and smiled. All three men were nodding solemnly. Hal Barton took up the banner once more. “Actually, yes. We thought if we could beat the security system and break into Lucian Daratrazanoff’s house, he might listen to us and back our revolutionary new security system. We designed it, but we don’t have the funds to mass-produce and market it.”
Jaxon turned her head and met Lucian’s black eyes with her dark brown ones. “This is totally brilliant. Such short notice, too. I’m truly impressed.” She turned back to the three men. “What did he offer you for lying to me? Freedom from prosecution? I’m a cop. Did he mention that?”
Hal Barton shook his head. “You don’t seem to understand the idea. If we can get Mr. Daratrazanoff to back us, we can make an incredible amount of money. We could all be millionaires. We have a great product.”
Jaxon tried to touch Barton’s mind the way Lucian was able to. His “scanning,” as he called it, not the intimate way she merged with Lucian. Such intimacy required taking blood. Her heart jumped, and she hastily banned the thought from her mind. She didn’t dare think too closely about what had transpired between Lucian and her the night before. As long as she didn’t actually think too much, everything would be all right. As she tried to scan the man, Barton seemed as if he were being totally honest with her. Jaxon sighed. It was so improbable. Grown men couldn’t really be that stupid.
Money often makes people do things they would not ordinarily do.
You can read their minds much better than I ever could. Do you really think they’re telling us the truth? Jaxon ran both of her hands through her hair. This all felt wrong. These men should never have broken into her home. And she had felt the vibrations of violence when she first awakened. She had known. She always knew when someone was violent in nature. Their signals had been strong enough to awaken her. Now she felt none of that. Could someone else have been in the vicinity?
No one, Lucian said with soft authority.
Jaxon shook her head. Her life had become totally bizarre. The people in her life were totally bizarre. What did that say about her?
Lucian’s palm cupped the nape of her neck. That you are a very tolerant woman. His voice caressed her, ran over her like the touch of his fingers, in the same way his thumb slid over her soft skin along the edge of her shirt.
“You have to admit, we were able to penetrate your security system,” Hal continued eagerly with his pitch. A frown crossed his face. “It was more difficult than I imagined. I’ve never run across anything like it before.”