Rescued By The Billionaire Ceo. Amelia Autin
harm...but so is he. Those lockets contain tiny transmitters. Little beacons that can be remotely activated. The girls have worn them ever since they were rescued from their kidnappers. We were fortunate last time that they were sending Dirk pictures of his daughters that had been geotagged, but we can’t rely on that happening again.”
When Alana raised her brows in a question, Mei-li explained, “Geotagging just means the pictures have GPS coordinates embedded in them. Most people don’t realize this is enabled in their smartphones, and neither did the twins’ kidnappers. But that was a fluke. Dirk wanted to be sure we could track the girls if they’re kidnapped again, and the locket beacons were the best thing he and—that is, the best thing he could come up with.”
Alana wondered why Mei-li had hesitated, then said, “Okay, I get that. But...”
“But how did we know where you were?”
“Yes.”
“You carry the same beacon transmitter as the twins. Just as I do.”
Alana gawked at her. “What?”
Mei-li made a face. “I told Dirk he should tell you, but...”
“But what?”
“He didn’t tell you because he was afraid you’d think he was intruding on your privacy after he promised you he wouldn’t. And to be honest, he really didn’t think we’d need to activate it, so you’d never have to know.”
“Why didn’t he ask me? I’m not stupid. I wouldn’t have refused to carry something that would protect me.”
“I know, I know. But he didn’t know you when you first came to work for him, and he couldn’t take that chance. He’s hyper-concerned for the safety of everyone around him, not just his daughters. Not just me. And given what he suffered when Linden and Laurel were kidnapped, I can’t really blame him. I hope he never has to go through that again with anyone.”
“How...?”
Mei-li’s tiny smile returned. “Didn’t you ever wonder about the key fob on the key ring we gave you when you moved in last month? The one that looks like something you’d use to electronically open a car door...even though you don’t have a car here in Hong Kong?”
Alana opened her mouth, then closed it. She stared at the other woman for a moment before admitting, “I thought it was a key fob for one of the cars in the garage. Not that I would even think about driving here as a general rule, not where everyone drives on the opposite side of the street. But in an emergency...”
“They do operate as a car door key fob. But they also contain a transmitter beacon, which can be remotely as well as manually activated. They’re deliberately designed to look like something innocuous, so no one would suspect their true purpose. Even if the men who abducted you went through your purse, it’s highly unlikely they’d have been suspicious of that key fob.”
Alana struggled with conflicting emotions for a 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