Honor Bound by Samantha Chase Read Free Book Online Page B

everything I need to do here for today.”
    “I’ll walk you to your car.”
    Maybe it was just a polite way to make sure I didn’t sneak around into any more private areas, but I didn’t think so. It felt like he was being nice. Almost gentlemanly. I really liked it.
    He opened the car door for me and smiled in a way that made me not want to leave. I lingered, trying to think of something to say. All I came up with was, “Thank you.”
    “You’re welcome. Will you be around next week?”
    “Yeah. Probably. Cheryl always thinks of something else I need to do out here.”
    “Okay. Good. I’m staying at the hotel on the corner of Oak and Brambleton—not far away—since Ken wants me around so much and the commute was killing me. So I’ll be around too. I’ll be the guy in room 421 who is bored out of his skull.”
    He was smiling at me again, and I was smiling back. And I was feeling a kind of giddy excitement that was clouding my thinking capacities. “Oh. Okay. Well, maybe I’ll see you next week.”
    “Definitely.”
    I got in my car and shut my door. Then I waved at him as he headed back into the house.
    I tried to talk myself back into sense by saying he might just be the kind of guy who comes on strong to any woman he meets. And why did he give me his room number? Did he think I’d stop by his room for a quickie or something?
    I was so flustered by the conversation and my responses to it that I pulled out my phone and did a quick internet search on his name. He’d said a lot of people knew about him, so if he was a player or something, then there would probably be something about it online.
    His name came up a lot. Some links were about his military service. A lot were about his family—where he was just listed as the only son of John Maxwell. It was clear that he was supposed to take the reins of the family business after his father died or retired, and that idea gave me a queasy feeling.
    Maybe he was just playing at this security business for fun, knowing he’d eventually go back to big business and run the corporate empire just like his father did.
    I kept looking and found quite a few mentions of him in the company of rich, beautiful socialites. He’d evidently dated a lot of them.
    Of course, he had. That was the kind of girl he would have been surrounded by all his life. The kind who were groomed to be his wife.
    Definitely not me. He seemed to be attracted to me, but probably just for a quick fling.
    He was a rich boy, after all. He’d worked his room number into the conversation, which was seeming more and more like an indirect hint.
    I put my phone away, feeling kind of depressed, and I was about to drive away when I realized I’d left my notepad in the ballroom.
    With a sigh, I got back out of the car and walked inside. I grabbed my notes from where I’d left them and was going to get outside before anyone noticed when I heard a voice speaking from around the corner.
    Since I recognized the unseen voice, I stopped to listen without thinking.
    It was Sebastian, and he must be on the phone again since there wasn’t another voice in the conversation.
    “What the hell do I care about that?” he said, sounding nothing like the warm, funny man I’d interacted with just a few minutes ago. “Just do it.”
    The little thrill I’d been feeling earlier dropped into a weight in my gut. He sounded cold, hard, without emotion.
    “I don’t care if he’s angry,” he continued, gritting out the words in a way that made me cringe. “That’s not my problem. If it were up to me, I’d leave him there to rot.” There was another pause. “Don’t bother me with this kind of bullshit again. I’m done.”
    I felt a wave of near-nausea sweep over me. I’d been right to ask questions earlier and not take the way he was acting at face value.
    This wasn’t a sweet man who’d been born into the wrong family. This was a Maxwell. A real Maxwell. And Maxwells would do anything they wanted to do,