Trust Me by Jayne Ann Krentz Read Free Book Online Page A

invisible webs. They dodged giant container ships and picked their way through the flock of sailboats that had materialized with the good weather.
    Stark thought briefly about how he ought to have been sitting on a beachfront lanai in Bora Bora. It had been Pamela's idea to go to the South Pacific for their honeymoon. Stark had raised no objections. He had left the matter to her, just as he had intended to leave his entire social calendar to her.
    Pamela had arranged everything, hotel, airline tickets, and his schedule. He wondered if she had bothered to cancel the reservations or if he would be getting bills for an unused honeymoon.
    The door opened. Stark turned as Dane McCallum strolled into the office.
    Tall, lean, and aristocratically good-looking at thirtyfive, Dane was Stark's fashion opposite. He had a taste for expensive tailoring and the ability to wear his beautifully cut suits with the stylish flair of a model. He got his blond hair styled in a salon instead of cut in a barbershop. He wore Italian leather on his feet, not scuffed running shoes, and he was never seen in jeans at the office.
    He was Stark's opposite in other ways as well. He was at ease in the social situations that Stark detested, and he genuinely cared about the arts, fine wines, and even the opera.
    He was also very good at managing people and money, qualities that made him invaluable to Stark.
    The two men had met a few years earlier at the Rosetta Institute. Stark had worked on the technical side. Dane had been in management and finance.
    When Stark had made the decision to go out on his own, he had approached Dane with an offer that amounted to little more than a gamble. He had not been able to hold out a fistful of money, because his first product, a computer encryption program, was still in his head. But he had promised Dane a vice presidency and stock in Stark Security Systems. To his surprise, Dane had jumped at the opportunity.
    Dane had proved to be just as skillful at bringing new business in to Stark Security Systems as he had once been at bringing in funding for the Institute.
    Stark was the first to acknowledge that he and Dane had little in common on the surface, yet somehow they had become friends. They were bound together by the mutual goal of making Stark Security Systems the leading company in its field. Hard work and success had welded them into a team.
    “How bad was the hangover on Sunday?” Dane asked equably.
    Stark shrugged. “I didn't have one.”
    “No?” Dane smiled faintly as he lowered himself into a chair and stretched out his long legs. “I realize you're not a heavy drinker, but I figured you'd make an exception Saturday night. If you didn't get drunk, what did you do? I called around eight, but there was no answer.”
    “I spent the evening at the theater.”
    Dane's brows rose. “Didn't know you went to the theater.”
    “I went Saturday night. Saw something called Fly on the Wall at the Limelight.”
    “I don't believe it. You went to see experimental theater? You must have been in worse shape than I thought. How the hell did you find your way to a fifth-rate playhouse like the Limelight?”
    “My caterer and her staff asked me to join them. It wasn't as though I had anything better to do.”
    Dane blinked in surprise. “Your caterer?”
    “Forget it. It's a long story.”
    “All right, you spent Saturday night at the theater. What did you do yesterday? I tried to get you on the phone a couple of times.”
    “I had the phone turned off,” Stark said. “I was working on ARCANE.”
    Dane's eyes gleamed briefly. “To quote Maud, when life hands you lemons, you make lemonade, hmm?”
    “This is not a good time to quote Maud,” Stark warned.
    ARCANE was his newest brainchild, a highly flexible computer security program based on principles he had developed from what the popular press called chaos theory. Stark preferred to term the new field that existed at the frontiers of math and physics “the