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  “They wouldn’t be nearly as fond of me if I were shoving worming tubes down their noses,” Cole said with a distracted glance down the hallway. His breath caught as Jessica’s face appeared in the doorway of his room; then she made a wild dash across the hallway, holding her red-and-white top over her bare breasts. Cole swung around to block Charles Hayward from leaving the stall, and in the process he hit the coffee mug against the man’s arm and sent coffee spewing over hay and trickling down Charles’s shirt.

  “What the—” Hayward began; then he choked off his startled exclamation and began brushing at the drops.

  “I’m sorry,” Cole said.

  “That’s okay, I’ll get another one. Why don’t you put our new resident on a longer line and see how he goes. I only spent a half hour looking him over in Memphis in a stall because that was all the time I had.” He peered at Cole, who’d started to turn, and said, “Is anything wrong? You seem a little edgy tonight.”

  Cole shook his head in the negative and followed him down the hallway, actually beginning to believe that Jessica had made a safe escape and nothing worse would come of her antics tonight. His relief came a moment too soon. “That’s odd,” Charles Hayward said as he passed Cole’s room. “I distinctly saw you close that door behind you tonight when you came out of your room.”

  “It probably swung open on its own—” Cole began, but his voice trailed off as Hayward came to a sudden halt, a puzzled smile still on his lips, his eyes riveted on something in Cole’s room.

  “I gather you were entertaining, and I interrupted,” Hayward said. “And now the young lady’s run off or in hiding—”

  Cole’s gaze followed his to the lacy white bra on the floor near Cole’s rumpled bed, but before he could react, the older man had noticed something much more damning than the bra, and his expression went from startled, to accusing, to furious. “Aren’t those my wineglasses?” he demanded; then he stepped forward and jerked the bottle of wine up to see its label. “And this is Jessica’s favorite—”

  “I borrowed it—” Cole began. “No, I stole it—” he said, trying to prevent the inevitable even as Hayward stalked toward the rear doorway of the stable, peering toward the flash of white racing toward the back door of the house.

  “You son of a bitch!” Hayward exploded as he whirled and swung with his right arm, his fist connecting with Cole’s jaw with stunning force. “You fucking bastard!”

  Momentarily free of imminent discovery, Jessica fled to the house and up the stairs to her room, but when she peeked out the window, she saw her husband moving at an infuriated half-run from the stable toward the house. “Oh, my God,” she breathed, quaking in terror as her comfortable life began to shatter around her. “What’ll I do—?” she whispered, looking wildly around the dark room for some way to avoid disaster.

  Down the hall, Barbara turned her stereo up another notch, and inspiration struck.

  “Barbara!” Jessica cried, racing into her startled daughter’s room and slamming and locking the door behind her.

  Barbara looked up from the magazine she was reading, her expression first startled and then alarmed. “Mom—what’s wrong?”

  “You have to help me, darling. Just do what I tell you, and don’t ask questions. I’ll make it worth your while—”

  Chapter 10

  Dallas, 1996

  GOOD AFTERNOON, MR. HARRISON. AND, CONGRATULATIONS,” the guard called as Cole’s limousine passed through the main entrance of Unified Industries’ ultramodern fifty-acre campus not far from Ross Perot’s E-Systems. A smooth four-lane drive meandered through a gently rolling landscape dotted with trees, past a massive fountain and manmade lake. In fine weather, employees who worked in the seven sprawling, mirrored-glass buildings that were linked together by enclosed crosswalks frequently gathered there to eat their lunch.

  The limo glided past Unified’s administration building and continued past the research laboratories, where three men in white lab coats were engaged in a lively debate as they approached the front door. The limo finally rolled to a stop in front of a discreet sign at the curb that said “Executive Offices.”

  “Congratulations, Mr. Harrison,” the receptionist said as Cole stepped out of the elevator on the sixth floor.

  Cole replied with a brief, preoccupied nod and continued through the executive reception area, which was separated from the offices by a tall teak-paneled wall bearing the corporation’s insignia. There, visitors with appointments waited in luxurious comfort on pale green leather sofas, surrounded by a sea of thick oriental carpeting dotted with graceful mahogany tables and accent pieces inlaid with mother-of-pearl or trimmed with brass.

  Oblivious to the restrained splendor of the reception area, Cole turned to the right behind the teak-paneled wall and continued down the carpeted hallway toward his office, only vaguely aware that the place was unnaturally silent.

  As Cole passed by the main conference room, Dick Rowse, the head of advertising and public relations, stopped him. “Cole, could you come in here a moment?”

  As soon as Cole stepped into the crowded room, champagne corks began popping, and forty employees burst into applause in honor of the corporation’s latest coup—the acquisition of a profitable electronics firm with fat government contracts to sweeten their balance sheet and a new computer chip that was in the testing phase. Cushman Electronics, owned by two brothers, Kendall and Prentice Cushman, had been the object of hostile takeover attempts launched by several major corporations, and the widely publicized battle had been bloody and fierce. Today, Unified Industries had emerged victorious, and the media was going crazy.

  “Congratulations, Cole,” Corbin Driscoll, the company’s controller, said as he pressed a glass of champagne into Cole’s hand.

  “Speech!” Dick Rowse called out. “We want a speech,” he persisted determinedly in the jocular tone of a man who feels compelled to make everyone feel relaxed and everything look rosy, and who has also had too much to drink. In this case his efforts struck a particularly false note, because jovial camaraderie between the executive staff and the corporation’s hard-driving CEO simply did not exist.

  Cole glanced impatiently at him, then relented and gave his “speech.” “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said with a brief, perfunctory smile, “we’ve just spent one hundred and fifty million dollars to acquire a company that won’t be worth half that if we can’t market that computer chip. I suggest we all get busy thinking up ways to cut our losses if that happens.”

  “I was hoping for a quote I could use for the media,” Rowse said. “My phone’s been ringing off the hook since the announcement was made two hours ago.”

  “I’ll leave that to you. Thinking up quotable quotes for the media is your job, Dick, not mine,” he replied; then he turned and headed toward his office, leaving Dick Rowse feeling reprimanded and everyone else feeling a little deflated.

  Within minutes the group had disbanded, leaving only Rowse, his new assistant director, Gloria Quigley, and Corbin Driscoll in the conference room.

  Gloria Quigley was the first to speak. Tall, blond, and glamorous, the thirty-year-old was the youngest, and newest, member of the senior staff. “What a letdown,” she said with an exasperated sigh. “Wall Street is in an uproar because Unified Industries wrested Cushman away from Matt Farrell’s Intercorp and two other major players. We’re all euphoric, the clerical staff is proud, and the janitorial people are probably dancing a jig,” she finished, “but the man who masterminded the whole buyout doesn’t seem to care.”

  “Oh, he cares,” Dick Rowse told her. “When you’ve been here for six months, you’ll realize that you’ve just seen Cole Harrison exhibiting extreme pleasure. In fact, he was happier just now than I’ve ever seen him.”

  Gloria looked at the two executives in disbelief. “What’s he like when he’s unhappy?”

  Corbin Driscoll shook his head. “You don’t want to see that.”

  “He can’t be that bad,” Gloria argued.