him, let alone feel...anything else toward him.
“Of course,” Meredith said, finally answering his question. Her voice was tight—with nervousness? Something else? “Jillian was just showing me pictures of her fiancé.”
“Really?” Adam said with a slight arch of his brow. “I’d love to see them.”
Some kind of look Jillian couldn’t read passed between brother and sister before Meredith thrust the photo holder at him.
Jillian watched as Adam slowly went through the photos, examining each one closely, eyes narrowed to slits. “What does your fiancé do?”
“He’s an architect.”
“Ah,” he said in a tone that seemed to say he didn’t believe her. “How did the two of you meet?”
“At a party,” she said automatically. It was the truth. “I’m afraid I don’t have a more romantic story of our first meeting than that.”
“All that matters is that you did meet,” Meredith assured her.
When Adam reached the last photograph, he finally raised those dark eyes to her, an indecipherable look in them.
“You make a very attractive couple,” he said blandly, reaching out to hand the photos back to her. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
He continued to stare at her for a long moment before finally nodding, giving the table a cursory glance, a tight, unconvincing smile on his lips. “I’ll let you ladies get back to business. Sorry to interrupt.”
“Not a problem,” Meredith said breezily, though again Jillian caught the look she shot him.
Curious, Jillian thought. There was so much going on beneath the surface she didn’t know about around here. She had to wonder how much of it was relevant to her purposes. She was going to have to figure it out—and soon.
“Now then,” Meredith said. “Why don’t we talk about flowers?”
Jillian couldn’t imagine anything she wanted to do less at the moment. Pasting on a smile, she made herself nod.
Keeping her attention on Meredith, Jillian turned away from Adam.
It didn’t matter. She could still feel him there.
She sensed him begin to depart, relief piercing the tension gripping her insides.
Listening with half an ear to Meredith, she waited for the feeling to dissipate completely.
It didn’t. Instead, fresh awareness prickled the back of her neck. And she knew.
He was watching her.
The tension holding her clenched tighter. A strange mix of emotions churned in her belly, twisting and changing into each other, making it hard to recognize them all. Wariness. Nervousness.
Excitement.
The last one made no sense, but she had no doubt it was the one that had her heart beating the hardest.
Even after he’d finally left, it took a while for the feeling to fade completely.
He was suspicious of her. She was convinced of that now. It was the only thing that made sense, the only possible reason for his unrelenting focus. There was none of Zack Hopkins’s flirtatiousness in his intense scrutiny. Which was ironic considering the effect it seemed to be having on her.
She was going to have to be careful around him. Or better yet, avoid him entirely. The man was a threat to her mission, and quite possibly, her life. She couldn’t forget that.
No matter how many times she had to remind herself.
* * *
THIS ONE WAS different than the last. More reserved. Not as overly excited about the wedding plans and her upcoming nuptials.
Only time would tell just how different from the last one she truly was.
The last bride to come here, for all her excitement about the wedding preparations, hadn’t been serious about what the commitment of her impending nuptials truly meant. At a time when she should have been thinking about nothing but her wedding and getting ready for married life, she’d been looking at a man who wasn’t her fiancé in a way she had no business doing so when she was engaged to be married.
She hadn’t been fit to be a bride, hadn’t deserved all those wonderful plans she’d made. Not at all.
This new one would have to be watched as well.
Chapter Three
Jillian waited until two in the morning before making her move.
She’d taken a nap after dinner, partly because the exhaustion of traveling here and pretending to be something she wasn’t, surrounded by people she didn’t trust, had gotten to her, partly because there was nothing else for her to do. She needed everyone else in Sutton Hall to be in bed and out of her way, needed the place to herself so she could do what she had to.
She needed to see the tower bedroom, the one where Courtney had been staying.
The one with the balcony she’d fallen from.
The final few hours before Jillian thought it would