I am going to marry her.The realization didn’t feel new. He wasn’t shocked—just annoyed with himself. He should have known it would be George. More importantly, he should have done something about it by now.
They finally left when Ephraim, worn out by the day’s revelation, asked them to go.
Deciding they’d all had quite enough, Rainer bundled Georgia against him and hustled her upstairs. He didn’t care that it was only ten AM, putting them both straight to bed.
CHAPTERTHIRTY-SEVEN
Rainer refused to cut and run a second time. “We are not going into hiding again,” he told Powell sternly when his head of security suggested a second trip out of town, this time with Ephraim in tow.
Stewart held up his hands in surrender. “I figured as much. But I only ask for the old man. He could use a change of scenery.”
“Yeah. I know. The poor guy has aged five years these last couple of days.” Rainer leaned back in his office chair, scrubbing his face with one hand.
“He feels responsible for what Mack did, but to hear Georgia tell it, those two have always butted heads.” Powell smacked his lips. “Fathers and sons, man.”
“Yeah.” Rainer sighed. There was a silver lining now. At least he and Powell finally understood why Elite was the center for this damn conspiracy. And his head of security had truly accepted that Georgia had never been part of it.
Mack was in the wind, despite Powell’s bulldog-like efforts to track him down. All of the man’s old phone numbers or credit cards were defunct, and none of his friends had admitted to hearing from him.
Since it was harder to live off the grid than most people realized, their best guess was that Mack had bought himself a new identity, complete with IDs, before going under.
Just my luck. I had to be targeted by a smart and patient planner. The only flaw in Mack’s plan had been committed years before—when he lobbied to get Georgia a job at his place of work.
“By now, Mack has to know George didn’t abandon me. How likely is it that these assholes will make another attempt without Kolesnik to do the dirty work?”
Powell ran a finger over one of his eyebrows. It was so finely shaped that Rainer wondered if he had them waxed, but he would never ask. He understood Powell had an image of cool perfection to maintain.
“If they’re smart, they’ll give it up, but it seems like Shane Mackenzie went to a hell of a lot of trouble to disguise his involvement to give up without some sort of payoff.”
“No shit. Unless there’s some other compelling reason he would go to that extreme. There isn’t, right?”
Powell shook his head.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Without the kidnapping ransom, faking his death was both stupidly extreme and pointless. Not only that, but according to Powell, the only way to put Mack in jail was to catch him in the act of asecondkidnapping attempt.This was baring some sort of miracle where they stumbled on a lair littered with evidence of Mack’s involvement in the first kidnapping, which didn’t seem likely.
“I still can’t believe faking your death isn’t illegal,” Rainer muttered.
Powell shrugged. “As long as you don’t commit fraud in the process—if, for example, a loved one tried to cash in a life insurance policy on you. But baring that, there are no legal ramifications if you want to drop everything and walk away from your own life.”
Rainer grunted. “Mack deserves jail and more for hurting Georgia and Ephraim the way he did.”
“Except ruining your relatives’ lives isn’t illegal.”
Powell sniffed, but wasn’t unsympathetic to Georgia and Ephraim’s plight. “If you intend on staying put, I’ll need to hire a few more men. Ephraim doesn’t get out much, but both he and Georgia will need their own security details.”
“Hire whoever you need,” Rainer said, waving away the added expense. “We’ll hunker down here until you have everything in place.”
Staying in the penthouse was hardly a hardship, particularly since he had his own office space. Georgia, on the other hand, was going to need some help in that regard. Rainer didn’t want her to lose momentum on her new business.
“Where are we on my plan to convert our storage area into a workspace for George?”
Powell glanced down at his phone, pulling up some notes. “The other owners didn’t have a problem with it as long as it wouldn’t increase foot traffic in and out.”
Rainer nodded in acknowledgment. “Shouldn’t be an issue.”
The garage was reasonably safe. The only way inside was through the elevator, which required a key fob for access, and the main garage door leading to the street. The latter opened only for tenant vehicles with a non-cloneable sensor in their car, but it remained a security vulnerability because a pedestrian could slip in behind them.