Page 2 of Fergus

Because at the moment, she was afraid to trust anyone.

Thea knew that the normal thing to do would have been to telephone the Paris offices of Wynter Security and make an appointment to see Fergus. The problem with that was Thea hadn’t been sure, once Fergus heard her name, if he would refuse to see her and cancel the appointment.

If Fergus was still the same honest and trustworthy man he’d been ten years ago, then Thea needed him not to refuse to see or speak to her simply because of her name and what that represented to him.

That first morning, she’d been standing outside the house he lived in in Paris’s 7tharrondissement—the wealthiest and most exclusive area in the city, of course—when he stepped through the security gates enclosing the property shortly after eight o’clock.

She’d followed discreetly as he chose to walk to the building on the Champs-Élysées, where the offices of Wynter Security were situated. She’d done the same when he left midmorning to go to the coffee shop, and again when he went for lunch at one of Paris’s most elite restaurants. At the end of his working day, she’d then followed him back to his home.

She’d been a little surprised when he didn’t leave his house again until the following morning. She’d imagined he would be out every evening enjoying the Parisian nightlife. Or possibly spending the night at a woman’s apartment.

But on both nights, Fergus hadn’t gone out again after returning from the Wynter Security offices. At least, he hadn’t done so before Thea had left at ten o’clock to go back to her hotel and order some food from room service before falling into bed.

After two days of watching his every move, Thea believed she had established that Fergus was well-liked by the locals, whom he greeted by name and who greeted him back with the same familiarity and warmth. The staff in the offices at Wynter Security, three women and two men, all seemed happy enough to be working for and with him based on the chatter Thea overheard between them on their way in and out of the building. As did the steady stream of clients who had called on him during those same two days.

At no time had Fergus given any indication that he knew Thea was following him. Which was why she was totally unprepared to have him confront her in the way he was now doing.

Revealing that he had known all along she’d been following him?

Knowing of his history, both in the military Special Forces and at Wynter Security, Thea realized she had been naive to think he wouldn’t have noticed her sometime during the past two days and grown suspicious about her presence. Now that she thought about it logically, she was surprised he had waited this long before confronting her.

The grip he had on her arm and his determined expression didn’t give the impression he intended letting her go again until she had explained herself. Even the bus had now closed its door and pulled away.

“Do I know you?” he now questioned guardedly, narrowed gaze sweeping over her in assessment.

And so it began!

“Not exactly.” Thea gave him a less-than-reassuring smile. “My name is Thea. We met once, briefly, ten years ago,” she revealed with a wince.

“I don’t recall—” He tensed as he abruptly ceased speaking, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Did you say Thea? As in TheaMorgan?”

Thea stared at him with wide eyes, too surprised he had remembered her and her surname so quickly to be able to do anything else. “How on earth did you realize that’s who I am just from the name Thea?” she finally managed to ask.

He shrugged. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who has that name.”

They really had met only once and briefly. Thea had been fourteen at the time and, to her mind, totally forgettable, with her mousy brown hair, braces on her teeth, and plagued still with puppy fat.

Nowadays, she regularly had red highlights put into her styled shoulder-length hair. The braces on her teeth had done their job, and her teeth were now perfectly straight. The puppy fat had long since disappeared, leaving her too slim, if anything. She certainly had no luscious curves with which to tempt a man.

As Martin, her last boyfriend, had taken great delight in telling her when they broke up shortly before her mother’s death four months ago.

She had ignored Martin’s attempts to come back into her life since then. Because she’d known, considering her curves hadn’t changed in the slightest since he’d described her arse as being “too damned skinny” for his taste, that his interest must now be in the money she had inherited from her motheraftertheir breakup, rather than a sudden realization he was in love with her after all.

Naively, at first, she had believed his sympathy over her mother’s death and his regret over their breakup to be genuine. But Thea had very quickly realized from his conversation about what he envisaged their future together being—instant retirement for him, a large house in London, servants, luxury holidays—that his interest was only in the money her mother had left her rather than in Thea herself.

Needless to say, Thea hadn’t taken a single one of Martin’s calls or answered any of his texts once she had realized what his real motive was in wanting her back.

More importantly to the situation right now, she looked nothing like that awkward fourteen-year-old Fergus had met ten years ago when he briefly dated her mother, so how the hell had he recognized her so easily?

She, of course, would have recognized him in a crowded room full of other attractive men aged in their early forties.

Because Fergus had always been so much more than that.

Oh, he looked very Parisian now, elegant and sophisticated, in his perfectly tailored suit and snowy white shirt with a pale green silk tie. His overlong dark hair with distinguished gray strands running through it was artfully cut into that careless style that looked as if he had just climbed out of bed and run a hand through that dark thickness before getting on with his day.

But those bespoke clothes and expensive hairstyle in no way disguised the edge of danger that had always surrounded Fergus like a second skin and was probably one of the reasons he had appealed to her mother.

Jessica had always been drawn to dangerous men. Ones with hard but arrestingly handsome features. In Fergus’s case, those features were piercing green eyes, a sharp blade of a nose, and sensuously sculpted lips above a square jaw.

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