Betrayals Read Online Free PDF Page B

seat.
    Jared came around to the driver’s side and climbed in beside her. He hated limousines more than he did tuxedos. At sixty-five, Wesley Sloan was an internationally renowned architect and could well afford his expensive tastes. The repeated offers he’d made to Jared to join his San Francisco–based firm were enough to make most architects salivate, but Jared, the eldest of Wesley’s three children by ten years, continued to turn him down. He preferred to work solo, in the small studio behind his house, specializing in renovations, restorations and additions— “glorified carpentry,” his father called it. But Jared’s half sister Isabel had recently earned her graduate degree in architecture from UCLA and seemed ready to make the move up to San Francisco, something he hoped would take that last bit of heat off him. Wesley Sloan knew Jaredwasn’t going to change his mind, but he wasn’t a man who liked to accept defeat.
    If Wesley had known how much his granddaughter enjoyed riding in his limousine, he’d have tried sending it around every afternoon and never mind her father.
    It was a cool, damp, foggy evening, the kind that made Jared intensely aware of his aloneness. He watched silently out the window as the car wound its way down the narrow, twisting streets of Russian Hill.
    A small crowd was gathered in front of the elegant newly opened San Francisco Villa Hotel, designed by Wesley Sloan. He and his current wife were hosting their annual charity ball, a major social event on the city’s spring calendar. Wesley had issued an invitation to his granddaughter every year since her twelfth birthday. This year, Jared had relented and agreed to let her attend. As he had before her, Mai would have to learn to deal with being a Winston and a Sloan on her own terms—not theirs, not his.
    But as much as he believed in her and admired her spirit and self-assurance, she was just a kid. His kid. And he couldn’t stop himself from wanting to protect her.
    She tugged on his arm. “Daddy—look.”
    Jared was already looking. As the limousine pulled up to the curb, eight or ten huge Harley-Davidson motorcycles materialized out of the fog and formed a menacing half circle around the car.
    “George?” Jared asked.
    “I don’t know what’s going on, Mr. Sloan,” the driver said. “There’s no way I can pull out—we’re stuck here.”
    “Are they going to hurt us?” Mai asked, trying to hide her nervousness.
    Jared shook his head. “No, they’ve got too big an audience. I think they just want to intimidate us.”
    They revved their engines and made a lot of noise, glowering at their own reflections in the limousine windows. They were an ugly lot—overweight, tattooed, unkempt. Not one wore a helmet. Tough guys. Jared spotted two policemen emerging tentatively from the crowd. A newspaper photographer was clicking madly away.
    “To hell with this,” Jared muttered and turned to Mai. “Stay put.”
    He threw open the door as far as he could, until it touched the edge of the lead bike, and climbed out, directing his attention at the driver, a mean-eyed individual with a battered leather jacket stretched over his fat gut. Jared asked nonchalantly, “What’s up?”
    “We weren’t invited to the party.”
    Jared laughed. “Consider yourself lucky.”
    The photographer had worked his way around the limousine behind the two policemen, who didn’t appear to be in any hurry to assert their authority.
    “Hate to miss a party,” the biker said. He made a point of coughing up a huge clam and spitting so that it landed at Jared’s toes.
    Jared wasn’t impressed. The guy and his pals were just getting their kicks intimidating a bunch of rich folks at a high-society gathering, only they’d picked the wrong target. Jared had dealt with scarier people than this.
    “You can go in my place,” he said, almost meaning it. “Got a tux strapped to that contraption?”
    The biker seemed to appreciate Jared’s humor