Chapter Twenty-Four
Rhys wanted to put his fist through a wall. Enclaves like this resort, the kind stacked with the mega wealthy, didn’t want police. They didn’t want reports. No negative attention or publicity that couldn’t be controlled or coerced.
Neither, apparently, did Chad Montgomery, an up-and-coming Wall Street bro who was stupid enough to use a kink app called Anonymous, and the high-priced lawyers he worked with.
Even Jules started to see the merits of keeping the situation quiet. She didn’t want to give any satisfaction to whoever was behind the situation. And she felt bad for Chad. He had a morality clause tied to his employment and didn’t want this to be the reason he lost his job.
For both Jules and Chad, the collateral damage for a public report wasn’t worth the headache. And maybe that was the genius behind how it had been set up. At least when it came to Jules.
But that didn’t mean Rhys would keep quiet. Titan would update their contacts at the FBI. The Lowry legal team would add this information to the files they kept to assist investigators. Still, that didn’t feel like enough, and he was climbing the walls.
If he had spent longer outside their bungalow, this would have been so much worse.
Not to mention Rhys had been played. There was no update. The call had been faked. He’d fallen for it, leaving her locked up tight and taking a nap. Who else had their entry code? He didn’t trust that it had been reset.
Abigail and Jules nursed bowls of ice cream on the couch while Rhys paced, waiting for Vivian and Dean to map their next move. The resort had comped their entire stay and begged them to stay for the next week.
Nope. Zero chance.
They were out the moment HQ sent a plan.
He hadn’t told the ladies that, but they had to assume.
He didn’t know where they were going, and that was how it had to be.
Jules might be pissed that they would separate from Abigail, but there’d be no chance anyone could find her until they understood what the hell was happening.
Jules dropped her spoon into the bowl of ice cream and set it on the coffee table. “Maybe we should eat less ice cream before dinner.”
“Maybe we need both.” Abigail scooped another huge bite. “Maybe we should get Rhys a Xanax. His head is about to explode.”
“If it did, I’d have a good reason,” he muttered. “Room service can bring dinner here.”
“I don’t want room service. I don’t want to hide. I’m on vacation. I want to go out to eat and maybe walk around with both middle fingers up so the paparazzi sends a message to whoever is messing with me.”
He turned to Jules.
“No.” She held up her middle fingers and shook them toward the front door. “Just like that. I’m not hiding.”
“You decided not to file a police report,” he countered. “That’s almost the same as hiding.”
“Not the same, Rhys. Going out is a choice. Filing a report gives everything to the public and leaves me without any control.” She dropped her hands, sulking. “Not filing a report is control. I’m controlling the narrative.”
“Someone crossed the line this time—”
“ So sorry, Rhys ,” she snapped. “I think I get it better than anyone else.”
“If you did, you would order room service for dinner.”
Abigail put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. “To your corners, both of you. Now.”
Frustration made his shoulders bunch. He stepped back but wasn’t done. “This isn’t the ridiculous ‘Please retire’ bullshit we’ve been ignoring. You could have been hurt. You could have been—”
“I know. But I’m not letting him control me—”
“Do you even hear yourself?”
“Have you ever met me?” she snapped. “If I deviate from my plans, he wins. Don’t you get that? If I file a police report, he wins.”
“Your life isn’t a damn game.”
Abigail whistled again. “What is going on with you two?”
Jules reached for her bowl and stabbed the spoon into the melting ice cream. “I’m wearing a cute dress, doing my hair up, and requesting the most visible seat in the entire restaurant.”
His teeth ground hard enough to make his jaw ache.
Then his phone rang. The number for headquarters illuminated the screen. “Yeah?” he answered.
“I’ve got Viv and Gage with me,” Dean said.
“How did they get our door code? Anyone got an answer before I tear this place apart?”
“Ours? As in yours?” Dean asked.
Rhys seethed. “Does that matter?” He tried to pull it together and tipped his head back. “As in we have three bungalows.”
Rhys paced away from Jules and Abigail and stepped onto the pool deck, letting the sliding glass door separate them. “The door code. How did Chad Montgomery have it?”
“You didn’t ask him for the code, right?” Dean’s keyboard clicked as he spoke.
“No. I didn’t have to. The fucker let himself in. Remember?”
His phone pinged with a text message.
Vivian: Everything good with you? You sound stressed.
His jaw sawed back and forth.
Rhys: A man had his hands around her neck
Rhys: I think I can sound stressed
Vivian: You sound emotional
Rhys: WTF, Viv. I’m pissed. Furious.
“He didn’t have your code,” Dean said. “He used one tied to housekeeping.”
Of course he did. Rhys’s temples pounded. “Let me guess. A hundred people also have it.”
“Not a hundred. But a lot. It changes once a week. So that’s something. Another thing: he didn’t think she’d be in bed. The guy actually thought she was pretending to sleep when he found her.”
“Meaning no one actually had eyes on her,” Gage said.
Dean continued, “We’re still keeping a lid on everything that has happened down there. No one outside of Titan and Jules’s attorneys has the most recent update.”
“All right.”
“Do me a favor and turn off her phone.”
She had a tracker on it. That explained how they knew where they had breakfast and which bungalow she was in. “Give me two minutes and consider it done. What’s the plan to get her out of here, since we’re doing jack shit to—”
“No one’s doing jack shit,” Viv snapped. “Look, is there anything I need to be aware of?”
“Like what?”
“Like the reason you sound like a homicidal asshole instead of a protection detail?” Gage tossed out.
His gaze flicked to the women intently watching him through the sliding glass door. “No.”
“You’re sure?” Gage pushed. “Scar said you haven’t been looking at the gossip blogs and photos, but…”
“But what?” Rhys growled.
“The fake-boyfriend act is pretty goddamn believable,” Vivian said.
Rhys pinched the bridge of his nose and looked back into the living room again. Jules and Abigail were both ignoring their ice cream.
He’d totally screwed up. Suddenly, he felt a possessive urge to explain that everything they had seen or read about was real.
This was a job. He’d agreed to a stupid stunt.
Somewhere between the beach and the bed and her laughing at his jokes, it had stopped being either of those things.
Yet there he was, angry, possessive, and fucked.
“Guess I’m doing a great job. Can we forget about that and talk about our plan? ”
“The risk assessment is clear,” Vivian said. “Whoever is behind this mess has officially transitioned from annoying to dangerous.”
“Agreed,” Rhys muttered as he paced the white stone patio.
“They have money. Resources. Access—”
“And we don’t know how,” Rhys bit out.
“Actually,” Dean said.
Rhys stopped pacing. “Actually what?”
“We found something.”
A hint of relief deflated some of his anger. “Lead with that next time, brother.”
“Yeah, well, when you’re dropping details about your bungalow, it throws me off.”
“What’d you find?”
“Basically, for an app called Anonymous, they do a crap job at anonymizing their traffic.”
“Meaning?” Rhys pressed.
“The app doesn’t store identities, but its back-end servers log technical data like IP addresses, time stamps, device type, error logs. Et cetera.”
A glimmer of hope appeared. “We have everyone’s IP addresses?”
“In theory, they do. Though most users probably use a VPN.”
His shoulders dropped. “Then it’ll look like everyone is in Amsterdam. Great. How’s that any help?”
“Their app sends push notifications. Those are called tokens, and tokens are attributed to specific devices. Sometimes, they’re tied to an email. Though those are probably throwaways, so that’s pointless.”
Rhys’s patience was running thin. “What’s not pointless?”
“Two things. Even when someone uses a VPN, their device may still send DNS requests and website lookups to their local internet provider. That doesn’t tell us much unless we know where to focus.”
“Do we?”
“Let’s assume there are a relatively manageable number of new Anonymous subscribers per day.
Of those new users, most used a browser to access the site instead of downloading the app.
Of those , we take a look at who’s posting in our desired location.
Where you are. Not many Anonymous, as you can imagine.
A small handful within the last week or so, and within the last forty-eight hours, there’s one user who was as clever as a teenager using a VPN to hide porn from their parents. ”
Another flicker of hope rose in his chest. A name. A face. Anything to figure out what asshole was hellbent on scaring Jules. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“The post on the Caribbean forum originated from the greater Los Angeles metro region.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, shuffling what they knew like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to make sense of it and see the big picture.
Someone with money. Someone from where she lived. A crazy neighbor? A local fan? A scorned lover—or whatever Mason could be classified as. But how did that tie together with wanting Jules to leave show business? “I don’t get it.”
“The FBI has everything, and they’re working it.”
Titan wasn’t investigating. They’d dug up evidence and passed it along. Rhys couldn’t expect more than that, but he wanted to be in the thick of figuring it out. Helplessness weighed his arms down. The person screwing with Jules was hundreds of miles away. How did he fix that?
“They’re treating it like a crime?”
“They’re treating it like an escalation of a pattern,” Gage said. “She’ll be able to use it when we find out who it is. Restraining order first. Prosecution… You know how she felt about that last time.”
“And we’re dealing with the age-old question that has always tripped her up,” Vivian added.
“When does stalking a celebrity become a crime? Until the last few days, asking her to retire didn’t amount to a tenth of the vitriol thrown at her and at most women online.
No one on her team would have noticed if the messaging hadn’t been so consistently odd. ”
“Odd,” he muttered. “Well, now the line has been crossed. She reasonably fears for her safety. That’s the ticket for a restraining order.
” Rhys glanced at Jules, who wanted to do her hair and makeup and make a big fuss for dinner tonight.
“She wants to hit the town tonight. Put on a big show with a big middle finger to whoever’s messing with her. ”
“Do it,” Gage said.
Rhys scowled. “I’m sorry. What?”
“I agree,” Vivian added. “With everything Dean has learned, it’s clear her stalker isn’t on St. Barts. Keep her with you. In public but away from people. Go out to dinner. Let the paparazzi see you. Let her send a message to whoever’s messing with her, then we’ll have you out on a jet tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah. Don’t tell anyone. Go out. Have fun. Then hightail it off the island when no one’s the wiser.”
Dragging Jules off this island would be impossible.
She might ignore a huge problem, but she didn’t run away.
She didn’t hide. Jules was a woman who’d faced certain humiliation at the altar and made a calculated decision to walk out, then very publicly enjoy her honeymoon with her bodyguard.
“Asking her to leave early will be a problem.”
“You have until after dinner to fix that.”
Rhys snorted.
Silence hung on the line.
“And go where? Back to California, straight into the arms of whoever this is? That’s a shit idea.”
“Good thing we don’t traffic in shit ideas,” Vivian muttered.
“You’re going to have to enlighten me, boss.”
“Head here.”
Here? As in there? “Granite Creek?”
“The last place anyone would look for Jules Lowry. A place where everyone watches out for everyone, yet somehow, no one ever sees a damn thing.”
Rhys turned toward the ladies, who stood at the sliding glass door with their arms crossed, aggravated that he’d left them inside. “We’re going to put that motto to the test.”
“Sounds like fun.”