Ed searched her face. “How long have you known Mr. Trainor?”

“Since Tuesday. His illness has accelerated our relationship, I guess.”

“Something certainly has.” He paused a moment. “I served under Mr. Trainor’s father and knew Nathan as a boy.”

This was even better than she’d hoped. She leaned in as Ed kept talking.

“General Trainor is the kind of commanding officer every Marine dreams of. He led by example and believed in the code and structure of the military. Nathan is brilliant in a completely different way. His mind works in great bounds of intuition.” Ed shook his head. “Nathan couldn’t please his father, so he went out of his way to provoke him. He grew his hair long; he wore sloppy clothes; he kept his room a mess. He even refused to polish the sword.” A ghost of a smile played over Ed’s lips. “He had a long list of page 11s.”

“Page 11s?”

Ed went back to being a butler. “My apologies. That’s military slang for negative comments on a Marine’s record.”

“But he invented a computer battery that helps the military as well as civilians,” Chloe said.

“General Trainor and Nathan don’t see it that way.”

Chloe sighed. “It’s so hard to break the patterns of childhood, no matter how out-of-date they are.” She remembered the wedding. “Are Nathan, er, Mr. Trainor’s parents divorced?”

Ed spoke as though he was weighing every word. “His mother died five years ago. It was hard on him and his father.”

Chloe was puzzled by his carefulness. What he said was sad but not out of the ordinary. Her mother had died when Chloe was twelve, which had been very difficult for her and her father. That was when Grandmillie had stepped in to help. “But grief didn’t draw them closer together,” she said.

He hesitated, his gaze flicking away and back. “It was a difficult time.” Again the strange precision.

“Mr. Trainor told me why his father is getting married so quickly. The whole situation seems at odds with such a straight-arrow military type.”

Ed evidently decided to trust her with some extra information. “Mr. Trainor felt that his father’s, er, wife-to-be caught the general at a vulnerable time after Mrs. Trainor’s death. He had some concerns about the sincerity of her affection.”

“Did he also feel his father was somehow being unfaithful to his mother’s memory? Is that why he wouldn’t even visit him?”

“He is not fond of the general’s intended, so he prefers to avoid her.”

“Yet his father invited him to the wedding, and Mr. Trainor is planning to go.” Chloe thought about the level of tension there would be at the wedding. “Wow.”

Ed kept his gaze on Chloe. “Mr. Trainor will need an ally beside him.”

“Aren’t you going?”

The butler looked down. “If Mr. Trainor plans to attend, I will.”

Ed’s loyalty warmed Chloe. He wasn’t going to desert his boss in favor of his former commanding officer. “Then he’ll have you as an ally,” she said, smiling her appreciation.

“Two of us against an entire Marine expeditionary force? You’re a brave woman, Ms. Russell.”

She felt guilty that she’d misled him into believing she would be there too.

Luckily, a door opened and a young woman in a cream shirt and black trousers walked into the room balancing a large tray, so Chloe’s conscience didn’t get the better of her and force her to confess.

Ed turned. “Susan, please serve the hors d’oeuvres here on the coffee table.”

She strode to where they were seated, gave Chloe a smile, and arranged the dishes on the table. The aroma of warm, buttery pastry cupping tiny quiches and miniature bowls of hot carrot-ginger soup set Chloe’s stomach grumbling again.

“Not a moment too soon, it seems,” Ed said with a lift of his eyebrow. He stood. “Enjoy, Ms. Russell.”

“Chloe,” she corrected automatically. She felt another jab of remorse about tricking Ed into thinking that she’d agreed to go with Trainor. Of course, their boss hadn’t yet admitted defeat on that front.

Ed nodded but didn’t use her first name. He and Susan went out the door together, leaving Chloe to her thoughts and her feast. She picked up the empty plate and placed a sample of each of the bite-size offerings on it. That way she would know which to have seconds and thirds of.

Her appetite was slightly dampened by Ed’s revelations. He’d painted too vivid a picture of the young Nathan battling with a powerful and rigid father for enough room to let his unorthodox brilliance shine.

Did either one of them recognize that Trainor had ultimately followed in his father’s footsteps? He dressed in neat, well-tailored suits that weren’t all that different from a uniform. He was responsible for the well-being of hundreds of people, if not for their actual lives. He was a leader, both in his own company and in his industry.

She had the unsettling idea that her boss didn’t want this role, but it was the model he’d grown up with, so he’d followed it.

CHAPTER 9

At eleven o’clock, Nathan watched Chloe hit “Delete” on the last e-mail in his in-box. Except for a brief break for dinner, eaten in his bedroom, they’d worked steadily with nary a complaint from her since he’d awakened five hours before.

She flexed her fingers and arched her back in a subtle stretch, drawing his gaze to the way her blouse draped over the swell of her breasts. He’d been noticing little things like that all day: the elegant whorl of her ear as she tucked her hair behind it, the supple arch of her foot when she slipped off her shoes under the desk, the tautness of her skirt’s fabric over her thighs as she shifted in the chair.