Baited by Love novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Take My Time

Lars's POV

I check things, which is why I had made a copy of the recording on Wednesday.

I had not told Otto, because Otto tells everyone everything.

The copy was a small silver drive, and it lived in my left sock.

At nine that night, I took it to the Ellsworth Inn.

Preston's father sat alone in the corner of the hotel bar with a glass of sparkling water and a legal pad.

He did not look up when I stopped at his table.

"Sit, Mr. Ashdown."

I sat.

"You have something for me," he said.

"A recording. Your son and Miss Kincaid, planning to make Betsy the problem before tomorrow."

"Have you got it with you?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then I will not listen to it."

I had not expected that.

I had practiced for an hour in the shower, and none of my versions began with a refusal.

"Miss Kincaid will say it is edited," he said. "She will say a chemist with a crush spliced it together in his bedroom."

He turned his glass a quarter turn.

"She will say it sweetly, and a roomful of people will believe a sweet voice before a flat one."

He set the glass down.

"I do not hear evidence in bars, Mr. Ashdown. I hear it in public."

"Tomorrow."

"At the ceremony. Miss Brightwell speaks, and then you will have your moment. I have asked for the hall's speakers to be left on."

"And Miss Kincaid?"

"I have moved her to my family box," said Preston's father. "Beside me."

I looked at him.

He was a large, tired man with an expensive watch.

I understood that he had been building this trap since a semicolon.

"Why did you sit behind her?" he asked.

"Sir?"

"Nine months, one row back. I have been a father for twenty-one years."

He looked at me over the legal pad.

"I know what it looks like when a boy does not say something. What is your reason?"

I thought about lying.

"Somebody should carry something for her," I said. "She carries everything."

He wrote a single word on his legal pad and underlined it.

"Good," said Preston's father. "Eat something. You look like a man who has been told he cannot."

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