‘Well done. Not bad at all.’

Sharon grinned proudly. ‘So what kind of guys do you like? Tall, dark and handsome?’

Sharon held up her romance novel for Bailey to see. Bailey glanced over her shoulder to look at it – the cover depicted an airbrushed picture of a tall, dark handsome man with a glistening muscled torso. The novel was called The Billionaire’s Secret Cinderella.

Bailey snorted a laugh.

‘Actually, I prefer blonde hair and blue eyes.’

‘You like the Teutonic look, eh? I’ve got one over there called Seduced by the Surgeon. The bloke in it is this rich blonde doctor. You can borrow it if you want.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Suit yourself. So have you been getting much action since… what was his name?’

Since the end of that relationship, it had been a case of going out every once in a while when the mood took her – putting on a bit of lip gloss and her favourite suede-fringed cowboy jacket, going to a bar, hitting on some guy, bringing him back to her place, and then ejecting him once business was done.

But then she’d got the scars and they had put an end to that. Intimacy was no longer something she felt comfortable with in the wake of that last undercover job. More than that, the wounds from the violations she’d been subjected to went far deeper than any physical injuries she’d suffered, and unlike the scars they were still raw and painful. No – she couldn’t see herself getting intimate with anyone again anytime soon, and perhaps not ever.

Bailey snapped the lid closed on the bottle of moisturiser and placed it back on the shelf by the mirror. She turned around and forced a smile at Sharon.

‘I’ve got some stuff to get done.’

And she turned and left the cell.

Chapter 10

She walked out onto the landing. There were plenty of inmates hanging around, some by themselves, many in groups, and the air was filled with their murmured conversations.

It was free association time and the inmates could move around the prison as they wished, although many just remained in their cells, watching TV or playing computer games.

Free association seemed to work out at around two to three hours a day and inmates were legally entitled to spend one hour of it outside in the fresh air in the yard if they chose. The actual times for free association varied from day to day. Bailey had realised that this time provided the best opportunity for her to conduct her investigation and she was determined to make the most of it. Her plan was to keep herself to herself and conduct her activities as discreetly as possible.

She figured that at some point she should probably try and track down Alice’s cellmate, Melanie Clarke, to see if she could extract any useful information from her, but at the moment she was unsure of the best way to go about finding her. She definitely wasn’t going to ask Sharon. Sharon was way too nosey and she was already asking too many questions. Not to worry. Bailey was confident that she’d locate this Melanie Clarke eventually. It was just a matter of time. Meanwhile, she had other avenues in mind.