Kristin Hardy Read online

“Some. The sooner you can get the fiancée to come clean, the better off your mother will be.”

  And the sooner he could go back to his life, escape the morass that was already beginning to suck him in.

  Abruptly, he rose. “Then I guess I’d better get on it,” he said, holding his hand out to Burton.

  “You hear from Bradley, you let me know immediately,” the lawyer said as he walked them out.

  “You know it.”

  The carpet in the hallway outside Burton’s downtown Stamford offices was thick and plush underfoot, the color of the brandy Pierce had favored. Ahead, light streamed through the glass walls that surrounded the ten-floor atrium lobby.

  “I just can’t believe it was Bradley,” Olivia said as they waited for the elevator. “She must have pushed him into it.”

  She might have been involved, but Lex had a pretty good idea nobody pushed Bradley anywhere. There was one trait they’d both inherited from their father, his stubborn single-mindedness. It had fueled Lex’s rise to the top of a difficult and dangerous field. It had also helped Bradley take a controlling position in Alexander Technologies, the position that had let him get away with his crimes.

  For a while.

  “Mom,” Lex said gently, “no one made Bradley run.”

  But if Keely Stafford had helped him, then she knew how to untangle this rat’s nest. And she damned well needed to start talking.

  “Bradley doesn’t know what to do with the mess she’s gotten him into,” Olivia maintained, but her voice was uncertain.

  “Have you ever, in your entire life, seen Bradley do anything he didn’t want to do?”

  “He couldn’t have done this on his own. I won’t believe it.”

  Translation: she didn’t want to.

  She had to face it, though, or she’d never get past it. “No one made him gamble, Mom.” Lex kept his voice gentle. “You saw the statements from the pit bosses. Brad got in trouble, he wanted out, and he wasn’t too concerned about how.”

  Abruptly, the starch went out of Olivia’s posture and for just a moment she sagged against the railing that looked down over the lobby. “What am I going to do?” she whispered. “They’re going to take it all. How could he do this? How could he leave me with nothing?”

  And now she did cry. All he could do was gather her against him and stand there, helplessly patting her back. No. Not helpless, never helpless. There was a way to fix this and he would find it.

  Starting with Keely Stafford.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be all right here tonight?” Jeannie stood behind the counter at the flower shop, buttoning her coat.

  “I’ll be fine. I’ve got Lydia coming in later to help.”

  “The mistletoe for the novelty hangers is on the table.”

  “I know. I was the one who put it there, remember? Now git.” Keely draped her mother’s scarf around her neck. “You’ve got a party to primp for. How else are you going to get to dissect the centerpieces if you’re not there?”

  “What would make you think I’d do such a thing?” Jeannie asked.

  Keely grinned. “I know you too well. Have a great time.” She kissed her mother’s cheek.

  “Thank you again. And don’t spend the whole night working. Go out and watch the tree lighting. You should have some fun.”

  “Out,” Keely ordered, pointing at the door.

  “I’m going,” Jeannie said hastily.

  Keely watched the door close behind her. In a while, Lydia would show up and their gab fest would begin. For now, Keely had the shop to herself. She breathed in air scented with roses, carnations, hyacinths, and remembered.

  The shop had defined her life in so many ways. One minute, the Staffords had had money, country club memberships, prestige. The next, she’d found herself pitching in to help pay the bills, filling out reams of scholarship and loan applications to cover college. The long, hot, lazy summers she’d grown up with had been replaced by cool days in the shop, wearing the tailored black shirt and trousers that were the uniform at Jeannie’s.

  Then Bradley had come through the door to buy a bouquet for his mother. And Keely had fallen as deeply into infatuation with him as she had at fourteen, when he’d been the star of the country-club tennis court and she’d prayed for him to ask her to play doubles with him.

  Now, five years later, she was back at the florist shop, tying a ribbon on an arrangement of mums. All those years of study, the internships, the work at Briarson, blown apart by Bradley. She struggled to push down the surge of anger as she carried the vase into the glass-fronted, walk-in refrigerator that held orchids, roses, daylilies and the other exotics.

  Behind her, a jingling signaled the entry of a customer. With a sigh of resignation, Keely turned.

  Only to see Lex Alexander.

  Suddenly, abruptly, the shop felt very small. And very empty. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t look around at any of the arrangements. Just headed straight for her.

  Keely met him at the door to the refrigerator. The shallow space in front of the tiers of flowers was far too small for two. “Looking for some flowers?” she asked.

  “Looking for you.”

  He was taller than she’d realized the day before, topping her five ten so that she found herself staring at his chin. In defense, she raised her own. “I’m working.”

  “The shop’s empty. We need to talk.”

  His eyes were dark, turbulent as he stared down at her. She felt that same stir of awareness she had before. Her pulse thudded in her ears. He was too big, too strong. Too there. She took a breath and pushed past him. “I have things to do,” she said without turning.

  “Fine. I’ll talk with you while you do them.”

  Keely made a noise of frustration and walked to the counter. “I don’t see what we’ve got to talk about.”

  “How about this little scheme you’ve got going with Bradley, for a start.”

  She did look at him, then. “I don’t have any scheme going with Bradley.”

  “The feds say you do.”

  “The feds don’t have a shred of evidence.” Because there was none.

  “They’ve got your name on the boards of some LLCs.”

  “They’ve got your mother’s name on those boards, too,” she countered.

  “Why do you think I’m here? I need to know what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything. I already told you, I’m not a part of this. Bradley was on his own.” She walked into the back and told herself she wasn’t fleeing.

  It didn’t matter. He followed her. “Oh, come on. You’re his fiancée, you’re an accountant. You know as well as I do he couldn’t figure this out alone.”

  “Nice that you have such a high opinion of him.” She didn’t look at him, just picked up some scarlet-berried holly off the counter and jammed it into a small vase to get it out of the way. Lex still made her as uneasy as he had when she was a teen, only now it was overlaid with something else, a humming tension she didn’t want to think too much about.

  “My opinion doesn’t matter,” Lex said. “What matters is that my mother could lose everything because of what he’s done. I need to get her out of this and to do that, I need you.”

  Keely snatched up one of the branches of mistletoe that lay on the worktable and began snipping off sprigs. “What you need is Bradley, and no, before you start in on it again, I don’t know where he is.” The snap of the clippers punctuated her words. “I don’t know anything about any of it.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “And I don’t really give a damn.” She slapped down the clippers. “I’ve got the feds on my tail, a boss who told me to get lost and an apartment that’s been torn apart, thanks to your brother. I could give a hang what you believe.” Jaw clamped, she snatched up the scissors and began chopping off hanks of red ribbon to bind the mistletoe. “Now, either buy something or get out of this store.”

  Lex studied her for a minute, arms folded. “All right, let�
��s say you didn’t have any part of it. If that’s true, then it’s in your interest as much as ours to get to the bottom of this thing.”

  “Sure, I’ll get right on that. Let me just find my magic wand.”

  “Look, you’re an accountant. Even if you didn’t have anything to do with it, you should still be able to follow the trail. Maybe you’ll find something the big boys missed. Clear your name and my mother’s. As his fiancée, I’d think you’d want to get to the bottom of it.”

  “He’s not my fiancé,” she said tightly. “I told you, we broke up the morning of the raid.”

  “Perfect timing.”

  “No, perfect timing would have been two years ago when we first started dating,” she snapped. “Forget it, okay? If I want to play detective, I can do it on my own.”

  “Not if you want access to my mother’s papers.”

  “What for?”

  He shrugged, toying with a piece of mistletoe. “He used her accounts as part of his scheme. You might just find the key to something.”

  “Your mother is never going to give me access to her papers. From what I hear, she blames me for the whole thing. First her, then you. What could possibly make me want to work with people who don’t even believe me?”

  “Change her mind,” Lex suggested. “Change mine.”

  “Why should I? Why should I care what either of you think?” Keely reached over for a sprig of mistletoe.

  And his hand landed on hers, stopping her dead. “It’s in both of our interests.”

  Heat bloomed up her arm. For an instant, she didn’t move, couldn’t. His fingers were warm, his palm hard. And all she could do for a helpless instant was wonder what it would feel like on her naked body.

  “Think about it,” he suggested.

  For a bewildered second, Keely wondered how he could possibly know what was in her mind. Then she realized what he meant, and swallowed. “Thanks, but no thanks. And like I said, it’s time for you to go.”

  He removed his hand. “Let me know when you change your mind.”

  “If,” she corrected.

  “When.”

  “Try never,” she retorted.

  He laughed, his teeth very white against his dark skin. “I’ll be around when you’re looking for me.”

  Chapter Four

  Lex stepped out onto the sidewalk into the late afternoon. The last bits of snow from the nor’easter crunched underfoot. The setting sun stained the sky ruddy.

  And he could still feel the softness of Keely’s skin against his palm.

  She hadn’t told him anything he needed, he reminded himself. What she’d told him was to take a hike. He should have been frustrated, but somehow all he kept focusing on was how she’d felt, fragile yet strong.

  And the way that mouth of hers might taste.

  He gave an impatient shake of his head. There were many dumb things he could do, but getting involved with his brother’s fiancée—or ex-fiancée—pretty much landed at the top of the list. He didn’t even like the woman. He’d never had any use for her or her Junior League kind.

  So why did he find himself distracted by wondering whether if he kissed her, the Junior League girl would turn into a woman, hungry and urgent?

  Ridiculous. He’d kissed plenty of women in his time. He didn’t need to kiss one more, no matter how much she kept popping up in his thoughts. What he needed to do was get his mother off the hook and get gone, because the longer he stayed, the more bound he felt—by the need to help Olivia find someone to run her finances, by the questions about her estate. The maid had shown up in his room that morning with his father’s old tux, to measure him for alterations so Lex could wear it to the Christmas gala as Olivia’s escort.

  Charity balls and investment advice weren’t him. Servants and tuxedos weren’t him. He was about tramping through bush and desert and jungle, looking to capture that elusive moment that could encapsulate a place and time, giving people an immediate, gut-level understanding of what was happening in their world.

  And maybe after fourteen years, he was starting to get tired of the dirt, the exhaustion, the crappy beds and food, starting to get soul-deep tired of man’s seemingly endless capacity for destruction. That just meant he needed a break, that was all. It sure as hell didn’t mean he needed to come back to Chilton and take up where his father and Bradley had left off.

  He stared at the fading light on the horizon and thought of sunsets along the equator, where the transition from dark to light took place in the blink of an eye. Where the sunsets and sunrises hit at the same time every day, no matter the season, because the seasons were just warm and warmer and you slept naked in the heat. And that quickly, images of Keely were back dancing in his head.

  To derail his thoughts, he pushed open the door to Darlene’s.

  Darlene stood behind the baked-goods case with a white bag in her hand as she filled the order of a harried woman trying to buy muffins and manage the children hanging on to her legs.

  “Two corn, four blueberry—Tommy, stop,” the woman snapped. “Two bran and two…” She paused for thought, studying the baked goods in the case.

  Darlene shook the bag a bit. Impatient, Lex thought with a smile. “Apple banana?” she suggested. “Carrot?”

  “I’d go with carrot,” Lex said, stepping forward. “They’re the best. I swear, I could smell them all the way over in Tanzania.”

  The woman stared at him. “Cranberry,” she muttered.

  Darlene raised an eyebrow at Lex. “About time you came back. You hardly even said hello yesterday,” she complained, dropping the customer’s final two muffins into the bag. “And what’s this about Tanzania? The last postcard I got from you was from Chechnya.”

  “I thought I’d head somewhere warm for a while.” Darfur, to be precise, at least until he’d seen all he could take. Taking photographs of endangered species being slaughtered was a hell of a lot harder to stomach when they were human beings.

  With an almost physical effort, he turned his thoughts back to the present.

  “Well, I still think you’re too skinny, wherever you’ve been. Here, take one of these. No, two.” Darlene shoved a pair of carrot muffins to him before she went back to her customer.

  Grinning, Lex watched her hand the woman change. Back when he’d lived in Chilton, Darlene had been one of the rare adults he could tolerate, one of the few who hadn’t treated him like either a brainless clone of a previous generation or a felon in training. So he’d broken a few rules; that made him a misguided kid, not a criminal, whatever anyone had said. Darlene hadn’t cared. She’d just treated him like a person and he’d adored her for it.

  “So what’s Tanzania like?” she asked, pushing a cup of coffee toward him.

  “Beautiful. So open and gorgeous it takes your breath away. You’ve got a postcard coming.” With a pair of smooching baboons on the front, he recalled.

  “It’ll go with the rest of my collection.”

  Glancing over her shoulder, he saw the wall behind her was decorated not with comic signs but with a rainbow patchwork of postcards—his postcards—sent from all over the world. She’d kept them all, he realized.

  And felt an unexpected stab of an emotion he almost didn’t recognize.

  When he’d walked away from home, he’d left behind all the strings and entanglements, and he’d kept it that way. It was easier. What little companionship he needed, he got from his colleagues, his editors, or passing involvements with women who wanted little more than an occasional warm body to hold in the darkness. It was a life that suited him.

  And if in the odd lonely night on the back side of the world he felt something was missing, whose business was it but his?

  Except that now he was staring up at all those damned postcards, tacked up there on the wall, as Darlene waited on another customer.

  He’d never sent letters to his mother, not wanting to make her the target of Pierce’s anger. He hadn’t really thought about why he sent them to Darlene; h
e wasn’t sure he wanted to now. It was easier to take his coffee to a table and leave Darlene to her customers.

  He didn’t need one more tie in Chilton.

  Keely stood at the front of the flower shop, hanging the bundles of mistletoe on the shop’s eight-foot pine Christmas tree. She’d gotten them all done pretty quickly after Lex had left. Better to keep busy than to think about that moment he’d touched her. It was nothing, of course. She’d been emotional anyway ever since things had blown up with Bradley. Of course she’d overreact to everything. She’d just been angry with him.