Kristin Hardy Read online

  Lex threw a helpless look at Keely. “Stay,” she mouthed to him.

  “Sorry,” he said softly as he came back over to the desk. “She’s having a tough time with this.”

  “Anyone would,” Keely said.

  He pulled up a chair and sat next to her, far too close for her peace of mind. “I can search drawers and files. I just need to know what you’re looking for.”

  A clear head, Keely told herself. “Something to prove that neither Olivia or I knew about the LLCs, that he put us on the boards without our permission or knowledge. Any files or contacts that might be part of starting up the LLCs would help, any contacts with his Latvian friend or whatever lawyer he worked with.”

  “I’ll check the drawers.” Lex rose and pushed the chair out of the way. “What about e-mail or notes?” he asked from beside her.

  “You go into business with a piranha, you keep records to protect yourself. Particularly Bradley. He’s always been one to cover his ass.”

  “He’s too smart to keep something like that in his condo,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Exactly. He considered this his office away from home. It stands to reason he might have squirreled it away somewhere here. He’d have known that even a search couldn’t be too comprehensive if my mother wasn’t a primary suspect.” Lex pulled out one drawer after another and inspected the backs and undersides.

  “Of course, your mother or the maid could stumble over it at anytime, depending on what it is. Do you think he’d risk that?”

  “What’s the risk?” Lex slid in the last drawer. “My mother left all the financial dealings to him and the maid wouldn’t pay any attention to business papers.”

  “He could have a hidey hole somewhere else, though.” Keely gave him a sudden, quick glance. “What about the room he used when he stayed here? Do you know if they searched that?”

  From the hallway came the murmurs of arriving DAR members.

  “It can’t hurt to look, whether they did or not,” Lex said. He stood in one fluid motion just as Keely pushed back the chair and rose.

  Only to find herself almost lip to lip with him.

  For an instant, every thought in her head scattered. Neither she nor Lex moved. Out in the hall, they could hear the clinks of teacups and spoons from the garden room at the back. Inside, humming tension filled the room.

  Then Lex inclined his head a fraction and stepped away.

  It was nothing, Keely told herself fiercely as she followed him into the hallway. It was just being uncomfortably close to someone she didn’t know very well, no more than that. It was nothing like that…whatever it was she’d felt the night before. Nothing at all.

  Lex stopped at the bottom of the stairs and nodded for her to go ahead of him. “Ladies first.”

  She shook her head. “No, you. Please.”

  “Come on, with my mother and half the DAR in the other room?” he asked. “They’ll sense it somehow and come out and string me up for bad manners. No chance. You go.”

  During the two years she and Bradley had been engaged, Keely had never seen the upstairs of the Alexander home. Though she’d been curious, definitely curious. The few times the two of them had been in Chilton together, she’d stayed with her parents and he with his. It didn’t matter that they were going to be married; that was just the way it was done. Climbing the stairs now, Keely felt as though she were sneaking into the inner sanctum.

  And she couldn’t help but be aware of Lex just behind her. She could hear his breath, hear the slide of his hand on the carved oak banister, the tread of his feet on the stair runner beneath their feet. She found herself hyper-conscious of her every motion, wondering if he was watching.

  Knowing, somehow, that he was.

  At the top step, she breathed a silent sigh of relief and stepped back to give Lex an inquiring look.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Bradley’s room.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know where it is. I’ve never been up here before.”

  “You haven’t…?” He gave a wry smile of understanding. “You wouldn’t have, I guess. My mother’s pretty old school. It’s down here.”

  Bradley’s walls were painted in a deep, luxurious teal. Olivia had redecorated it a year or so before, Keely recalled. It must have been per Bradley’s request because there was none of Olivia’s fondness for the traditional. There was also no personality to the room. Zip. None. It didn’t look a bit like his condo in Manhattan. It might have been a room in a stylish boutique hotel. There was a black framed full-length mirror leaning against the wall, a narrow desk, a chrome and frosted glass bedside table.

  And a bed.

  Keely felt instantly awkward. It was as though they were intruding—not on Bradley, because there was nothing of him here, but on someone. And that bed, that enormous bed, practically the only thing in the room so that it was almost impossible not to stare at it. Would the atmosphere have felt so…charged if she’d been standing there with any man? Or was it because she was standing there with Lex?

  And why the hell was it that when she was here searching the past in order to save her future, she couldn’t stop thinking about his mouth on hers, his hands running down her body, the sharp male scent of him, the heat of his breath as he—

  Stop it.

  No distractions. This certainly was no time to get thinking about aberrations like the night before. It had been a lapse, she reminded herself impatiently, a mistake. Nothing more.

  “Where do you want to start?” Lex asked.

  Keely jumped. “The bed. I mean, you. Search the bed, that is,” she fumbled. “Check behind the headboard and underneath. I think it’s got some built-in drawers. I’ll check the closet.”

  And that was where she fled.

  It would be possible to sound more idiotic, she supposed, but it would take some doing. Where was that poise that she was always able to summon up at work? This was its own kind of job, a crucial job, so why was she babbling like some bubble-headed bimbo?

  Keely opened the door to the walk-in closet to find built in bureaus, which at least answered the question of why the room was so bare. And gave her something to do. She began pulling out drawers. The search was unlikely to yield any clues but it was worth it to be sure.

  At least there wasn’t much to search. Bradley hadn’t spent all that much time in Chilton. There were a few shirts and pairs of jeans, a couple of sweaters, a single suit. A couple of the baseball hats he liked to wear sailing. Add T-shirts and shoes and underclothes, and that was pretty well it.

  The things on the shelf that ran above the clothes racks were the sole items that spoke of a life prior to the present day. She found a lacrosse racket and helmet, a pair of downhill skis and poles. And at the very end, all the way inside, a tennis racket.

  For a minute, she just held it in her hands, staring down at it. They had been magic, those long-ago days on the courts. There had been a time Bradley had been her knight in shining armor. And even once the shine on the armor had dulled, she’d liked him well enough. Respected him, even. Feeling they weren’t right together hadn’t changed that.

  She would never in a million years have guessed that behind the Bradley she knew, the Bradley she’d practically lived with for more than two years, was a completely different person. A corrupt, careless person. If she’d been that wrong about him, what did it mean about everybody else? What did it mean about her?

  What did that mean about Lex?

  She heard a sound behind her and he was there, filling the doorway of the closet.

  “Need some help in here?” he asked.

  Adrenaline surged through her veins. The light shining down from overhead cast his eyes into shadow. This wasn’t the town common. They weren’t in public now but in this private place. Her heart thudded. Anticipation? Alarm? She couldn’t say, only that she couldn’t have moved if her life depended on it.

  Lex reached toward her and she stood, motionless.r />
  He pulled the chain above her head and with a click the overhead light turned off.

  “Maybe we should go downstairs,” he said, his face was scrupulously wiped of expression. “I think we’ve done everything we can do here.”

  After Bradley’s room and the closet, being with Lex in the office downstairs felt positively relaxing. The door was open, there were people around. There could be no repeat of those uncomfortable moments of intimacy.

  And if she could just forget about them, everything would be fine.

  Lex turned from the last of the bookshelves, having gone through each and every book. “We’re done here.”

  “Did you check the backs and undersides of the bookcase?” Keely asked.

  He snorted. “They’re six feet high and solid walnut. I doubt he could move one even without the books in it, assuming my mother and the maid were ever gone long enough for him to get that far.”

  There was the tap of heels and Olivia walked in. “What about me being gone long enough?”

  “Bradley, hiding things on the backs of the shelves.”

  “Oh, those things weigh a ton. They’ve never been moved since I’ve been here.” She glanced at Lex and Keely hopefully. “Any luck?”

  “Not so far,” Lex said, “although we know where it’s not.”

  “Well, the committee is gone, so let me know what you need.”

  Lex pointed to the tall oak filing cabinet. “You can find us the key for that so I can search it,” he said.

  “Oh, of course. I should have given you the key before I left. I’ve been locking it lately when I’m not using it. The help, you know,” she elaborated.

  What would it be like to live with someone you couldn’t trust? Keely wondered. Walking around locking things, worrying, never having any privacy. Like being a prisoner in your own house.

  She watched as Olivia came back out of her office with a small, gold-toned key and handed it to Lex. He tried to slide it into the lock but it stuck. “Are you sure this is the right key?”

  “Of course it is. I use it all the time. It’s just a little sticky.”

  “A little? You ever heard of powdered graphite?”

  Olivia frowned. “What’s that?”

  “Stuff that you use to keep a lock from being like this.”

  “Oh, it just takes a little finessing,” she said impatiently, holding her hand out for the key.

  Lex dropped it into her hand, holding it by the key-chain, a little yellow plastic cutout of a house with Chilton Realty printed on it. He laughed. “Chilton Realty. Good old Eva Jo Romano. Is she still sending you pads of paper and keychains?”

  “Oh, she finally gave up on us.” Olivia fiddled with the key. “Bradley started looking for a place around here a couple of years ago, though, and it started her back up.”

  She didn’t notice that both Lex and Keely stiffened.

  “Bradley started looking for a place?” Keely repeated carefully.

  “A house. He wanted it for the two of you to use once you were married. So you could stay together. I told him you could stay here but he didn’t listen.” The lock went over with a snap and she glanced up triumphantly.

  Only to see them both staring at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Bradley bought a house,” Lex said.

  Olivia waved it away. “No, he just looked. Said he couldn’t find anything that was right.”

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t get one without telling you.” Lex was pacing around the room as he spoke.

  “Are you thinking the same thing I’m thinking?” Keely asked him, an unholy excitement fluttering in her gut.

  He nodded. “A safe house. If he worked it so it stayed off the record, he’d have that nice hidey hole you were talking about earlier.”

  “And if we find it, we might get all the proof we need.” Even as Keely cautioned herself not to get her hopes up, the grin spread over her face.

  “So what do we do now, call the real-estate agent?” Olivia asked, some of their excitement infecting her.

  Keely shrugged. “I doubt she’ll say anything to us. People are pretty gun shy when it comes to violating client privilege.”

  “Eva Jo? She’s practically like a member of the family.” Lex leaned against the desk. “Her face was always staring up at us from those telephone notepads she passed out. With a few additions, of course. Fangs, horns, missing teeth…”

  Keely’s lips twitched. “And I’m sure she felt close to you, too. That said, if she’s not supposed to tell you, she’s not going to tell you. Even if you did give her horns,” she added. “Anyway, there’s no guarantee he even went to her. He might have looked a little bit but if he wanted to buy the place incognito, he probably went to someone who didn’t know him.”

  “Why? It won’t be under his name. It’d probably be under one of the LLCs, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily. Safe means he’d want to keep it completely disconnected from any of the LLCs so it couldn’t be traced back to him if everything went to hell. It could be under a fake name. It could be under Olivia’s name. That could be where the millions went.”

  Lex stopped pacing and dropped back into his chair. “Wouldn’t the feds know, if that were the case?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “So how do we check it out?”

  Keely started shutting down the computer. “Look through all the files, first. If we don’t find anything then Monday first thing we’ll go down to the town hall and look through the property transfers, see if we can find anything.”

  “And if we do?”

  “Then we figure out a way inside.”

  Chapter Six

  “How can I help you?” The pretty young clerk at the town hall gave them a practiced smile.

  Keely smiled back. “I want to look at property-transfer records for the past two—”

  “We’ve got it all in the computer,” the clerk interrupted, pointing to the terminals. “You just look it up by the name or address.”

  “What if you don’t have the name or address?” Lex asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “We don’t have the address.”

  The smile faded. She tapped a tidy, pink varnished nail on the glossy white counter. “You’ve got to have a name or address to use the computer.”

  “Exactly,” Keely said, searching for patience. The contents of the filing cabinet had been a bust. “We don’t have either, so how can we look up transfers?”

  The clerk gave them the frown and sigh reserved for people who refused to cooperate and ask the standard questions. “I don’t see why you wouldn’t have a name or address.”

  Lex leaned in and gave the clerk one of those smiles that could weaken the knees of any woman. Keely knew from personal experience. “Lynette?” he read off the clerk’s badge.

  “That’s right.” Her voice suddenly sounded oddly breathless.

  “Pretty name. Listen, Lynette, is there somewhere we can just look at a list of all real-estate transactions that happened in the past two years?”

  “Well, we have the land record books in the basement,” she told him, eager to please. “They’re listed by alphabetical order.”

  “That’s fine. They have all the transactions for the year, right?” Lex asked.

  “Actually, they’re in groups of ten years,” Lynette chirped.

  Keely’s heart sank.

  The ledger-sized books hit the long table with a thump. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the land record books for the first decade of the twenty-first century,” Lex announced. “A through L and M through Z. What’s your pleasure?”

  “Funny,” Keely said darkly and dragged the top book over in front of her. It was nearly the thickness of a telephone book, hundreds of pages, each of which would have to be combed through. The real-estate boom had made for busy times in land records.

  They sat, not in a room but in an enormous fireproof vault in the basement of the Chilton Tow
n Hall. The space could easily have accommodated a large dinner party. The air held the dry, bone-deep chill of a climate-controlled space. Overhead, a dying fluorescent light buzzed like an angry hornet, flickering out, only to flicker back on an instant later.

  “M,” Lex siad, and opened the ledger before him.

  The ledgers were large and the type was eye-blurringly tiny, especially after a couple of hours of staring at it. Neither of them had thought to bring rulers or anything to help them keep their places. The worst part was that they hadn’t a clue what they were looking for and only a faint hope they might find it.