by Jo McNally
Steve took a swig of his beer. “Pal, if you’re asking me how women’s minds work and the kind of head games they can play, you are way past casual. And to answer your original question... There are lots of times when women will expect you to know their thoughts. And they will be disappointed every time, because we’re not freakin’ mind readers. We will never know what they really want for their birthday, or where they want to go for dinner or how to answer the dreaded does-this-make-me-look-fat question.”
“But then how do you...?”
“Survive?” Steve shook his head. “It’s a mystery. But trying gets you points. And groveling when you get it wrong helps. And once in a blue moon, if you come out and ask them for a direct answer, they’ll forget the women-rules and tell you.”
“That seems like a lot of risk... I mean...work.”
His friend sobered. “It’s both. Risk and work. You each have to be ready to trust and forgive. A lot.” Steve tipped his head and studied Luke. “But if this ‘casual’ relationship of yours ever gets serious, it’s totally worth it. Marrying the right person is the best move any man will ever make on this earth. If you find the right one, figure out a way to keep her.”
But how do you know? Luke shook his head and kept that question to himself. He’d already exposed more to Steve than he’d intended. And he was no closer to figuring out what to do about Whitney Foster.
He wiped down the bar. He’d always scoffed at marriage, but the minute Steve mentioned it, Luke could see himself spending his life with Whitney. But what was she picturing?
* * *
WHITNEY STARED AT the tall stack of bank statements. More accurately, she stared at three tall stacks of bank statements. Helen and Tony’s personal account. The Falls Legend business account. And the other one.
The statements for the mystery account said “Falls Legend Winery” under Tony and Helen’s names, but it wasn’t a business account. It had been relatively inactive until Tony’s death. But after that, there were fairly frequent withdrawals. Big ones. And deposits. The deposits weren’t always big, but they were fairly consistent—two hundred one month, three hundred the next.
Those small deposits weren’t enough to explain how there could be almost two hundred thousand dollars in the account. Helen’s personal account was just enough to keep her afloat. The business account had been solvent two years ago, but was barely covering the bills now. But this mystery account held a small fortune. And someone was writing checks out of it. Checks for thousands of dollars.
She could see where some of that money had gone—some of the bills had been paid from the account, and Helen swore she hadn’t used it. There were mystery withdrawals taken out, then redeposited, penny for penny, a few days later. And the occasional cash withdrawal that didn’t get repaid. She closed her eyes and massaged her temples.
Helen came in and sat, handing Whitney a coffee. “You’re telling me we actually have money in this new account? Enough to pay our bills?”
After Whitney finished putting all the numbers together in a dozen different spreadsheets, she’d presented the data to Helen that morning. Her aunt swore she’d known nothing about the mystery account, and had no idea where a checkbook might be. She’d been shoving all the bank statements into boxes and bags for the past couple of years to avoid dealing with them, so she had no idea there was a third account.
“That’s the thing, Helen.” Whitney sighed. She didn’t like mysteries. Especially when she was in the middle of an audit. Especially this audit. “There are a couple of recent bills from vendors that have overdue balances, but not that many, and not that much. It looks like bills have been paid, but not from the business account. They were paid from this account. But...I don’t know where this money came from. Or who’s been using it.”
Helen shifted in her chair. Something about her body language caught Whitney’s attention. Helen’s hands had a death grip on her coffee mug, and her eyes were fixed on the far corner of the dining room.
“Aunt Helen? What aren’t you telling me?” If her aunt was hiding another box of papers somewhere, Whitney was going to lose it.
“I called Tom Garland at the bank after lunch.” Helen fidgeted again, then set the coffee cup on the table and turned to face Whitney. “He said the account’s been open for years, since before he got there. It looks like Tony deposited a chunk of money in there every year, usually in January. Tom said I’m on the signature card with Tony, but I don’t remember it. Then again, Tony used to hand me stuff all the time to sign, and I didn’t pay much attention. There’s only one other signature on the account.” Helen’s fingers twisted together in her lap. “It’s Luke.”
She’d feared as much, even though she’d hoped it wasn’t so. Once Helen made it clear Whitney and Luke didn’t need to sneak around anymore, their relationship—for lack of a better word—had settled into a comfortable routine. They each did their own thing during the day, with perhaps a quick kissing session in the barn or out in the vineyard, and then they’d have dinner together. Sometimes with Helen, sometimes just the two of them. And then they’d spend the night, usually at Luke’s, but sometimes he’d quietly slip upstairs to share her bed. It felt easy now. It felt like the type of thing that could grow into...more. Neither of them had said so, but it felt like love.
She gripped the edge of the table and closed her eyes, trying to hold back the burning tears. Her heart swelled and hurt at the same time. It was true. She was in love with Luke Rutledge. Head over heels for the man. Couldn’t imagine her life without him in it. And his name was on a mysterious checking account with a small fortune in it.
None of this made sense. Not falling in love. And not the mystery account. There had to be an explanation for the money. And she needed to figure it out soon. Without having to ask him, if she could help it. Luke knew she believed in him, and that meant something to him. If she had to confront him about this account, it could shatter his fragile trust before she had a chance to tell him she loved him.
On the bright side, she’d found those rent checks he said he’d been paying. He’d been depositing them in the mystery account. But why hadn’t he told her that? Why had Luke kept this all a deep, dark secret? Why was he withdrawing money from the mystery account? He wouldn’t steal from Helen. That couldn’t be what happened. But whatever he was doing, even if it was some crazy-but-well-intentioned scheme, she needed to know. She needed to fix it.
“It’s not like Luke was hiding it from us,” Helen pointed out. “I had all the bank statements right here in the house. I just didn’t look at them. All that worry and we had money the whole time. This is my fault.”
“That’s true. I mean not the ‘your fault’ part...”
Helen snorted. “That’s the most true thing of all. It’s a miracle the place isn’t in bankruptcy because of me.”
“We’ve had this conversation already. We’re not playing the blame game anymore.”
Despite her words of reassurance, Whitney couldn’t help thinking back to dealing with her mom’s careless attitude toward money. Toward everything. Nothing was ever a problem. Nothing was worth worrying about. Everything will work out fine, baby. But they hadn’t been fine. They’d been in a hole they almost didn’t dig out of.
Why couldn’t people understand that managing money was the ultimate security? Knowing where the pennies went meant knowing where the dollars went. And dollars added up to mortgage payments and car payments and groceries. The idea of not knowing where her money was made Whitney’s brain twitch. How had her aunt survived it? What was Luke doing with that money? Why couldn’t her mom understand paying some shady guy for music lessons at fifty-eight was not going to make her the next winner of some TV competition? Why didn’t people have any damn sense? How could she possibly be in love with Luke Rutledge? It all made her head hurt. She stood so quickly her chair almost tipped over.
“I need to go for a
walk.”
The falls were noisy after the rain they’d had, but it still wasn’t enough to shut out all the questions whirling through Whitney’s head. Were she and Tony the only ones in the family with any money sense? With any common sense? Why did it have to be Luke who had been using the mystery account? There were thousands of dollars gone since Tony died that couldn’t be accounted for. Her heart insisted Luke would never help himself to anything that belonged to Tony or Helen. But her head reminded her that numbers don’t lie.
“There’s a pretty picture if I ever saw one.” She’d been so caught up in her thoughts that she never heard Luke approaching. He sat beside her on the rock. “This isn’t the legendary rock where the lovers turned into deer, you know. That’s out there.” He lifted his chin toward the flat rock centered in the swirling water.
“I know.” She didn’t even try to smile. She wasn’t ready for this conversation right now, but here it was. Luke frowned.
“What’s wrong?”
There was no easy way to do this. No way to sugarcoat it. Better to get it out in the open and deal with it.
“There’s a bank account Helen didn’t know about. One that you’ve been making withdrawals from.” She finally met his gaze. Already she could see the walls coming up. “I need to know why.”
“You think I’m stealing from her.” It wasn’t a question. He thought she’d assumed the worst of him. Because he thought everyone did that. Even her.
She blinked away. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t deny it, either.” He stood and started to pace. She could see his anger growing. Or was it pain? She reached for him, but stopped herself.
“Luke...”
He stopped and scrubbed his hands down his face. “What?”
“I don’t think you just took it without a reason. You would never hurt Helen like that. But...money looks like it’s missing.” She pleaded with him. “Just tell me. We’ll juggle things around to make it right.”
He turned away from her and shoved his hands into his pockets, staring at the water tumbling over the rocks. “Helen really didn’t know anything about the account?”
“To be fair, there were a lot of things Helen chose not to know about. She wasn’t looking at any of the records.” She stood and joined him by the stream. “Whatever you’ve done, we’ll deal with it together.”
His head snapped around. “What I’ve done? So you’ve already decided I took the money. From Helen. You think that’s possible.”
“No-o.” It wasn’t a very convincing denial. She was so confused. Maybe he’d needed the money because Helen wasn’t paying him enough. She could work with that. She could fix it.
“Unbelievable.” Luke gave a harsh laugh and turned away. He took a few steps as if he was going to leave her standing there. But he stopped near the trail, speaking straight ahead toward the trees. “It was Tony’s ‘rainy-day fund.’ They’d had a harsh weather year a few years after the winery opened, and it nearly broke them. When things turned around, he started setting money aside, in case it happened again. He gave me the checkbooks the year I moved into the carriage house. Said I was family, and if anything happened to him or Helen, I should have access to it to keep the winery going. I figured Helen knew.”
Whitney hated the distance between them. The distance in his voice. But she didn’t move, knowing he wasn’t finished.
“I forgot about it until the first bill collector called the business line six months after Tony died. It was the power company, threatening to cut us off if we didn’t pay immediately. Helen was practically catatonic at that point, so I wrote a check out of the rainy-day account.” He finally turned to face her again. “I had no idea what the account balance was. I just crossed my fingers and hoped there was enough to cover the check. I guess there was, since the lights stayed on.”
“So all those withdrawals were to pay bills. Did you just wait for calls to come in?”
Luke rubbed the back of his neck and sighed, finally turning to face her. “Sometimes. But after a while I could recognize the dunning notices in the mail. You know, ‘Urgent,’ ‘Time-Sensitive,’ stuff like that. Instead of giving those to Helen and upsetting her, I’d pay them. I didn’t have her PIN number or anything, so I never knew how much money I was playing with. I’d write myself a check, wait a few days to make sure it cleared, then put it back in and pay the bill. Sometimes they wanted instant payment, and I’d have to use my credit card to pay right then, and reimburse myself. Either way, if a check was going to bounce, it would bounce to me, not to one of our suppliers.”
Whitney couldn’t wrap her head around what he was saying. “You...took money out...waited...then put it back...and paid bills...”
Please don’t let us be audited.
She’d never be able to explain that cash flow without it sounding like a money-laundering scheme. God save her from bad money managers!
Luke lifted his hands, then let them fall, shaking his head. “I tried to discuss it with Helen a few times, but she always shut me down. Told me there was nothing to worry about. But the calls kept coming. I’d make up some excuse about a miscommunication and pay them.”
She should be angry. It was an accounting nightmare. She was angry, but the person she was angry with was dead. Tony had always managed his own books, and clearly he’d never taught Helen or Luke anything about his bookkeeping methods. That was a huge mistake. After his sudden death, Helen fell apart, and Luke was juggling the grape growing, the wine making and the bills.
“When Helen told you there wasn’t enough to cover your pay, you must have thought...”
“I thought we were finished.” Emotion roughened his voice more than usual. “I kept waiting for the money to run out.”
She walked over and took his hand. He tried to pull away, but she wouldn’t let him. Luke’s plan to withdraw money to see if it was really there, then put it back and pay bills, was completely unorthodox, and possibly unethical or maybe downright illegal. She’d never heard of anything like it. But it was his way of making sure they didn’t bounce a check to anyone, which would have seriously damaged their reputation as well as their credit. And it had worked.
“Luke, there’s over a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in that account.”
He went still as stone.
“Say that again?”
“Tony’s rainy-day fund was big enough to cover a lot of rainy days. I don’t think you ever had to worry about bouncing a check.”
He shook off her grip, waving her off angrily when she tried to reach out again.
“Give. Me. A minute.”
He walked back to the water’s edge, bending over to put his hands on his thighs like someone knocked the wind out of him. He sounded stunned. “Every time I took money out, I thought it was the last time. You must think Helen and I are complete idiots.”
Her heart broke for the pressure he must have been under.
“I think you were both doing the best you could under the circumstances.”
He straightened and shook his head, staring up at the falls.
“Your little accounting brain must be ready to stroke out right about now.”
She gave him a crooked grin. “It was touch-and-go there for a few minutes. The only thing saving you and my aunt from a beatdown right now is the fact that you were both listening to your hearts. Hers was broken, and yours was in hero mode, trying to protect her.” She moved closer, and he didn’t back away this time. “It was definitely creative bookkeeping, and I don’t ever want to explain it in a tax audit, but you pulled it off. I only have one question—where did the random deposits come from?”
“Me.” His shoulders lifted and dropped. “I was so afraid the account would run dry, I shoveled any spare money I had back into it to keep us solvent. And, of course, my rent.”
No wonder he’d been shell-shocked to
hear the account was in six figures. He’d been working all those extra jobs because he thought he was paying the bills for the winery.
“What have you been living on?”
He huffed out a laugh. “As my mom used to say, I was living on dreams and beans. When you grow up poor, you learn how to make a dollar go a long way. I eat good food, but it’s day-old bread. Generic brands. A turkey breast or pork roast can last me a week between sandwiches and meals.” He gave her a sardonic grin. “And I steal fries from the kitchen at the Shamrock when Bridget’s not looking.”
“Ew!” She stepped up and slid her arms around his waist. He froze for a half second, then took her in his arms. It was the first fully released breath she’d let go of all day. She was home. Luke was holding her. His chin rested on top of her head.
But something had changed. He was holding back. Just a little.
“Luke?”
He took a deep breath, his voice catching. “You thought I’d stolen that money.”
“No! I know you’d never do that.” Her pulse quickened. They both knew she’d suspected him of something from the day she’d arrived. But that stopped once they fell for each other. Or had it? Was there a part of her that would never be able to trust any man? Not even the one she loved? She should tell him, but this didn’t seem like the right time. It would sound false. Contrived.
“Don’t lie to me, Whitney,” he growled. “Even if it was just for a heartbeat, you thought I took it. Even if you thought I was doing something ‘good’ with it, you thought I took it.” He stepped back, setting her away from him. Throwing up a wall between them. She could see it in his eyes. Hear it in his tight words. “You thought I was hiding things. Gaming the system. With Helen’s money.”
“Luke...” What could she say?
He turned and walked away, leaving her alone by the falls. She’d hurt him, and she wasn’t sure how long it would take to repair that. Or if she’d ever repair it.