Tom sent her a dismissive glance. “You say you’re an unknown quantity to Thatcher. But we have no way of knowing if that’s true.”
Shelly looked down at her folded hands. “If you choose not to believe me, well, I completely understand.”
Helen said gently, “I think Shelly’s point is well taken. And, Shelly, I’m getting the impression you do want to help us any way you can. Is that right?”
“Yes. I do.”
Tom wanted to call her a liar, to shout her down right then and there. He wanted to hurt her—for her betrayal of his trust, for his own idiocy in giving that trust in the first place. But he kept quiet. If Helen wanted to take the lead here, so much the better. Cooler heads should prevail—and right then, he was anything but cool.
“We would like to trust you,” Helen said quietly, “but I’m sure you can see that wouldn’t be in our best interests right now. However, if you honestly want to help, you can allow Tom to escort you to his office. Someone from security will join you there and wait with you until we come to some kind of decision as to what to do next.”
Shelly stood. “That would be fine with me.”
Tom cast a questioning glance at Helen. Shelly was as good as fired, and when an employee was fired, security accompanied them everywhere—including to the door.
Helen read his look, “I think a security guard leading her to the other end of the floor would attract attention we don’t need right now.”
“I see your point.” He nodded at his colleagues and spoke to Shelly without actually looking at her. “Let’s go, then.”
She followed him back to his office. Another secretary, an emergency replacement sent up by HR to handle phone calls, sat at her desk. The woman smiled at them as they went by.
The guard tapped on Tom’s door a few minutes after he and Shelly entered. Tom let him in and spoke to Shelly for the first time since they’d left the others in the meeting room.
“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for you to stay if you call Thatcher the minute I leave the room.”
Without a word, she fished her cell from her purse and handed it to the guard. Tom left her there, under guard, and rejoined the three in the meeting room.
He told them, “I had an hour or so to kill before you got here. I put the time to use gathering what information I could on this. Also, you should know that I’ve already had a call from a reporter at the Tribune. He left a message requesting I get back to him right away to confirm or deny a story they’ve just received.”
Helen sighed. “You’re saying that what Shelly just told us checks out?”
“That’s what it looks like.” Tom gathered the clippings from the table and put them back in the envelope. “As to the password…” He tapped the envelope for emphasis. “It belongs to one of my managers—Jessica Valdez.”
Helen made a low sound of distress. “I can’t believe that Jessica’s working for Thatcher.”
“Neither can I. And if she were, why give the password to Thatcher? Why not just copy the files herself?”
They called Jessica in and told her that someone had tried using her password to hack into the TAKA-Hanson computer system.
Jessica seemed honestly stunned. She swore she’d never shared her password with anyone. They told her to change it and sent her back to her desk.
Once she was gone, Tom vouched for her. “She worked closely with Louie on more than one project. And just recently, Jessica has been between secretaries. Lillian Todd stepped in and helped her out. I’d guess what happened is the Todd woman got lucky at some point and saw Jessica enter her password.”
Helen frowned. “So you believe Lil Todd was working for Thatcher?”
Tom shrugged. “It’s just a possible explanation—I have no proof.”
“It makes sense, though,” said Jack. “And anyway, you can’t reassign everyone in the hospitality division. I suggest you limit Jessica’s access to nonsensitive information for the time being and keep an eye on her.”
Mori and Helen agreed.
Tom tried to look on the bright side. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and Jessica’s password will be the last leak we need to plug.”
“From what I’m learning about this Thatcher character, I wouldn’t count on that,” said Jack wryly.
“Don’t worry, I’m counting on nothing. And as far as the coming media storm over my checkered past, I think there’s only one sensible solution. I’m resigning, as of today.”
“No,” said Jack.
“A bad idea,” said Mori.
Helen said, “Absolutely not.”
“Come on,” Tom told them all wearily. “It’s the only way.”
Helen wasn’t having any of that. “There’s never only one way. We knew this could happen two years ago. I hired you then and I’d do it again. You’ve exceeded our expectations of you right down the line.”
Tom rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease out a little of the tension. “Yeah, well. The point is it has happened, and the company doesn’t need this kind of trouble. I go, you do damage control when it all hits the fan, and TAKA-Hanson comes out of it strong as ever.”
Jack was watching his stepmother. “I know that look. Helen’s got a plan.”
“Of course I’ve got a plan. And a good one, too.”
The plan depended on the Hanson North America arm of the company, which was media. Print, radio and television were all going to be put to use starting immediately. Jack enlisted his wife, Samantha, a Hanson N.A. vice president who had contacts in every corner of the media community, to make the calls and set up the series of radio and TV spots. The hope was to scoop Thatcher on the story, to get their version on the street ahead of his.
But even if Thatcher’s story came out first, Helen’s and Tom’s interviews would serve as a powerful rebuttal—or so they hoped.
Helen and Tom did the print interviews together via conference call that afternoon. Tom called his contacts at the industry rags. They were only too happy to hear Tom’s story, told by Helen.
It was the tale of an ambitious young man from a poor, hardworking family, a young man who went too far and broke the law. Helen explained how the young man was tried and convicted and paid his debt to society. How he’d worked for over a decade to turn his life around. And how he’d succeeded.
“Readers will lap this up,” said the reporter from the Tribune. “You’re a damn hero, Tom. A true American success story.”
“It’s a good title,” said Helen. “‘An American Success Story.’ Be sure to write how proud we are at TAKA-Hanson to have Tom on our team.”
The reporter promised he would write just that.
By the end of the day, Samantha had Helen and Tom lined up for Chicago’s top TV morning show on Channel 9 and a series of drive-time interviews at three major radio stations the next day.
Jack reported, “Samantha says her work here is done.”
Helen said, “Tom. Before you take off, I need a few minutes….”
“About?”
“Shelly.”
It was quarter to five when Tom returned to his office. He found Shelly sitting patiently on the couch and the guard standing at the window looking out over the Magnificent Mile.
He told the guard to give Shelly back her phone and then let him go.
Once Tom was alone with the woman he’d so stupidly trusted, he said, “By tomorrow morning, Thatcher will know that you blew the whistle on him.”
She tipped her soft chin high and met his eyes. “Fine with me. Does this mean I can go and pick up my son now?”
He didn’t answer her. Instead, he said flatly, “I can understand, objectively, why you did what you did.”
Softly she added, “But you can’t forgive me.”
He thought about kissing her, about the soft resilience of her body beneath his hands, of the scent of her that pleased him so deeply, a scent that seemed, somehow, made just for him.
He glanced away from her. Bad idea, to think about the
smell of her or the feel of her lips under his. “I can’t…I can’t have you working for me anymore.”
“Tom.” She was waiting, he knew, for him to look at her.
He made himself do it, though it tore something within him to gaze into those brandy-brown eyes again.
She said, “I didn’t know about you and Thatcher. He never told me until last night. And neither did you.”
Gruffly, he demanded, “And that makes it okay, that you never happened to mention how you came to apply for Verna’s job? That makes it okay that you lied to me in the interview, that first day we met, that you told me how you’d heard ‘good things’ about TAKA-Hanson, how you just happened to ‘drop in’ to get your résumé on file?”
“No. It doesn’t make it okay. I was afraid to lose a job I needed and wanted so badly, so I lied and I withheld important information. But, Tom, come on. So did you. You never told me about what my uncle did to you, about the price you paid. About your parents. That was what you meant, wasn’t it? When you said you hadn’t made them proud? For some reason, you could tell me about the child you lost. But you couldn’t tell me about—”
“Stop.” He put up a hand to silence her. “I don’t want to hear it. I shouldn’t have told you anything. I realize that now.”
“Oh, Tom…”
“Don’t look at me like that.” He turned from her and went to the window and stared blindly down at the traffic crawling by all those stories below. “I spoke with Helen. What you told us today was invaluable to TAKA-Hanson and to The Taka hotel project. It’s clear to everyone that you never betrayed this company and you never would have betrayed TAKA-Hanson, that in the crunch, you more than did your part. You will be paid a large bonus. And, since Helen insists that you deserve a second chance, HR will place you in another division. Media, maybe. Or software. You’ll receive a check for the bonus within the week and HR should be calling you soon to offer you a new position.”
She said nothing.
He turned on her. “What? Is that unacceptable to you?”
“Oh, please. Of course it’s acceptable. It’s…very generous. More than I ever would have expected.”
“Helen’s a hell of a woman.”
“Yeah. She is.”
“Come here.”
She drew in a slow, shuddering breath. “Oh, God. Tom, don’t…”
“Come here. Now.” Something dark and a little twisted within him took harsh pleasure in tormenting her, in mocking the intimacy they had once shared—right here, in this room.
She approached him slowly. He despised himself for admiring the easy sway of her hips, the curve of her waist, the roundness of her breasts beneath the pretty yellow dress she wore. At the edge of his desk, she hesitated.
“Don’t stop there.” He crooked a finger, a gesture that once would have teased her, but in this situation was nothing short of purposely cruel.
She shook her head, bit her lip. But still, she took another step. And another after that. Until she stood before him in front of the wide window, close enough that he could see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes, the misty sheen to them that spoke of tears she refused to shed. Close enough that he could breathe in the sweet, fresh scent of her.
She swallowed, hard. “All right. I’m here. What do you want?”
“Give me your hand.”
She hesitated, but she did it. She laid that soft, cool hand of hers in his. He imagined allowing himself to give a sharp tug, to pull her sweet body up hard against him. He saw himself bringing his mouth down on hers, sucking all that sweetness into himself, stripping off the yellow dress and anything she had beneath it, laying her across his desk and entering her.
Taking her. Having her.
One more time.
He did no such thing. Instead, he took Thatcher’s check from his pocket and laid it in her palm. With slow care, he closed her fingers around it. “This is yours. I’d cash it fast. By tomorrow, there’s bound to be a stop payment on it.”
She stepped back from him, her face deadly pale, except for two bright flags of color high on her cheeks. “If I intended to cash it, I wouldn’t have turned it over to you.”
He slanted her a dismissing look. “Hey. Fifty thousand dollars is a nice wad of cash. Why not keep it? You certainly earned it.”
She held up the check to him. “Watch.” And then, with slow deliberation, she tore it in two, and in two again. She let the pieces drift to the floor between them.
“Noble,” he said.
She only stared at him, eyes flashing with defiance and fury—and hurt. “I’ll ask you again. May I go now?”
“One more thing.”
“Say it. Get it over with.”
“I want to meet with Thatcher. I want you to help me make that happen.”
She shook her head. “You don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“It’s not as if I dial a number and he answers. I call him. And then, maybe, he calls me back. Eventually. Or maybe he just shows up at the curb in front of my house in a limousine. He takes his time about getting back to me. I’m…a low priority with him, to put it mildly. If, as you’ve predicted, by tomorrow he knows I’m not on his side, I doubt I’ll ever see him again. I have no idea what makes you think I could even get him to call me, let alone get him to meet with you. You’d have more luck just calling him yourself.”
“All right,” he said after a moment. “What you say makes sense.”
“Great. May I go?”
“You said you have a number for him.”
“That’s right.”
“Give me the number. Then you can go.”
For a long, slow moment, she regarded him. He wasn’t sure what he saw in those eyes. He only knew it was going to take him a long time to get over her.
But he would.
Tom Holloway was a survivor. He knew how to move on. He’d done it often enough, each time leaving pieces of himself behind. But he was still standing, still moving forward, still determined that nothing—not even sweet Shelly Winston’s betrayal—would hold him back for long.
She got out her cell and flipped it open and punched a couple of buttons. Then she went to his desk, took a pen from the pencil drawer and scribbled a number on his desk pad. “Knock yourself out.” She flipped the phone shut and headed for the door.
He stayed where he was, by the window, unmoving, until she was gone.
Chapter Twelve
Shelly held it together through the train ride to Max’s daycare. She put a resolute smile on her face and exchanged small talk with one of the teachers while he gathered his things from his cubby.
They got back on the train to ride the rest of the way home. The car they ended up on was packed, as usual. They held the rail and the train sped toward their stop. Halfway there, Max tugged on her arm.
“Hmm? What, honey?”
“Are you sick, Mom? You don’t look so good.”
“I’m fine.” She stared past the blank faces of their fellow passengers, out the smeared windows, seeing nothing, trying not to remember the hurtful things Tom had said to her.
“Mom?”
“What?”
“You’re not really fine, are you?”
She made herself look down at him, made herself give him a reassuring smile. “I’ve got a lot on my mind, that’s all.”
He studied her face. “Oh,” he said at last in a small voice. “You mean you’re not going to tell me, right?”
“I’m fine. Really,” she said again.
And her little boy shrugged and let it go.
At home, she let him watch the television while she put a salad together and broiled a pair of chicken breasts. When the food was ready, she had him set up trays and they ate in front of the TV.
As a rule, Shelly insisted on real family dinners, where they sat at the two-seater table in the kitchen and shared conversation instead of staring at a television screen. Tonight, she was grateful for something to stare at, for the bright
colors of the cartoons Max enjoyed, for the music and the sound of recorded voices. She knew she wouldn’t have made it through the meal without breaking down if she had to look at her son’s sweet, open face behind his new glasses and know that he knew something wasn’t right, though he didn’t understand what that something could be.
After the meal, she shooed him into his room to play on his own for a while. At eight, he had his bath. And at eight-thirty, she tucked him in.
He folded his arms on top of the sheet. “I was thinking that I should prob’ly call Tom tonight.”
Tears scalded the back of her throat. She swallowed them down. She would have to tell him something, about Tom. Just, please, not tonight.
“You called him last night,” she reminded him in a voice so bright and brittle it seemed it might crack.
Last night, before Drake showed up. When Tom still trusted me.
Max tried again. “I think he likes for me to call him.”
“Not tonight.”
“Mom…”
“Not tonight.” She pecked his cheek and stood, swiftly, turning to shut the curtains and get out of there before he could ask her again.
She was lucky. He gave it up. She escaped into the hall and shut his door and leaned against it, trembling.
It could have been worse, she reminded herself. Yes, she’d lost Tom. But she hadn’t disgraced herself—except in his eyes.
Helen still trusted her. Soon, she would have another job, a job as good as the one with Tom had been.
Everything would be okay. She didn’t have to pound the pavement, hoping against hope that something would turn up.
It could have been worse.
She had to remember that.
She had to…
The tears spilled over. She cried, silently, standing there in the hall at her son’s bedroom door, the hopeless sobs shaking her frame, but no sound escaping her.
Finally, when the tears slowed a little, she went to her own room, shut the door and called her mother.
Norma answered on the second ring.
Shelly said, “Hi, Mom.”
Norma knew her too well. “Oh, honey. You sound so strange. What’s happened?”
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