THE COMEBACK OF CON MACNEILL

by Virginia Kantra

  He stood up. "Well, that says it all, doesn't it?"

  "Con, I—"

  "You better get dressed," he said over his shoulder. "You've got to be at the restaurant in half an hour."

  * * *

  Con swore as his computer screen froze and then went blank. He was plugged in at an empty desk in the loan department, out of sight of the bank's customers, waiting for the teller—Donna Winston—to take her break at three-fifteen so he could ask her about her relationship with Rob Cross. He scowled at the blue screen. Bullying an attractive twenty-something bank clerk into revealing the sordid details of her personal life was not his idea of a fun time.

  Was that how Val thought of what he'd done to her last night?

  He'd stayed away from the restaurant all day. Working, he told himself. And heard his mother's amused judgment in his head: Sulking, boyo. You're too used to getting what you want.

  Give me a break, Ma.

  He hit Control and stabbed at a few keys. Define the problem. Solve the problem.

  The problem was Val, with her feathered earring and her stubborn independence and her quick claim not to need him.

  The problem was the way he felt about her. Hungry and hurting and raw. He was in love for what was probably the first time in his life, and his nice, logical thought processes were jumbled and his direct, deliberate career route suddenly felt like a dead end.

  The real problem was the way she didn't feel about him.

  In bed, at least, her body answered his. Her quick humor responded to his teasing, her warm heart surfaced when she was with his family. Last night, he thought he'd breached the wall of her reserve, seduced her outside her circle of privacy.

  Con ran a check on his hard drive and inadvertently deleted a file. Hell. Maybe he could make her respond to him. But he couldn't make her like it. She was too wounded by her ongoing battle with Papa Cutler to accept another take-charge kind of guy in her life. If he did take the job in Boston, Con suspected he'd have to drive the devil's own bargain even to see her again. She wasn't about to leave her life, her friends and her restaurant to follow him anywhere.

  Val didn't need him.

  Correction, didn't want him.

  And there wasn't a single damn thing he could do about that.

  He scowled and snapped his laptop closed. No, she wanted her independence. Her precious personal choice.

  Well, damn it, before Con hopped his flight to Boston, he'd prove to her that there were some differences between him and Edward Cutler.

  * * *

  Val sat at her desk, once more in possession of herself and her office, painstakingly adding up the day's deposit. It was Con's job, but she could do it. You didn't need a Harvard degree to operate a calculator.

  The second total agreed with the first. So she was handling things fine.

  Just like she handled things this morning. She put down her pencil and rubbed her eyes like a tired child.

  She heard the kitchen door thump into the shelves and footsteps in the hall. Con, she thought, with a lift to her heart like hope.

  She squared her shoulders and summoned a smile to her face. "Come to escort me to the bank?" she called cheerfully.

  Rob Cross filled the narrow office doorway, exuding Polo cologne and menace. "No. I'm not going to the bank today. And neither are you."

  * * *

  Chapter 16

  «^»

  Donna Winston had expertly outlined lips and an eager smile. She crossed her legs as she sat down, so that her tailored skirt slid up her stockinged thigh, and used the smile on Con.

  Rob Cross was pond scum, but he had a pretty girlfriend.

  Con blanked the memory of poor Ann Cross's purpled face and swallowed rage. He was going on gossip and with his gut here, and if he scared this bright young thing all he'd have to take to Cutler was a hunch.

  "Miss Winston. I appreciate your coming to see me on your break."

  "Mr. Cutler said I should stop by."

  She didn't ask him why, didn't give him any kind of opening at all.

  "Yes. Thank you." He picked up a pencil, feeling like a rookie cop or a prying reporter. "Mr. Cutler has asked me to look into some recent allegations of misconduct at the bank."

  She ran her tongue over the dark pink outline of her lower lip. "Misconduct?"

  "That's right. Concerning Mr. Cross." Con balanced a pencil between his fingers. "Now, of course, if you're not involved, I apologize for taking your time. But if you are, I think the best and safest course is for us to get to the bottom of this as quickly and easily as possible."

  "Does Mr. Cutler know?"

  Con narrowed his eyes. This was almost too easy. Was she going to confess to the theft just like that? "We have an appointment later this afternoon to discuss the matter, yes."

  "Oh, God." She pressed her clasped hands to her mouth. "He said no one would find out."

  "Rob Cross said that?"

  She nodded.

  "But you knew eventually someone always finds out about things like this." Con did his best to squeeze some sympathy into his voice. No need to tell her he still didn't have any proof.

  "Eventually, I guess. But I was sort of hoping it wouldn't come up until Rob left his wife."

  "That the two of you were involved," Con clarified.

  Her eyes widened. "Well, yes, we… Oh, God, were you talking about something else?"

  Cursing his quick assumptions, Con shot her a reassuring smile. "I could be. Your personal life doesn't have to come into this at all. If you wouldn't mind answering a couple of other questions…"

  Wary, she sat back in her chair, tugging at her skirt. "I guess not."

  "You've processed the daily deposits for Wild Thymes restaurant, haven't you?"

  "A couple of times, yes."

  "Do you always total the receipts?"

  "If the customer asks me to. For Wild Thymes, I think we do."

  "Did you ever take cash out?"

  She blinked rapidly several times. "To give to the customer, do you mean?"

  "Let's say, for any reason," Con said calmly.

  "No. No, I don't think so."

  "Did Mr. Cross ever ask you to take any cash out?"

  "Why would he do that?"

  "Did he?"

  "No. Look, I don't know what you're getting at, but I take my break every day sometime between three and four. I'm not even at the counter most days when she comes in with the deposit."

  "Who is?"

  Her manicured nails tapped her knee. "Peggy, I guess, or Cheryl. You want the truth, I don't even like seeing her face, all right?"

  "You two have a problem?" Con asked carefully. Was there a history here? A grudge? But why wouldn't Val have mentioned it?

  Donna Winston laughed shortly. "A pretty obvious one, I'd think. I mean, she had him, and I want him."

  "Then when the deposit bag comes in…"

  "I don't have anything to do with it. You'd really have to ask Cheryl. Or Peggy." She stood, tugging the hem of her short, tight jacket. "In the meantime, if you've got a problem with me or my performance, try taking it up with the vice president of the proofs department."

  Not a bad exit at all, Con thought dryly. Too bad it left him stuck down another blind alley.

  He tossed the pencil down on the desk. But he couldn't rid himself of the frustrating sense that Donna Winston had given him something he could use, if he could only see it.

  * * *

  Fear danced along Val's nerves. She could taste it in her mouth. Or maybe that was adrenaline, flat and sweet as day-old Coke.

  She moistened her lips. "You don't have the right to tell me where I'm going anymore, Rob. What do you want?"

  He took a step forward, his eyes hot and his "just folks" smile hard around the edges. "I want my wife back."

  "She's gone home."

  "No. She's not there. I checked."

  "I meant, she's not here."

  He shook his head like a disappointed father. "Val, she
works here," he said in a reasonable voice. "I want you to talk to her. Tell her to get her skinny butt back where it belongs."

  Welcome anger ignited in her gut. She warmed herself at it, let its heat infuse her voice. "She won't be back. She doesn't belong with you."

  "She belongs to me, and she knows it. Where else is she going to go?" He chuckled. "New York?"

  "Go to hell, Rob."

  He took a step closer. "Tell her. Tell her she'll be sorry if she puts me to the trouble of finding her and hauling her back home."

  "The way you tried to haul her home from my apartment?" Val edged back from her desk and stood, careful to keep the chair between them. "I don't think so. Even Chief Palmer might have questions about you dragging a screaming woman out of a public place."

  Rob smiled at her, and a finger of sweat traced a slow, crawling line down her spine. "Ann won't scream."

  "I will."

  Another step, closer. His head bent confidingly low. His shoulders bunched forward. She could smell the sweat of his excitement and a remembered blend of bourbon and mint mouthwash that nearly gagged her.

  "You didn't before," he said.

  "I was seventeen. I'm not that girl anymore."

  His lips curled in a knowing smile. "So, what are you going to do now, Val? Call the cops?"

  She raised her chin. "If I have to."

  He laid his big-knuckled hand on the chair between them. "You're nine years too late to press charges."

  "For what you did to me then, perhaps. Not for stealing from me now."

  His breath hissed. "No one will believe you." Certainty steadied her heart and stiffened her knees. "Con believes me."

  But the moment she said the words she knew they were a mistake. She should never have allowed Rob to goad her into provoking him.

  "Then you'll have to tell him different," Rob said, almost pleasantly. "I'm not letting you ruin me, you little bitch."

  Val swallowed. "I let you bully me into keeping quiet once before. I won't do it again." She nudged the seat of the chair. It stopped against his legs. "Let me by, Rob."

  "I can't do that. Not until I've given you a reason not to talk."

  He shoved the chair into the desk, the sound shocking and loud in the deserted restaurant. Her stomach churned.

  "Just like old times," Rob said, and reached for her.

  * * *

  Edward Cutler's desk was as long and shiny as an eight-thousand-dollar coffin. Behind it, Edward was as chilly as a corpse.

  "Tell me what you've got," he said to Con, "and I'll deal with Rob."

  "I'd like us to tackle him together," Con said carefully. "All I've got at this point is a suspicious pattern of low deposits at irregular intervals for no reason I can find."

  "In other words, you have nothing."

  Con rocked on his heels, stuffing his hands in his back pockets to avoid taking a swing at something. "I have a discrepancy that your proof department should have caught."

  "If there's a problem in the proof department, I'm sure Rob will look into it."

  "Cross is the problem in the proof department."

  "Rob Cross is a trusted member of my management team and a respected member of the community."

  "Yeah, well, personally he's pond scum. The man beats his wife."

  "Whatever his marital difficulties—which I'm sure you're exaggerating—they have no bearing on his performance at the bank."

  "How about the fact that he's sticking it to a teller? Does that have any bearing on his job performance?"

  Edward flushed. "You can't know that. Besides, office romances happen all the time. Rob is a very attractive man."

  Con studied the man barricaded behind his desk with an unsettling mixture of pity and contempt. There was no way he would betray Val's confidence by telling Cutler what his golden-haired bank vice president had done to her. Yet there had to be some way to make Cutler see that Rob Cross was not one of the good guys.

  "At the very least, Cross is preying on a junior member of your staff. And who's to say she's the first woman he's victimized?"

  Edward's face was pale and as hard as the profile on a coin. "If this attack on Rob is some ill-judged attempt to pry remuneration out of me…"

  "Hold on. You think this is about the bonus?"

  "I think it's in your interest to convince me Rob is at fault, yes. It's not hard to understand why. After all, my recommendation is riding on your findings as well."

  And this, Con realized, was what Val had contended with all her life. This was what she feared from him. Somehow, in Edward Cutler's eyes, it all came down to what he was owed and what he might have to pay.

  Con stood on the kilim carpet, staring across four feet of polished mahogany at the determined bank president. He didn't kid himself. Val's father was as earnest in his defense of his business, his employee and his judgment as Con would have been.

  Con's own future as well as his bonus hung in the balance.

  "Go to hell," he said, and walked out.

  * * *

  Val ducked and lunged, trying to get past Rob to the door. He was too big. Too big and too strong and too intent on his revenge.

  He grabbed her, his hand fast and brutal on her shoulder, and threw her against the filing cabinet. Pain shot up her back as metal banged and echoed and papers toppled to the floor. The drawer pull dug between her shoulder blades. Her hands splayed, to hold herself up, to hold him off, and Rob laughed, moving in.

  "I should have done this the day you came back to town."

  She screamed then, startling them both. She used her hands and her knees and her feet and, when he crowded still closer, her teeth. He swore and jerked back. She tried to dive under his left arm, but he raised his right one and backhanded her. Her head snapped back. Pain exploded in her jaw and in her neck and circled her head like a galaxy of sparks.

  He let her fall, the cool linoleum flat against her palms, and then hauled her up and shoved her across the room, against the desk. She heard herself whimper as he grunted and pressed against her. Blood, salty and insinuating, pooled in her mouth.

  "You should have married me. You needed this all along."

  She spat at him, splattering blood in his face and on the collar of the starched white shirt that Annie had pressed.

  Rob swore, wiping his face with one big hand, holding her with the other, off balance against the desk. Her back hurt. Her head still spun. He rubbed against her, using his groin like a weapon to insult, to threaten, to punish. Wrapping his hand in her braid, he yanked back her head, forcing her to look at him.

  "You can't stop me," he gloated.

  Nausea rose in her throat, cutting off her air. Nausea and rage. And Con's voice echoed quietly in her head, inside her. Not a victim. You're a survivor.

  She swallowed. Her hands groped blindly over the surface of the desk behind her, seeking support, seeking…

  "Maybe not," she said thickly. "But I can mark you. I can make you mark, me. This time I'll bring charges."

  And her left hand closed over something smooth and cool and curved, and her arm came up, and she smashed the smiling ceramic pig against the side of his head.

  Pencils and sharp splinters showered them both.

  "Stupid bitch!" Rob bellowed, and his fist came up, a blur in the corner of her eye.

  In her head, tiny points of dancing color exploded against the dark.

  * * *

  Con paused at the top of the bank steps, surveying the parking lot, considering his options. He could go back inside and type out a letter of resignation. He shook his head. Redundant. He could drive to the motel and pack for his flight to Boston. Premature. Or he could stroll the three blocks to the restaurant and inform Val Cutler of his conversation with Donna Winston and his own most recent personal choices.

  He was halfway down the steps when he heard a siren in the distance. Police car? Ambulance? In tiny Cutler, was it more likely to be someone suffering from heat prostration or a cat stuck in a tree?
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  A shiny red pickup slid through the corner stop sign and gunned down the road. Con stared after it, frowning. And saw, like a pall over Main Street

  , black smoke rising above the trees.

  Fire.

  He almost got the Jag. But farmers' trucks and SUVs were speeding down the main drag, converging on the small downtown area. A second siren picked up the wail of the first like a hound joining the hunt. Adrenaline pumped through him. Con started down the sidewalk. His leather-soled shoes were too stiff for running.

  It could be anything. It could be anywhere. The hardware store or the laundromat or the county courthouse.

  He breathed in evenly, and out, as if governing his breathing could control his rising sense of wrong, his growing fear. He passed another pickup truck, double-parked. A police car hurtled by, blue lights flashing, and pulled up half a block away. An officer in an orange vest jumped out and signaled traffic to stop.

  Cars jammed the street. People hurried out of stores and drifted out on porches to watch and exclaim.

  Not the hardware store, Con thought, and picked up his pace. His heart crowded his chest. The haze of smoke increased, making it difficult to draw breath. Not the laundromat.

  A block and a half away from Val's restaurant, he dropped his briefcase and began to run.

  * * *

  Hot. She was uncomfortable and hot. Val stirred, restlessly seeking a cooler spot between the sheets. Her throat hurt. Her chest felt weighted, as if she'd pulled up too many covers. Her arm moved to shove them off, and her hand brushed a hard, gritty surface. Something rolled away from her fingers.

  Frowning, she shifted, but she couldn't get comfortable. The grit pressed her cheek, another irritant to add to her scratchy throat and pounding head. Really, her head was the worst. Her jaw throbbed. Her lips were cracked and dry. A starburst of pain radiated from the side of her head. She reached up, her fingers finding the lump under her hair, and heard a groan. Her own? The sound startled her into full consciousness.

  She opened her eyes to haze and heat and terror.

  She wasn't in bed. She was lying on her office floor in the shards of the ceramic pig, and smoke was pouring in the top of the open doorway.

  Kitchen fire? She forced herself to think, to move, to take shallow breaths. She had to get out.