She paused, blew out a breath. “I assumed she was looking at one of my friends … even thought, Man, I wonder who it is. It was me. All that time.” Then she shrugged and shifted her attention to the kids in the back. “Micah was almost two when things really came to a head. Anton and I, well, our relationship was getting rocky. I was fed up with him acting like he wasn’t a father—I didn’t need the money, but I wanted him to be a father. Micah loved him. Adored him, asked about him all the time. Stupid me, I’d tell him, You’ll see Daddy soon. The nanny I hired for him would bring him into the office twice a week and I would practically trap Anton into having lunch with us, just so my son could see his father. Other than that, Anton came by to visit him a couple of times a month. Up until Micah turned two.”
“What happened when Micah turned two?”
“Everything.” Sadness darkened her eyes. “Within one week, everything happened. It was like my entire world exploded. One Sunday, at a barbecue, one of my father’s oldest clients asked me why he’d been overcharged by more than five thousand dollars. Monday, before I could talk to Accounts Payable and figure out what was going on, another client—a newer guy—told me that he knew what Anton and I were up to, but maybe he wouldn’t take it personally, he and I could work something out. Between us.”
Blood rushed up to stain her cheeks red as the words hung between her and Noah.
Noah’s eyes glittered like glass. “Did you hit him?”
“No.” She smiled a little. “I wanted to, thought about it. But I was still operating under the delusion that there was a mistake. That something was just wrong with the books or somebody had made an error and we could fix it. That guy had always been an ass, so I just brushed it off. Went to find Anton, determined to figure out what was going on—I’d talk to him, then Accounts Payable—and I ended up walking in on a nooner between Anton and the woman he’d been sleeping with since about halfway through my pregnancy.”
She went quiet, staring down at the table.
The air around her and Noah all but vibrated with the remembered pain, the shame. He reached out and touched her hand, unsure of what to say, what to do.
She looked up at him.
“This sounds awful, but again, the only thing I have to say is, Did you hit him?”
It startled a laugh out of her, one that ended on something that sounded like a sob. She covered her face with her hands, and a moment later she whispered, “No. But man, I wish I would have.”
Reaching out, Noah caught her wrists and tugged them down, staring into her pale-grey eyes. “I know from experience it would have made you feel better, for about five minutes.”
“Probably ten.”
He stroked his thumb over her inner wrist, but before he could think of anything else to say, anything else to offer her, a cheerful voice cut in.
“Hope y’all are hungry,” Ali said. “Here you go.”
Trinity barely managed to get down two slices of the pie. They sat in her belly, an unappetizing lump, but if she hadn’t eaten anything Micah would have noticed and she didn’t want him upset again.
After he’d finished a slice and a half, he asked if he could go play again and she sent him off, suppressing a sigh of relief. She wanted this done. Over and done.
“You want to hear the rest of this?” she asked, dragging a finger through the rich red sauce lingering on her plate.
Noah popped the last bite of crust in his mouth, his eyes resting on her face. “That’s up to you. I’m curious, yeah, but I don’t want you to keep going if you’d rather not.”
With a mirthless laugh, she shrugged. “No point in stopping now. I walked in on them—they were in the most compromising position imaginable, her bent over his desk, her skirt up over her butt, pants around his knees.” Trinity closed her eyes and passed a hand over her face. “I guess I didn’t need to go into that much detail.”
“I’m familiar with the general idea of sex,” he drawled. “I get the picture.”
“Yeah, well, apparently, Anton thought I wasn’t familiar with the general idea, because he spent the next few months telling me I was overreacting. Things weren’t quite what I thought they were … blah, blah, blah. Then he was telling me how she seduced him. Took advantage of him. Naturally, it was my fault, because I was always busy working, or taking care of Micah, and of course a man has needs and I was pregnant there for a while and then recovering from being pregnant and he was trying to spare me,” she said mockingly.
“How kind of him.” Noah crossed his arms over his chest and sat there for a second, looking like he was thinking something over. Finally, he said, “This is bad; I keep going back to this: Did you hit him?”
“You do keep going back to that,” she said, amused. You know for a preacher—or former preacher—you’re kind of violent. Aren’t you supposed to say turn the other cheek?”
“Yeah. Well.” He shrugged sheepishly. He flashed her a wide grin that was surprisingly wicked. “You should have seen me growing up. And obviously, you didn’t know me fifteen years ago. I might have surprised you … a lot. I’m thinking you didn’t hit him, did you?”
“He wasn’t worth it.” She looked over at Micah. “The only thing of worth I ever got from him was Micah. He never even cared about our son. Never.”
“That just tells me how very little he was worth.”
“Yes.” Lapsing into silence, she tore a crust down until it wasn’t much more than crumbs as she tried to figure out where to go, what to say next. There was so much trapped inside her.
All the frustration, all the sadness. All the pain.
But if she launched into any of that she might start crying, and she didn’t want to break down here.
“Anyway, the next day, I was out at lunch, desperate to get out of the office, away from all the knowing looks—some of them had been laughing at me, all that time. Others felt sorry for me. I had to get away. I was eating a sandwich near this park close to our office—there’s a fountain. Micah loved to go there.” She looked down, stared at her wineglass, startled to see it empty. “I wasn’t really eating—just sitting there. These two guys came up. When they first showed me the badges, I thought it was a sick joke. I’d been through enough that week and I was like this close to smacking the one closest to me. But then I looked in his eyes. A cop’s eyes—you hear that phrase, but you don’t really understand it until you’ve been on the end of one of their looks.”
Sighing, she brushed her hair back, tucking it behind one ear. “I knew, the second I really saw his eyes, that it wasn’t a joke. My very recently ex-lover, my child’s father, had been embezzling money from my father’s company, from our clients, ever since we’d hired him. All in all, he’d taken over a million dollars.”
A low whistle escaped Noah.
Slipping him a look from the corner of her eye, she smiled faintly. “It’s a lot of money, isn’t it? I mean, you sit there and think, How can somebody just steal that much money? He did it, right under our noses, and we never saw it.”
“How did he do it?”
“Carefully, at first. Then, when he wasn’t being so careful, he had Kera, his lunchtime playmate in Accounts Payable, helping him smooth it over.”
Trinity reached for her napkin, unable to stay still another moment. With slow, deliberate motions she folded it in half, stroked a finger down the crease. Another fold, another crease. “I think he got cocky,” she said after a moment, letting her spinning mind settle. “If he’d stayed small, skimming a few hundred from the smaller accounts, a few thousand from the bigger ones, he would have kept it hidden a lot longer. But when you take a client who has never paid more than three grand on a job and suddenly start charging him forty-five hundred dollars for the same job, or in some cases easier jobs, there are going to be problems. He started hitting too many people.”
“Arrogance.”
Flicking Noah a look, she nodded. “He was always … confident,” she said wryly, smirking a little. “But this just went
past arrogance and into what the hell was he thinking land.”
“So how did you get pulled into it? If you knew nothing about it?”
“That’s a little more complicated.” She shrugged and gave the napkin another fold, another crease. It was now a nice, neat little square about two inches across. When she went to let go of it, it started to unfold and she held it in place with one finger. “The cops questioned me because I had a connection to him, because my father owned the company. All the lines led back to my father and me. I don’t think the guy heading up the investigation ever really suspected us, but his partner, some of the others involved. The ADA.”
She shrugged it off. “They questioned me. Decided I wasn’t involved. They questioned my dad. Man, his face, the look on his face, scared me to death.” The memory of it turned her gut into an icy knot and she rubbed the heel of her hand over her heart, trying to soothe the ache there. “I thought he might have a heart attack, right there in the living room, in front of the cops. I worried maybe he’d try to go after the son of a bitch on his own—by that time we’d both realized the guy had come into the company with the intent to screw around with us. There had been problems at the previous job, but he hadn’t done as much damage there. Plus the problems weren’t discovered until after he left. It was a four-man operation, just Anton, two owners and a son. One owner died and apparently the place was in a state of chaos from the guy’s passing. It took a while for it to settle down, and by the time they’d discovered the problem Anton had moved on—from the West Coast to the East Coast—and from what I can tell, neither of the two guys in charge was much for finances. It took them a few years to even realize there was a problem—and they didn’t find it. A new accounting firm took over the accounts and they found it.”
She groaned and pressed her fingers to her eyes. “I’m barely making sense here.”
“You’re fine.”
She sat there like that, waiting for some of the noise in her head to settle, waiting for some peace. It wasn’t coming.
Then two warm, calloused hands closed around her wrists, tugging her hands away. Blue eyes, endless and warm as the summer sky at twilight, stared into hers. The chaos inside her faded and she felt lost, completely lost and wrapped up in him. He squeezed her wrists gently and said, “You’re doing fine, but Trinity, you don’t need to talk about this if you don’t want to.”
His right thumb scraped over her wrist and then he went to pull back.
Before he could, she twisted her wrists and caught his hands. For some reason, she wasn’t at all surprised when he laced their fingers together. They fit. Looking down at their joined hands, she couldn’t help but notice that. They fit.
How had she stumbled onto this … here?
Stumbled onto him?
Now she was telling him about her past. Was she about to destroy anything they might have before they had a chance to start?
“Do you know … nobody has ever asked.” She focused on the way their hands looked together, staring at that instead of at his face. Into those mesmerizing, peaceful eyes.
She could just get lost in those eyes.
Get lost … stay lost.
Forever.
“Even my dad, who believed in me. Nobody ever really wanted to hear my side of it. I mean, the cops, the lawyers, they drilled me over and over, but it wasn’t because they cared. They just wanted to find anything they could to put Anton away. Nobody cared what it might be doing to me.”
“Does that mean you want to talk about this?”
With a soft sigh she said, “It’s not so much wanting to … but sometimes it feels like I’ll explode if I don’t do something.”
Noah rubbed his thumbs across the backs of her hands, slow, soothing little circles that managed to excite her at the same time.
“Anyway, there’s not much left to tell about what happened,” she said, her voice getting hoarse. “I mean … details and stuff, but…” She shrugged and lowered her head, staring at the red-and-white-checked surface of the table. “The cops asked us if we could help … specifically … me. Dad had been pulling back from the day-to-day running of things, trying to get the people he’d selected to take over more comfortable with things. He wanted to retire soon. If he suddenly got back into the swing of things when he’d been pulling back, well, the cops were worried—”
“Nobody wanted to spook Anton off,” Noah said as she floundered for the words.
“Right.”
“So you had to work with them as they investigated the father of your child.”
Just then, Micah’s giggle echoed through the air and she lifted her head, looked back at him. “He was never much of a father. He’d donated sperm. He came by when he felt obligated, and that was mostly just to shut me up.” Bitter laughter escaped her as she looked back at Noah. “All of this came to a head right after I’d discovered his affair, the way he was cheating on me, cheating the company, our clients. I think he realized something was up, and he started playing the doting daddy. Or trying to. He’d come by three or four times a week, no matter how mad I was. He brought me flowers, tried to smooth things over with me, apologized, played with Micah. Trying to get to me through my son. It was the only time he ever showed any affection and it was all an act.”
“Did you tell him to leave you both alone?”
Blowing out a breath, she said, “No. I debated. Thought it through. The evidence the police needed was easy to find. Didn’t even take a couple of weeks. I was afraid if I suddenly made him stop seeing his son when I’d been trying to get him to do just that, it would make things even more complicated. He was already jumpy enough. I could see it. He was paranoid. Locking the door to his office, and when he left the building you could see him looking over his shoulder him like he thought he was being followed.” She grimaced and flexed her hands restlessly in Noah’s warm, certain grasp. “If I thought I could have made him believe it, I would have thrown a bitch fit and just pretended I was jealous and reacting out of spite. That wasn’t me, though. I always told him, no matter what, I wanted Micah to know his father. To have a relationship with him. Besides, I was never very good at lying. It shows on my face. Not because I’m honest to a fault or anything, but if I’m thinking, Screw you, buddy, it shows.”
Noah laughed. “Trust me, I get the idea.”
Despite herself, she smiled. “I can play the diplomat when it comes to business, but when it’s personal everything I feel pretty much shows through.”
“That’s not a bad thing.” His thumb did another slow stroke across her wrist.
“It was almost over. So I gritted my teeth … and hovered no more than a few inches away from Micah the entire time.”
“Weren’t you worried he’d hurt you? Micah?”
“No. Anton isn’t the violent sort, really. People can be pushed, though. I knew that.” She cracked a faint smile. “But timing-wise, that was one thing that actually played in my favor. We’d been living with my dad for a while … there was renovating going on at my condo and all the dust was making it hard on the nanny—she had awful allergies. She lived with us, so it was just easier if we weren’t there while they renovated. Dad had plenty of room … and Tank.”
“Tank?”
She grinned. “Dad tells everybody he’s the butler. Mostly he’s there because Dad gets lonely. They’ve been friends most of their lives and Tank hit a bad spot a few years ago. Dad helped him out, conned Tank into moving in and helping him with some of this, some of that, and he just never left.”
“Does he come by the name honestly?”
Trinity just smiled.
“So you were safe.”
“Yeah.”
He nodded, staring past her. She followed his gaze, saw him eying Micah, although she’d already known who Noah was looking at. He always got this look in his eye when he looked at her son. A look of awe, mixed with amusement … and although she wasn’t exactly ready to put a name on it, there was something in Noah’s eyes that had ne
ver been in Anton’s.
It was a look that all fathers should have, Trinity thought.
But this man, not the boy’s father, was the one who watched her son with what looked like love.
Swallowing the knot in her throat, she shrugged and tried to make herself focus. “Once I had the information the cops needed, I turned it over. Then I saw a lawyer about limiting Anton’s rights to see my son. I wasn’t going to try and terminate them, but I didn’t want Anton lashing out at me through my son.”
Noah looked back at her.
She shrugged. “Micah doesn’t know. But Anton laughed it off. He was out on bail—on house arrest, had to wear one of those things on his ankles that tracked his movements—but he was so furious. Insisted he’d never go to jail and nobody would believe me. He told me Micah would hate me once this was over.”
She tried to ignore that small fear inside, the one that whispered to her in the night, You sent his father to jail. What is he going to do once he really understands how big of a part you had in locking his father away?
“He was so angry. At me. At my dad. At the cops—at everybody but himself. I told him I was filing for full custody—not that it mattered. He never cared. Didn’t pay child support—I didn’t need it, but he never tried to be a dad. I don’t know what I was trying to do when I told him that I was going to talk to a lawyer about getting full custody of Micah. It was like he knew the best way to hurt me … by hurting Micah. He told me that he didn’t want to see the kid again—he’d even sign the papers terminating his rights. Just like that.”
“It’s that easy to give a kid up?” Noah murmured.
“Not really.” Trinity rubbed her brow. “He couldn’t terminate his parental rights, but after he said that I told my lawyer what he’d said and the state decided it wasn’t in my son’s best interest for that son of a bitch to have parental rights. So they terminated his rights. I’m perfectly capable of providing for him. His dad never loved him. Better this way than for Micah to learn later on.” She stopped and sighed. “But he’ll probably find out at some point anyway.”
Deeper Than Need: A Secrets & Shadows Novel Page 21