She shrugged and blushed. “I don’t know. Just kind of hard to believe I’m actually here with you.” Like she was nervous, she averted her eyes for a minute and when she looked back at him, the look there just about drained the strength from his legs. “You wouldn’t believe how often I thought about you.”
Hooking his free arm around her neck, Blake replied, “Sure I would. Probably about as often as I thought of you.” He kissed her, soft and slow, not lifting his head until she was breathing hard and arching against him. It was either stop then or find someplace private, real quick.
Somebody drove by and whistled and Blake glanced by with a grin. The police car disappeared around the corner and he rolled his eyes. “Come on before that idiot goes and spreads the word we’re making out in the square.”
“Not like we haven’t done that before,” Del said, grinning. They fell back into step and another minute passed before she looked back at him. “So if we hadn’t had a few roadblocks tossed at us, you think we’d be married and trying to con a friend into baby-sitting for us just so we can sneak a meal in peace?”
“Hey, no reason we can’t still do that.” He kept his voice casual as he came to a stop in front of the law office.
Her grin faded, replaced by a wistful expression. “Blake…”
Shaking his head, he said, “I’m not going to try to rush something on you, but I already told you that I never got over you. I don’t see it happening either, not after twelve years of loving you.”
She looked down and when her gaze came back up, her green eyes gleamed with tears. “Blake…” Her voice was thick and husky.
“Shhhh.” He dipped his head and kissed her softly. “Don’t go thinking about it too much if you’re not ready for it. But I did figure I should probably let you know that I still love you.”
Then he tugged his hand away, gesturing towards the door as it opened to reveal Sam standing there. Slowly, she backed away and turned. Blake watched as she climbed exactly two steps and then stopped and turned back around. She jumped down the steps and reached for him, wrapping her arms tight around his neck.
Her hurried whisper was faint, but Blake heard it as clearly as if she had screamed it from the square. I love you, too.
He was still grinning as she ran back up the steps and disappeared inside with Sam.
“You look a bit different from the last time I saw you,” Sam said as he led her toward the large office in the back. It was his father’s, but he seemed as comfortable in it as if it was his name on the diplomas and certificates hanging on the walls in black frames.
Del skimmed a look over Sam Beaumont and grinned. “Gotta say, the same goes for you.” The last time she could remember seeing him had been the summer she was fifteen. He’d come home from college and he’d looked exactly like what he had been—a bored rich kid killing time at home over summer break. She’d heard enough stories about him. Even though she was over-the-moon crazy for Blake, Sam had been good looking enough, with a slightly dangerous edge, that even she hadn’t been totally blind to him.
That slightly dangerous edge had been replaced. Once, that danger had been just a possibility. Now, Sam seemed to exude an aura of menace. He settled down behind a large mahogany desk and she studied his face as she took the chair directly in front of him. His face had matured but the planes and angles were all the same, his craggy good looks just a little bit rougher.
His eyes had changed the most. They weren’t the same at all. They were harder. Colder. Flatter.
Del had seen a similar look in her own eyes a time or two and she wondered what had happened to him, who he’d lost. But she wasn’t here for some kind of personal discussion with Sam. She just wanted to see why his father, and now Sam, kept pestering her.
“So why am I here, Sam?” she asked, leaning back into the soft, plush leather.
He crooked a brow at her. He had his dad’s dark brown eyes and like his dad, he could show as much or as little emotion as he chose. The longish hair and his casual clothes didn’t detract from the comfortable way he flipped through the file on the desk in front of him, pausing to study one sheet. “Been going through some information and it looks like my father left a number of messages with your mother, sent her correspondence a half dozen times over the past few years.”
With a shrug, Del said, “I don’t know why that affects me. Mom and I aren’t really on speaking terms.”
Sam nodded, still studying the file. He reached up, idly stroked his chin. “How long has it been since you talked with her, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Twelve years.”
That caught his attention. He looked up from whatever he’d been reading. He blinked and then glanced back down at the file frowning. With a flick of his wrist, he closed the file and leaned back into his chair, watching her closely. “Twelve years.”
Del nodded. “I haven’t seen her or talked to her since I was sixteen, Sam.”
“Hmmm.” With a long-fingered hand, Sam reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. “She never sent you any letters at school? Never came to visit?”
“I didn’t go to school, Sam,” Del replied, her voice flat. Although Del knew the highlights, she didn’t know the specifics of whatever fantasy world Louisa had painted to explain Del’s absence and in all honesty, she cared very little. Way too little to even consider going along with whatever stories her mother had told.
“Twelve years,” Sam whispered.
He looked up at her again and this time, when their gazes met, she saw that his was cold and hard. He glanced at the clock hanging on the wall and then back at her. “This is going to take a while. Have you got the time?”
Del, getting irritated, demanded, “What is going to take a while?”
Slowly, Sam looked down and flipped the file in front of him back open. He pulled out a rather legal looking document and then he turned it around so that she could read the ornate script across the top of it.
“Your father’s will, Del. And a trust fund that you should have inherited when you turned twenty-one.”
Mouth dry, Del parroted back, “Trust fund?”
Sam’s mouth quirked in a grin. “Enough that you wouldn’t ever have to work again.” His grin faded. “There was also a large sum set aside for your college education and I do mean, large. It would have paid for a four-year education at just about an Ivy League school in the country, as well as any other schooling you might have needed. Law school, medical school—it would have paid for Harvard, Yale, Princeton. Anywhere.”
Yale. Back before Daddy had died, she used to tell him she wanted to be a doctor. She could remember him smiling down at her and telling her she could do anything, be anything she wanted. Yale—she’d busted her ass just to get through a state-funded community college, living in low-income housing and damn near killing herself to keep her grades high enough that she wouldn’t lose the grants and scholarships that Joely had helped her get and there had been money for her to go to Yale.
Looking up, Del met his eyes. “I don’t know anything about it.” Her head pounded furiously as she tried to wrap her mind around what Sam had just told her. Good grief, how many times had she skipped eating dinner so she’d have enough money to pay rent, pay tuition once she started college? She wouldn’t let herself think about the years when she’d been too high to care that she was sleeping in the streets. Money, at that point, wouldn’t have helped and it probably would have made it worse. Made the drugs she craved that much more accessible.
But after? Damn, when she’d gotten herself straightened out there had been times when she’d been so hard up for money, she’d sold plasma just to buy Ramen noodles. Times when she had worked forty hours a week flipping burgers and going to school full time. There had been many, many nights when Del had gotten less than four hours of sleep. “I had no idea.”
Sam shrugged. “Considering you left home before you could access it, even with the trustee’s permission, that’s not a surprise. No, what is k
ind of surprising is the fact that Dad has done nearly everything he could think of to get you to the office. Sent registered letters to your mother’s house and she told him, repeatedly, that the letters were all forwarded onto you but she wouldn’t ever give him that forwarding address. He took out notices in every major paper for the past five years, trying to find you. I know for a fact that he went by your mother’s house quite often hoping to get some information on your whereabouts.” With a faint smile, Sam said, “It was like you’d dropped off the earth. Of course, your mom’s told people about you finishing school up over in Europe. Spent some time in France.”
Her eyes burned as she looked at Sam. “I never went to France, Sam. I never graduated high school. I got my GED when I was twenty.”
If he was surprised, it never showed. One black brow went up slightly and he nodded. “Dad’s the trusting sort. Your mother tells him that you’re living the high life in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, he takes her at her word. He took out ads in easily a half dozen major newspapers hoping you’d see them but that’s about as far as he went.” Sam gave her a sardonic grin. “Me, I don’t trust people any further than I can throw them so I called a friend who used to help me out when I was working in Nashville.”
He held her gaze as he withdrew a piece of paper from the file on the desk and laid it down in front of her. Del kept her hands clenched in her lap and hoped they weren’t shaking as she skimmed the list. It pretty much detailed her life from the time she’d been founding bleeding to death in the rest stop ten years earlier.
“Any reason you’re so damn curious about my life, Sam?” she asked, forcing the words out through a throat as dry and rough as sandpaper.
“Delilah.”
His voice was gentle, a lot more gentle than she would have expected coming from somebody like Sam. Slowly, she looked up at him and found him staring at her with compassionate eyes. “I don’t know what happened that made you run away from home, and I don’t need to know. But I know when a woman’s been through hell. I’ve seen it, all too often. Whatever has happened in your past belongs to you, and you alone. But I needed to know why Dad wasn’t ever able to find you. You’re the heir to an estate that is valued in the millions. And…” His voice trailed off and he looked down, as though trying to figure out how to say something that wasn’t going to be much fun. Not for him to say and not for her to hear.
“Spit it out, Sam,” Del said, her voice harsh. This wasn’t his fault, logically she knew that and she could even understand why he’d paid somebody to root around in her life. But she was still humiliated. Still furious. Sick inside.
“Delilah, your father left you damn near everything. Including the house. When you turned twenty-one, it was to revert to you.”
“Everything?” she repeated.
“With the exception of a monthly stipend for your mother, and a lump sum that she would have received when you turned twenty-one, yes.”
Most of what Sam went on to explain was a lot more legalese than Del could follow, but after he explained the legal crap, he laid it out in plain and simple English. There was a lot more than just the house and the trust fund. A lot.
Del had been eight when her dad died. Too young to understand or even know about all the legal ramifications that came along with death. Twenty years had passed since her father died and every month since then, her mother had been issued a check that was meant for Delilah.
“The money from a trust can be used in a variety of ways. Clothing, food, childcare—any of these. You were a minor and so your mother was in charge of the money.” His voice seemed to drone on and from time to time, he’d look up at her, as if to make sure she was still following him.
Desperate to get out of there, to get someplace quiet, someplace alone, and just think, Del nodded as though he made perfect sense. Truth be told, she’d stopped really processing his words a while back.
Money. Money for food. Money for school.
Del hadn’t ever needed for money growing up. She always had new clothes, very nice new clothes, plenty of cash to spend, she’d even gotten a new car for her sixteenth birthday.
There had been times after she’d run away from home when she barely recognized herself, living on the street, stealing food, stealing money to buy food. And drugs, she thought bitterly. Can’t forget the drugs. She’d given years of her life to drugs and all that pain and misery had pushed her down the road to that rest stop where she’d tried to kill herself.
That had been the catalyst that turned her life around and she wasn’t going to forget anything that led her to that point.
She was missing entire pieces of her life, pieces she’d never get back. During that bleak stretch of time, nearly three years in all, there had been days when she’d been too drunk or too high—or both, to know where she was or even care. Del had moved around a lot, even after she’d sobered up while she tried to figure out what to do with herself.
Del couldn’t really fault her mother for not being able to find her and relay the message from the lawyer. But Louisa had been lying about it—for years. More than that, Louisa was apparently still cashing those monthly checks. Louisa let people think that Del was getting the money and out living the high life—finishing up high school in France and jet setting around Europe.
That was what made Del sick. She tried not to think about how many nights she had spent in some shelter, or how hard she’d busted her ass to put herself through college once she straightened out and got her GED.
As hard as those years had been, Del knew that if she could have traded her real history for the one her mother had fabricated for her, she wouldn’t do it. The rapes? Yes, she would have undone that hell in a heartbeat, but what came after? No. All of that had led her to what she was now—the woman she was now was a hell of a lot stronger than the girl she had been. The woman she was now made a difference. She’d saved lives and some of that had come from her own experiences in hell.
Undoing those years would undo all of the things that had happened since and she wouldn’t do it. The life her mother described was meaningless.
The past had put her on the path she was on now and the fact that her mother had been lying and filling people’s heads with some fake life of luxury made Del irrationally furious. Even madder than the fact that Louisa was living in the house that belonged to Del. Banking money that belonged to Del.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars—and there were millions in the bank, just waiting for a signature from Del to be all hers. Each time Junior had tried to contact Del, Louisa had made him believe she was relaying the messages to her daughter and that Del wasn’t interested in coming home to see her to affairs, that she preferred Louisa to remain in charge.
She had a headache from clenching her jaw by the time it was all done. Sam called the secretary, Paulette, in to act as a witness while Del signed the necessary paperwork. Del gripped the fountain pen so hard, it wouldn’t have surprised her if it broke and she signed her name in an angry scrawl before slamming the pen down.
After the sweet-faced, black woman had added her signature, Sam said, “Paulette, why don’t you go ahead and take your lunch? You never did get one earlier—tell you what, why don’t you turn the phones over and then you could go ahead and take off for the day. You could swing by the hospital and see Dad. Mom promised my sister she’d go into Lexington while Jenny had her ultrasound and Dad wouldn’t let them reschedule so he hasn’t had any company today. I bet he’d love to see you. Especially if you snuck him some fried chicken from the diner.”
Whatever the secretary said fell on unhearing ears as Del sat in the chair, her nails digging into the armrests and her gut in a knot. The door closed behind her and she didn’t even move. It wasn’t until Sam got up from the chair and headed towards her that she reacted. Already tense and on edge, her body perceived damn near everything as a threat right now and she shot up from the chair, moving so that the big leather piece was between her and the man watching her with cal
m, measuring eyes.
She saw the knowledge in his eyes and she flushed, furiously. He held up his hands in a calming gesture and instead of coming any closer, he settled his leans hips on the edge of the desk. He tucked his hands into his pockets and looked like he was doing his damnedest to appear non-threatening. Not the easiest task for a man that looked like he did.
“I’ll walk you over the bank so you can talk to the manager. Most of this is just a formality because the money technically has been yours for seven years now.”
Del nodded jerkily. Although she desperately wanted to be alone right now, she wanted this over with. But she didn’t trust herself to speak rationally just yet, considering how mad she was getting. Madder than she had ever been, and it was getting worse by the second.
“If you like, when we’re done, I can go with you to speak to the sheriff.”
Sheriff. Her face blank, she looked at Sam and repeated, “The sheriff?”
He inclined his head. “Delilah—”
“Del,” she corrected. “Call me Del. Please.”
He nodded. “Del, you do understand what your mother has done, don’t you?”
She bared her teeth at him in a mockery of a smile. “Damn straight I do. My beloved mama has stolen money from me. A lot of money.”
Sam shrugged. “That, I can’t swear to and even though I suspect it, you need to know that there’s a possibility nothing will happen. Particularly if she can account for the money. All she has to do is claim she was managing it for you until you came home.” He flicked a glance at the half-buried report on the desk and added, “A smart lawyer could have her claim that she was aware of your…less than wise choices and that she was simply safeguarding your interests until she knew you could be trusted.”
Finally, she figured out why he had suggested the sheriff’s office. A mean smile curled her lips and she debated doing just that. She would just love to see a uniformed deputy and the county DA speaking with her mother in some small room with two-way glass, demanding to know why the woman had been helping herself to money that belonged to Del.
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