by Nora Roberts
“Kate.” Bittle drew her attention with one quiet word. “The excess money was transferred via computer out of the client’s escrow account in cash.”
“In cash,” she repeated, blank.
“Since this came to our attention, we initiated a check on all accounts.” Bittle’s face was grave as he watched her. “Since late March of this year, amounts that total seventy-five thousand dollars have been withdrawn from escrow accounts, seventy-five thousand in excess of tax payments. Computer withdrawals, in cash, from your accounts.”
“From my clients?” She felt the blood drain out of her face, couldn’t stop it.
“It’s the same pattern.” Calvin Meyers spoke for the first time, tugging on his bright red tie. “Two copies of the 1040s, small adjustments on various forms, to total excess on the client’s copy in amounts ranging from twelve hundred to thirty-one hundred dollars.” He puffed out his cheeks. “We might not have caught it, but I golf with Sid Sun. He’s a whiner about taxes and kept after me to look over his form and be certain there was nothing else he could use to cut his payment.”
Embezzlement. Were they accusing her of embezzlement? Was this some awful nightmare? They knew about her father and thought . . . no, no, that was impossible. While her hand flexed nervously in her lap, she kept her voice even.
“You examined one of my accounts?”
Calvin lifted an eyebrow. The last thing he’d expected from steady-as-she-goes Kate Powell was blank-eyed panic. “I did so to get him off my back, and in examining his copy, I found several small errors. I thought it best to look further and pulled out our file copy of his latest return.”
She couldn’t feel anything. Even her fingertips had gone numb. “You think I stole seventy-five thousand dollars from my clients. From this firm.”
“Kate, if you could just explain how you think this might have happened,” Marty began. “We’re all here to listen.”
No, her father had stolen from clients. Her father. Not her. “How could you think it?” Her voice shook, shamed her.
“We haven’t come to any firm conclusion,” Amanda countered. “The facts, the numbers, however, are here, in black and white.”
Black and white, she thought as the print blurred, as it overlapped with visions of newspaper articles from twenty years past. “No, I—” She had to lift a hand, rub her eyes to clear them. “It’s not. I didn’t.”
Amanda tapped one scarlet nail on the tabletop. She’d expected outrage, had counted on the outrage of the innocent. Instead, what she saw was the trembling of the guilty.
“If Marty hadn’t gone to bat for you, if he hadn’t insisted we search for some rational explanation, even incompetence on your part, we would have had this meeting days ago.”
“Amanda,” Bittle said quietly, but she shook her head.
“Larry, this is embezzlement, and over and above the legal ramifications, client trust and confidence have to be considered. We need to clear this matter up quickly.”
“I’ve never taken a penny, not a penny from any client.” Though terrified that her legs would buckle, Kate shot to her feet. She would not be sick, she told herself, though her stomach was heaving into her throat. “I couldn’t.” It seemed to be all she could say. “I couldn’t.”
Lawrence frowned at his hands. “Ms. Powell, money is easily hidden, laundered, spent. You’ve assisted a number of clients in investments, accounts in the Caymans, in Switzerland.”
Investments. Bad investments. She pressed a hand to her throbbing temple. No, that had been her father. “That’s my job. I do my job.”
“You recently opened a business,” Calvin pointed out.
“I’m a one-third partner in a secondhand boutique.” Grief and fear and nausea swirled inside her, made her hands shake. She had to be coherent, she ordered herself. Shaking and weeping only made her look guilty. “It took almost all my savings to do it.”
She drew in a breath that burned, stared straight into Bittle’s eyes. “Mr. Bittle—” But her voice broke, and she had to begin again. “Mr. Bittle, I’ve worked for you for five years. You hired me a week out of graduate school. I’ve never given this firm anything but my complete loyalty and dedication, and I’ve never given a client anything but my best. I’m not a thief.”
“I find it difficult to believe you are, Kate. I’ve known you since you were a child and always considered my decision to hire you one of my best judgment calls. I know your family.”
He paused, waiting for her to rebound, to express her fury at being used. To demand to assist the firm in finding the answers. When she did nothing but stare blindly, he had no choice.
“However,” he said slowly, “this matter can’t be ignored. We’ll continue to investigate, internally for now. It may become necessary to go outside the firm with this.”
“To the police.” The thought of it dissolved her legs so that she had to brace herself with a hand on the table. Her vision grayed and wavered. “You’re going to the police.”
“If it becomes necessary,” Bittle told her. “We hope to resolve the matter quietly. Bittle and Associates is responsible, at this point, for adjusting the escrow accounts.” Bittle studied the woman standing at the end of the table, shook his head. “The partners have agreed that it is in the firm’s best interest for you to take a leave of absence until this is cleared up.”
“You’re suspending me because you think I’m a thief.”
“Kate, we need to look into this carefully. And we have to do whatever is in the best interest of our clients.”
“A suspected embezzler can’t handle accounts.” The tears were going to come, but not yet. She could hold them back just a little longer. “You’re firing me.”
“A leave of absence,” Bittle repeated.
“It’s the same thing.” Accusations, disgrace. “You don’t believe me. You think I’ve stolen from my own clients and you want me out of the office.”
He saw no other choice. “At this time, yes. Any personal items in your office will be sent to you. I’m sorry, Kate. Marty will escort you out of the building.”
She let out a shuddering breath. “I haven’t done anything but my best.” Picking up her briefcase, she turned stiffly and walked to the door.
“I’m sorry. Christ, Kate.” With his lumbering stride, Marty caught up with her. “What a mess, what a disaster.” He started huffing when she took the stairs down to the main level. “I couldn’t turn them around.”
She stopped, ignoring the pain in her stomach, the throbbing in her head. “Do you believe me? Marty, do you believe me?”
She saw the flicker of doubt in his earnest, myopic eyes before he answered. “I know there’s an explanation.” He touched her gently on the shoulder.
“It’s all right.” She made herself push through the glass doors on the lobby level, walk outside.
“Kate, if there’s anything I can do for you, any way I can help . . .” He trailed off lamely, standing by the door as she all but ran to her car.
“Nothing,” she said to herself. “There’s just nothing.”
* * *
At the last minute she stopped herself from running to Templeton House. To Laura, to Annie, to anyone who would fold her in comforting arms and take her side. She swung her car to the side of the road rather than up the steep, winding drive. She got out and walked to the cliffs.
She could stand alone, she promised herself. She had had shocks, survived tragedies before. She’d lost her parents, and there was nothing more devastating than that.
There had been boys she’d dreamed over in high school who had never dreamed back. She’d gotten over it. Her first lover, in college, had grown bored with her, broken her heart and moved on. She hadn’t crumbled.
Once, years before, she had fantasized about finding Seraphina’s dowry all alone, of bearing it proudly home to her aunt and uncle. She had learned to live without that triumph.
She was afraid. She was so afraid.
Like fath
er, like daughter. Oh, dear God, would it come out now? Would it all come out? And how much more damning then? What would this do to the people who loved her, who had had such hopes for her?
What was it people said? Blood will tell. Had she done something, made some ridiculous mistake? Christ, how could she think clearly now when her life had been turned upside down and shattered at her feet?
She had to wrap her arms tight around her body against the spring breeze, which now seemed frigid.
She’d committed no crime, she reminded herself. She’d done nothing wrong. All she’d done was lose a job. Just a job.
It had nothing to do with the past, nothing to do with blood, nothing to do with where she had come from.
With a whimper, she eased down onto a rock. Who was she trying to fool? Somehow it had to do with everything. How could it not? She’d lost what she had taught herself to value most next to family. Success and reputation.
Now she was exactly what she’d always been afraid she was. A failure.
How could she face them, any of them, with the fact that she’d been fired, was under suspicion of embezzling? That she had, as she always advised her clients not to, put all of her eggs in one basket, only to see it smashed.
But she would have to face them. She had to tell her family before someone else did. Oh, and someone would. It wouldn’t take long. She didn’t have the luxury of digging a hole and hiding in it. Everything she was and did was attached to the Templetons.
What would her aunt and uncle think? They would have to see the parallel. If they doubted her . . . She could stand anything, anything at all except their doubt and disappointment.
She reached in her pocket, chewed viciously on a Tums, and wished for a bottle of aspirin—or some of the handy tranqs Margo had once used. To think she’d once been so disdainful of those little crutches. To think she had once considered Seraphina a fool and a coward for choosing to leap rather than stay and face her loss.
She looked out to sea, then rose and walked closer to the edge. The rocks below were mean. That was what she’d always liked best about them, those jagged, unforgiving spears standing up defiantly to the constant, violent crash of water.
She had to be like the rocks now, she thought. She had to stand and face whatever happened next.
Her father hadn’t been strong. He hadn’t stood, he hadn’t faced it. And now, in some twisted way, she was paying the price.
Byron studied her from the side of the road. He’d seen her car whiz past as he was leaving Josh’s house. He wasn’t sure what impulse had pushed him to follow her, still wasn’t sure what was making him stay.
There was something about the way she looked, standing there at the edge of the cliff, so alone. It made him nervous, and a little annoyed. That vulnerability again, he supposed, a quiet neediness that called to his protective side.
He wouldn’t have pegged her as the type to walk the cliffs or stare out to sea.
He nearly got back into his car and drove off. But he shrugged and decided that since he was here, he’d might as well enjoy the view.
“Hell of a spot,” he said as he walked up to her. It gave him perverse pleasure to see her jolt.
“I was enjoying it,” she muttered and kept her back to him.
“Plenty of view for two to enjoy. I saw your car, and . . .” When he got a look at her, he saw that her eyes were damp. He’d always been compelled to dry a woman’s tears. “Bad day?” he murmured and offered her a handkerchief.
“It’s just windy.”
“Not that windy.”
“I wish you’d go away.”
“Ordinarily I try to comply with women’s requests. Since I’m not going to in your case, why don’t you sit down, tell me about it?” He took her arm, thinking the tension in it was edgy enough to cut glass. “Think of me as a priest,” he suggested, dragging her with him. “I wanted to be one once.”
“To use some clever phrasing, bullshit.”
“No, really.” He pulled her down on a rock with him. “I was eleven. Then puberty hit, and the rest is history.”
She tried and failed to tug free and rise. “Did it ever occur to you that I don’t want to talk to you? That I want to be alone?”
To soothe, because her voice was catching helplessly, he stroked a hand over her hair. “It crossed my mind, but I rejected it. People who feel sorry for themselves always want to talk about it. That, next to sex, was the main reason I decided against the seminary. And dancing. Priests don’t get lots of opportunity to dance with pretty women—which, I suppose, is the same thing as sex. Well, enough about me.”
He put a determined hand under her chin and lifted it. She was pale, those long, spiky lashes were wet and those deep, doe’s eyes damp. But . . .
“Your eyes aren’t red enough for you to have had a good cry yet.”
“I’m not a sniveler.”
“Listen, kid, my sister highly recommends a good cry, and she’d deck you for calling her a sniveler.” Gently, he rubbed his thumb over Kate’s chin. “Screaming’s good, too, and throwing breakables. There was a lot of that in my house.”
“There’s no point—”
“Venting,” he interrupted smoothly. “Purging. There aren’t any breakables around here, but you could let out a good scream.”
Emotions welling up inside her threatened to choke her. Furiously she jerked her face free of his hand. “I don’t need you or anyone to charm me out of a mood. I can handle my own problems just fine. If I need a friend, all I have to do is go up to the house. Up to the house,” she repeated as her gaze focused on the towering structure of stone and wood and glass that held everything precious to her.
Covering her face with her hands, she broke.
“That’s a girl,” he murmured, relieved by the natural flow of tears. “Come here now.” He drew her close, stroking her hair, her back. “Get it all out.”
She couldn’t stop. It didn’t matter who he was, his arms were strong, his voice understanding. With her face buried against his chest, she sobbed out the frustration, the grief, the fear, let herself for one liberating moment be coddled.
He rested his cheek on her hair, held her lightly. Lightly because she seemed so small, so fragile. A good grip might shatter those thin bones. Tears soaked through his shirt, cooled from hot to cold on his skin.
“I’m sorry. Damn it.” She would have pulled away, but he continued to hold her. Humiliated, she squeezed her aching eyes shut. “I never would have done that if you’d left me alone.”
“You’re better off this way. It’s not healthy to hold everything in.” Automatically, he kissed the top of her head before easing her back to study her face.
Why it should have charmed him, wet, blotchy, streaked with mascara as it was, he couldn’t have said. But he had a terrible urge to shift her onto his lap, to kiss that soft, sad mouth, to stroke her again, not quite so consolingly.
Bad move, he cautioned himself, and wondered how any man faced with such sexy distress could think like a priest.
“Not that you look better.” He took the handkerchief she’d balled up in her fist and mopped at her face. “But you should feel better enough to tell me why you’re so upset.”
“It has nothing to do with you.”
“So what?”
She could feel another sob bubbling in her chest and blurted out the words before it could escape. “I got fired.”
He continued calmly cleaning and drying her face. “Why?”
“They think—” Her voice hitched. “They think I—”
“Take a breath,” he advised, “and say it fast.”
“They think I stole money out of client escrow. Embezzled. Seventy-five thousand.”
Watching her face, he stuck the ruined linen back in his pocket. “Why?”
“Because—because there are duplicate 1040s, and money missing. And they’re my clients.”
And my father—my father. But she couldn’t say that, not out loud.
&
nbsp; In fits and starts she babbled out the gist of her meeting with the partners. A great deal of it was incoherent, details crisscrossing and overlapping, but he continued to nod. And listen.
“I didn’t take any money.” She let out a long, unsteady breath. “I don’t expect you to believe me, but—”
“Of course I believe you.”
It was her turn to gather her wits. “Why?”
Leaning back a little, he took out a cigar, shielding the flame on his lighter with a cupped hand. “In my line of work, you get a handle on people quickly. You’ve been around the hotel business most of your life. You know how it is. There are plenty of times with a guest, or staff, that you have to make a snap judgment. You’d better be accurate.” Puffing out smoke, he studied her. “My take on you, Katherine, in the first five minutes, was—well, among other things—that you’re the type of woman who would choke on her integrity before she loosened it to breathe.”
Her breath came out shaky, but some of the panic eased. “I appreciate it. I think.”
“I’d have to say you worked for a bunch of shortsighted idiots.”
She sniffled. “They’re accountants.”
“There you go.” He smiled, ran a finger down her cheek when she glared. “A flash there in those big brown eyes. That’s better. So, are you going to take it lying down?”
Rising, she straightened her shoulders. “I can’t think about how or what I can take now. I only know I wouldn’t work at Bittle again if they came crawling on their hands and knees through broken glass.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant someone’s embezzling and pointing the finger at you. What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t care.”
“You don’t care?” He shook his head. “I find that hard to believe. The Katherine Powell I’ve seen is a scrapper.”
“I said I don’t care.” And her voice hitched again. If she fought, looked too close, demanded too much, they might uncover what her father had done. Then it would be worse. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“You’ve got a brain,” he corrected.