by Cherry Adair
Maybe he was just lulling her into a false sense of security while he called in the authorities… .
She dressed quickly in black drawstring pants, black T-shirt, and flat shoes. Then she walked to the window and held the drapes aside. There was a rickety iron fire escape right outside the window. It looked as if a strong wind would wrench it right off its rusty mooring to the ancient wall of the hotel.
Turning back into the room, she finger-combed her hair and started braiding it over her shoulder. She didn’t relish making a run for it, but she would if necessary. Europe was a big place. Rand wouldn’t find her, and she had the advantage. She knew where the second guy carrying the vials was. He didn’t. Better yet, she thought she might have a clue—certainly something she was going to follow up on. With or without Rand’s help.
The shower turned off and she pulled up a second chair to the desk, then took the covers off the meal he’d ordered. Thinly sliced steak on a bed of arugula, drizzled with oil and balsamic vinegar, and sprinkled with curls of cheese. Exactly what Dakota would’ve ordered for herself. She was surprised that he remembered what she liked to eat. She picked up the glass of icy-cold milk, he’d remembered as well, and sipped it while she waited.
When he emerged from the bathroom fully dressed, she saw he’d shaved. His hair was wet and scraped back, his version of combing. Oh, God, Rand— Dakota’s heart hurt just looking at him. She pulled out a chair and sat down. She wasn’t even remotely hungry, but she placed her napkin in her lap and picked up the silverware as he sat down opposite her. “This looks good. Thanks.” Her reckless heart insisted on holding out hope that all was not lost between them. Despite the breakup and the passage of two years, Rand had not only remembered her likes and dislikes, he’d taken them into account now, even when he must really hate her.
He poured himself a glass of white wine. “Walk me through everything from your perspective.”
“Starting when?”
“Let’s start with meeting my mother before they left on their trip.” He shoved the cork into the bottle. Too bad there was no shoving this situation back into the bottle as well.
“You saw what—”
The glass stopped midway to his mouth. “Dakota? I’m asking you. I’ll start with saying that I watched that video several times. With and without sound. That was some creative editing.”
Her fork clattered on the edge of her plate. The rush of relief she felt was staggering. “Oh, my God. I—”
“Save the editorial,” he said grimly. “Just walk me through that night as best you can remember.” He knocked back half the glass in one long swallow.
She told him about the initial phone call from his mother asking her to share a girls’ night and talk about the wedding. The oddness of having the conversation outside on the porch in the cold. What Catherine had really said, and what she remembered saying.
Rand sliced into his steak, but didn’t eat it. “What was in the envelope?”
“Their wedding present to us. Tickets to Paris and an itinerary.”
“No money.”
He didn’t phrase it as a question, but she answered anyway. “No.”
“If my mother had tried to bribe you as the video indicates, would you have told me?”
“Yes. Okay, maybe. I’m not sure. I thought our interaction was vaguely odd at the time, but not odd enough to report to you. She told me she wanted to surprise you with the trip, and not to mention that they’d given us Paris as a wedding present. The fact that she’d invited me over, then not bothered to ask me inside, was strange, but I knew they were leaving the next day and probably had a million things to do. I didn’t give it a lot of thought afterward. They left the next day for their trip, and I expected to see you for Christmas. I was going to feel you out about the trip… .”
“Instead, I was on my way to Brunei. By then my mother had already called to tell me her version of your conversation. I didn’t know she had backup in case what she told me didn’t stick. I kept waiting for you to tell me about it, and when you didn’t …”
“Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” she said, trying her best to sound reasonable when she was feeling anything but. Losing her cool when he was sitting there prepared to listen would be counterproductive. But it would just be damn-well nice, if for once he believed her just because he loved her. “No matter what your mother told you, you should’ve come to me and asked for my side of the story.”
“At the time, I was too angry to talk to you rationally, and by the time I’d cooled down, all hell had broken loose and my mother was dead.”
“So when you flew directly back to Los Angeles from Brunei instead of coming to see me, you already knew it was over?”
“I was trying to justify to myself why it shouldn’t be.”
“Great.” Dakota sat back farther in her seat. There was no space to get away from the pulsating raw emotion filling the room, swirling between them. “That didn’t work in my favor, did it?”
“Actually, by the time I got to LA, I’d decided to take my chances and say to hell with all the damning evidence. I was going to finish up my business there, put everything else on hold, and come to Seattle. A week later, my mother was dead and my father was arrested.”
“Then you had even more reason to break up with me, right?” She remembered the conversation—if you could call it that—so clearly; she’d had two years to go over every word. He’d called from Italy and told her in no uncertain terms that they were done. Whore. Money-grabbing bitch. Opportunist. Get the hell out of my life. Never want to hear your name. Over. No room for her to get a word in edgewise. No defense.
Accused. Tried. Convicted.
It had almost killed her.
“Yeah. I did.”
“Do you know that your father’s lawyer called me a couple of days after your father was arrested?”
“To try to convince you to agree to testify on his behalf?”
“No. He asked me to e-mail a document to him that was on Paul’s computer at the lab. He thought it would help his case.”
“Who called? Mancini?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe. It was a terrible line, and it was hard to understand that accent.”
“Mancini doesn’t have much of an accent.”
“Then maybe it was someone from his office. I felt bad for Paul. And even though I wasn’t willing to perjure myself for him, I thought that if I could send them what he was asking for, it would help him.” And help you understand how much I loved you, even though you refused to talk to me. Every call she’d made to Rand had gone directly to voice mail.
Rand frowned. “Paul didn’t mention a key piece of evidence that will clear him.”
“Because I didn’t find anything. That was the night the lab blew up.”
“So you did go to the lab that night.”
“On your father’s behalf, yes. But Mr. Rydell saw me, called me into his office, and fired me on the spot.”
“For what? You were one of their most respected chemists.”
“Because I refused to testify on your father’s behalf, because he said I had stolen files I had no business –seeing—” The list went on. Dakota didn’t want to relive that night; it was too devastating. “It doesn’t matter now. He requested the company access cards back, and told me to clean the lab of my personal belongings. Which I was doing—”
“You were in the lab when it blew?”
“Fortunately I went to the supply room first, to put away the chemicals I’d been working with earlier. Writing the last few notes, trying to leave things in order even though I’d just been fired.” She shook her head in bitter amusement at the memory. “If I’d just left after Rydell canned me, I would have been gone when everything went to hell. But there I was, when the lab exploded. The blast destroyed the wall between the lab and the supply room… .” And damn near destroyed me too. I was knocked out, she wanted to scream at him, knocked out and left for dead. It was only hours later that
she’d been found under some debris by a firefighter in the cleanup. “No one was supposed to have been inside the lab itself. Seventeen people died that night. I was considered a suspect at first.”
“No charges were made; Ham would have told me.” He winced briefly, evidently thinking of the ex-cop and his death.
“I was in the hospital awhile.”
He didn’t move, but she sensed she had his full attention. “How long is awhile?”
“Three and a half months. The percussion broke so many bones I was Humpty Dumpty.” Even now, when the weather changes, she knew it would happen before it made the evening news. Some things never healed right—like her relationship with Rand.
A stormy look darkened Rand’s face. “Why wasn’t I told about this?”
She gave him a wry look. “We were over. You’d made that crystal clear. You had your father to worry about, anyway. Things turned out fine. I’m fine.”
“Now. No thanks to me. Jesus, I would’ve rushed to your bedside if I’d known.”
“My friends knew what had happened.” My friends who hated your guts for the devastation you caused and for breaking my heart. “How you broke up with me. They took it upon themselves to keep my condition quiet.”
“Why didn’t your parents call me? They had my number.”
Dakota didn’t move, but she felt the phantom pains radiating through her system. Her parents had been almost as debilitating to her psyche as the accident had been to her body. They’d finished off what Rand had started. She’d been a complete mess, both physically and mentally. “They’d told me all along that you’d leave. They … they did the best they could. They let me live with them as I recovered.” The pain of physical therapy every day had been killer.
“You mentioned you sold your condo.”
She shrugged. “Hospital bills add up.”
“Dakota, I have more money than I can spend in a lifetime. You should’ve—”
Her small laugh was dry and brittle. “Asked for money from the man who had told me in no uncertain terms that I was a money-grabbing, opportunistic whore? Ask that man for help? I don’t think so.”
RAND WINCED. HE’D SPEWED a lot more. The surprise was that she’d remained on the line to listen to the vitriol. His mother had done a fine job filling his head with Dakota’s transgressions. She’d sent a PI after his fiancée and given him the report right before he left on the Brunei trip. It had been devastating reading on the long flight from LAX.
It seemed that Dakota had a penchant for men with money, and was free in sharing her favors with those who had buckets. So while she was whispering I love you to him, who knew what she was saying to them? She’d been a busy girl, especially when he was on the road.
The PI report had been bad enough, but he’d been prepared to challenge her on what he’d read. Then his mother had told him about their exchange. He pushed at the steak on his plate. All she’d had to do if she needed money was ask. The PI report, with the chaser of his mother’s anger at Dakota’s willingness to walk away for money, had come as such a shock.
Dakota had never brought up money when they were together, and claimed to feel uncomfortable when he spoiled her with the occasional piece of jewelry. No, he couldn’t care less about a woman liking the security of cash; it was that long list of men that had sent him over the edge.
Jealousy had eaten at him like acid. Each memory of them making love was now tainted by the thought—the image—of her doing that same act with someone else. He didn’t give a shit about the money. Rand would’ve given Dakota the inheritance from his maternal grandfather; it was the basis of his mother’s fortune and the bone of contention between his parents for as long as he could remember. In his family, money was, above all else, a bargaining chip.
He’d been struggling with all that when his mother had died, and his father accused of Dakota’s murder. He’d had a full fucking plate. “I didn’t give a damn that you wanted to marry a wealthy man,” he told her. She gave him a steady look over the table. Neither had eaten more than a couple bites of the meal. She pushed her plate a few inches away in a final gesture.
“I wouldn’t have cared if you were dirt poor. Your loss that you didn’t believe that.”
His fingers tightened on the stem of his glass. “What about the other men?” Did you tell them the things you whispered to me late at night? Did you stroke your foot up their calves and nuzzle their chests and tell them how much you loved them?
That got her attention, and she frowned. “Other men? What other men? I had two lovers before I met you. Three lovers isn’t considered a lot by any stretch of the imagination.”
It was Rand’s turn to frown. “My mother showed me the report from the PI who followed you for months.” A four-inch-thick red folder, secured with a rubber band, with a stark white label affixed to the front that read baldly DR. DAKOTA NORTH. He’d known before he snapped the band off that opening the file was going to change the entire course of his life. “There were nine men. The meetings photographed and documented. Dates, times, places.”
Dakota leaned back in the chair with a shake of her head. “Wow. She was dedicated, that’s for sure. Add that to the doctored video, and I guess you have your answer.”
No, goddamn it. He not only had no answers, he had a shitload more questions. “Let me make sure I have this in a nutshell.” He dropped his hand to the table, realized it was clenched into a fist, and flattened his fingers on the surface. “My mother hired a PI who gave her a thick file on your raunchy activities over several months. There’s a video—doctored, you claim—of a conversation that never happened on my parents’ front porch… . And you’re saying it’s all lies, that someone has gone to all this trouble just to set you up. Do you see how this all looks incredibly coincidental and farfetched?”
“Oh, yes. I certainly do. I think that was exactly the goal.” Her eyes glittered. “Now I have a question for you. Was your mother trying to set me up? Was she trying to get you away from me, or was this someone else’s manipulation? Because I have some pretty out-there opinions about all this.”
He hadn’t listened before; he would listen now—though he felt his shoulders rise defensively. She still had the power to hurt him. “And those are?”
“Given that I know absolutely that none of these things are true or even remotely as they seem, I think we’re both being manipulated.”
He leaned forward, folding his arms on the table. “A conspiracy theory? Seriously? You think we were all set up by my mother? You, me, Paul?”
“I don’t see how this could all be your mother’s doing, although God only knows, this is Machiavellian enough to lay at her feet. But she’s not doing it from the grave. Yet everything about this seems to me as though a puppeteer is pulling strings to suit a bigger purpose. Doesn’t it look that way to you?
“Think about it, Rand; go all the way back.” She leaned across the table, staring intently into his eyes. “Your mother believes, or is fed, a pack of lies about me, which she promptly feeds to you; then she’s killed, and your father convinces you that I’m to blame. So neither of us has the other’s support, neither of us knows the whole story. Then the lab is destroyed. Then the wedding that you’re doing security for is sabotaged, using a product connected with your father, whose formula was supposedly destroyed years before. Then hired killers somehow manage to find us over and over, and to top it all off, Ham is dead and half your security people are missing in action. Have I left anything out? Probably. But let’s start there, shall we?”
“No. Yes. Possibly.” He was shaken; when she laid out the sequence of events that way, it was inescapably disturbing. “But I don’t know who could be doing it, much less why. Obviously not my mother. Yes, I admit that the doctored video and PI’s notes could certainly have been her motherly way of making sure I didn’t marry you. But since she died two years ago, we know that at the very least, the rest of this is someone else’s work.” Rand mulled over the notion, concentrating on th
e events surrounding his breakup with Dakota. Even if his mother hadn’t suffered severe and debilitating depression, she’d been a vindictive and manipulative human being all his life. She used her wealth as a club to make people do what she wanted them to do. Rand. His father … The list was long. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—negate Dakota’s theory. His mother had been capable of all that. And more.
It wasn’t his mother’s actions that killed him now, though. It was his own. By blindly believing the reports she’d shown him, he’d allowed her venom to poison what he had with Dakota. He’d never even considered that there might be a flip side to the coin, making it that much easier to believe the lies he’d been fed.
In a way, he had almost welcomed his father’s version of events; it had justified his suspicion, his rejection of the woman he’d sworn to love forever. He’d been blind, yes, but he wasn’t entirely blameless, and the realization hit him hard.
He drained his glass, then reached for the bottle to refill it. “If it’s an enemy of Paul’s who’s running the board,” he said flatly, “he’s won that part of the game. Unless there’s a last-minute piece of evidence they’ve missed, Paul will be in jail for the rest of his life.”
“Not necessarily, if Mancini’s law firm is worth what you’re paying them. They have those discs,” Dakota pointed out. “They’re damning, and he’ll use them to sway the jury into believing that I’m the one who is guilty. Your father could walk.”
Rand met her intense eyes. She looked exhausted; the smudges of shadows under her eyes had nothing to do with the crappy lighting in the room. Her pallor had everything to do with him. If her conspiracy theory proved true, his entire family was responsible for ruining her life. Him included. “Mancini won’t be using the so-called evidence. I called him and told him they were fakes. I also told him that I had some serious questions about the ‘experts’ he hired to look at them, and that I expected him to get me some answers.”