Summer Lovin'

by Carly Phillips

  Zoe sensed the power behind Ryan’s words. Her stomach jumped with equal doses of anticipation about what his uncle would admit to, and empathy for Ryan’s obvious pain.

  “And what exactly did you find?” Russ asked, suddenly more relaxed.

  Zoe felt certain the man figured Ryan’s fishing expedition had been as fruitless as his own. Ryan’s initial indignation no longer threatened the older man, but he would soon find out he was deluded, she thought.

  “The first thing I discovered was that Zoe’s hunch about you was correct. You’d visited the bus station a few hours before we did. So I wondered, what in the world could you be looking for?”

  “Ryan, surely you know I’ve always had your best interests at heart.”

  “I thought so. Up until our search led us to the contents of Faith’s locker.”

  “That’s impossible!” His uncle propelled himself forward, righteous certainty in his voice. “They told me there was nothing to be found.”

  “Unless you know the right questions to ask,” Zoe said, unable to contain her pride in Ryan.

  “It doesn’t matter how we found Faith’s things,” Ryan said, stepping between them. “What matters is that she left behind a note documenting everything that led up to her running away.”

  Uncle Russ walked to his side of the desk and lowered himself into his large, leather chair. “You can’t possibly believe the ravings of a seventeen-year-old drug addict.” That he was no longer eye to eye with Ryan, but gripping the armrests hard, gave away the measure of his fear.

  “You wouldn’t look so worried right now unless you knew for sure Faith’s words were more than ravings.”

  “That’s nonsense,” his uncle said in return.

  A muscle ticked in Ryan’s jaw. “Still in denial?”

  Tension radiated between the men and she sensed Ryan’s disappointment in the uncle he’d idolized throughout his life. Even cornered, he wasn’t man enough to own up to his actions.

  She had to clench her fists in order to prevent herself from calming Ryan down. He needed to do this and she needed to let him.

  “So tell me just what it is you think you know,” Russ said dismissively, speaking to Ryan as if he was nothing more important than an annoying little boy.

  A pathetic old man’s last bid to dominate the nephew he claimed to love, Zoe thought. But she knew Russ’s attempt to cause Ryan to back down was doomed to failure.

  “What do I know?” Ryan mimicked, then stormed across the room and braced both arms on the desk. In mood and in action, he took charge. “Dad already mentioned the mob-related truck hijackings that took place during the years Faith was most troubled. Thanks to her letters, I know you were involved with organized crime. That you gave them Baldwin’s trucking schedules.” His voice was filled with disdain. “And I know that select vehicles with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of electronics were hijacked.”

  “Coincidence.”

  “Bullshit,” Ryan countered. “Because I also know you’d increased the insurance appraisal and made yourself a hefty sum of money without revealing that to my father. And I’m certain the mob sold the goods they stole and made a bundle. It was the perfect scam until Faith found out and confronted you, so you needed to get her out of the way.”

  “It sounds like a work of fiction.” But Russ’s eyes darted from side to side, his panic obvious.

  And Zoe clung to every word. Though she’d thought Russ had an unusual interest in the keys, in her wildest dreams, she’d never imagined Russ was involved in something like this.

  “By the way, I also know that it wasn’t Faith’s choice to run away. You gave her money and told her to take a hike because everyone at home would be better off with her gone and nobody would miss her once she disappeared.”

  Zoe winced as Ryan revealed the most painful betrayal of all.

  Ryan’s throat hurt from hurling the truth at his uncle without letting his anger overwhelm him completely. His heart ached with the knowledge that the one man he’d trusted had let him down in this way. The only thing keeping him together right now was Zoe, who stepped up and silently clasped her hand inside his.

  “You must be taking Faith’s words out of context,” Russ said, his voice shaking, his fear real.

  But not as real as his sister’s must have been, Ryan thought. “How could you?” he asked barely concealing his disdain.

  Russ’s eyes suddenly blazed with emotion. “How could I? I’ll tell you how. I was Faith’s only ally in that house, just like I’ve been yours. I was the one who comforted her when her parents yelled and passed judgment. I bailed her out of trouble more times than your family knows about. Especially that last time.”

  Ryan’s legs shook and he lowered himself into the nearest chair. Zoe remained behind him, her hand on his shoulder and he appreciated her steady support. “What are you talking about?” Because for all his sister had revealed in her letter, he’d sensed there was much she hadn’t said.

  And unfortunately, Uncle Russ was the only one who could fill in the blanks. It was up to Ryan to decide whether or not to believe him.

  His uncle rose and paced the small area behind his desk. Sun shone in from the plate-glass window behind him, but Ryan felt as if the sky were full of black clouds.

  “Your sister had been doing drugs for years,” Uncle Russ began. “I didn’t know where she got them and I didn’t ask. I tried to get her into treatment and I paid for shrinks your parents didn’t know about, but the bottom line was, Faith was messed up and she still had to go home to that dysfunctional house every night. Therapy wasn’t working. So when she came to me that last time, I had no choice.”

  “But to throw her out?” Ryan asked, unable to contain his sarcasm.

  Zoe’s hand squeezed his shoulder tighter.

  “To bail her out and send her away.” Russ shook his head, the bachelor looking older than his years for the first time in Ryan’s memory.

  But Ryan wasn’t ready to believe that easily. He swallowed hard. “What do you mean?”

  “Your sister ran out of money to support her habit. Your parents weren’t giving her cash and I sure wasn’t helping her kill herself. We all thought she’d give in and let herself be helped. But she began to borrow money from a friend at school. The friend turned out to be connected and when Faith couldn’t pay him back, he threatened her. And she came to me.”

  Ryan rubbed his hand over his burning eyes. He refused to be conned, but so far the story made sense. “Go on.”

  “I met with this friend who brought his boss. They were only too willing to let me take on her debt. In fact they’d had it planned all along, using your sister’s addiction to further their bottom line. Threatening Faith was never about the couple of hundred dollars she owed. They wanted a cut of Baldwin’s profits. And they wouldn’t leave her be until they got it.”

  His voice cracked and his eyes glazed over as he remembered. “They promised the truck hijacking would be a one-time thing. If I turned over the trucking schedule, they’d pick the shipment. They’d let me know with plenty of time to up the insurance so I could make some money off it too.” He looked down, shame briefly clouding his expression. “But that was peanuts in comparison to their take when they sold the goods on the street.”

  Ryan’s head began to pound, but he forced himself to focus on what was most important. “Why did you pay Faith to leave?”

  Uncle Russ slammed his hand on the desk, making Ryan flinch.

  “You’re a smart man, Ryan. Use your brain. Faith had a drug habit. She wasn’t getting better. Hell, she just didn’t care. Living at home, she was destined to repeat the cycle and I was afraid Baldwin’s would be in bed with the mob forever, to use a cliché. But I hoped that if she got away from the situation that caused her to turn to drugs in the first place, maybe she’d get better.”

  “That’s the most naive thing I’ve ever heard,” Ryan muttered.

  “And stupid. But this was seventeen years ago. What
did I know about addiction? As the only person who was thinking clearly about the business and the family, I had to consider the possibility that Faith was on such a destructive path, eventually she’d cause someone in the family to get hurt. We were already involved with the mob. What was next?” He glanced at Ryan, his eyes imploring. “You have to believe me. At the time I thought I had no choice.”

  Considering what a shock all this was, and knowing his uncle had made a profit off the scheme, at the moment Ryan wasn’t sure what to believe. “Yet you lied and told us all that Faith stole money from you to run away.”

  “That wasn’t far from the truth. She stole the key to my briefcase along with false insurance papers documenting a shipment worth more than the actual goods.”

  Ryan narrowed his gaze, confused. “You’d been helping her. Why would she turn on you before leaving?”

  Russ spread his hands wide. “She was a drug addict, Ryan. Who knows why she did what she did?”

  “Why did you continue the scam over the years?” Ryan asked.

  Russ frowned. “Who says I did?”

  “You did. Through your actions.” Though Ryan laughed, he recognized the hollowness in the sound. “If you’d done it once to help Faith, you wouldn’t have been in a panic when you saw Sam’s key. Your actions were screwed-up, but sort of justifiable and eventually forgivable.”

  “I don’t see you believing in me at the moment,” his uncle said, his voice laced with bitterness.

  “That’s because Faith’s letter indicated you made money off the scheme more than that one time. It seems she kept those papers in the locker for a year or so, adding to them on occasion.”

  His uncle opened his mouth, closed it again, then finally said, “How the hell would she have known?”

  “Because like you said, she was a drug addict. She needed drugs after she ran away and turned to her ‘friend’ to supply her before she finally took off for New York. He must have filled her in.”

  “Good Lord.” Uncle Russ turned toward the window.

  “Yeah,” Ryan muttered. “So what the hell was going on?”

  Russ faced them again. “It was supposed to be one time. Then a year later, they called on me again. Between their veiled threats to reveal my insurance scam and the fact that the extra money in my pocket helped my lifestyle—”

  “You’re hardly hurting for cash from the business,” Ryan pointed out.

  “And neither is your father or brother and they don’t work nearly as hard as I do. After a while, it seemed like I wasn’t getting what I deserved from Baldwin’s,” he admitted. “Who was it hurting?”

  “How about the small-business owner who sees insurance rates skyrocket year after year?” Zoe said, making her presence known.

  Not that Ryan had forgotten.

  Uncle Russ scowled, but the slight incline of his head acknowledged her point. “I heard from your sister from time to time.”

  “What?” Ryan asked in shock.

  “She’d call collect or drop me a note. She’d remind me of what she knew and I lived in abject fear of her revealing all. But then after a while the threats stopped. It seemed as if she was cleaning up her act and I was able to justify sending her away. But then it was silent for too long. I was petrified of her going back on drugs, or exposing me. That’s when I began my investigation into her whereabouts.”

  Ryan’s head pounded and he braced himself for his uncle’s next admission.

  “I found out she’d died in a drug dispute,” he said, his voice cracking.

  “You kept that from my parents? From me? You let me investigate and search and hope?”

  Russ nodded. “Please hear me out. When I first found out, the guilt nearly killed me. I blamed myself and I stopped my part in bilking the insurance company. It helped that the feds were cracking down and the guys I dealt with wanted to lay low and focus on other things.”

  “And with Faith gone, so was the threat of discovery,” Ryan said.

  Russ nodded. “I stayed clean and focused on you, but the guilt never went away. Guilt over sending her away, over her death, over keeping the news from you, but I couldn’t see what good it would do to tell you. I couldn’t hurt you that way.”

  “Or deal with my reaction to your role in it.”

  Russ hung his head. “That, too.”

  “But then I started investigating on my own. With only partial information to go on, since you withheld the important things, like my sister’s death,” Ryan said with contempt.

  “Guilty as charged,” Uncle Russ admitted dully.

  Ryan leaned back in the chair, his body heavy with the weight of everything he’d just heard.

  “How did you feel when Ryan found out something you hadn’t? When he found Sam?” Zoe’s voice startled Ryan and he glanced her way. She was face-to-face with his uncle.

  Uncle Russ merely shook his head and Zoe continued. “I can answer that. You got nervous that maybe she knew something or had something that could implicate you, isn’t that right?”

  Ryan’s gaze shot back to his uncle. “Is she right?”

  Uncle Russ nodded and nausea churned in Ryan’s gut. He’d had enough revelations today to last a lifetime, but Zoe obviously wasn’t finished.

  “You were so nervous this child of Faith’s might know something or have something of her mother’s that you hired someone to break into my family’s home and tear the place apart, starting with Sam’s room,” she said, accusing him of something that had never even crossed Ryan’s mind. While he’d been consumed with the past, Zoe had been focused on the present.

  “She’s right about this, too, isn’t she?” Ryan said, knowing the answer before he’d asked the question.

  Defeated, Russ merely nodded. “But how did you know?”

  “The guy’s in jail in Boston and we found out he has a mob connection to the same people involved in the truck robberies. I also had my brother-in-law run a check on you during Faith’s troubled years.” She shot Ryan a regretful glance, but he wasn’t about to be angry at her.

  “Do you know how badly I wanted to be wrong?” she asked Russ. “Ryan loves you. He believed in you. I didn’t want to think that you were capable of something so low,” Zoe said, her anger and fury evident in the clench of her fists and the barely controlled tone of her voice. “Do you realize you scared a fourteen-year-old girl half to death and you violated my parents’ home, all to save your sorry—” She stepped forward.

  Ryan rose and grabbed her by the waist to prevent her from going after his uncle. Her Mediterranean blood was fired up and though he’d like nothing better than to let her take care of the man, he was compelled to protect her from her own anger.

  When her breathing slowed and he knew she’d calmed down, he released her, holding her hand to be sure.

  “You also pretended to extend an overture to Sam just so you could get your hands on her keys,” Zoe said in disbelief. “She’s a child and you violated her trust in the worst way. But then you’d already done the same thing to her mother, so why should Sam get in your way?”

  With each word, with each revelation, Ryan’s stomach rolled in sick disbelief. “I don’t know who you are,” he said, glancing at his uncle.

  “Sometimes I don’t know the answer to that, either,” Russ said.

  Zoe’s hand still in his, Ryan pulled her toward the door.

  “Ryan,” his uncle called to him.

  Ryan paused.

  “I’ve always loved you—you and Faith,” Russ told him. “And I pray that someday when you’ve had time to think this over, you’ll see through my weakness and stupidity and realize that.”

  Unable to see anything at the moment, Ryan strode through the door with Zoe without looking back.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ZOE FOLDED HER LAST TANK TOP and placed it into her suitcase. A few more items and she’d be good to go. She glanced around the small guest room she’d called home for a short time and realized she’d always felt comfortable her
e. Not just here in this room, but here in Ryan’s apartment and in his life. Surely that was because he hadn’t been in his normal routine any more than she’d been in hers.

  As she’d told him already, they needed to return to their jobs, their friends, their lives and then their differences wouldn’t just be apparent, but dramatically so. Of that she was sure—no matter how much her heart hurt at the thought of leaving him.

  Sam knocked, interrupting Zoe’s thoughts. She bounced into the room and plopped herself cross-legged on the bed. “So we’re going home?” she asked, her gaze on the bag.

  Zoe nodded. “It’s about time, don’t you think?”

  “I guess.”

  Catching the uncertainty in Sam’s voice, Zoe knew the young girl had started to care for her new family and would find it difficult to leave them behind—even if it wasn’t for good. The next chapter in all their lives promised to be a challenge.

  “You had fun here, didn’t you?” Zoe asked.

  Sam twirled a long strand of her hair around one finger. “This last day or so, yeah I guess I did. Even the old lady isn’t so bad as long as I keep Ima away from her.” Sam snickered.

  “Be nice, you,” Zoe chided, but she was laughing, too.

  Suddenly Sam sobered. “Am I gonna have to come live here?” she asked, her eyes deadly serious and too wise for her fourteen years.

  Zoe turned and sat down beside her, joining her on the bed. “I wish I could say no, but there’s a good chance you will.”

  Sam nodded slowly. “I figured.”

  Zoe narrowed her gaze, wanting to be sure she was reading Sam’s mood correctly. That her lack of tantrums and yelling meant she’d begun to accept the inevitable and even look forward to her future a little bit.

  “You’re okay with this?” she asked the teen.