Evening Storm

by Anne Calhoun

  He gave a soft groan, or perhaps it was a growl, but either way he drew his mouth down her straining throat to the notch between her collarbone. His control was impeccable. Not once did he cross the line and actually touch her skin. His tongue never darted out to taste. He angled his head the other direction and let his open mouth hover over her skipping pulse before retracing his steps to the soft hollow under her ear.

  “How am I doing?”

  She’d never been kissed like this in her life, just only with breath, desire, a restraint that was utterly unexpected. “What?” she managed.

  “It’s not French kissing,” he murmured. “Do you find it . . . acceptable?”

  It was more than acceptable. The promise of touch struck sparks in her bloodstream, slipping through her veins and arteries to pool deep between her hip bones. Every nerve in her body was on high alert, the ones that had been breathed into hypersensitivity by his nearness and the promise of his kisses humming with awareness. But this is what happened with men like Ryan. The direct threat was never the one that would actually break her. When told no, men like Ryan figured out another way to get what they wanted.

  The heat of his body radiated through his jeans and shirt to press against hers, as tangible as his palm on her shoulder. When she didn’t answer, he tilted his head so his temple rested against his bicep, supporting his weight with forearms braced against the mirror. In her peripheral vision, she could see them reflected in the angled mirrors, the way he shifted his weight from one hand to the other, using that fraction to get closer to her without crossing the final line. It was intimate, possessive, beseeching, pleading for absolution she couldn’t give him. “Simone,” he whispered.

  “Step back.”

  His breath shuddered from him, and for a moment she thought he wouldn’t obey. But then he did, in stages, straightening his arms first, then letting them drop to his sides. Just like that they went from being a breath and a heartbeat apart to having a good twelve inches of distance between them. It might as well have been from here to the moon.

  “Would you date me if I wasn’t Ryan Hamilton?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, reeling from arousal to bewilderment.

  “If I wasn’t that,” he said, gesturing at the door leading to the showroom. “I-banker. Rich. Powerful.”

  She thought about how to say what she needed to say. “I don’t know who Ryan Hamilton is. I’ve dated men like you present yourself,” she said obliquely, reluctant to bring up Stéphane, “but you remind me of moments of sweetness, my first boyfriend when I was fourteen, vacationing in Brittany. He was the son of our estate manager. He used to bring me daisies he’d picked by the river. I love daisies. They’re not pretending to be anything other than what they are.”

  When he didn’t answer, she turned on her heel and pushed back through the door to the showroom. Lily was waiting at the counter, a pile of lingerie pinned under her elbows. Simone rang up each item in silence, carefully folding each piece into tissue paper secured with the shop’s trademark silver stickers. The final total made her blink. Ryan’s little excursion into the workroom was going to cost him a small fortune.

  He emerged with his phone to his ear, as if he’d been taking a work call. Lily snatched the shopping bags and turned away, leaving Ryan to deal with the bill. He withdrew a fat envelope from his back pocket and set it on the counter. “For your trouble,” he said, knowing she couldn’t stop him without making a scene in front of two dozen curious eyes. Then he left.

  ***

  The shit was about to hit the fan.

  Ryan looked around the beach party in East Hampton, the big umbrellas set up in the sand, the steady flow of drinks and trays of food flowing from the enormous sleek house done in traditional gray and white, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the private beach. This was what it meant to be a MacCarren: wealth, privacy, the best of everything, all built on money stolen from unsuspecting investors.

  “Where are you staying?” Don asked companionably.

  “In East Hampton, at a friend’s house,” Ryan said. Fuck, fuck, fuck! Logan hadn’t mentioned whether the recorder would survive sustained contact with saltwater, so Ryan couldn’t keep it in his swim trunks. The damn thing was five feet away, in the front pocket of a thin hoodie he’d been taking off and putting on all day, claiming that he burned easily. He sent up a silent prayer that Don wouldn’t choose a noisy, open environment like the beach to talk about the Ponzi scheme. His voice would get lost in the wind and waves, the children’s laughter, the music quietly playing from discreet speakers on the buffet table.

  “Good. Good. Let’s enjoy the party. We’ll talk business later.”

  Ryan heaved a sigh of relief. The rest of the day was surreal, the sunshine glinting like shards of glass off the waves, children running around, shrieking and splashing, begging adults to play games. Don let his grandkids bury him in the sand for a couple hours, while Charles’s sister, Arden, carefully chaperoned her mother and Lily out to the sailboat, where they tacked back and forth not far from shore, Arden at the helm, a young crew member handling the rigging. Lily preened under the attention from Arden and her mother, and chatted sunnily with Charles’s wife, Serena. As Ryan dried his face with a towel, he caught Don watching him, his eyes intense. Ryan jerked, badly startled by Don’s quiet approach.

  “She’s a pretty girl,” Don commented while he watched Lily build a sand castle with Charles’s two younger daughters. “You thinking about settling down?”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. At this point he would have said he was planning to marry a goat to end this, and a guy vested in community and family, with appearances to maintain, fit right into that secret society at MacCarren.

  “Good. Let’s talk.”

  Ryan pulled on the hoodie and fumbled with the tiny recording device while Don collected Charles with a sharp whistle. “Going to talk a little business,” he said to his wife, who was coaxing her young grandson to choose fresh fruit from a platter on the table.

  “Not for long,” she said. “This is a family weekend, Donald.”

  The interior of the house was cool and quiet. Don led Charles and Ryan down the hall and into a sleek office, all reclaimed maple and steel fixtures. The windows opened on the beach, the sound of the women talking, children laughing, the waves curling against the shore, hopefully not too loud for the recorder. Ryan chose a position against the bookshelves, as far away from the windows as possible, and folded his arms as he watched Arden MacCarren weave daisy chains with her nieces. Her bright smile made his stomach lurch, but now wasn’t the time to pop antacids.

  “Okay,” Don said simply, staring at Ryan across his desk. “You’re in.”

  Not enough, he thought, not with Daniel Logan on the other end of this. He needed details, confessions, acknowledgement of wrongdoing. “Good,” he says. “Bring me up to speed. How long has this been going on?”

  Don shrugged. “Since I bought out my brother years ago, more or less.”

  “Who else is involved? Arden? Any of your brother’s kids?”

  “Just myself and Charles,” he said. In the corner of his eye Ryan watched Charles puff up a little.

  “Why not Arden?” From everything he’d heard, Arden had the same pedigree as Charles: Brown undergrad, Wharton B-school, but after just a few months at MacCarren, she’d moved to the family foundation, which was funded almost entirely by the investment house.

  “She’s better suited where she is,” Don said magnanimously.

  “Does she know?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone else? Your wives? Garry?” he asked, naming the brother who’d shoved off for New Zealand a few years earlier.

  “Why do you care?” This, from Charles.

  “I need to know what I can say, and to whom,” Ryan pointed out reasonably.

  “Only the three people in this room kn
ow anything,” Don said. “Aren’t you the clever boy to figure it out?”

  Ryan shrugged. Other people had to know. They’d just chosen to keep their mouths shut, or leave. He was just the first person brazen enough to do something about it. “How did it start?”

  He’d been prepared to dig, probe, ask leading questions, but fuck him running, they wanted to talk about it. It started like these things always started. Don had an idea, investors, a way to exploit a loophole no one else noticed. After a couple bad months and a highly desirable beach property in the south of France coming up for sale, they fudged the numbers a little and withdrew what they needed to buy the property. They repaid it the first time, but not the second. Or the third. Brought in more investors to pay out the ones who left. Then it snowballed. A third kid, a third private school tuition, a house in Vail, a big donation to charities that got them newspaper recognition, and more investors clamoring for the MacCarren mystique. Charles was like a frat boy bragging about conquests, or players after the big game. They were just so fucking smart. Like Ryan was smart enough to join the club, but as a sycophant, not quite a water boy but definitely junior varsity. He complimented their accounting ingenuity, their audacious bravado, nearly weightless with sheer relief. He’d done it. He’d fucking done it. The recording device caught the shit dribbling from their mouths.

  “Didn’t you ever worry about getting caught? The SEC reamed our ass pretty hard a couple of times after the crash,” he said giddily.

  “People smart enough to figure out what we’re doing don’t go to work for the SEC. They go to work for us, take their bonus payments, and keep their mouths shut.” He looked at Ryan across his desk. “We’ll need you to make it rain. Hard.”

  “Not a problem,” he said. “I’ve got the contacts I need, trust me. It’s all good.”

  “You gotta tone down that lifestyle, though,” Charles cautioned.

  “You think so?” Ryan said. “It’s working. Look who’s building sand castles with your kids. New money. Younger money.”

  They all looked out the window at the expansive horizon. Storm clouds were massing to the south and west, looming in the distance, bearing down on them.

  “Looks like it’s time to bring the kids inside,” Don said. “Are you staying for movie night? It’s Maleficent.”

  Don had a home theater in the house’s basement, and routinely had directors and actors over to do voices for the kids. Ryan thought of his mother, who had everything invested in MacCarren because her smart boy who made good on the American dream said it was safe. A smart decision. She was planning a movie night for his sister’s kids. Popcorn and sleeping bags on the floor in front of her television. “I didn’t want to intrude on too much of your weekend,” Ryan said. “I’m taking Lily out for dinner.”

  “Of course,” Don said, magnanimous now that Ryan was in the fold. “Enjoy your evening. See you at the office.”

  ***

  Lily wanted to primp before dinner. He left her showering and slathering herself with gels and lotions in the monster master bathroom of the house he’d borrowed for the weekend. He looked at the dress laid out on the bed, the exquisite gray silk lingerie next to it, then crossed the polished wood floors and rapped on the doorframe leading to the bathroom.

  “I need to go out for an hour, meet someone,” he said vaguely.

  “That’s fine,” she said. She pulled down the towel wrapped turban-style around her head, and her damp blond hair tumbled around her shoulders.

  “I’ll text when I’m on my way back.”

  In response, she picked up an industrial-size blow dryer and turned it on high.

  Ryan went down the stairs and through the enormous open floor plan to the back door that led to the parking area beside the house. Waiting for him was the Mercedes sports coupe he had bought with a small part of his last bonus. He’d had the previous year’s model, and put maybe six thousand miles on it the whole year, but he had to do something with the money. He started the car, plugged the address Daniel Logan had texted him into his cell phone, and navigated through the Hamptons to an out-of-the-way crab shack. Logan and the Jock were sitting on a weather-beaten picnic table in a dining area separated from the parking lot only by a row of rough-cut stones. The Jock had a plate of French fries in front of him, one arm curled protectively around the food to ward off the greedy seagulls. Logan was sitting on the table, his feet on the bench, his hands wrapped around a cup of coffee.

  Ryan stopped in front of Logan, pulled the recording device from his pocket, and held it out. “I got it.”

  The Jock coughed around a mouthful of masticated French fries. Logan took the tiny recorder and turned it over in his hand. “You got it?”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Just like I said. They thought about it for a while, and they made the offer on their own territory.”

  Logan plugged in a set of earbuds and offered one to the Jock, then tucked the other one into his ear. They listened to the conversation while Ryan watched the storm massing in the west bear down on the Hamptons like the fist of God coming out of the sky.

  “Well done,” Logan said. He nodded at the Jock, who got up, dumped his paper tray of French fries into the trash, and headed for the unassuming SUV backed in to the end of the parking lot.

  Ryan shrugged. “What happens now?”

  “Now,” Logan said precisely as he slipped the recording device into his jacket pocket, “we serve the subpoenas we’ve had on standby ever since you started talking to us, and arrest them.”

  Ryan’s heart stopped in his chest. “Now? You’re going to arrest them right now? Where? Here? Or back in the city?”

  Logan looked at him and Ryan could tell from his face that he had been Ryan’s handler in every sense of the word. His friendly neighborhood FBI agent had been using him, keeping the details of what happens next from him in order to keep the information flowing. Logan didn’t look soft, but he absolutely looked unassuming, geeky, the kind of man that you would look right past without fully understanding what he was capable of, what he would do to get the result that he wanted.

  “You are a ruthless bastard.”

  Logan didn’t deny it. “I do what I have to do to get the outcome I want.”

  The message was clear. The FBI would use a rat, but they didn’t trust a rat. They knew he had one foot in both camps. “You’re not going to storm that house with the SWAT team and armed FBI agents. There are kids in that house. Women and children. They know nothing about what’s going on.”

  “Keep your voice down. Of course not,” Logan said. “We knock on the door. We politely ask the suspects to come out without involving family. We box up everything related to the case. If they choose not to take that option, then they made the decision to involve their children, not us.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Ryan said, then ran his hands through his hair. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “Do you have reason to suspect they’ll run, or resist?”

  “Don’t involve me in your decision,” he snapped.

  “I can’t manage this correctly if I don’t have information.”

  How Logan could be so calm was beyond Ryan’s ken. “No,” he said finally. “They won’t resist. They won’t run. They wouldn’t do that to their kids.”

  “Are you sure?” Logan’s voice was even, and as inflexible as steel. “Because they’ve already involved their kids. This isn’t the first Ponzi scheme we’ve shut down. They have to know that when they got caught, they would drag every member of their family, their kids, their wives, their parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, close friends, into the sewer with them.”

  “I’m sure,” Ryan said. “They didn’t think they’d get caught. Consequences mean nothing to them. They think they’re untouchable. Nobody thinks about the splash damage that happens when you hit bottom.”

  Logan didn’t respond with anyth
ing other than a nod. Ryan hadn’t thought it through, either. He tried to, and managed to, for the most part, curtailing his relationships with his closest friends, limiting himself to meaningless encounters with women.

  Except for Simone. He hadn’t counted on Simone, on her fiery hair, on her blue eyes that held the strength and compassion that he hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve. That he needed it. He needed her. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She was supposed to be like all the others, and she wasn’t.

  “What happens now?”

  “We’ve had teams on standby for these raids for weeks. They’ll be executed within the next sixty to ninety minutes. My guess is that the story will break by tomorrow morning. If it hasn’t, the attorney general will release a statement.”

  “I meant what happens to me?”

  Logan looked almost surprised. “Tonight you go about your business. After the story breaks, you might want to get out of town for a while. But don’t go too far.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  He stood up at the end of the picnic table. Logan stopped him, and looked up at him through mirrored aviator shades. “You did the right thing.”

  “Somehow that hasn’t made it any easier. Thousands of people who go to bed tonight thinking that not only is their money secure but it’s also invested with one of the most talented financial managers in the world are going to wake up tomorrow with nothing. People I know and care about will be out of jobs, and tainted by the stigma of having worked at MacCarren. I’m out of a job, and I bet my car I’ve got a bleeding ulcer.”

  One corner of Logan’s mouth lifted in a smile that told Ryan he knew a lot more about doing the hard, right thing than he let on. “Nice car, but I won’t take that bet.” He stood up, extricating his long legs from the picnic table bench. “It will get better from here,” Logan said.

  “Can you get me a phone number?”

  Logan looked at him, surprise clear on his long, angular face. “Whose?”