by Lexi Blake
—
Two hours later, Ellie looked around her sister’s apartment, wondering if she was going to get her mind off Riley anytime soon.
How the hell was she supposed to deal with him now? She couldn’t get her mind off his last speech to her. What guy said that? What was his game now?
What was she going to do if he wasn’t playing a game?
Bran whistled as he walked around, looking at the space. “This place is nice. Wow. Modeling pays well.”
“Not the way Shari does it. She started out well, but she struggles to get jobs now because she’s so difficult to work with. She doesn’t believe call times should apply to her.”
“Well, someone’s doing well. This place isn’t cheap.”
She’d had a massive fight with her sister when Shari had bought this place. “They bought it with Colin’s half of our old place and his half of everything I earned during our marriage along with Shari’s half of our inheritance. I argued that they shouldn’t spend everything they had, but Shari claimed she needed the best to keep up appearances. They’ll be lucky if they’re still here in a year.”
“That sucks.” He picked up a picture that was sitting on the hallway table. “Is this your ex?”
She glanced over. Sure enough, there was a picture of Shari and Colin. “Yep. They had those done last Christmas and sent them out as Christmas cards.”
“He doesn’t look like your type.” Bran set the frame back down.
“I suppose Riley looks like my type.”
Bran strolled around the apartment. “Sure. He’s solid. Masculine. That dude in the picture spends way too much time on his hair. Riley might dress well, but that’s because of his job. He works out because he needs to be strong, not to show off his six-pack.”
“Colin wasn’t always like that.” She looked around the apartment. The trouble was almost everything here had come from her dad’s old place. The elegant sofas, the prewar tables. Shari might be an idiot, but she knew good furniture when she saw it.
Why would she have taken anything from their father’s office?
“Oh, that’s the problem. See, talking about shit really does work. I can’t convince Drew of that. He thinks he’s going to be all stoic. I personally think it’s best to put it all out there. Sure it’s cost me a bunch of women I would have liked, but hey, if they weren’t built for the long haul, why start the ride?”
She turned to her brother-in-law. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the fact that a lot of your anger at Riley isn’t really anger. It’s fear that another man you care about is going to turn on you.” Bran looked back at her, his eyes soft. “He won’t, you know. He’s not coming from the same place your first husband was. He’ll need you more than you can know, more than he’ll likely ever say. Definitely more than that asshat in the picture there.”
“I’m not still wounded by my divorce, Bran.” That was ridiculous. “I’m pissed off that your brother lied to me and used me.”
“Then why are you still sleeping with him?”
Case never asked those kinds of questions. When the big cowboy had been her babysitter, he’d talked about football and where to get the best burger. She really preferred Case. Maybe honesty would shut him up. “Not that it’s any of your business, but your brother is incredibly good in bed.”
Bran simply grinned. “It runs in the family. But I also have to call bullshit on that. You’re not the type of woman who sleeps with a man for pure pleasure. There has to be something else involved.”
“I can’t want an orgasm?”
“For you an orgasm means more than simple physical release. You need more and you found it with Riley, but because you thought you found it once before, you’re afraid to trust it.”
She let out a long sigh. “Go psychoanalyze someone else, Bran. I have a . . .” She didn’t even really know what she was looking for. “Something to look for.”
She strode down the hall. She was sure Colin had an office somewhere in here. Despite his recent retreat from the academic world, he’d made it a habit of keeping an office. Now that he was “managing” Shari’s largely nonexistent career, he wouldn’t stop his former habits.
She found it down the hallway. It was a lovely wood-paneled room with a wall of beautifully stacked books.
He’d loved books. She looked at the shelves. She’d given him many of the books left there. Shari had never met a book she liked.
Bitterness. She could taste it in her mouth.
She didn’t love Colin. Not at all. She actually wondered if she’d ever loved him, but she felt the anger well.
Was Bran right? Could a person let go of love but hold fear and anger close? Could she be pushing Riley away because she was worried he would change on her?
He’d lied about his reasons for meeting her, for becoming her lawyer. Did that mean he’d lied about who he was? About his feelings for her?
Could she believe a word he said? Ah, that was the real question.
She’d believed Colin. She’d brought him home and showed him off and planned a whole life around him, and her feelings for him hadn’t been half of what she felt for Riley. She’d been hurt when Colin left. How would she feel when Riley decided he’d been punished enough for what he’d done to her?
Oh God. She was thinking that way. When he’d offered her a month, she’d taken it with the full knowledge that she would leave because he wouldn’t last a month with her. She should walk away before he did.
“Hey, El.” Bran was standing in the doorway, his big body taking up all the space. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t push. I can only say I’m worried you’re going to leave. I don’t want you to leave. I like having you around.”
“You might not be wrong about me thinking Riley will change on me. Colin did. He was the first person I really brought into my life, and he changed very quickly.”
“Riley won’t. He’s not the same as Colin. He’s constant. Ellie, he’s had one goal for twenty years. Nothing has been able to change that goal with the exception of you. He loves you. He needs you. I know that because I need someone like you. Do you have any idea what I would do to have what Riley has?”
She sniffled. Was he being serious? “He has a woman who won’t commit to him.”
Bran took a deep breath, and she felt a well of emotion from him. “He has a woman he loves. Yes, I want that. I want to love someone. It’s the big mistake people make. They think they need someone who loves them. But loving someone is way more important. It says more about who we are that we can love. I want to love, Ellie.”
Damn it. He was getting to her again. “I don’t know if that’s going to happen for me and Riley.”
“It doesn’t matter. He will have loved you. Loving someone is so much more important than being loved. I think my brother loves you and that will make the difference in his life. He can spend it in this cave of revenge we’ve built, or he can walk in the light.”
Her father had lived in a cave with no one to love or care about. No one who loved him.
He’d spoken often about his cave.
He’d said he was safe in the cave. He’d said he needed no one, so his cave was safe. He’d said he’d buried all the sins in the cave.
What if he’d been making sense? She’d thought the morphine had been talking, but what if her father had been rationally trying to tell her something?
His cave. He’d called his office his cave.
“We could be in trouble here.”
“How so?” Bran asked.
“I think we’re looking for something from my father’s office.”
“Okay. We can do that.”
He didn’t understand the inherent problem. “But I know for a fact that Shari has sold off a lot of stuff.”
Bran’s face fell. “Shit. So it could be any
where. Well, take a look around. You think he hid it, don’t you? Where would your father hide his secrets?”
“I don’t know. Let me think. Look through those books. Some of them are from my father’s library.” Shari had sold some of their father’s stuff through a Christie’s auction, and a bunch more had simply been sold on eBay.
She searched through Colin’s desk, finding nothing but notes on Shari’s meetings and the parties she needed to attend. Apparently her sister was attempting to make the move into acting and it wasn’t going well.
There was nothing in the desk. No false drawers or hidey-holes she could find.
She walked back through the apartment, finding absolutely nothing. An hour passed and her frustration nearly reached the breaking point.
Bran found her in the living room, silently cursing her sister.
“It’s gone,” she said. “Someone from Minnesota or some buyer from Finland likely has it.”
Bran put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Ellie. We’ll find another way. Say, if there’s anything you want from here, you should take it. She’ll probably sell everything after she gets the money from my brother. Any chance you want that portrait of you as a girl?”
She stopped. He wouldn’t. Her father had kept a portrait her stepmother had commissioned. It was of Ellie as a young girl, holding her toddler sister in her lap. They looked angelic in the painting. Her father had said he’d placed it behind his desk because it gave him cover for his own misdeeds. Who, he’d asked, could see such tiny angels and think of their father as the devil?
It would be exactly like her father to hide his secrets there.
“I need you to help me get that picture off the wall.” She walked back to the living room, which had been decorated in Shari. There were pictures of her all over the space, including the large portrait of her as a toddler in her sister’s arms. It was the only sign that Shari even had a family.
Bran moved in, his height making the portrait takedown easy. He lifted it off its anchor and brought it down. “What exactly are we looking for? Do you think it’s behind the canvas?”
“No idea.” She disregarded the front. The artist had a light hand with the oil. Everything was smooth on the front of the canvas. She turned it around and inspected the back.
The canvas had been stretched over wood. From what she could tell it hadn’t been redone. Looking at it told her nothing. It seemed perfectly normal.
“Ellie, there’s something under the upper right corner,” Bran said quietly. “It’s hard to see because the color masks it, but I think something has been shoved under the frame.”
Ellie ran her hand under the wood and sure enough, something was there. She had to wiggle her fingers under, but she pulled out the small thumb drive.
There it was.
Bran looked at her and smiled. “I hope that’s what we think it is.”
“We won’t know until we try. Did you happen to see a computer in that office?” She wanted to boot this sucker up and make sure it was real.
“No computer. I think they took it with them to the South Pacific, where they’re likely figuring out that they have no Internet. I voted for cutting off all their power and not sending them any food. We can see who eats the other first. My bet’s on the dude. Your sister doesn’t look like she eats.”
Ellie felt unaccountably optimistic all of a sudden. She’d found it. Whatever was on this thumb drive was important. “She doesn’t, but neither one of them would ever get their hands bloody.”
“Neither would you, and that’s a good thing.”
That was where he was wrong. She was way stronger than any of them gave her credit for. “I will get my hands completely bloody for the right cause. I’m ready for a little of Castalano’s blood.”
She might have a chance to make this all right. Maybe not all, but she could start working to right her father’s wrongs.
First things were first. She pulled out her cell and texted Lily.
Come back to the penthouse. Found the info.
She wanted her family around her when they opened the package. Lily was as close as she had to a family left. She needed Lily to get along with her new relatives.
“You ready? I’ll try to hail us a cab.” Bran winked as he left her to lock up.
Her cell phone trilled as Bran closed the door. When she answered it her entire world went straight to hell.
Sixteen
Riley flipped through the data the McKay-Taggart specialist had sent him a few moments earlier. He was glad he could use the whole “Taggart as an in-law” connection like a blunt instrument. He’d gotten someone named Adam on the phone and once he’d explained that he was Mia’s brother, his two-to-three-day turnaround had become roughly thirty minutes. Riley was fairly certain the guy had been on his way out the door, but apparently everyone adored Mia.
“Did I miss anyone?” Adam Miles asked over the speaker.
“I don’t think so. It’s just a mega shit-ton of names.” There were a lot of workers at StratCast. The year the last bank account was opened, there were almost a thousand workers employed by StratCast. A whole bunch of them had gone to the Bahamas.
It was an easy winter getaway from the city. He should have known.
“You’ve got some additional issues,” Adam pointed out. Adam was a McKay-Taggart “communications specialist.” Or as Case liked to call it—dude who knew how to hack a system.
He glanced down the list, recognizing a couple of names. “What kinds of issues?”
He’d had the idea after Ellie and Bran had left. He didn’t recognize the woman in the picture Case had found, so he needed to narrow down the prospects. Castalano didn’t have a large group of friends. He wouldn’t trust many people. It was possible he’d hired someone to “play” Ellie, but he was betting Castalano would keep that woman fairly close. He would have something on her.
He kind of hoped Castalano hadn’t offed the girl.
“Besides the fact that your bad guy might have used someone not connected with the company, your main issue is cruise ships. If this guy is really smart, he sent her via cruise ship because while they do check passports, they don’t stamp them,” Adam explained. “If she flew in, we’ll have a record. If she went in for a day through a cruise ship, you are shit out of luck.”
“Or you could look through cruise ship rolls for that week.” It seemed fairly simple.
There was a long pause. “You suck, asshole.”
McKay-Taggart wasn’t known for their customer service. They were known for getting shit done. Also, he’d likely thrown out professionalism when he’d told Adam there was Taggart sperm in his family tree. Well, it was certainly in his sister’s tree by now, or very soon, since those two seemed to go at it twenty-four seven.
He wished he had the same happy arrangement with Ellie. Their lovemaking only happened at night when they went to bed. It made it seem almost dirty when it was anything but. It was the best part of his day, the only part that made him feel truly alive. He wanted the right to take her hand and make love to her the way he had before she’d discovered the truth.
“I’m sorry. It’s important.”
A long sigh came over the line. “This is about your wife, right?”
“Yes. She’s the one in trouble.” He found he couldn’t lie to Mia’s new family. “But she only married me because I kind of forced her.”
“So it’s a marriage in name only?”
“Not in my mind. This marriage is forever. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t think the same way.”
“Hey, you’ve got her name on a document that states that you belong to each other. You’ve got more than most people do. Get that woman into bed. Give her something special. It’s seriously so much easier when there are two of you. Jake and I can tag-team our wife and she never gets a chance to think too hard.”
Yeah, he’d heard McKay-Taggart had some crazy sex stuff going on. “I’m going to have to handle it on my own.” He skipped through the names. “Hey, there’s no Lily Gallo here.”
“You asked me to look through the employees working for StratCast that year. If she’s not there, she wasn’t on the payroll.”
Something about the girl in the picture made him think of Lily. It could be that he wanted it to be her. She hated him.
But finding out that Lily was a plant would kill Ellie.
“Of course,” he replied. “I’m sure it’s fine.”
“Give me two seconds to pull her passport records,” Adam said.
“Don’t,” Riley began, but the Muzak on the line had started up. At McKay-Taggart there was only one song played over and over again. The crazy elevator version of “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” It was enough to make a person insane.
Who thought to do that? Who took classic rock and made it elevator music?
And why was he humming along?
Castalano’s wife. He’d thought about it and discarded the notion. She was too thin to be the girl in the picture. She was sixty according to her records, and though she’d had an enormous amount of work done, she wasn’t as young as the woman in question. He would place her age as late twenties to early thirties. Not anywhere close to Castalano’s wife or his mistress, who was in her late forties.
There were other women, but none Riley thought had enough at stake in the game to be used. Castalano would have something over this woman, something important.
The GNR song kept playing and he wondered where Ellie was. She should be home fairly soon. Bran had texted him a while back that they’d finished up with Lily and were on their way to Shari’s apartment.
Shari. Waste of flesh. He didn’t understand any sibling who could treat a sister or brother the way she had. Maybe if their parents hadn’t been brutally murdered, he and Drew and Bran and Mia would have been normal and seen each other every Thanksgiving and Christmas and barely known what was really going on in each other’s lives, but that wasn’t what had happened. They were all they had. Even Mia, who’d found happiness, gave her brothers everything she had.