THE PARK OF SUNSET DREAMS

by Ava Miles

  Meredith led him into their navy dining room, where Tanner and Uncle Arthur were already sitting. Papers, a few files, and two laptops were scattered over the white tablecloth shot through with gold thread along with the dishes for the meal he wouldn’t be able to eat.

  “You look like shit,” his uncle said from his chair without any preamble. “Did you sleep at all last night?”

  “No,” he said, shaking Tanner’s hand when the man rose to greet him. “Meredith said you found something.”

  Uncle Arthur rose too and gently tapped his foot with his cane. “First, let me say how insulting it was to hear from Meredith that you actually had to ask us not to say anything to anyone.”

  “I’m sorry.” It was hard to meet the older man’s eyes when he said it.

  “Well, that’s settled, so let’s take a seat,” his uncle said as he settled back into his chair.

  Meredith gestured to the chair next to Tanner while she sat beside Uncle Arthur across from them.

  “Now onto the findings,” his uncle said. “It’s…unusual to say the least. We wanted to show you in person.”

  “Tell me.”

  His uncle swept out a hand. “We hit one wall after another today when we searched for information on Jane’s whereabouts for these last seven years. We couldn’t even find a copy of her driver’s license.”

  Now that surprised him. “How is that even possible?”

  His uncle pushed his glasses up further on his nose. “Someone paid for it to be removed from the system, I expect. Highly unusual. It’s like no one wanted her to be found. And if my theory’s correct, I have a pretty good idea of why. Tanner, show him the video.”

  Tanner slid his laptop to him and hit play. “I want you to watch this footage of one of Rhett’s poker tournaments. Tell us if you see Jane anywhere.”

  The footage was seventeen minutes long, and he kept scanning the crowd when the cameraman panned to it. He even paused the feed a couple of times, his foot tapping with increasing frustration. At the end, he pushed the laptop back to Tanner.

  “I don’t see her.”

  “Neither did I. And I didn’t see her in any of the other footage clips I watched either,” Tanner said. “Arthur said it wasn’t possible for her not to be there. Poker scouts have to be onsite, right? We have further proof of that too. Jane wouldn’t have traveled with Rhett to his tournament in Cabo otherwise, which we know she did. You told us she did.”

  They were onto something. “Exactly.”

  “So Grandpa started musing about how he’d handle the situation if he didn’t want other people to know about his scouts,” Meredith said. “We came across some poker blogs that have written about that, saying scouts have only recently become a more accepted facet of the game.”

  “There’s nothing saying they’re illegal,” his uncle said. “But when Rhett first started out, things were different. The World Series of Poker tournament didn’t allow a long break before the players met at the final table. Now the final table is actually months after the first part of the tournament begins. Everyone knows the players have scouts. Hell, it’s expected.”

  He was following their logic. “But it wasn’t then.”

  “So what if Jane was hiding in plain sight?” his uncle said. “In a way that suited Rhett’s…ahem…flamboyant style? Hand him the photos, Tanner.”

  The man opened a folder beside him and drew out a blown-up color photo of Rhett and his poker babes. “Look at the blond first,” Tanner instructed, handing it to him.

  Matt scanned her features. She was definitely playing up the Marilyn Monroe look with the blond hairdo, pouty red lips, and beauty mark, but that smile… It looked familiar.

  “Show me the footage again.” It took another ten minutes, but it finally clicked. “Holy shit! That’s Elizabeth.”

  “Yes,” Meredith finally said, her brows knitting.

  “But she’s his—”

  “Publicist?” his uncle said. “It was genius of Rhett to put on his whole bad-boy redneck act from the start of his career. No one would have suspected he’d pull something like this.”

  Could that be part of the secret? Was Jane afraid to tell him about her career with Rhett because it risked exposing Elizabeth, her best friend? But that still didn’t explain the question of why she wasn’t in the footage…

  “Elizabeth also seems to be missing a history,” Tanner told him. “It’s like she doesn’t exist.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “Yes,” Uncle Arthur said as he rose from his chair with the help of his cane. He walked over to Matt’s side and put a warm hand on his shoulder. “Look again at the photo, Young Matthew. The brunette this time. Tell me what you see.”

  She was stunning. Curvaceous in all the right places. A man’s fantasy come to life if his tastes veered toward porn stars. Matt’s didn’t. “Long hair. Big boobs. Curves.” He squinted, trying to see more. He was missing something—he just didn’t know what.

  “What about the shape of the eyes?” his cousin murmured.

  The big bangs she wore concealed them a little, but he could tell her eyes were a stunning blue, a shade so unusual he suspected color contacts. “I’m sorry, I just don’t see what you’re hinting at.”

  Meredith met his gaze when he finally looked away. “Don’t worry. Tanner and I couldn’t see it. Grandpa has the eyes of a cat, it seems.”

  “I’ve studied more mug shots and police drawings than all of you combined. I’ve become a master at separating out facial details. Okay, Tanner, show him the mark-up.”

  Tanner pushed his chair back until it angled away from the table so he could sit sideways. He handed Matt a photo with two pieces of paper obscuring everything but the person’s eyes. They were chocolate brown with a twinkle in them.

  “We pulled this picture from some media reports on Rhett’s tournament in Cabo,” Tanner said. “Now look at the brunette’s eyes again.”

  “The shape is the same,” he said, and he felt something ping in his gut—a confirmation, a warning.

  “Take the paper away, Tanner.” His uncle gripped his shoulder now.

  The trap door was about to open. Matt could feel it.

  “Take a breath, Young Matthew.”

  Matt fell back against the chair when Tanner took away the overlay, revealing a picture of Jane holding Annie in a casino. Rhett was in the background.

  “No,” he said, his ears buzzing with shock.

  “What better way to hide poker scouts than to make them part of your bad-boy show in a way no one would expect?” his uncle asked. “I’ve played enough poker with Rhett to know how diabolical his mind is.”

  “It can’t be her,” he hissed out, gripping the two photos in his hands now, scanning them. They had to be missing something. “That woman doesn’t look anything like her. Her body.” Her breasts, he almost sputtered out. “Shit.”

  His head was spinning, and he lowered it into his hands, elbows digging into the table.

  “Meredith, get him some water,” Uncle Arthur commanded.

  “I’ll grab you a bourbon while we’re at it,” Tanner said.

  Before he knew it, Matt had a tumbler of bourbon in his hand. He downed it before Meredith returned. “I can’t… It can’t…be true.”

  “But I know I’m right. Jane’s eye color…and, well, a whole heck of a lot else may be different, but you can’t hide the shape of those eyes even with all that gunk on her face. We have more photos, if you’d like to see them.”

  His mind had gone blank, like a sledgehammer had shattered his skull. “Not right now. I…can’t seem to wrap my head around it.”

  “It makes sense in some twisted way,” Uncle Arthur said, patting Matt’s arm before wandering back to his seat. “What else would Jane want to tell you under privilege? This could hurt Rhett professionally.”

  “Jane and Elizabeth were pretty close to the final table, which technically gave them an advantage as scouts,” Meredith added.

  �
��Are you saying they cheated?”

  He ran this hand through his hair. Shit, if that were true…

  “No, Rhett doesn’t strike me as that kind of man,” Tanner said, “and I’ve known him over a year now. I know a cheat when I meet one. Jane and Elizabeth’s roles as Raven and Vixen were carefully designed to be both part of his bad-boy act, putting them closer to the action so they could scout the other players. It’s genius, if you ask me, though incredibly unorthodox.”

  Raven. Vixen. Hell, even their names made them sound like porn stars.

  “But it doesn’t even look like her!” he said again, thrusting a hand out at the photos lying on the table.

  “That, I expect, was the idea,” Meredith said, setting a glass of water beside him and giving him a half hug. “Jane went to Harvard. She’s an heiress from old money. The daughter of a politician. It would be an important secret to keep.”

  “But she hates her family.”

  “Then what better way to hurt them,” Uncle Arthur said, “than by dressing as a poker babe? My God, the enmity between her and her parents must be fierce. How sad.”

  He studied the photo again, which seemed burned into his brain.

  Meredith rubbed his shoulder in comfortable circles. “I have to admit to being pretty shocked myself when I saw the photos of her in…those outfits. It’s…ah…quite the transformation.”

  “Her father would have the resources, financially and politically, to make her records disappear,” Tanner said. “And Elizabeth’s. And as for the private companies…”

  He tried to focus. “She set them up in the Caymans. Swiss bank accounts are involved too,” he told them. “My forensic accountant friend already hit a wall.”

  “A lot of people’s reputations are at stake here,” his uncle said. “Including your own, Young Matthew. This is what Jane wanted to protect you from. If this were to become public, it could ruin your political career, here and in any other office you choose to run for in the future.”

  His throat grew tight, and his finger traced the photo of her with Annie. When his eyes tracked to the other photo, the one of Raven, he wanted to punch his fist through a wall.

  “I’ll have her confirm it,” he told Tanner, finally pushing back from the table. He couldn’t sit a moment longer.

  She was going to say this to his face.

  “Not tonight,” Meredith said, resting her hand on his sleeve, her eyes imploring him. “Don’t do anything rash. Remember that she loves you.”

  Loved him? At the moment, even that one certainty had been burned to ash.

  “I have to go,” he said, absently kissing her cheek before glancing at Tanner and his uncle. “There’s no way I can eat now. I’m sorry.”

  He wanted to run as fast and far as he could.

  As he strode out of the dining room, he heard his uncle’s cane tapping the floor in pursuit. He grabbed for his coat—still anxious to get out as soon as possible—but stopped in his tracks when he realized that his family had gathered a short distance away from him. They were all frowning.

  “Matthew,” his uncle said, leaning on his cane, looking tired now. “You might have forgotten that your Aunt Harriet came to Dare Valley under an assumed name.”

  Suddenly it came back to Matt—the story of how Aunt Harriet had come to Dare to find evidence to disprove a career-destroying article about her father that had been written by his uncle. Aunt Harriet had been devastated to discover her father’s guilt, but she’d stayed in Dare and fallen in love with Arthur.

  “When I found out the truth, I was downright pissed.”

  Shock rippled over him, hearing his uncle talk like that.

  “I had fallen for a woman who wasn’t who she said she was. She’d been working as my secretary, lying to me every day, and then… Well. It was a hard thing to forgive at first. And it was a big secret to keep in this town until she chose to tell everyone. Thank God, my family stood behind her, so it made the road less bumpy.”

  Though he’d heard the story before, of course—it was part of the Hale family canon—it was still hard to conceive that sweet Aunt Harriet could have done something like that. Hell, he knew her as the great aunt who could always be relied on to sneak them chocolate chip cookies.

  “What I’m trying to tell you is that Jane has a step up on Harriet in this situation, and yet I still managed to forgive her.”

  He thought of the photos of Jane as Raven. “How’s that?”

  “She wasn’t trying to hurt you by keeping this information from you. From where I’m standing, she was between a rock and a hard place. She wanted to protect all the people she loved. Think hard about that before you confront her. Trust an old man: it’s hard to erase words said in anger, and right now, you’re more pissed off than I’ve ever seen you. Go talk to your brother or head to your fancy gym to use the punching bag.”

  His fists clenched at the very thought. Yeah, that sounded good right about now.

  “Just don’t, for the love of God, talk to Jane right now.”

  Meredith and Tanner reached for each other’s hands, but stayed silent.

  “Thanks for finding this,” he forced himself to say. Thanks? God, he wasn’t sure if knowing the truth was better or not.

  “That’s what family is for, Young Matthew,” his uncle said. “We’ll be here for you too, no matter how things play out. Don’t forget that.”

  Well, that tore his heart in two.

  “Jesus,” he finally said, thinking of his family. “What if we manage to stay together and this somehow comes out?”

  “Take it one step at a time,” his uncle said.

  “And what?” Matt nearly shouted, the anger rushing out. “How can I keep this from the rest of my family?”

  “As I said, you need to think it through,” Uncle Arthur said, limping toward him now and patting him on the back. “When I told my parents about Harriet, even though I felt yellow with fear on the inside, I knew they’d support me. No matter what. And that’s what we’ll all do for you. Whatever you decide.”

  His uncle hugged him then, and Matt wanted to bury his face in his shoulder, just for a moment, but he didn’t. It would only embarrass them both.

  “I’ll think it through,” he whispered. It was as much a promise to his uncle as it was one to himself.

  “Well, God knows you have the mind for it. Just don’t forget to listen to your heart. Another lesson from your old uncle.”

  “Thank you,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Thank you all.” His gaze flicked to Tanner and Meredith, who nodded their acknowledgment.

  When he left, he decided not to head over to Andy’s. He was too raw, and his uncle was right. He needed to take a moment for reflection.

  The woman he loved had led a double life.

  As a poker babe.

  Dressed like a slut.

  His mind flashed back to that picture of her, the way she’d been leaning into Rhett, her cleavage pressing into his side. God, had there been anything between them? Rhett called Jane his “girl” and acted much too possessive for a boss. Had she—

  Dammit, he couldn’t go there.

  He knew Jane hadn’t slept around. There’d been too much hesitation and innocence with him in the beginning.

  When he arrived at his house, he shed his coat and made a fire. Henry jumped onto the couch with him, but Matt didn’t rebuke him, especially when he laid his head on Matt’s thigh and looked up at him with troubled eyes. Suddenly he realized Henry hadn’t barked once since he’d come home yesterday, upset over Jane. In fact, the dog had been a real comfort.

  “You are a good dog, aren’t you? Just like Jane said.”

  His throat clenched, and inside all the rawness came to the surface, as though his skin was being turned inside out. His wounds were on display, throbbing, painful, enormous.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t want you before. That I only took you because Patricia asked me.” Henry whined and pressed his wet nose into Matt’s hand. “You’re my do
g now, okay?”

  The sorrow he’d been trying to hold back was suddenly impossible to ignore.

  He buried his face against Henry’s coat and let go.

  Chapter 31

  When a knock came on his door, Matt’s laptop was resting on his knees, and a glass of thirty-year-old single malt from Islay was cradled in his hand. Henry lifted his head from his place beside Matt on the couch. With a final glance at the current picture of Raven on the screen, he snapped the computer shut.

  The simmer in his blood had shot to a boil after researching “Raven” online.

  Poker fan websites were covered in pictures of her and Vixen. The shockingly sexual comments about them had made him want to hurl his laptop into the fire, but he’d fought for control, grinding his teeth. People thought she was a slut, apparently, and they talked about her like she was one too.

  Dammit!

  And God, she looked the part, dressed like that.

  What the hell had she been thinking?

  This woman, this Raven, was nothing like the woman he loved.

  It scared him shitless. And pissed him off.

  When the knock came again, Henry nudged him and then leaped off the couch, tail wagging, as if waiting to walk with him.

  His earlier meltdown had shifted things between them, and he rubbed Henry’s head before pulling himself off the couch to answer the door. God, he hoped Uncle Arthur hadn’t called his mom. He couldn’t face her now.

  When he opened it and saw Rhett, the man for whom Jane had dressed in that slutty getup, his anger shot out like lightning piercing the sky.

  “We need to talk,” Rhett said.

  “You son of a bitch!” Matt growled, clenching his fist and letting it fly.

  He hit Rhett with an upper cut under the chin. The big man staggered a few steps backwards in surprise. Henry started to bark wildly, and Matt grabbed him by the collar to keep him from charging their unwanted guest.

  When Rhett straightened, he rubbed his chin. “Well, now—”

  “I fucking know what you made her do!” he yelled. “How could you make her dress like that? Let men talk about her and look at her like that?”