He thought about what he had to tell her and wondered how much of his soul he was going to have to lay at her feet to make her believe him.
She rolled off him and stood next to the bed. Her arms crossed over her chest, she lowered her head. His eyes were still drawn to her bare legs that he knew from experience could tighten around his waist like a vise when she was excited.
He waited for the questions to start. He figured she would begin with the obvious and ask him if he was a murderer. Or maybe she would want to know about his past first. His criminal record.
Instead, she took him completely by surprise.
Chapter 11
“Why did you leave me?”
His throat closed and he needed to swallow before he could answer. Pushing himself off the bed, he stood on the other side of it across from her. Munch, who had been sleeping soundly at the foot of the bed, was suddenly awake. She looked from master to mistress, clearly torn in her loyalties.
“Downstairs, Munch.” The dog immediately obeyed scampering off to do more exploring. Dominic was struck with the silly idea that he didn’t want the dog to see her parents fighting.
“Why?” Caroline asked again. This time her voice was tighter, angrier.
“I had to,” he answered simply even though he knew that there was nothing simple about it. He tried to pull his thoughts, put them into some kind of chronological order that would make sense. He wasn’t the damn storyteller.
She was shaking her head, “If you’re not going to give me more than that, I’m leaving. I mean it.”
Leaving had the necessary effect. “I knew I had been set up. Knew it wouldn’t be long before the police found out who I was. I didn’t have enough time.”
“Time to do what?” she pressed.
“Time to figure out what the hell had happened to Denny!” He took a breath and ran a hand through his hair as everything came back to him again. “After you and I argued that night, I went to the office. Denny was there. We had talked that afternoon. He told me what he was working on.”
“You said it was dangerous.”
“Yes. Anyway, that wasn’t all and for whatever reason, he decided he didn’t want any more secrets between us.”
“What’s wrong with Denny’s project?”
“It’s trouble. Bad trouble,” Dominic elaborated. “Over-our-head trouble. Nothing that I wanted for Encrypton, I can promise you that. I told him to go home. That I would contact some people. And he left. Alive. You have to know that, Caroline. You have to believe I didn’t kill him.”
“I do.”
That was it. Two words, and all the fear and worry and anguish he’d felt in the last week was suddenly gone. Two words, and he had hope his life wasn’t over. Two words, and she’d sealed her fate as much as when she’d spoken those same words in front of the justice of the peace. Because he was never going to let her go.
Caroline was standing across from him. She was safe. She was with him. And she believed him. Nothing else mattered.
Breathing slowly, letting her belief in him settle inside his gut, he was able to tell her everything that had happened from the moment he’d learned of Denny’s project.
“It was late. My mind was racing. I sent an e-mail to a contact in Washington. With the time difference, I didn’t expect an answer right away, but I was too keyed up to even think about leaving. I don’t know what compelled me to stay. It was work and I was there. I needed to review the financial statements before our meeting next month. Files that were on my hard drive. There were entries against an expense account to a vendor I knew we didn’t have.”
“Two million dollars’ worth.”
“You know.” She nodded and it made sense. The police would have needed something beyond his record as a reason for killing Denny. Money was the motive. A perfect setup. “I knew it couldn’t be anything but deliberate. Someone had gotten on to my system and replaced real financials with the altered ones. Then Steven called with the news that Denny had been killed and suddenly it made sense.”
“It made sense?” Caroline sounded surprised. “You just heard that your partner was forced off a cliff and that made sense to you?”
“You have to understand the nature of the software program he designed and its implications. If what he told me is true, then I can think of hundreds, maybe thousands of people who would be desperate to get their hands on it.”
“But who else knew what he was working on?”
“I don’t know.” Dominic shrugged. “I asked him if he told anyone else about it. He said he hadn’t, but he was lying.”
“How do you know?”
“I knew Denny. He couldn’t lie worth shit. Lying is a communication skill and he didn’t have any. I didn’t press him because I thought we had time. I figured I could call in the cavalry before it got out of hand. I was wrong. Whoever he told killed him and set me up. When I left the building and saw that my car was gone, I knew it had been the one used to push Denny off the road.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police? Tell them.”
“I’m an ex-con!” Dominic shouted, the frustration he’d felt those hours after Denny’s death resurfacing. “You know that now. I would have had to tell them everything. Who I was, my past, everything. Some detective would have shown up, seen the missing money, a Mercedes with a few dents in it, and an ex-con with a forged identity. They would have had me in jail so fast it would have made your head spin.”
Her jaw tightened and her lips pressed firmly together. He felt guilty for shouting at her and wanted to take it back. But he was afraid if he reached out to her, she would pull away from him. It would kill him.
“We could have proved your innocence,” she said softly. “You didn’t do it so there will be proof. The e-mail you sent to your contact in Washington. That alone could be enough of an alibi. What did you think running would get you?”
Dominic turned away from her and sat on the bed. He stared out the window that overlooked her small patch of backyard. He saw a section of it that had been roped off and realized she must have had a garden at one point. He imagined her kneeling in the dirt, a big hat on her head to protect her from the sun, plucking a misshapen tomato. A sweet picture. How was he ever going to make someone like that understand what prison had done to him?
He heard her move around the bed and then she was standing over him. Her hand resting on his shoulder. The warmth of that touch spread to his toes.
“Talk to me.”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t risk spending a day in jail. Being in a cage almost destroyed me. And I knew if I saw one close on me again, I would lose it. Totally lose it. Yes, I sent the e-mail, but I don’t know when Denny’s car went off the road. I was alone in an empty office. There was motive. I couldn’t risk it.”
“Okay.”
He looked up at her. “Okay? That’s it. You accept that as an answer.” Because it was a lousy answer. Even he knew it. He just didn’t have the vocabulary to explain what going back to jail would have done to him.
She cupped his face in her hand. “Do you think I shouldn’t?”
“It’s the only answer I have.”
“Then it’s enough.”
“Because you love me,” he realized. The power of it was astounding. He wondered what the one thing in his life was that he’d done right to deserve this woman and her faith in him.
Sighing, Caroline dropped on the bed next to him. Her hip bumped up against his. From the moment she’d met him, every action she’d taken had been rash, illogical and so against her natural inclinations to stay safely tucked away that she almost questioned her sanity. However, there wasn’t one thing she regretted.
“Tell me I’m not a fool.”
His laugh was quick, almost harsh. “I wish I could. I wish I could tell you that loving me made sense, but it doesn’t, Caroline. I have done nothing to deserve you but I know if you got up from this bed and ran out of the house I would follow you to the ends o
f the earth and drag you back to me.”
“That’s good to know. It doesn’t mean that you get a blank check, though. I still need answers and I’ll know if you’re lying. You’re not the best at it, either. You get this red flush on your cheeks. It’s a pretty bad tell.”
He pulled her hand against his face and held it against his traitorous cheek. “Thank you.”
“We’re not done yet.” She looked around the bare room. “When did you come back here?”
“I withdrew ten thousand dollars out of a miscellaneous account and got on a plane heading east before the police actively started looking for me. This was the first place I thought of. I broke in through the back door. The lock is pathetic, by the way. Before we leave, we’ll need to replace it.”
Replace the lock. Funny. It was such a husbandly thing to say.
“I lit candles when I needed them and snuck out every once in a while for food. And I waited. I waited as long as I could.”
Caroline was about to ask him what he’d been waiting for when suddenly it occurred to her that the reason she was here with him now was because he’d called her.
Go home. Go home.
He hadn’t been sending her away. He had called her to him. A giddy feeling filled her heart. “You knew. You knew if you told me to leave that I would have no choice but to come back here. You wanted me to come!”
He gripped her hand. “Wanted? I was desperate. Someone set me up. Someone killed Denny. Someone who had access to the company financials, my computer, my car. Someone who knew about my past. There is a murderer back there. A murderer who knows me. Knows you. I had to get you out of there.”
“A murderer,” she repeated. It was a word she’d used so blithely in her books. A bad guy. A character with means and motive and lacking morals. She’d fictionally bumped off people a dozen different ways, but now it was real. Someone had killed Denny. Someone Dominic knew. Someone she knew. My God.
“I realized if I called too soon the police might think it was suspicious you leaving so quickly. But after a few days, well, you had no real ties to me. Leaving might be a logical thing for you to do. I waited as long I could, every day sick to death, afraid for you. I also knew you were the only person I could trust.”
No. Not the only one. “Tell me about the contact in Washington.”
Dominic shook his head “She’s gone. I don’t know where. I don’t even know if she got my message. We can’t count on her.”
“I think you’re wrong. I think you can,” Caroline said slowly. “She’s the former employee. Your contact in D.C.”
“Yes.”
“Who is she?” Caroline continued. “I mean, other than an FBI agent by the name of Eleanor Rodgers.”
His body jerked. “How do you know her?”
“She’s in San Jose. Right now. She came to the house with the detective in charge of the case. She said she was there as an observer. She gave me her card and said if there was anything I needed to contact her. I felt like…I felt like she was on my side. Which didn’t make any sense to me, but I was a little distracted at the time. Who is she?”
“She used to work for me at Encrypton. She had some trouble with the law as a juvenile, but she had an amazing talent for computers. I gave her a chance, got her a decent education. A few years ago, she was recruited by the FBI. She believes she owes me. I knew I could trust her and more than that, I knew she would immediately understand the implications of Denny’s program.”
Caroline studied his face while he spoke. He wasn’t lying. At least she didn’t think he was. But the distance was back. It was there in the formality of his words. As if he was picking and choosing them carefully. She’d teased him about the flush on his cheeks, but the truth was she didn’t need that to know when he wasn’t telling her everything.
“You’re lying,” she accused him. “There’s more. Was she your lover?”
“No,” he said.
“Then what?” Caroline’s mind searched for an answer that made sense. If Nora wasn’t a former lover, why would he hide the truth about who she was? An image of the woman’s face flashed in her mind. She recalled her dark feathery hair and brown eyes, and remembered thinking that she looked familiar.
“Why does it matter?”
“Because you need my help,” Caroline reminded him. “Because in order for me to give you that help, I have to trust you. Completely. I can’t do that when you hold back. I would shake it out of you if I could, but you’re too damn big. So I’m telling you it ends now. You have to let me in.”
“You are in,” he said tightly.
“No, it’s not enough. You think you’ve let me inside, but you don’t realize how many levels of defense you have.”
“I’m trying.”
It was barely a whisper, but it gave her hope. “I know. Who is she?”
He paused. “She’s my half sister.”
It was the truth. “You told me you had no family.”
“She’s my father’s daughter. He abandoned her like he did me. Only her mother was lucky. She remarried. Nora’s stepfather adopted her, but they never got along. As a teenager she had an attitude. Revenge, spite, who knows why a teenager does what she does? She went looking for her real father only to be told by him that he wanted nothing to do with her.”
Caroline tightened her grip on his hand in a knee-jerk reaction of sympathy for a girl who was all grown up. “How did she find you?”
“Like I said, she had a talent with computers. Somehow she tracked me down. Found me despite my new identity.” Dominic grinned as he remembered. “She showed up in my office with spiked purple hair, white face paint, chains from one end of her body to the other, combat boots and a ring through her nose. I thought she was from the circus, but she told me who she was and threatened to expose my past if I didn’t give her the money she needed to run away.”
“You gave her a job instead.”
“Then I called her mother.”
Of course he did. Caroline swallowed the lump in her throat as it once more became painfully obvious to her that this man, her husband, was a good guy.
“Nora and I aren’t close. My fault. She tried a couple of times, but I did everything I could to keep her at a distance. She could work for me, but I didn’t let her stay in my house. I didn’t acknowledge to anyone that she was related to me. She was an employee. That’s all.”
“You regret that.”
He nodded. “I went to see her graduate from the academy. She didn’t know I was there. I thought if we got this government contract I would be traveling back and forth to D.C. a lot. I thought maybe I could try to see her. Get to know her.”
Caroline rested her head on his shoulder. “You’re really pathetic, you know that?” She felt him flinch, but he didn’t pull away. “You did everything you could to keep this person out, too. But the second you sent her an e-mail saying you needed help, she was on the first flight out to the west coast. You know, for someone who does everything he can to keep people at arm’s length, you’re remarkably lucky to find these women who obviously love you. Or maybe it’s not luck.”
She lifted her head and met his eyes. She saw in them what she’d seen the first time he looked at her. Intensity, desire-that was there, too-and need. It was probably the need that got to her. The need that cried out and practically begged for the soft touch of someone who cared.
She leaned forward and kissed him. She felt the surprise in him, knowing he hadn’t expected it. She ran her tongue over the seam of his mouth, loving the feel of him, loving the idea that she could do this again. The pain of missing him was gone and it felt as if she’d lost a hundred pounds. But when he opened his mouth, wanting to deepen the kiss, she pulled back.
As much as she wished it could be over, they weren’t done yet. There was still one thing she had to know. It would hurt him, she thought. Hurt him to tell it, and so it hurt her to ask.
“Tell me why you went to jail, Dominic.”
Chapter 12
“I need to know.”
Dominic remained silent.
“They said you assaulted a man.”
He closed his eyes and she could see his body tightening. There was no escaping the question. They’d gone too far now. It had to be everything between them or there could be nothing.
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because I hated him. And when I was eighteen, I wasn’t as adept at controlling my emotions as I am now.”
“Who was he?” Although she already suspected the answer, she thought the questions would help him get it out.
“My father,” he exhaled.
Caroline, too, released the breath she’d been holding. “Tell me about him.”
“What’s to tell? He was a bastard. Worthless and mean-spirited. My mother was seventeen when they met. She was a migrant worker in the grape fields in Central California. I like to think it was his fault. That he seduced a girl who barely knew English, but she loved him.”
“Sometimes you can’t necessarily help it.”
“That sounds like you’re speaking from experience,” he said.
Caroline wasn’t going to lie. “I will admit there have been a few times in the past week where I wished I had just gotten a cat.”
“Anyway, they married. How she managed to get him to do that, I’ll never know, but it was legal. She became pregnant with me. Once that happened he left. She was devastated. But we had each other.”
“She loved you.” She remembered how defensive he’d gotten when she’d suggested that his mother abused him. There was devotion on his part. Had there been on hers as well?
“She did,” he agreed. “But maybe only because I was a part of him.”
Caroline said nothing. She simply processed the blow to her chest. She’d called him cold. Heartless. But he wasn’t. Not really. He was just a man who had been abandoned by his father and made to believe his mother only cared for him because he reminded her of the man she loved.
It was a wonder that there was any softness in him at all. And it made her question whether or not he would ever be able to return the love she wanted to give him. She couldn’t think about that. She needed the story. All of it. Then they had to figure out what the next step was going to be.
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