“I’m through with living on nothing while you all dine on caviar,” she said to Jarred while Will stood soberly at his mother’s side. “Tell your father that Will is his responsibility now. He’s a good boy, but I have no money and I’m done.”
She said it with utter finality. Shocked by her words, Jarred turned to Will. Jarred was fifteen at the time, and though Nola certainly wasn’t up for “mother of the year” she was not nearly as heartless as this woman. “Come on then,” Jarred told Will, indicating with his head that the boy was to follow him inside the house. Will complied and Jarred closed the door on the other boy’s mother, who had already turned away.
That was the last anyone had seen of her.
Nola had not welcomed the newcomer with open arms, but Jonathan and Jarred were delighted to have him, frustrating Nola to no end. Will, for his part, seemed content and relieved to be part of the Bryant household. He followed Jarred through the University of Washington, eventually earning an MBA and becoming Jarred’s right-hand man at Bryant Industries after Jonathan, in the wake of a very disappointing decade for the company, bowed out, leaving the business to Jarred.
Will was not in line to inherit. Even though he now used the Bryant name, he was not a legitimate heir to Hugh Bryant. So while Jarred inherited the company stock, Will was currently only a Bryant Industries’ employee. This stipulation was written in stone, as far as Nola was concerned anyway, but with his father’s unspoken blessing, Jarred was planning to change all that as soon as possible.
“What are you thinking about?” Will asked now, eyeing Jarred intently. “Your mind is elsewhere.”
“I’m thinking about how uncomfortable I am. I can’t wait to get out of here.”
“No, you’re not. You’re thinking about Kelsey, and you don’t like it that I don’t trust her.”
Jarred wasn’t about to enlighten Will about the extent of his memory just yet. There was no way Will was going to understand about Kelsey, and Jarred didn’t feel like arguing about it.
“We’ve lost a big section of waterfront property to Taggart Inc.,” Will said soberly. “The Brunswick property was ours, and now it’s not. Kelsey’s been giving Taggart information on every piece we’ve wanted, feeding him all the facts and figures and it’s child’s play for him to outbid us.”
“The Brunswick property…?”
“Oh, God,” Will sighed, sounding defeated. “You really don’t remember? What do you think we’ve all been in such a fuss over? Your mother, Sarah, even Dad— we’ve all been going crazy. We’ve been trying to get you to sign the original papers. They were just sitting on your desk, for God’s sake. Unfinished. Just needing your signature, but no one would let us get close to you. And then today we heard that Taggart’s got the property, and it’s too late. And we know who to blame.”
Jarred mulled that over. It was all a blank. “Why did you say, ‘Even Dad,’ as if he wouldn’t care?”
Will stared at him in consternation. “Jarred, please. I really need you to stay on track on this. You’re the only one who really knows—knew—why you never signed the deal. Think, man. Think.”
“I wish I could help you,” Jarred offered sincerely, “but I can’t. What’s the deal with Dad?”
“He just doesn’t pay any attention to the business these days,” Will responded shortly.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. And that’s one thing you don’t know either, so stop worrying about trying to remember it. We talked about Dad before the accident, you and I, and you said you thought his health was failing. Neither one of us knows why he’s so distracted these days.” Will shrugged.
Jarred dimly recalled worrying about his father. It was just one of those thoughts that swam in and out of his consciousness and seemed disconnected to anything tangible.
“All I’m saying, Jarred, is be careful around Kelsey. Okay, I grant you that we don’t know for sure that she’s the one funneling information to Taggart, but she’s our best bet. Information’s getting to him that no one, except you and me, knows anything about.”
“That would make one of us the spy,” Jarred pointed out with faint humor.
Will managed a laugh. “All right, someone else knows. The Brunswick property hasn’t been much of a secret, but the details have been, the negotiations, and that’s what’s getting to Taggart’s ears.” He spread his hands. “Kelsey’s the most likely candidate.”
“Sometimes the most likely candidate is the least likely candidate. She doesn’t work for us. How would she know the ins and outs of that deal?”
Will looked impressed and relieved. “Glad to see you haven’t lost your cognitive skills, old boy. I was beginning to wonder.”
“I just want to know how she would transfer sensitive information that she doesn’t have in her possession.”
“She works for Taggart,” Will explained as if Jarred could have forgotten.
“But she doesn’t work for Bryant Industries.”
“No.”
“She’s not your spy, Will.”
“How do you know that?” he demanded in frustration.
“I just know it,” Jarred responded with growing annoyance. He was tired. Tired of arguing and tired of thinking about Bryant Industries. He realized how naive he must sound, but he couldn’t come up with a better explanation at this time. “Look, I trust her. It’s just something I woke up with. She’s not made the way you think she is.”
“You are wrong, brother,” Will said with true sympathy. “And I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
Sighing, Will climbed to his feet. “Your memory will come back. Then we’ll talk.”
Jarred almost told him that it had damn near returned in full already, but he checked himself. Instead he asked, “If Kelsey didn’t work for Taggart anymore, do you think the leak would stop?”
“I… don’t know. She could still certainly call him or meet him and pass on our bidding information.”
“But she’d have to get that information from someone from the company,” Jarred pointed out. “That’s who you need to find. Whoever at Bryant Industries is taking the information. That’s your spy.”
“Our spy,” Will responded, but he looked more thoughtful.
“Ask yourself who else has access to that information. Someone must.”
“No, it was all in your office.”
“Then who has access to my office?”
“You mean besides me—and Gwen, of course?”
“Gwen…?”
“Your personal secretary who’s been with the company for forty years? The longest, most loyal employee of the bunch whose only crime is that she gets a bit flustered when the phones are ringing like crazy and who suffers from migraine attacks now and again? Gwen, whom Dad trusted like a saint and who hung in there during some hard years when profits were sinking off the charts and the whole corporation nearly sank with it?”
“I know Gwen,” Jarred said shortly, recalling the thin woman with the soulful blue eyes and the gray roots showing beneath dyed black hair. He didn’t disillusion Will by saying he’d wished, upon occasion, that he could find a way to either fire her or shuffle her off to someone else. She might have been one stellar secretary during his father’s day, but her skills had slipped with age, and he hadn’t wanted to have to rely on her. She was sweet, but unreliable.
You really were a heartless bastard, he thought with an inward wince.
“Someone’s getting access to the material,” Jarred said doggedly. “And that someone isn’t Kelsey.”
“Okay, maybe she hasn’t been the one to actually lift the information,” Will conceded reluctantly.
“Then, logically, someone else has been reading our sensitive information.”
“Taggart has a spy,” Will agreed. “That’s the bottom line. And okay, maybe I don’t know how Kelsey’s doing it, but I can’t help thinking she’s involved somehow. At the risk of really pissing you off, let me say that no one else
detests you as much as your lovely wife. Not even Trevor Taggart. So watch your back.”
Silence fell like a lead curtain. Weariness invaded every blasted pore, and Jarred closed his eyes. He’d been told more than once that he was known for being a cold character, that ice ran through his veins instead of blood, that he could flirt with a woman, maybe even get her into bed, learn all her secrets, and then expose them without turning a hair. Maybe he’d had those capabilities once but they were gone forever. They’d been gone from the moment Kelsey Bennett entered his life.
“She is a beautiful woman,” Will said after a long moment. “And she is trying to stick by you now.”
“So she’s not evil incarnate?”
“She’s just not trustworthy, Jarred. That’s all.”
Will left and Jarred lay quietly in the hospital bed. Could his brother be right? Maybe Kelsey wasn’t trustworthy. Maybe she was the spy who had helped leak information to Taggart. He now remembered that of the last five major real estate deals, three had gone sour at the eleventh hour—all to Taggart Inc.’s benefit.
Jarred thought of Kelsey’s mobile face and lovely amber eyes. Her honesty and humor and wit—qualities he’d always found so entrancing, even when he was angry or away from her. Could she be a traitor? Someone who hated him so much that she would undermine his business, all that he and his family had worked for all of their lives? Could she?
“No,” he said aloud to the empty room. Though he’d certainly entertained dark thoughts like that in the past, he knew now he’d only blamed her because he’d been hurt. It wasn’t any real belief in her culpability. She didn’t work that way.
Moments later, exhaustion crept in again and Jarred let himself succumb. All he wanted now was to get the hell out of this hopsital bed and begin his life anew.
With Kelsey.
Wiping off the steam-fogged mirror with a towel, Kelsey examined her face. “What are you doing?” she whispered to her own reflection. “What are you doing?”
Mr. Dog scratched and whined at the bathroom door. Wrapping a fluffy lemon-colored towel around her damp skin, Kelsey yelled, “Go away. I’ll be out in a minute.” The whining and scratching increased. Unlocking the door, she cracked it just enough for the retriever to get his nose inside. “You’re a pest—you know that?” Mr. Dog squeezed his whole head through and barked excitedly. Kelsey threw open the door, holding out her arm and commanding sharply, “Sit! Right now. Sit! Don’t you dare jump up on me now and wound me. I need more armor on. Don’t think I don’t know that you’re a spy from the other camp! And don’t give me that innocent look. Sit!”
Mr. Dog’s whole body wriggled as he sat down. He tried to scoot across the floor toward her, which broke Kelsey into laughter. The dog leaped and she screeched and laughed, pushing him away. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, go away!” she cried, heading out of the bathroom, the dog at her heels. She grabbed his collar and dragged him into the hall, losing her towel in the process. Then she scurried back across the threshold, pointing her finger at him. “No! No! Stay there!”
Lifting one paw at her in a silly doggy wave, he whined and wriggled. She felt guilty, closing the door on him. Normally he wasn’t so persistent, but Jarred had been gone for nearly a week and the poor thing was desperate for company. Though Kelsey suspected she was a poor substitute, she appreciated the attention.
“When I’m dressed,” she called through the door to the canine. Mr. Dog barked wildly in response. “Yeah, you’re happy now. Just wait until I bring Felix over.”
Padding across the lush cream carpet to the bed, she snatched up her jeans and a tailored, blue cotton shirt, which she left unbuttoned at the throat. She yanked on a pair of black ankle boots, then threw on a black wool jacket to complete the outfit. Returning to the bathroom she brushed out her unruly reddish brown locks, letting them fall to her shoulders. A slap of lipstick and a touch of blush and she felt armored and ready for another trip to the hospital.
“Get out of my way,” she mock growled at Mr. Dog as she ran down the back stairs to the kitchen. The dog jumped, barked, and bounded, nearly knocking her over before she reached the bottom step and the archway to the kitchen.
The pendant lay on the granite counter where she’d left it earlier. She stared at it rather grimly for a few moments, almost loath to touch it. There was so much history in that necklace, none of it good.
Mr. Dog snuffled her boots and the hem of her jeans. Absently scratching his head, she picked up the pendant. Straightening, she opened the clasp, then slowly placed the necklace around her neck, lightly touching the sapphire pendant at her throat, dry mouthed at the message she would be sending her husband when he saw her wearing it.
More dreams. Jarred thrashed against them even while he didn’t actually move in the hospital bed. Visions of water. Great expanses of it. And even while fitfully asleep, he understood that he was dreaming, yet he couldn’t stop himself. His mind kept traveling through the same channels.
Now he was standing on grass. He looked down at his shoes and noticed there were huge dandelions and crabgrass making up this lawn. He was worried about the grass. Whose place was so neglected? Shouldn’t he tell someone?
Then there was a man in front of him. He said his name was Charlie. But abruptly Jarred was in a dirty kitchen of some sort with crusted dirt in the corners of the linoleum floor and chipped Formica counters, where Petrie dishes, filled with growing lines of microorganisms, lay jumbled up against metal pans packed with purple rock salt.
Drugs, he thought, and then he was back in the water. He was drowning! Choking! His throat clogged. Couldn’t talk. He fought. A rasp. A rale!
“Jarred!” Kelsey called in his ear and he woke with a start. Her hand was on his shoulder and she gazed at him worriedly, her pink lips scant inches from his own. “I’m sorry. You were dreaming and making terrible sounds. I thought you were having a nightmare. Are you okay?”
“Fine…” He cleared his throat. The dream was already fading, sinking into oblivion. Frowning, he dragged it back into his consciousness, needing to examine it. “I was dreaming about…drugs.”
“Drugs?” Kelsey leaned away from him and he instantly wished she would stay close. “You mean, recreational drugs?”
“And water.” He licked dry lips. “Speaking of which, could you hand me my glass?”
“Sure.” She poured water into a plastic cup, adjusted a Flexi-straw, and placed the glass in his good hand.
Jarred sucked hard on the straw. “Maybe I was just thirsty.”
“Why were you dreaming about drugs?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I was in a room, like a kitchen or a lab,” he said. “But it was more like a kitchen, and there was all this stuff. They were making something.”
“They?”
“The drug guys,” Jarred said for lack of any better explanation. “I’ve seen that before,” he added, thinking hard. “I mean, I feel like I have. Maybe it was on TV.”
Kelsey regarded him seriously. “What were they making?”
“I don’t know. What can you make?”
“I know you can grow marijuana,” she said.
“No,” he said, disagreeing with the image, not the statement. “That wasn’t it. It was…”
Crystal methamphetamine.
The answer came like a bolt from the blue, and something must have showed on his face because Kelsey said, “What? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m just trying to figure it out.”
“Does this all have to do with Chance?” Kelsey suggested lightly, uncomfortably. “Maybe the water and the drugs. The plane crashed into the Columbia River and Chance was a… dabbler.”
Jarred just looked at her. A dabbler? By all accounts, the man was an out-and-out user and abuser. Kelsey dropped her gaze, and it killed him to think she still had deep feelings for the man.
And then he noticed the pendant. His grandmother’s sapphire-and-diamond necklace lay softly against her throat, just visible in
the opened neckline of her blue shirt. She’d repaired it, he realized, and emotion swept over him, humbled him, left him mute.
“Have you moved into the house?” Jarred asked after a long moment.
“Yes… I’m in the process anyway.” She linked her hands together, as if afraid they might betray her in some . way.
“I can’t wait to get out of here.”
“You seem… stronger every time I see you.”
“I have a feeling I’m going to have a fight on my hands with Dr. Alastair,” Jarred complained, sounding sulky.
Kelsey smiled, relaxing just a tiny bit. He still made her so uncomfortable, and she inwardly marveled at his power. “Jarred Bryant generally wins a fight,” she said with gentle humor. “I almost feel sorry for Dr. Alastair if he tries to keep you in here too long.”
“You’re wearing the necklace.”
He gazed at her directly and it was all she could do to keep from covering the telltale piece of jewelry with one hand. “Yes. You remember it then.”
“I remember a lot of things.”
“Do you?” She regarded him intently.
“Most things,” he admitted, and he watched the changes cross her face as she realized his memory was practically intact. “Not everything. Not the accident. And I’d rather not publicize my returning memory just yet, if you don’t mind.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I…think you’re probably wise.”
“You don’t trust my family either?”
“Not much,” she admitted with a shaky laugh. “But you always have.”
“Well, I don’t anymore.” He paused, then added gruffly, “I’m sorry about the necklace.”
The scene where he pulled it from her neck replayed itself across the screen of her mind. She’d always cast him as the villain, yanking the fragile chain from her neck in a fit of anger. But with his apology, she could finally admit the truth, and she said in a voice that was not quite steady, “You had your hand on it. You were angry with me because I wanted to take it off. You liked me to wear it and I wanted to thwart you, so I leaned my head back.” She swallowed hard. “And the chain just snapped… and I blamed you for it…and I was wrong.”
Not Without You Page 9