Hush

by Karen Robards

  Fair enough.

  He was feeling kind of on the grim side himself.

  He’d had ears in Margaret’s house, and Riley had done her drag-the-other-woman-into-the-bathroom-and-mask-their-­conversation-with-running-water thing again.

  He doubted she’d done that to tell her Emma had been kidnapped. No masking necessary for that conversation.

  Not long after, he’d gotten a notification that Jeff’s cell phone had just been turned on. Seeing as how Jeff’s cell phone was in an FBI lab missing a vital part, that seemed unlikely.

  What seemed way more plausible—in fact, he was willing to bet his life on it—was that the SIM card that was in essence the brain of Jeff’s cell phone had been activated.

  He didn’t even have to ask himself by whom.

  He damn well knew.

  * * *

  FORGET OFFERING to help her with her suitcase. Instead, Finn stayed inside the car, popped the trunk as she approached, and waited.

  Which was fine, Riley told herself. She didn’t need his help. She could heft that suitcase into that trunk perfectly well by herself.

  If, once her suitcase was in there nestled beside his, she slammed the trunk hard, it was because she wanted to make sure it was latched.

  Then she yanked open the door and slid into the passenger seat beside him.

  “Put on your seat belt,” was how he greeted her. A growl. Which was perfect, because it matched her mood. As she complied—she might be angry, apprehensive, and a whole host of other emotions too tumultuous to name, but she wasn’t an idiot—he slid on a pair of Ray-Bans and drove out of the parking lot.

  She gave him a long, hopefully not obvious, look. Not helpful. Bottom line was, he looked hot. He looked cool. He looked like a fricking federal agent that she would be a fool to trust any farther than she could throw him.

  Which was, not at all.

  The question was, was she afraid of him?

  For a few moments, as he negotiated the local streets and got the Acura onto I-45 North heading for Dallas, neither of them said anything. With the sunglasses concealing his eyes, his rough-hewn features were impossible to read. He seemed to be concentrating on the road, which at that moment was a free-for-all as the crazy East Texas traffic whizzed in and out around them. When finally they were clear of the city and the traffic settled down, he glanced at her.

  “You tell Margaret about Emma?” The growl was gone. There was nothing at all in his voice now.

  She wanted to yell at him. No, she wanted to accuse him. She wanted to plug that SIM card back into her phone—it was at that moment in a zippered pocket of her purse—and show him that picture of himself and shout, explain this.

  But it had occurred to her that she didn’t really know Finn Bradley at all. He was a big, buff, good-looking guy who turned her on. They had sexual chemistry so electric that even now, when she was suspicious out the wazoo of everything he said and did, she could look at his hard profile and uncompromising chin, at the stern lines of his mouth, at the breadth of his shoulders in the tailored charcoal suit and the powerful length of his legs bent to accommodate the gas and brake pedals, at his tanned, capable hands on the wheel, and feel herself starting to go all hot and shivery inside.

  So was she afraid of him?

  He’d saved her life, come to her rescue when she needed it. He’d held her when she’d cried—God, she hated remembering that!—and kissed her dizzy. More than once.

  She’d called him at the darkest moment of her life, and she trusted him to save Emma.

  What she didn’t know was what his picture was doing on Jeff’s cell phone.

  And that bothered her. It made her wonder. It made her cautious.

  At the thought that he might, perhaps, have had something to do with Jeff’s death, she was alternately frightened and furious.

  At the moment, he was helping her, protecting her. What she couldn’t let herself forget was that he was doing it for reasons of his own.

  What happened when he no longer needed her to help him get what he wanted?

  She had no idea. But until she did, confronting him, letting him know that she’d seen that picture—that she knew he’d been in Jeff’s vicinity shortly before Jeff was murdered, a fact that he had never once mentioned—would, she concluded, be dumb as rocks.

  So she didn’t. She kept her mouth shut. If he was using her for his own ends, so be it. She was using him for her own ends, too.

  The key was not to lose sight of that.

  To stay cool.

  Keep her guard up.

  Play her own game.

  “Well?” he prodded, slightly impatient now. And she realized that she’d been staring at him—not glaring, hopefully—without answering.

  She had to behave as though her discovery of his picture on Jeff’s phone hadn’t sent panic licking up her spine. She had to behave as though her discovery of his picture on Jeff’s phone hadn’t happened at all.

  “Yes,” she said, calm as could be.

  When she said nothing more, his eyebrows went up. “So?”

  Riley shrugged. “She was upset. Of course she was upset. I was glad Bill got there before I had to go. I would have hated to leave her alone.”

  “So you took her into the living room, sat her down, and gave her the bad news.”

  “More or less.”

  He waited a minute. “That all you’re going to tell me?”

  “What do you want, a blow-by-blow account? I told her about Emma, I changed clothes, I left.”

  “You were in her house for a while. I just wondered what went down that took so long.”

  “Well, now you know.”

  A pause ensued. His lips firmed as he seemed to concentrate on the road ahead. Then he glanced her way again.

  “You get that SIM card?” His voice had a definite edge to it.

  God, she hated to admit she had it! But there might be information on there that would lead to Emma. She had to turn it over. The thought of what Emma must be enduring was a constant, heavy weight in her chest. It scared her clear down to her toes, made her sick, made her sweat. None of which would help Emma.

  Keep your focus on the job at hand.

  She was in a quandary, though: she couldn’t point out those emails to him without revealing that she had accessed the SIM card, and if he knew she had accessed the SIM card, if he was the one who checked the information it contained, he would inevitably see the picture of himself and conclude that she’d seen it, too. The result would be the same if someone else checked the SIM card and told him about the picture.

  By letting him know that she had, indeed, seen his picture on Jeff’s phone, she might be putting herself in danger.

  Which raised the question one more time: was she afraid of Finn?

  It was difficult to look at him and find herself wondering if he was capable of murdering Jeff. If he was capable of hurting—or worse—her.

  “Damn it, Riley—”

  “It’s in my purse.” Okay, that maybe sounded a little surly. The last thing she wanted to do was give him reason to suspect that she was harboring serious doubts about him.

  “Care to hand it over?”

  Not really, was the honest reply to that. But she fished in her purse, extracted the small plastic rectangle, and put (did not slap) it down on the palm of the hand he held out to receive it. Glancing at it, he stowed it away in his jacket pocket.

  He said, “So I was right about you taking it out and pitching Jeff’s phone in the tub yourself.”

  Riley didn’t reply.

  “How about you tell me why you felt you needed to do that.”

  He was asking like he thought she might actually be going to tell him.

  Fat chance.

  “Well, you know, Jeff and I were married once,” she said in her best coy Southern belle persona, which she could assume at will after seven years of hanging around the finest flowers of the South. “I hated to think that anything I might have”— she was pra
ctically batting her eyelashes here—“sent him . . . might still have been on his phone for anyone to see.”

  Finn’s head snapped toward her so fast that she hoped it hurt his neck.

  “You’re saying you went to the trouble of taking that SIM card out of Jeff’s phone because you were afraid there might be naked pictures of you on it?”

  “It wasn’t any trouble,” Riley replied. “Snapping a SIM card out is easy.” She gave him a sweet-as-pie smile, and was rewarded by the tightening of his jaw. She added, “I’m guessing you weren’t able to get the information on Jeff’s phone off iCloud after all? Because if you’d been able to do that, then you wouldn’t need the SIM card.”

  That retaliatory poke at him didn’t garner a response beyond a slight grimace. Well, she didn’t need one: she knew the answer.

  All of a sudden, a way to give him the information she wanted him to have without revealing that she’d seen what was on the SIM card hit her, and she went with it.

  “You know, you should probably check out Jeff’s email. I seem to recall him saying something about getting a couple of strange emails the night he died.”

  That interested him. He looked at her. “He tell you that when he asked you to meet him at Oakwood?”

  Lying was getting easier and easier. “Yes.”

  “He say what bothered him about them?”

  “Not really. Just that he didn’t know who they were from. Oh, and that they mentioned Paris.”

  She could sense him perking up.

  “Anything significant about Paris? Had Jeff been there recently?”

  Riley shook her head. She tried not to do it too swiftly. This was dangerous territory: she wanted to point him toward the correct emails so that he could determine the identity of the sender sooner rather than later, not hint him toward some kind of missing-money connection to Paris. Not that he or anyone else was likely to ever figure out what that connection was. “Not since he was a teenager, as far as I know.”

  She thought he was looking at her, although it was hard to tell with the sunglasses.

  “You know much about what Jeff was up to in the final weeks of his life?” he asked.

  Riley shrugged. Thinking about Jeff hurt. It probably always would. “Nothing special. Like I told you, he was looking into the deaths of those four associates of his father’s. Other than that, he was trying to piece his life back together. It isn’t easy, if you’ve been used to having oodles of money, to find yourself dead broke.”

  “Doesn’t seem to have bothered you particularly. Unlike Jeff, you managed to get yourself a job. Two, actually.”

  “The difference is, I wasn’t all that used to having oodles of money. Before I married Jeff, I was strictly a paycheck-to-­paycheck kind of girl.”

  “A finance degree must have come in handy once you became George Cowan’s daughter-in-law.”

  “A finance degree came in handy after I stopped being George Cowan’s daughter-in-law. Wait, how do you know what kind of degree I have?” She scowled at him. “You did a background check on me.”

  “That’s right.” He didn’t even have the grace to sound abashed. “You got to admit, an ex-daughter-in-law with a finance degree is pretty interesting, when you think about all that missing money. Help me out here, since you have some expertise in that field: if you wanted to make a billion or so dollars disappear, how would you do it?”

  “I don’t know,” Riley said coldly.

  “Take a stab at it. Where would you hide that much money?”

  “I never deal in hypotheticals.” Riley’s voice was even colder than before. “People tend to read too much into them. Look, do you mind if we don’t talk for a while? I have a headache, and I’m just going to close my eyes.”

  She didn’t wait for his answer. Instead she leaned her head back against the back of the seat and did exactly that.

  While mentally flipping him the bird and cooing, interrogate this.

  * * *

  SHE WAS lying. Finn knew she was lying. He just wasn’t sure how big in scope her lies were, or exactly what she was lying about.

  One lie was, the reason she took the SIM card out of that damned phone.

  Much as he hated to admit it, the mere idea of Jeffy-boy having naked pictures of Riley on his cell phone was driving him around the bend.

  Exactly why he didn’t like it he didn’t care to speculate. The fact remained, he really didn’t.

  He was pretty sure she was lying even about the existence of the naked pictures, but he couldn’t be positive. The worst thing about it was, it was not entirely outside the realm of possibility that naked pictures of Riley might actually be on her ex-­husband’s cell phone.

  He was fairly confident that they hadn’t had that kind of relationship at the time of Jeff’s death, but there was always a chance the pictures were old, from when they were still married.

  The images that he couldn’t keep from flashing through his mind every time he thought of her pathetic excuse for an ­excuse—mental snapshots of Riley naked; worse, ones of Jeff looking at Riley naked—weren’t helping.

  But his thoughts on the subject were clear enough so that he was sure that whatever her reason for taking the phone from Jeff’s body in the first place, and the SIM card from the phone in the second, concern about naked pictures of herself being discovered on it wasn’t it.

  Whatever she was hiding, Margaret had to be in on it. That was the only explanation for the carefully masked bathroom conversations. They were colluding about something—and it had to be something to do with the missing money.

  What it was he didn’t know, and it was pretty obvious that Riley had no intention of telling him.

  Which left Margaret.

  She would be far easier to break than Riley, no question about that. A possible option would be to have a team pick Margaret up, ask her some pertinent questions, see what they could find out. No threats, no torture, nothing like that. No physical or mental coercion needed: given Margaret’s background, and temperament, to say nothing of the trauma of her son’s death and daughter’s kidnapping, he was pretty sure the job could get done by confronting her with what they knew and using plain old official government intimidation to do the rest.

  But even as he had the thought, he knew he wasn’t going to go that route. First off, Margaret was a woman: scaring—or bringing in other people to scare—women wasn’t how he rolled. Second, if Margaret confessed all, and if that confession involved Riley being part of George’s schemes, it wasn’t something he wanted officialdom to know, at least not until he’d had time to think about it. And third, getting Margaret to tell what she knew only worked if Margaret knew what he wanted to know: where the hell the money was.

  Otherwise, that course of action would do more harm than good.

  Picking Margaret up would alarm and alienate Riley. It would also alert her to the fact that she and Margaret were under close surveillance. And increasing suspicion.

  Which could be counted on to make Riley far less easy to keep tabs on, as well as far less likely to cooperate with the government (in other words, him).

  For now, it was better to go with what was already in the works: while the team that had been deployed to find and rescue Emma did its job, he would take Riley to George and see if she could worm the whereabouts of the money out of him.

  If she could do that, they could all go home happy.

  If she couldn’t—well, then he would work from there.

  A vibration on the cell phone in his pocket had him casting a quick glance at Riley before checking it.

  She’d fallen asleep. A look reassured him that, no, she wasn’t faking it to get out of talking to him. Her body was totally relaxed, with her hands lying limply in her lap. Her head rested against the headrest. Her face was turned toward him, bright hair tucked behind an ear, long dark lashes resting against soft cheeks, rosy lips slightly parted.

  She didn’t snore—and hadn’t last night, he’d been lying about that�
��but her breathing was deep with an occasional catch in it.

  She was wary of him, he knew, but still she trusted him enough to go to sleep in his company.

  That touched a chord in him. He acknowledged that it did with reluctance.

  Careful, he thought with wry comprehension of his own susceptibility. She’s beautiful, she’s vulnerable—and you’re a guy.

  It was a combination that had brought down whole kingdoms.

  His phone vibrated again, and, glad to have his thoughts interrupted, he scooped it out of his pocket to see the message he was expecting: A1.

  An arrangement to hand off the SIM card for analysis at a prearranged spot had just been confirmed.

  He didn’t have to reply, didn’t have to do anything but show up.

  The exit he wanted was some fifty miles up the road. He’d let her sleep until then.

  His eyes slid over her again. Her posture, in conjunction with the neckline of her dress, allowed him a nice glimpse of some pretty spectacular cleavage. Her breasts curved enticingly toward him, with just a hint of her nipples pressing against the thin fabric of her dress. Her waist was slim above the loose skirt that hid her killer legs.

  The shaft of desire that went through him simply from looking at her caught him by surprise. That was his body reacting spontaneously, and with an intensity that made him grit his teeth and tighten his hands around the steering wheel. A damned glance, and he wanted her so much he ached with it.

  Not good. Even worse: the instantaneous memory of how she felt in his arms, how soft and silky her skin was beneath his hands and lips, how hotly she’d kissed him.

  He had no doubt at all that she would be even hotter in bed.

  The ache intensified to the point where it was almost unbearable. Faced with the unwanted boner from hell, he found himself in the miserable position where all he could do about it was wish he was wearing looser pants.

  That was the effect she had on him. He cursed himself for being a fool, and a horny one besides.

  Then his gaze found the bruises on the side of Riley’s throat that her bright hair didn’t quite hide. Another small bruise was visible on her shoulder, peeking out from beneath the strap of her dress. And her legs were bruised, too, he knew, although he couldn’t see the marks.