by Layne, Ivy
Watching them together, my head reminded me that people justified fucked up choices all the time, but my gut refused to accept that Lily would risk her child's life over money.
My gut remembered that my older brother Cooper had read me bedtime stories, not my mother. The housekeeper had packed my lunch and baked me cookies.
My mother had been too busy with her social life and her endless supply of martinis. My father had been a shitty husband, something I understood with new depth now that his secrets were coming to light.
Seeing Lily with Adam, I was reminded that a shitty husband didn't have to mean a checked-out mom. I was getting the picture that Trey Spencer hadn't been all that interested in his son, but Lily seemed determined that Adam have all the love and attention he needed.
Being a good mom doesn't make her a good person, I reminded myself. But didn't it?
No. It didn't. Working security and investigations had taught me that people were complicated. A career criminal might give buckets of money to charity. A pastor could beat his wife.
I'd seen it all, enough to know that a woman who loved her son could be guilty of anything. And if she'd made her choices thinking she was protecting Adam? In that case, Lily Spencer was capable of anything.
They disappeared into the bathroom and emerged half an hour later, Lily's clothes flecked with water, Adam in a pair of superhero pajamas, his blonde curls combed straight and plastered to his forehead. She tucked him into bed and read him story after story until his eyelids drooped and he fell asleep.
Just as she had described, she walked the house before settling in, checking every door and window. When all was secure, she set the alarm. I expected her to get into bed and go to sleep, but she tossed and turned for hours. It wasn't until three am that she dropped off, her body finally still beneath the covers.
Once she was out, I got to work.
It didn't take long to deactivate the alarm from my laptop and let myself in the back door. I moved in near silence through the mudroom, down the hall to the office. Closing and locking the door behind me, I reset the alarm in case Lily woke. If she checked the panel, she’d see the comforting red light and go back to bed.
Trey’s laptop was exactly where she’d left it in the top drawer of his desk. I opened it and quickly determined that Lily had been trying to access a dummy account. No wonder she’d been frustrated. There was just enough here to make it look like he regularly used the computer, but it was no more than a front.
Logging out, I pulled a thumb drive from my pocket and connected it to the USB port. Lucas Jackson led our division of computer experts, and his team had come up with this little gem of an app. It should reveal all the accounts on the computer and break the encryption, letting me into everything on the hard drive.
If Trey Spencer had been a hacker on Lucas' level, the thumb drive wouldn't have done the job. In that case, I would have been on the phone dragging Lucas' ass up to Maine. But Trey Spencer wasn't a hacker, and Lucas' app looked like it did the trick.
A minute later I was in, and Trey Spencer's life was spread before me.
The banking information was the same that Lily had access to through the dummy account. Ditto for their insurance and household bills.
But the files were completely different. Where Lily found empty folders, I uncovered a treasure trove of data. Flicking through, opening, scanning, and closing documents, Trey's laptop painted a damning picture.
Everything was in Lily's name.
Everything.
The house, the cars, the investment accounts. Insurance policies for artwork and jewelry. From what I could see, it had been this way for years before Trey Spencer died.
When his car drove off that bridge, Lily became a very wealthy woman.
That sure as hell didn't make her look innocent. If Trey Spencer had been murdered, the information on his laptop provided a ton of motive.
If Lily had killed her husband, why was I here?
If she was responsible for his death, she'd gotten away with it. There was no murder investigation. The insurance paid out with only the standard delay.
Why bring me to Maine unless she absolutely had to?
Trey's involvement with my father was the wildcard.
Lily could have killed her husband and then discovered he left loose ends that threatened her and Adam. As much as I wanted to believe Lily was innocent, I didn't have a shred of proof.
Interestingly, what I didn't find was information about Adam Spencer. No birth certificate. No adoption papers. No medical bills. I didn't have to ask to know that Lily hadn't given birth to Adam.
I suspected Trey was his biological father. From the pictures I'd seen, Adam's blue eyes and white-blonde curls were a perfect match to childhood photographs of Trey Spencer. Echoes of Trey's adult face showed in Adam's childish one. They were absolutely father and son.
There wasn't a trace of Lily in him. Adam's skin was a pure ivory without a hint of her caramel tones. His hair was his father's shining white-blonde, nothing like his mother's soft cloud of spiraling, dark curls.
If Adam was the product of an agreement with a surrogate, there should have been a contract. At the very least, there should have been a birth certificate somewhere. Trey Spencer had scanned other documents on the laptop. Why not the birth certificate?
I scrolled through the files again and checked to make sure Lucas' drive was still plugged in. The hidden account on the laptop had been packed with personal data, excepting anything about Adam Spencer, but nothing here was connected with Trey's business.
Was there a second laptop? Had it been with him when he'd died? The police report hadn't mentioned a laptop in the car, but if Trey had been forced off that bridge, his killer would have taken anything of use, including a computer.
I'd have to find a way to press Lily for more information. Trey Spencer had worked from home. It would have been hard to hide a second laptop. From our reports, he'd been driving back from dinner at his club in Bangor, a long trip in the wilds of Maine, but not one he'd make with his business computer. Had Lucas' app missed a second hidden account? Without Lucas himself, I couldn't tell.
I pulled a discrete portable hard drive from my pocket, plugged it into the laptop, and started the process of copying the files to the drive. While that was working, I installed a keystroke tracker Lily wouldn't be able to see. In the time it would take to copy the laptop, I'd check the closet.
Much like Lily, I found nothing. Bills for heating oil. Invoices for vehicle repairs. Years of utility bills. Hospital bills.
There were a handful related to Lily. I didn't need a medical degree to see that she'd been pregnant and miscarried twice. The file ended there. There weren't any bills for fertility treatments, consultations, or testing. Less than a year after Lily's second miscarriage I found a record of Adam's infant vaccinations.
Adam. Was he a key to the mystery of Lily Spencer or a distraction? It was too soon to say.
The more I discovered, the more questions I had. If Adam hadn't looked so much like his father, I might have suspected my Dad's hand in his sudden appearance. Private, possibly illegal adoptions were just one of the sordid things we'd uncovered about our father. Even Adam's resemblance to Trey didn't chase the connection from my mind.
I turned off the light in the closet and closed the door, removing my drives from the laptop and shutting it down, leaving the office exactly how I'd found it. I crept down the hall to the mudroom where I deactivated the alarm, exited the house, and reactivated it behind me.
Unlike Lily, I dropped off to sleep immediately, sliding into the darkness, my mind free to drift and dream. Untethered, my thoughts went straight for Lily.
Her soft curls. The full curve of her lower lip. The view down her T-shirt when she was in the closet. Those round, ripe breasts, the way they shifted and swayed as she'd reached for basket af
ter basket.
In dreams I cupped them in my hands, thumbing the hard points of her nipples. I ducked my head into the curve of her neck, inhaling vanilla and spice, tasting her. I spread her out beneath me on crisp, white sheets and devoured every inch of her body until she cried my name.
I woke to find myself rolling my hips into the mattress, fucking her in my sleep, my hard cock grinding uncomfortably into the soft sheets.
I stood under a cold shower in the gray of dawn, pumping my cock with my fist, trying to think of anything but Lily, and failing miserably.
Chapter Eight
Lily
The light from the TV screen flickered, reflecting off the plate glass windows in the living room. During the day, I loved the view of the lake through those windows. At night, the dark was unfathomable. Oppressive.
I curled deeper into the corner of the sofa, pulling the soft chenille blanket over my legs and tried to focus on my movie. On-screen, Rosalyn Russell and Cary Grant bantered in quick-fire explosions of words, all sharp wit and biting humor. Normally, I loved this movie. Tonight, it couldn't hold my attention.
Adam was tucked into bed after a series of arguments over everything from the temperature of his bath to the cartoon character on his pajamas. Par for the course with a five-year-old. Three books and a back-rub had him deeply asleep, his stuffed monkey clutched in his arm.
I was supposed to be unwinding in front of the TV. Instead, my ears were trained for the slightest sound. I assumed Knox was around somewhere. He'd turned down my invitation to dinner, choosing to stay in the cottage. I'd seen him only a few times during the day, stalking through the woods around the house, a dark pack on his back, tools in his hands.
I didn't ask what he was doing.
I didn't need to know as long as he was keeping us safe.
I had to trust someone sometime. Knox was as good a place to start as any.
Rosalyn Russell's ill-fated fiancé came on screen, prompting a sympathetic smile. He was nice enough, but how could any man live up to Cary Grant? My mind immediately flashed to Knox.
Knox and Cary Grant weren't remotely comparable. If anything, Trey had been more like Cary than Knox.
With his easy, smooth charm, his sense of style, his ability to always say the right thing at the right time, Trey was a master of the elegant facade. It had taken me years to guess at what lay beneath.
I watched Cary talk circles around Roslyn's fiancé and had to wonder if my lifelong love of Cary Grant was responsible for my attraction to Trey.
If so, Cary had a lot to answer for.
Trey's charm and wit had been all surface and no substance. Knox was more silence than words. Action instead of empty reassurance. I couldn't help remembering Davey's visit the day before and the way Knox had studied him, then made a point of not leaving us alone. I wasn't the only one who thought something was off with Deputy Dave.
It wasn't just Knox's blunt lack of charm I found appealing. Trey had been slender. Lean and fit, but slight of build. Far bigger than me, but nothing like Knox.
Those shoulders…
Just thinking about Knox's shoulders brought a flush of heat to my cheeks. And other places.
Don't forget about his forearms, the light sprinkle of dark hair over tanned skin, muscle corded beneath. So much strength. He was tall, broad and could probably break me in two.
Why didn't that scare me? It should. Trey was dead, and with every day that passed, I was more certain his car hadn't gone over that bridge by accident.
Knox's serious, steady gaze filled my mind. He was a virtual stranger, employed by a company Trey had chosen, which should have made him instantly suspect.
Less trustworthy, not more.
So why did I want to trust him?
I needed to be sure my instincts were on target. That some deeply-buried part of me recognized Knox's innate goodness. Maybe that was it. Or maybe I was a woman alone, starved for touch, for affection, allowing her mind to be swayed by a tight ass and dark eyes.
My mind drifted to another old favorite. Dial M for Murder. And another. Gaslight. Men fooling women who wanted to believe the best of them. Just because Knox looked like an action hero didn't make him the good guy.
I focused on the movie. It worked for about two minutes. Then Cary Grant cracked a joke, and the wicked glint in his eye reminded me of the way Knox had winked at Adam as they'd watched Davey pretend to enjoy my coffee cake.
His lip had curled in a hint of a smile, but Adam had seen it and laughed along with him. Could I trust my son's instincts if I couldn't trust my own?
Adam had never warmed up to his father. When Trey was alive, their distance broke my heart. Now I could only be grateful for it. Adam was hot and cold with Davey, but Knox he took to right away.
What did Adam see when he looked at Knox Sinclair? It wasn't the ruggedly handsome face—the strong lines of his jaw that warned me off, and the lush lower lip that invited me in. It wasn't his long-fingered hands or his powerful thighs—
No, Lily. No way.
I pushed the heels of my palms into my eyes until I saw stars behind my eyelids, banishing my lustful thoughts of Knox Sinclair.
He's here to keep you safe, not to perv over. You and Adam have been doing fine without a man around. Knox can't do his job if there's anything personal between you so get your hormones under control and forget about him.
I'd get over it. I'd get used to Knox being here, and I'd stop thinking about him like this. It was only the novelty of having a man around who was even slightly trustworthy. Once I got used to him, things would change. They had to. The last thing I needed was a man to complicate my messy life.
I was so wrapped up in my head, the shrill beep of the new perimeter alarm sent me bolting off the couch with a shriek. Adrenaline spiked up my spine and down my limbs, leaving my fingers and toes prickling. My heart thundered in my chest, so loud it almost drowned out the alarm.
Fumbling for my phone, I called Knox. It rang once, twice, three times before Knox's low voice invited me to leave a message.
“Knox? It's Lily. The alarm went off, and I don't know—”
I jolted, almost dropping the phone as it vibrated in my hand with an incoming text. I ended the message to Knox's voicemail and tapped the screen of my phone. Knox.
Perimeter sensors tripped. Adam's room. Lock the door.
I took off down the hall, leaving the movie still playing in the background. I flew up the stairs, skidding to a halt outside of Adam's door, trying to get my breath under control so my wild gasps wouldn't wake him.
I eased into the dark room to see my boy sprawled across his bed, covers kicked to his feet, his too-long blonde curls splayed across the pillow. His back rose and fell with slow, deep breaths.
Adam didn't stir as I sat on the floor beside his bed, leaning my head against the mattress much as I had the night I'd called Knox.
The minutes passed like hours, dragging until a second might as well have been an eternity. The perimeter alarm cut off, leaving behind a heavy silence.
I couldn't make out anything no matter how hard I strained my ears. Not a footstep. Not the crack of a branch, the sound of a knob turning, or a door swinging open. Nothing.
When my phone vibrated again, I clamped my teeth into my lip to hold back the squeal of alarm. Another message from Knox.
Outside clear. Checking the house. Stay put.
I rested my chin on my raised knees and waited, listening. I thought I heard a door open and close. A heavy, steady tread on the hardwood floor, the sound coming into focus and fading as Knox walked past the stairs. Then the thump, thump, thump of him jogging to the second floor, the creek of the joists as he moved down the hall, methodically checking every inch of the house.
Finally, another message.
House is clear. Meet me in the living room.
>
I took a deep breath for the first time in a half hour and rose from the floor feeling creaky and tired. Leaving Adam still deeply asleep, I made my way downstairs to find Knox standing in the center of the living room, hands on his hips, eyes locked to the TV screen.
I'd forgotten to pause the movie. Rosalyn Russell and Cary Grant were bickering. Knox watched with the same amused expression as the spectators in the film. His dark eyes turned to me as I entered the room.
“What was it? An animal?” I asked hopefully.
Knox shook his head once. “No. Human. Smaller than me, bigger than you. I'll take a closer look at the footage from the cameras later. Whoever it was had an idea that the cameras were there. The good news is they didn't get close to any of the doors or windows.”
“And the bad news?”
“That they suspected there was surveillance, and they tried anyway.”
I nodded, not sure what to say. I was relieved no one had gotten inside. Relieved Knox was there to search the woods in the dark instead of me. Knox was far better equipped to scare off whoever kept trying to break in than I was.
I tried a faint smile. “Your upgrades to the alarm system paid off.”
The side of Knox's mouth quirked in a semblance of a grin, and he let out a rumbling noise that could have been a chuckle. “That's one way to look at it.”
“I'll take what I can get,” I mumbled.
Knox's eyes sharpened. “We're only getting started, Lily. I'm not going to let anything happen to you.”
My throat tightened with gratitude. I couldn't force out a word, so I settled for a brisk nod.
“What's the movie?” Knox asked, inclining his head at the screen.
I swallowed hard before I said, “His Girl Friday. Rosalyn Russell and Cary Grant. They're divorced, but they used to work together—”
Knox watched Rosalyn and Carey bicker/flirt for a few seconds before saying, “They don't look very divorced to me.”
“They don't, do they? But they haven't figured that out yet.”
Knox stood, his thumbs tucked in his pockets, his eyes on the screen. He didn't look like he intended to go anywhere. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, not sure what to say.
