“Anything else? Whatever you remember.”
Shelly shook her head. “I’m sorry. That’s pretty much it. I wish I could be more help, but I had no idea she was up to anything—beyond being a man-crazy gossip. You might try getting hold of Verna and asking her for her take on Lil. Verna dealt with her for a lot longer than I did.”
“That’s a thought. We want to keep this under wraps as much as possible, though.”
“I understand. And I just…It’s so strange. I was wary of Lil—suspicious, you know? But never in a million years would I have pegged her for a spy. I guess she totally had me fooled.”
“You’re not alone. She had everyone fooled.”
Chapter Nine
Tom went back into a closed-door session with Helen and his department managers at three. At five, he was still in the meeting. Shelly left the office without seeing him again that day.
Tom called the house around seven, just to check in and to apologize for being preoccupied.
“I get it,” she replied. “There is nothing you have to apologize for. This is serious and you’ve got to deal with it. I only wish I could help.”
“You do help,” he told her. “Just by…being you.”
They talked for a few more minutes and then he said goodbye. She finished cleaning up the kitchen, got Max into his bath, watched the news, put Max to bed. The whole time she was aware of a certain…tension with herself. A sort of irritation, rubbing just beneath the skin.
“I think I’d better call Tom,” Max said when she tucked him in for the night.
“Not tonight, big guy. Tom’s kind of busy.”
“Aw, Mom. Tomorrow?”
“Probably. But check with me for the right time.”
Max untangled his arms from beneath the sheet and folded then across his chest. Just to make sure she got the message that he was not pleased, he stuck out his lower lip. “Tom said I could call him.”
“And you will—but not if you keep sticking out your lip like that.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Not.”
“Are.” Shelly knew how to win the argument. She tickled him.
Max squirmed and laughed and shouted, “Stop, don’t. Ouch!”
“Say you’ll stop pouting…”
“Awright, okay. I’ll stop, I’ll stop!”
She quit tickling and looked at him levelly. “And what are the rules about calling people?”
“I have to ask first and not be a pest.”
“That’s right. So follow the rules. Got it?”
“Yeah.”
She kissed him and left, turning out the light, pulling the door silently shut. And then she went around the house locking up, wishing she didn’t feel so edgy, wondering how Tom was doing, hoping he’d had a decent dinner and would get a good night’s sleep.
A bath sounded like just the thing—a long, lazy soak. She would let the tension of the day seep away into the warm, soothing water.
She put in some bath salts, undressed and sank into the tub with a grateful sigh. Leaning back, she closed her eyes.
And then, a moment later, the nagging feeling that something wasn’t right found its focus. She popped up straight. Water and bubbles surged over the tub rim.
“Oh. My. God,” she said aloud to the tiled walls that surrounded her. “Uncle Drake…”
Uncle Drake, with his inside information about TAKA-Hanson. Uncle Drake, who’d known that Verna was leaving before anyone else did. How could he have known that?
Through Lil. Oh, God. Through Lil. It made perfect sense.
Lil was working for Drake.
Was that possible?
Shelly knew the answer to that one. In the world of corporate one-upmanship, just about any dirty trick was possible.
It all came so painfully clear. Lil had wanted Shelly’s job. Yes. Of course. But Verna hadn’t thought much of Lil and had let Lil know—probably with great tact and serious diplomacy—that she wasn’t going to get it.
Lil had told Drake. And Drake had passed the tip on to Shelly, figuring that it was better than nothing, to have a niece who owed him a favor in the job, if his spy wasn’t going to get it.
But why?
Why would Drake want spies at TAKA-Hanson?
Shelly jumped from the bath, splashing water everywhere. Still soaking wet, with bubbles dripping down her legs, she grabbed her robe and yanked the tie tight around her and hustled into the bedroom where she grabbed her cell. She auto-dialed Tom.
And then she snapped the phone shut before the connection was made.
She pressed the phone to her forehead. “Coward,” she whispered. “I am such a coward….”
At last, she had everything. A great job. An amazing man who liked her son. A possible future with the requisite rosy glow all around it.
She was going to lose it all.
She should have told Tom about Drake. She should have told him right at the first.
And lost the job without ever getting it.
Yeah. That’s what would have happened. She knew it. She’d known it all along. Men like Drake didn’t warn you not to mention their names unless they knew for a fact that it wouldn’t go over well.
But she’d lied to herself about what she knew. She’d kept a dangerous secret to protect herself from losing it all. She’d tried to tell herself that everything would be okay, that all she had to do was keep quiet and work hard. All she had to do was bury her nose in the sand and the problem would go away on its own.
Within days of landing the job at TAKA-Hanson, she had her long-lost uncle pushed, like the darkest of nightmares, into the farthest corner of her mind. Like most nightmares, he would pop up occasionally.
And she would shove him right back down.
Shelly rushed on bare, wet feet into the kitchen where she’d left her laptop when she got home from work. She booted it up. And then she did the thing she should have done weeks ago, the thing she had been avoiding since the night her uncle first appeared in her life.
She surfed the Web for anything she could find about Drake Thatcher.
For half an hour, she waded through endless references to her mother’s half brother, most of them to do with his various businesses, more than one implying that he wasn’t the most straight-ahead entrepreneur to get a nod in Business Weekly.
And then, there it was, a few lines in the “New Projects” section of Hotelier Monthly Online:
6/25. Drake Thatcher in the hotel business? So our sources tell us. The wealthy tycoon’s newly formed Thatcher Group will be developing top-end luxury hotels. Prospective grand opening of the group’s flagship site slated for thirty-six months out in San Francisco. More as the project develops.
Shelley read those lines over twice. And then a third time.
Drake Thatcher in the hotel business.
She’d feared the worst and she’d gotten it. Again, she grabbed the phone. She dialed the number Drake had given her. Like last time, she got his voice mail. When the line beeped, she babbled out a frantic message.
“Uncle Drake, it’s Shelly. I really need to speak with you as soon as possible.” She rattled off her numbers—both home and cell. “Please. Call me back as soon as you get this.” She hung up and set the phone on the desk next to her computer, half expecting it to ring any second.
It didn’t ring. Drake didn’t call back. Not that night, or the next morning. Shelly went to work with a hot band of dread squeezing her chest.
Tom came in at the usual time, looking distracted. All night, she’d been telling herself that she’d get honest with him the minute she saw him.
She did no such thing. She greeted him with a casual, “Morning.” He responded with a quick, warm smile and went into his office. He left for meetings as soon as they finished the calendar.
Shelly watched him go and despised herself for being a total coward, at the same time as she desperately reminded herself that she’d done nothing wrong, done nothin
g to compromise Tom or TAKA-Hanson. Nothing except get a mysterious job tip from an uncle she hardly knew. Nothing except keep her mouth shut when Drake called her and said outright that in the future, he would expect her to spy for him.
It was, after all, entirely possible that Lil wasn’t working for Drake, that some other company in competition with the Taka hotels had put Lil in place in the finance department.
It was possible that Lil had stolen TAKA-Hanson files for someone else altogether. Shelly clung to that, to the faint and fading hope that Lillian Todd and her uncle were in no way connected.
Tom returned at a quarter to five. He called her into his office. “I was kind of hoping we might get together tonight,” he said. “Pick up a pizza, go to your place. But it turns out I’ve got meetings, damn it. This thing with Lil Todd has put us behind. And then there are the endless issues with San Francisco and Kyoto. We need to go over some numbers.”
She smiled. “Just please try and get some rest when you get home.” Amazing. How sweet and calm she sounded, how little like the two-faced liar she knew herself to be.
“Rest,” he said. “I hope. How’s Max?”
“Fine. Getting back into his daycare and his buddies here in town.”
Tom rose from his desk and came around to her. She stood to meet him. “He wants to call me, right?”
“Does a sea lion poop in the bay?”
He chuckled and put his big hands on her shoulders. She melted inside—hating herself. Wanting him so. He tipped her chin up with a finger and they shared a sweet, soft kiss.
Then he asked, “What time does he go to bed?”
“Around eight-thirty, but you don’t have to—”
“Eight-thirty’s good. Tell him to call me then….”
“All right. Yes. I will.”
He brushed the backs of his fingers along the side of her neck and she wished he would always touch her like that—with such tenderness, such loving care. She wished she might never lose him. That they might always share this closeness.
Maybe they would. He was such a good man. If she told him the truth, chances were he would understand. She should tell him now. Just get the damn words out.
He was frowning. “Winston. You okay?”
And she told yet another lie. “Fine. Truly.”
“Good.” He kissed her again, a deeper, even sweeter kiss. When he lifted his head, he said, “This weekend, I promise. We’ll spend time with Max. And maybe Saturday night, if you could get a sitter…” He let the suggestion finish itself.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“It’s a deal.” And then he let her go.
That night, as she tucked Max in, she handed him her cell.
He reached for his glasses on the nightstand, sat up and pushed the covers back. “Tom?”
She nodded, her throat clutching at the excitement in his voice.
He flipped open the phone and punched out the numbers, fast, from memory. Then he put the phone to his ear and waited, his expression oh-so-serious. She knew when Tom answered because her little boy beamed.
“Hello, Tom. This is Max.”
The tight band that seemed to have wrapped itself around her chest lately grew tighter still as she listened to her son tell Tom all about his friends in daycare, about the model of a frontier fort he was making with Popsicle sticks, about the butterfly cocoons incubating in a terrarium in a corner of the daycare classroom.
On top of the tightness in her chest, her throat clutched harder and her eyes burned with unshed tears. So that Max wouldn’t see her distress, she rose and went to the window, where she stared blindly out at the twilight and the gray clapboard wall of the house next door. Behind her, Max continued to chatter away.
“Yeah. I can’t wait for the butterflies to come out of their cocoons. A cocoon is also called a chrysalis—did you know that, Tom? Or a pupa. Pupa.” Max laughed. “That’s a funny word, huh? I like the pupas almost as much as I like watching chicken eggs hatch. We did that before I went on my trip to Granny’s. I like chicks, little fuzzy yellow balls. My granny has chickens in back of her house. And a big, mean rooster who will peck you if you get too close…. Mmm-hmm. I can. Yeah…”
Lord. They liked each other so much, Max and Tom. Right from the first, when Max offered his hand to Tom last Thursday before the picnic, they’d seemed to have a connection. Was that connection in jeopardy now?
“Mom.”
She whirled from the window, pasting on a bright smile.
The small hand held out the phone. “Tom wants to talk to you now.”
Shelly took the phone. She made all the right noises. She told him she’d see him tomorrow. And then she said goodbye. She kissed her son good-night, shut the curtains, turned out the light and left him, pulling the door closed behind her.
Now what?
Her problem remained the same as it had been from the first. The truth counted, but how much? How much did this particular truth matter, when measured against the terrible damage her revealing it might do—when really, she was innocent of wrongdoing. Her uncle had asked her to do nothing unacceptable.
Not yet, anyway.
Maybe he would never ask her—okay, she didn’t believe that. But it was possible.
She thought of getting ready for bed, of slipping between the cool sheets…
For what? So she could spend the night staring into the darkness, her stomach in knots?
She wandered out to the front porch and sat on the step and watched the twilight fade to true night. Seeking a peace that didn’t come, she tried to clear her mind of the truth that dogged her, to simply sit. To simply be. Leaning back on her hands, she stared up at the dark sky.
The city lights obscured the stars and planets spinning so far above her head—all but the brightest of them, anyway: the North Star. Mars, maybe. She wished that by staring up at those bright points of light she might find her answer, know what she had to do.
Keep silent and wait? Tell all now and accept the consequences?
No answer came to her.
But then she lowered her gaze and stared out past her front walk at the street, where a long, black limousine was just then sailing to a stop at the curb. The door opened. Her uncle, in a designer suit of gray silk, leaned out.
“Shelly. Just the woman I wanted to see.”
Chapter Ten
Her chest so constricted, it hurt to breathe, Shelly rose from the step and went down the walk to the shining black car.
Drake gave her a nod. “I did get your message. And as it happens, I need to have a little talk with you, anyway.”
She glanced over her shoulder at the lights of the house. She couldn’t drive off with him and leave Max alone. And she didn’t want to ask him in, didn’t want to chance her son waking and coming out to see who was visiting his mom.
“My son’s in bed. I can’t go anywhere.”
“No problem. We can talk right here in the car.” He slid back along the seat, clearing a space for her.
No. She was not getting into that big car with him and his driver and the too-heavy scent of his expensive cologne.
“Sorry,” she said, “but I should stay close to the house. In case my son needs me….”
Drake scowled, but he did emerge from the car. It was then that she noticed he held a large manila envelope in his perfectly manicured hand.
“Let’s, um, sit on the porch.” She signaled the way up the walk.
He went ahead of her. At her front step, he turned and graced her with an insincere smile.
“Well, I believe congratulations are in order. You have more than exceeded my expectations.”
“What expectations? I don’t understand.”
“Come on, Shelly. You’re not stupid. I mean with Tom Holloway. He’s hardly a trusting type. But he trusts you, doesn’t he? Not even a month since you became his assistant and you’re spending your nights in his bed, leading the guy around by the nose.” She opened her mouth to protest, but Drake
only laughed and waved a hand. “Spare me the outrage. I’ve had you followed. I know everything. I’ve even got pictures of you going in and out of his apartment building—once at night. And that time during the day last week when you dropped in for a few hours of good, sweaty fun.”
Shelly told herself she would not let this man get to her. So what if he knew about her and Tom? She didn’t care if he knew. She didn’t care if the whole world knew. She was proud of her relationship with Tom.
She said coolly, “You talk as if you know Tom personally.”
“Maybe that’s because I do.”
“Excuse me?”
“What? He hasn’t mentioned me? I’m crushed. As a matter of fact, Tom and I go way back. He worked for me once. Sadly, that didn’t turn out well for him. Small world, no?”
Shelly held herself very still. She had the sense that, if she moved too quickly, she would shatter, just break into a thousand pieces and go flying off in all directions.
Tom had worked for Drake. And something had happened back then, something that had turned out bad for Tom. Oh, God. This was worse. Worse than she’d ever imagined.
She strove to think clearly, to get past her shock and learn whatever she could while she had the chance. Somehow, she forced a tight smile. “Small world. True. And too bad about Lil Todd, huh? I’m guessing she was getting good information for you—until she almost got caught. She’s lucky she got away in time.”
He shrugged. Elegantly. “Lil Todd? Hmm. I don’t believe I know a Lil Todd.” The gleam in his eyes told her otherwise.
“I think you’re lying, Uncle Drake.”
With his free hand, he brushed a nonexistent bit of lint off his beautifully cut sleeve. “Never call me a liar, Shelly. You don’t want to get on my bad side, believe me.”
What she wanted was to scream at him, to call him names a lot worse than liar. But somehow, she held it together. She remained calm. At least on the outside.
Quietly, she asked, “Why are you here?”
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