“I want to help you work on the tile project. Before we go to dinner. I don’t want you to waste this weekend.”
That made him laugh. “This weekend is the furthest thing from a waste I can imagine.”
“But you were going to get that done, and then I showed up. Torpedoed your real life.” This is way better than my real life.
But it reminded him that he had a real life, and he couldn’t pretend he didn’t. And if they were going to do something as official as have a first date, he had to make sure she knew what she was getting herself into.
“Get dressed,” he told her. “I’ve got something I need to tell you.”
* * *
He’d left her alone in the bathroom to get dressed. Who said, “I’ve got something to tell you,” and then fled the scene? That was bad manners.
In the empty, echoey bathroom, her feet cold against the ceramic floor tile, Nora’s vivid imagination had a field day.
I’m married. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a recovering ax murderer.
Maybe he had a few kids by a previous marriage. She could handle that.
But if it was really bad, she could still walk away, right? A midnight kiss, a few phone calls, some phone sex, plus the sex on the floor of his front hall and in the shower—surely she was not in so deep that she couldn’t extricate herself.
Surely.
She shook her head at herself. If it’s really bad, Nor, you need to walk away.
But all the other bits of her brain, the ones that should have said, Uh-huh! Yeah! We hear ya! We will!, were silent.
She stepped out of the master bath and into his bedroom, which occupied most of the upper floor of the house, under the eaves. Skylights everywhere, a low platform bed against the far wall. His quilt was black and white and the walls were gray, and—maybe it was the faint masculine scent of soap and aftershave—the room reminded her of men’s dress clothes. Of the excitement of seeing a finely dressed man appear before you when the last time you’d laid eyes on him he was a grubby guy in jeans.
Being with Miles felt that way all the time, she realized. The treat of his physical beauty, the way he was so assertively male. A lean grace to how he moved, how he spoke, how he treated her, his demeanor as pleasingly hard as male muscle.
Right now he was standing in the middle of his bedroom, wearing a pair of jeans low on his hips and nothing else, and that would be how she would fantasize about him tomorrow night when she was back in her bed by herself. Flat abs, the slanted ridge of muscle at his hips that dove under his waistband, the trail of curly dark hair that directed her gaze downward. And when she tore her focus from his crotch and looked back up, the planes of his pecs with their dusting of half curls. Her own nipples tightened, remembering how that hair had felt.
When her eyes finally met his, she found that he’d been watching her watch him, and her breath caught. But he shook his head, as if to say, Not now.
His face was so serious, it made her stomach hurt.
“I’m a suspect in a criminal investigation.”
Her vitals went nuts then, a flurry of manic heartbeat and tight chest and shallow breath, while her brain made fight-or-flight calculations. Door that way, large, well-muscled male between her and all exits. Oh, my God, what kind of self-destructive lunatic flies from Boston to Cleveland and enters a strange man’s house on her own?
“Nora, wait. Embezzlement. Embezzlement. I should have said that—”
“Oh, Jesus, don’t do that! I was thinking rape, assault, battery, serial murder of girls in shower stalls, where you scalp them and hang the scalps from your shower rod and—” Embezzlement. “Is embezzlement a felony?”
He pulled his shirt on, and his face popped out, grim.
“What they suspect me of is, yes. They suspect me of embezzling more than three hundred thousand dollars from the organization I work for.”
Three hundred thousand dollars. That was quite a hunk of change. Not murder or rape or assault, but a serious crime.
“Did you?”
She was surprised by how calm she felt, now that the painful adrenaline rush of a few moments ago had passed.
He’d looked away from her, into a far corner of the room, and there was a struggle behind his expression as he said, “No. But it’s messy. That’s why I’m taking the leave of absence. It wasn’t voluntary. I was suspended without pay. I had the best access, and the time frame of when I bought this house is suspicious. For a while my lawyer’s primary focus was on clearing me, but we’ve shifted to working on my defense, because he’s pretty sure I’m going to be charged, by the beginning of January at the latest. Unless they find another logical suspect.”
He said it matter-of-factly, but she saw in his eyes that this was the source of the sadness. There was nothing matter-of-fact in his feelings about the situation.
She felt a rising sense of outrage on his behalf.
You don’t know he didn’t do it.
—He said he didn’t.
You’re too trusting.
—Bugger off, Henry.
“You have a good lawyer, right?”
“An excellent lawyer, but … the way the money was taken, it’s called vendor fraud. We have a lot of programs, and we pay many vendors, and someone managed to create a large number of invented vendors. I’m the most logical someone.”
“But you didn’t do it.”
“Without knowing who did do it, it’s hard to clear suspicion from me. So it will probably go to trial.”
“But they’ll get you off, right?”
“It’s possible—my lawyer says probable, even, that they won’t get a conviction, if I’m lucky—but the point is, I would understand if this turned you off. I’m damaged goods. No job, the possibility of a criminal conviction, jail time. I’m low on funds. I’m going to look for other work, but my name’s been in the local papers, so I don’t know if I can even get it. Your friends would tell you to run the other way. Stat.”
Nora tried to imagine what Rachel would say. Back away from the possible criminal, Nora. Turn and run now. Don’t look back. Yeah, that was about right.
But she didn’t. Couldn’t. She’d known before he’d told her, as soon as she’d known there was something he wanted to tell her, that very little he could say would make her turn and run.
Probably Henry was right. She was too trusting. Too lacking in all the skills necessary for self-preservation.
In too deep, too fast.
In, for better or for worse.
She shook her head. “Well. That sucks. A lot. For you.”
“For you, too.”
“Does it?”
“ ‘Mom, I’m dating this guy. He’s charged with embezzling three hundred thousand dollars from an organization that feeds kids.’ ‘Oh, hon, that’s great!’ ”
“I’d say, ‘Mom, I’m dating this guy. He’s been falsely accused of embezzlement, but he’s innocent.’ ”
“Would you?”
“Of course I would.”
He closed his eyes, and Nora couldn’t figure out the look on his face for a moment, until she realized he was trying to keep some emotion in check.
“Miles?”
“Give me a minute.”
She did, and when he opened his eyes again, he said, “At the New Year’s party? I was on the rebound, too. Or something like that. My fiancée had just dumped me. Because she found out about the investigation.”
“Oh, God, Miles.”
“So … I might have … I didn’t … I wouldn’t have taken it for granted that you’d stand up for me, that’s all.”
His fiancée. The woman he’d been planning to marry. Someone who should have stood by him no matter what.
“At least you found that out about her,” she said.
“I thank God for that every day. Also, I wouldn’t have been single on New Year’s if she hadn’t left me. And I probably wouldn’t have been quite so—”
He stopped.
“I told you that yo
u were a fuck-you to Henry,” she said. “You can hardly say anything more obnoxious than that.”
“I was going to say that I was ‘hard up’ that night.”
She hooted with laughter. “Okay, yeah, that’s pretty bad.”
“I was,” he said. “I was a mess. Angry, sad, all kinds of bad. The worst. Probably capable of wreaking havoc.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“You danced with me.”
“Yes.”
“And kissed me.”
His eyes were dark on her face. Steady. “Yes. But then, if you’ll recall, I tried to beat some guy up for also kissing you.”
“True. Not smart. But kind of a turn-on.”
“We can be glad our exes were such idiots,” he said.
“Definitely.”
He stepped toward her then and kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her nose, rested his head against hers. They stood there, and she could feel the forces that drew them together, but quieter now, at bay for the moment. Later tonight she’d want him to tear her clothes off again and make love to her slowly, thrusting and withdrawing, his body over hers, his breath against her cheek when his mouth wasn’t on hers. But right now she wanted this. This time together, a sacred space in the madness, an acknowledgment of the magic.
* * *
“What made you want to be a sixth-grade science teacher?”
They sat at a cozy table in a corner of his favorite restaurant, the Farmhouse Table in Cleveland Heights. Two music venues and the art-house theater were right near there, and they could linger as long as they wanted at dinner and then decide what they were in the mood for next. And Miles had in the back of his head that maybe they wouldn’t be in the mood to go out after. Maybe they’d be in the mood to go back to his place. That was what he was already in the mood to do, because he’d spotted a scrap of royal-blue satin on top of the pile of clothes she carried into the bathroom to change for dinner. He’d bet it was somewhere on her person. He bet if he peeled off her pretty flowered top and lifted her long brown skirt, he’d find it.
She paused with her fork still in the papardelle-and-mushroom pasta she’d been demolishing. “I started out wanting to be a doctor. I was pre-med in college, took a ton of science classes. And then someone very wisely suggested I spend a day shadowing a doctor. So I did. And I stood there, watching what she did, thinking, oh, God, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to take people’s lives in my hands like that. Not every day. Not ever, actually.”
She was so animated when she talked, hands moving, her skin glowing, cheeks pink, her eyes bright with excitement. He thought of the conversation he’d had with her on the phone, the urgency of the desire she’d called up in him. Even without visual contact, all her vivacity had found its way across the phone line and under his skin. That was her power over him.
“And then I thought, wait, if this is the best way to understand what a job is like, I should shadow some other people. I asked everyone I knew, my parents’ friends and stuff, if I could go to work with them. I went to work with, like, ten different people, and it all left me cold. Then I went to work with a woman who had been my babysitter when I was a little kid. She was a seventh-grade science teacher. And, honestly, she wasn’t that good at it. I kept thinking, Wait! I have a better way to explain that! I wanted to butt in so bad it hurt to shut up. So I knew.”
He’d like to watch her teach sometime. Maybe he’d go visit her in Boston soon, and he’d ask if he could see her in action.
If there was no criminal charge against him. That would probably put a damper on his ability to spend time inside a middle school.
When she’d asked him if he’d embezzled the money, every little thing inside him ground to a halt. It had become so quiet in his own head that for the first time in months he’d been able to hear something else. His heart. He wanted, with a kind of fervor he couldn’t understand, to tell her everything. How terrible it was to be accused, how terrible it was to be doubted, how quietly desperate it felt, knowing no one believed he was innocent.
It was connected somehow to the moments he’d first seen her, at the party. To the way she’d been then: So open, so completely in the world. So willing to pull everyone else in with her. If only he could pour everything out to her, he could be there, too. With her.
But when he had opened his mouth, none of that came out. Only the barest facts, the simplest delineations of what you could read in a newspaper. His assertion of his own innocence had felt like way too little, way less than he needed her to know. Not an invitation into the world, just a reminder that he was in a place no one else could live in with him.
“Miles?”
“Sorry.”
“You went somewhere.”
“I was thinking about—” But he didn’t want to return them to the darker topic, didn’t want to suffocate her ebullience. Didn’t want to subdue the sparkle that was all over her skin, something he could lick off later and hope would get into his own blood. “You’re lucky you had someone to tell you to do the shadowing. I don’t think enough people think to do that.”
“They don’t,” she agreed. “How’d you figure out what you wanted to do?”
“I was in I-banking after college. Not because it was the right thing for me particularly, but I was graduating and I didn’t know what I wanted to do and it was there. They came right on campus to recruit us, and it was a solution to not knowing, so I did it. And I turned out to have a gift for parting people from their money—”
He heard the words coming out, felt them like a slug in the gut. He’d said that phrase a hundred times, probably a thousand times, told the same story to countless people, but for the first time, it was ugly.
“Shh,” she said. She took his hand across the table.
The warmth of her hand, the warmth in her eyes, helped steady his breathing. Again he felt the urge, the need, to pour himself out to her. I’m innocent! It would be a kind of anguished cry, an insistence bigger than the words. I’m innocent, and I need you and everyone in the whole world to know and see.…
Help me. Help me tell them.
And maybe she would. If there was anyone in the world who would, it was Nora.
“It’s fine. I know what you meant. Go on.”
Her voice, so quiet and even. Free of judgment. She wasn’t disturbed by his situation, but she might be turned off by his desperation.
And he’d been stoic so long, he wasn’t sure what would happen if he stopped. He’d made a science out of the stoicism, knew exactly how to wrap his arms around all the pieces and hold them together. The thing inside him—it had the feel of a genie in a corked bottle, all unintended consequences and wishes for things you could only approach, could never have. Weren’t fairy tales full of those kinds of stories? I want her to know what I’m thinking. Feeling. Only no one did, really. No one wanted to be that kind of naked and exposed.
He swallowed it—the bigness of what he desperately wanted to say—and went on with his story, more careful this time to listen to his own words. He wouldn’t say something like that again. Something that might make her doubt him. I turned out to have a gift for parting people from their money. Jesus.
“It didn’t feel like the right thing for me to be doing, taking people’s money and using it to grow this big business, this too-big-to-fail bank. I didn’t hate it—I loved the thrill of it, convincing people to take my word for where their money would work hardest for them. But I had this sense that the ends didn’t justify the means. And then one of my customers started asking me about investing in some ‘do-good’ companies and nonprofits and so on, and things started to take shape in my mind. I went back to school, got a nonprofit management degree, started my organization, and the rest is more or less history.”
“So it didn’t start with some huge philanthropic vision. You kind of found the philanthropy.”
“It found me.”
“You love it?”
“Yeah.”
/>
“And you’re good at it?”
He could only nod. Several months before the investigation had opened, his organization had appeared on a national list of the best-run charitable organizations. He remembered thinking, This is the beginning. Everything good from here on out. His alma mater, Yale, had contacted him about an interview for the alumni magazine, a short feature on his organization and him. After news had broken about the investigation, the magazine editor had called him back to put the project “on hold.”
Even if he was acquitted, the Internet would never be sponged free of links between his name and the crime. The stain would follow him, and it would corrupt Nora, too, if she stayed in his life. She wouldn’t lose her job, but she might have trouble finding subsequent ones, because there would be guilt-by-association issues. Especially if they combined their finances. If they—
Had he been about to let himself think that? If they got married.
Fifteen minutes at the party plus four phone calls plus one day was still only a day of knowing her. It was just the way she’d occupied his mind for months, just the wanting, that made it feel like longer.
The waitress came and cleared their plates. “Can I leave dessert menus with you?”
He raised an eyebrow at Nora, and she nodded vehemently. He laughed, and the cloud lifted for a moment. Over and over she made him feel as if things were somehow, improbably, going to be okay, the kind of okay her whole world seemed to be made of.
He wanted to believe in it. He desperately did.
“Miles?” she asked, when the waitress was gone.
“Yeah?”
“Can we make another date? Like, for another weekend? You could come to Boston.”
“Of course,” he said.
“And if money’s an issue … You said—”
“We’ll make it work.”
But, despite his certainty, his heart beat against his ribs like something trying to escape, and he wanted to hold his hands there to keep it where it belonged. So many things he didn’t know: where the money would come from, how they would handle the thousand miles between them, how she would react if he was charged with embezzlement, if the case went to trial, if he was found guilty, if he went to jail…
Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance Page 32
