His motive shouldn’t matter, but it does. She couldn’t help herself. Ten years had passed since she left Jack behind, but she still couldn’t stand the thought that he would sell her out. He’d asked her to trust him, and she hadn’t been able to. But he was no Bill.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she answered finally. “But, whatever it is, I’ll make sure you’re the first to know.”
He reached his hand across the table.
“You’ve got a deal.”
# # #
“Lance is about to bust a blood vessel.”
Jack pushed past Maren without waiting for an invitation and stepped into the middle of her small living room. The smell of his aftershave followed him, a sharp tang of leather and musk, and she resisted the urge to breathe the scent deep into her lungs. His crisp, white button-up shirt and dark slacks were all business, and she could imagine the tie that might have hung around his neck until he slid into the driver’s seat. If there had been one, though, it was long gone. The solid line of his throat peeked from behind his unbuttoned collar and his tanned, muscular arms stretched from beneath rolled-up sleeves.
Mercy. She swallowed past a dry throat and turned to close the door. As a teenager, the sight of him had melted her into a puddle. As an adult, he was positively lethal.
Calm down. He’s just a guy. There are millions of them.
She forced her attention away from what he smelled like and back to what he’d said. Something about Lance.
Was that who he paid off?
Stop it. Ron had been careful to tell her he was still gathering evidence—he heard and he guessed. His accusations had been little more than unconfirmed gossip.
But still.
“Maren?”
She turned back to face him. “Why?”
He eased himself onto the couch, leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Her heart contracted. “Because we haven’t put a shovel in the ground yet. The man’s a politician. Anyone that works for a small-town government ought to have endless patience, but he has none.”
Suspicion tickled the back of her mind again, and she shoved it aside. “Nothing has changed, Jack. I don’t know what you want me to do.”
He opened amused eyes and stared up at her. “You do know how much trouble you’re causing, right?”
Me? From where she stood, Jack had caused all the trouble. But he had something in his head, and she couldn’t help but be curious. All right. I’ll play along. She dropped into her grandfather’s recliner.
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“I realize that.” He stared back at her, his expression suddenly unreadable. “I have a dozen other projects that need my attention, but here I am.”
A dozen other projects. Based on what she’d seen, a dozen was a conservative estimate. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Okay.”
“You had to realize I was going to do some research.” She stopped. In truth, she’d backchecked him hard. Laura May had told her to dig, and Maren had used every resource she had to do just that. Guilt settled on her shoulders. What would he think if he knew how much she’d plundered through his life?
“I assumed you would.”
You have no idea. “I mean on your company—your work. I…” She shifted her gaze away. “I’ve been checking out your business.”
His brows dropped. “All right.”
“You’ve got developments all over the place. Miami. Maine. Arizona. Right?”
“Yes.”
She made herself hold his gaze, but those steady eyes unnerved her. She bit her lip. “And Shepherdsville.” When she’d been preparing for the Board’s meeting, she’d assumed he had chosen to get involved for the chance to get back at her. After her discussion with Ron, though, and considering Jack’s efforts to make a deal with her, she wasn’t so sure anymore. “Why? I mean, you have so many big things happening. Why this?”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “That’s three questions.”
“Two,” she corrected him. “The last one was a repeat. And I didn’t know I had a limit.”
He chuckled. “Would it matter if you did?”
“I suppose not.”
“No, it wouldn’t.” He shrugged. “I grew up here. Everyone trusts me. And the town is dying. People need a reason to stay here.”
A reason to stay. Maren nodded. She looked over his shoulder and out the window, where the empty field across the road stretched to a thick line of pine trees. Once, cows had grazed there and the back corner of the field had been home to row after row of corn, peas, and okra.
Not anymore. Grandpa was gone. Hank was ill. And Maren would never be able to run a farm on her own, even if she wanted to. Hank, or probably Jack, had kept the grounds trimmed and neat, but the life that used to bustle here was long gone. Even with her grandparents living in this house, Maren had no reason to stay. Now that they were gone, she had nothing to keep her here but this house.
Then why are you fighting?
Because this was the only home she had.
After a minute, she glanced back at Jack. He studied her with speculative eyes. “How long has it been since you came home?”
The deep rumble of his voice in the silence that had fallen jolted her out of her thoughts. “Five years. And five and a half years. Once for each funeral.”
He frowned. “They died the same year?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Grandpa was lost without her. I tried to talk him into coming to live with me, but he wouldn’t. I think he just gave up.”
Hot tears stung her eyes and guilt dug like sharp nails into her stomach. The last time she had seen Grandpa was at her grandmother’s funeral. She had missed out on the last few months of her grandfather’s life because she had been too overwhelmed with school to come home. She had promised him, and herself, that she would be home for Christmas, like always. By then, it had been too late.
“They’d been married a long time.”
He watched her carefully, and she shifted under the weight of those intense, green eyes. What is he thinking? “What are you getting at?”
He frowned, then scooted down the couch until he sat on the end, right next to her chair. She caught another whiff of musk, and she swallowed hard. “Maren, you’re not the only one who wanted out of here. The town is shrinking because people have left looking for something Shepherdsville doesn’t have. I’m trying to change that. But it doesn’t matter what I do. It won’t change how you felt. You didn’t leave because you were running to something. You were running away.”
“No, I—”
“Yes, you were,” he cut her off. “From the town. From me. You never wanted to be here in the first place. I guess I don’t blame you for that.” He started, and an odd expression rippled across his face.
He always blamed me for it. That expression confirmed it.
He shook his head. “I’m sorry about your grandparents. I know how much you loved them. But they’re gone now.”
She let out a soft sigh and blinked the mist from her eyes. True. She let her gaze roam around the room. She had stood in this room after Grandpa’s funeral, completely and utterly alone. That had been the worst night of her life—worse, even, than losing her mother. At least when her mother died, there had still been her grandparents. When she buried Grandpa, she had no one left at all. “I know.”
His fingers were warm on her cheek, stroking her skin, threading into her hair. Her breath caught in her throat.
And then his lips were on hers, warm and gentle as they caressed her. Her heart rolled over in her chest, then picked up speed. One of her hands gripped her chair and the other slid over the firm, rough skin of his arm and pulled it toward her. His hand settled against her waist and heat flooded her chest and poured like a river down into her stomach.
She sighed against his lips. Was this what it had been like before?
Yes.
And no. Jack had always bowled her over just by standing near her. No
w, though, an ache caused by a decade away from him let loose, and the tension melted away into a feeling like…
Coming home.
Maren flinched, then pulled as far back as the chair would allow.
“Maren . . .” He sat back and watched her with wary eyes.
Well, that’s no surprise. “Sorry.”
He shook his head, then pushed himself to his feet. “No, I shouldn’t have …” He pressed his hand to his neck and rubbed, a tired gesture that made Maren want to brush his hand aside and take over. “Why did you come back?”
She dropped her eyes. “I told you. I wanted to be near them.”
“But why?”
“I don’t—”
“I know.” He let out an exasperated sigh. “You don’t want to talk about it. How can you expect anyone to listen when you won’t give us a reason to? Why do you want to turn everyone’s life upside down just so you can go home and forget about it again?”
She’d turned his life upside down? What about her? If Ron was right, Jack had sold her out for political gain.
“Jack, it’s my house. My dad left before I even knew him. My mom died when I was thirteen. And now, my grandparents are gone, too. This house has always been here for me, though. Is it so wrong for me to want to hang on to it?”
He paused. “Believe it or not, I don’t want to be the one to take the house from you.”
Yeah, right.
She frowned up at him. “Then why are you here?”
“Because...” He shook his head. “Lance brought in the county attorney.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Is that supposed to worry me? You realize what I do for a living, right?”
“They’re calling a special meeting to push the vote up to the end of next week.”
Next week? Panic squeezed her heart in her chest. “They can’t do that.”
“They can,” he said. “Lance was pretty upset that you wouldn’t let the appraisers finish the job. He said he wants you on defense. If you want him to back off, you’ve got to give us something.”
Ah, crap. She understood what Lance meant. Right now, Lance had to fight against her to start work. Once he had the right to take over, she’d have to fight to make him stop. He wanted to shift the status quo in his own favor.
You’ve got to give us something.
Like what? She didn’t want to admit her stupidity to Jack—or Lance, for that matter. She’d come here to hide from it, not broadcast it to the whole county. Would they lighten up if they knew the predicament she was in?
Of course not. Jack had bought his way into the deal on political promises, and Lance had to be wrapped up in that somehow. Her situation wouldn’t change their minds.
Still, Jack was here. He had come to warn her about Lance’s plan, instead of letting her get trapped by it. Jack might be trying to help. Had Ron been wrong about him? She ought to give him a chance to explain.
Are you nuts? People who do business like that don’t admit to it. Look at Bill. She could have caught him in the act, and he wouldn’t have admitted anything.
No. Ron had to be right. Jack would never help her. But he had warned her. He might be worried about a lengthy court battle or he might be playing the good cop, but for whatever reason, he had come.
Give us something.
“I messed up,” she finally said.
“How?”
Heat crept into her cheeks. Am I really going to talk about my fiancé with my ex-boyfriend? Awkward. Her eyes flickered to a group of pictures on the wall. Grandma, Grandpa, Mom and a much younger version of herself all stared back at her. She hardly noticed them.
“I started working for Bill right out of law school. He’d been practicing for seven years, and I was as green as spring grass. He taught me everything I know, and I fell for him.” She flashed him a nervous smile. “At least I thought I did. We got engaged. Six months later, he was gone, along with nine hundred thousand dollars from our law firm’s bank account.”
Jack’s face darkened. “He stole it?”
She dropped her eyes. “Yes. I’m not sure what happened. After he left, I pieced a lot of information together by reading between the lines when I was being interrogated by the FBI.”
“Interrogated?” His eyes skewered her, and she forced herself not to shift under his gaze.
“Yeah.” She swallowed a wave of hot shame. “Bill was a corporate attorney who handled a lot of multi-million-dollar companies. He was a big deal.”
He twirled his finger in a tight circle. “Go on.”
She couldn’t look up at him. She clenched her fingers into fists and stared resolutely off to the side. “So he held a lot of money for them. As it turned out, some of it was legit and some…not so much.”
“Money laundering?”
She flinched at the harsh tone in his voice. “I think so. No one would tell me, since I was a suspect, but that’s what I gathered.”
Jack’s expression turned thunderous, and his jaw clamped so tight she could see a muscle ticking in his neck, but he kept quiet.
“I think something went wrong, but I haven’t been able to figure out what,” she said. “He grabbed the money and bolted, and when he did, he used me to cover his tracks.”
His eyes iced over. Oh, jeez. Of all the reactions he could have had, she hadn’t expected him to believe she was guilty. “Unbelievable.”
She bit down on an urge to beg him to believe her. He didn’t trust her any more than she trusted him, and that was before she’d told him what went wrong.
Instead, she gulped and forced herself to continue. “I was stupid, Jack, but I’m not a criminal. The feds let me go. My firm, though, was another story. They suspended me until they could sort it all out. So I lost my job, which meant I lost my apartment. And my fiancé.” She fixed her eyes on a dark spot on the carpet. “So I did the same thing I did when I lost mom.”
“You came home.”
“I came home.”
# # #
Holy crap. Jack tried to make his brain absorb Maren’s predicament, but he couldn’t. His heartbeat thumped in his temple and guilt and anger warred with each other in his head. For the second time in her life, she had come here because she literally had nowhere else to go. And he would be the one to take her last refuge away from her.
Of course, she’d ended up in this mess because she’d agreed to marry a guy who’d used her, then left her to take the blame for his crimes. Jack couldn’t bring himself to feel too sorry for her. She hadn’t wanted Jack because he wanted to live his life in southern Alabama, but she’d been fine with a man who’d committed a felony and tried to drag her down with him.
That guy was a better bet than me? Bitterness lodged in his throat. He folded his arms over his chest.
“Okay. So what now?”
“What now?” She frowned up at him. “That’s it. There’s nothing I can do until my firm lets me come back.”
He gritted his teeth. Exactly what he’d thought. Why should he feel guilty? Maren wanted to throw his life, and the entire county’s wellbeing, into a tailspin because she needed a hotel while she sorted out her life.
That’s not entirely fair. Her mother had died in a car accident in Boston when Maren was barely thirteen. She’d come here, a city girl who didn’t understand how to exist in a small country town, and her grandparents had taught her how to start over. In high school, he’d been so busy being angry with her for not wanting to stay with him that he hadn’t considered the role her trauma had to have played. He’d taken her desire to leave personally and had lashed out at her for it. Maybe he shouldn’t have. He’d only realized a few minutes ago what bad memories Shepherdsville must hold for her. For the first time, he truly understood why she didn’t want to be here.
Yet she had come back. That’s what her grandparents had shown her to do when life threw her a curveball. She hadn’t come back to spite him or anyone else.
He blew out a long breath. “When the feds are done with you, yo
ur firm will take you back,” he continued after a moment. He frowned. “I’m little surprised the cops let you leave town, actually.”
“Why?” She glared back at him. “I told you. I’m innocent.”
“You were in bed with a criminal.” He winced and forced his voice to stay even and steady, even while an image of Maren entwined with an unknown man skittered through his mind. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know what you meant.”
“Right. So they might have thought you would lead them to your fiancé—”
“Ex-fiancé,” she cut him off. “I wish I could have told him where to put that ring.”
The venom in her voice drew a smile from him. She didn’t want the guy back, at least. “You could always go after him with that pellet gun full of rock salt.”
Maren laughed, a light, musical sound that hit him like a punch in the gut. “I wish I could. Bill is one of those prim and proper society guys. He wouldn’t know how to handle that.”
Prim and proper? He couldn’t imagine Maren, who had spent more summer days in cutoff shorts and bare feet than he could count, on the arm of some guy who lifted his pinky as he drank tea from a china cup. “Doesn’t sound like your type,” he grumbled.
“Oh?” She raised an eyebrow. “I have a type?”
Oops. How, exactly, had he ended up here? He had come to reason with her before Lance pushed the whole thing over the cliff, and, instead, he had been backed into discussing Maren’s love life. With another guy. A “prim and proper” criminal.
Thanks again, dad.
“I guess not,” he answered. “But if you did, it wouldn’t be a guy in an orange jumpsuit.”
The smile faded from her eyes. “Yeah.” She gave her head a rough shake. “But you asked why I’m here. Now, you know. I won’t let you and Lance take my house. I can’t.”
Dang. She had to understand this didn’t change anything. It couldn’t. But how could he slap her in the face with a “too bad” after everything she’d just told him? He couldn’t be that kind of guy, no matter who was sitting in that recliner. “You also can’t ignore what’s going on back in Seattle.”
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