She thought of how passionate, how persuasive he’d always been about the center and what he called the worthiest mission of his life. For more than six months, he’d poured every ounce of energy into Warriors-4-Life.
Difficult to believe he had room for another agenda, impossible to think his Southern honor would allow it.
But as she remembered how he’d pushed her to share confidential information, another possibility slipped like a shadow into her mind. What if Julian was one of the victims in this, a victim of blackmail? Someone might have something on him, some secret so devastating they could use it to bend him to his or her will.
So devastating he didn’t care if it cost him the woman he had sworn to love for as long as he lived, the woman he wanted by his side as a life partner.
What if he’d been pressured into more than she guessed, if their relationship itself had been part of the sham? He hasn’t even taken the time from his work to pick out a ring, some small, suspicious part of her whispered, though when he’d blushed, admitting he had found it so hard to believe a “beautiful, intelligent young woman” would accept his proposal that he’d been afraid to buy “the hardware” first, she’d blurted that she cared nothing for diamonds, only for him.
Her stomach flipped, and she told herself she was wrong, that Julian genuinely loved her. His coercion had to be more recent, for him to turn so suddenly.
When someone knocked at her door, she took a quick glance at the mirror and arranged her face into what she hoped would come off as a bland expression.
Their psychiatric nurse, Cassidy, stood there, grinning from ear to ear as she handed Andrea a key ring. “The cutest guy just dropped these off for you a while back, but I was on my way to do meds. But anyway, this cowboy? He had the whole hat, boots and license-plate-sized belt buckle going for him. Scrumptious!” A tiny redhead with a million freckles, she sighed happily and twirled one of the bright red corkscrew ringlets that fell over her shoulders.
Though she was only a couple of years older than Cassidy’s twenty-nine, Andrea couldn’t help but smile. Had she ever been so young or lust so uncomplicated? “Oh, yes. I remember,” she said as she pocketed the keys. “They told me a couple of the hands would bring back my car.” If Cassidy had gotten a gander at either of the Rayford brothers, she would have probably choked on her own drool.
“A couple? Darn it all, I only saw the one.” Cassidy snapped her fingers before her smile abruptly faded. “Hey, what’s that on your forehead? And what’re you doing back so early anyway?”
“The short version is I bumped my head.”
“I want the whole story. Come on. Dish it, sister.”
Andrea looked down at the center’s live wire before shaking her head. “You’d be bored to tears, and anyway, I’m exhausted.”
Cassidy studied her, her eyes narrowing. “Something’s bothering you. Tell me.”
Though she hated to lie, Andrea pointed toward her forehead. “Kind of a bad headache. So let me rest now, and I’ll tell you about the cowboys I saw on the ranch later.”
Cassidy brightened instantly. “In excruciating detail?”
“So excruciating, you’ll be begging for mercy.”
“I’ll hold you to that, then. Feel better.”
Andrea was still smiling and shaking her head at her departure when she heard the harsh grinding of an ignition in the staff parking lot outside of her one small window. Frowning at the unpleasant sound, she peeked out from behind her curtain, curious about which staff member was murdering his or her ride.
But the SUV she saw whipping out onto the state highway was Julian’s Ford Explorer. Though she couldn’t see him through the tinted windows, he must be beyond upset to speed off like that. She’d never known him to be anything but a safe and cautious driver.
Could Julian be so furious thinking of Ian kissing her that he’d decided to go and confront him on the ranch? Almost instantly, she dismissed the thought. Julian wasn’t the type to fly off in a jealous rage. Besides, if he had blamed Ian, he surely wouldn’t have pressured her to go back into the proverbial lion’s den.
Nor did she believe that Julian was so upset about her confession that he’d roar off to the nearest bar to drown his disappointment. He might have a stiff glass of bourbon in the privacy of his own room, but he was far too disciplined—and too proud—to risk making a public spectacle of himself or damaging the center’s reputation.
More likely, she thought, he was desperate to speak to the person pressuring him to get inside information on Ian Rayford’s progress. Though why he couldn’t do it in his office, she had no idea—
His office.
She caught her lip between her teeth, thinking of how much time he spent there working on fund-raising campaigns, weighing the needs of the center’s many applicants and conducting a host of other administrative tasks. Which meant, she decided, that if someone were putting pressure on him, it was the most likely place to look for evidence of whatever secret he was keeping...
Evidence she could use to save him from his blackmailer—and maybe their relationship, as well. But is there really something left to save if you’re willing to spy on him? And do you really want a man you can’t be certain you can trust?
A part of her cringed, knowing those were the questions she would ask any client she was counseling. But it didn’t matter, not when the idea of getting answers had taken root so stubbornly and especially not when whatever Julian was keeping from her could be dangerous to Ian.
She slipped out of her room, avoiding her coworkers and the clients, who were sharing their evening meal in the dining room. Instead, she walked down to the building’s front corridor and knocked at the door to Julian’s office, as if she believed for half a second that he might be inside.
When there was no answer, as expected, she let herself in, grateful that he’d been too upset or distracted to lock the door. The office itself was moderately but comfortably decorated. Though Julian had chafed at the suggestion of putting up what he called “an ego wall,” she’d talked him into hanging his framed degrees and photos of him smiling with illustrious donors, supportive politicians and several of the center’s first residents to foster confidence from both the families of clients and potential contributors.
Now, though, those photographs came back to haunt her, staring down with seeming disapproval as she commandeered his leather chair and nudged the mouse of his desktop computer to wake it out of sleep mode. What came up, however, was a dialogue box asking for the administrator’s password. She cursed under her breath; she had her own log-in to the network, but it was both easily traceable and useless in gaining access to his private messages.
Forgetting the idea, she started digging through drawers as she recalled the many times she’d seen him scribbling notes while he was on the phone. Surely, he must have saved some. In the top drawer, sure enough, she found a stack, each message so innocuous that she burned with fresh guilt and thought of giving up.
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” she said. But it was Ian’s lean and handsome face that moved her to flip through pages of Julian’s calendar and then lift his desk blotter, where she plucked out a slip of paper.
Opening the folded square, she blinked and then gasped as she recognized her own passwords.
Her blood ran cold, chill bumps erupting as she realized he had not only her network and email log-in information, but passwords for the social network pages she used to keep up with old friends. He even had access to her online banking, a discovery that raised every fine hair behind her neck. She’d heard of keystroke-tracking software that could be secretly installed on a computer, but how on earth could he have gotten to her laptop? Somehow, through the network. He must have—
“What the devil do you think you’re doing?”
She nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of Julia
n’s voice behind her. Hands curling into fists, she leaped to her feet, heart slamming wildly and body shaking so hard that her teeth were chattering.
“Never mind that,” he said, eyeing the open drawers at the side of the desk. “The answer’s quite apparent. What I want to know is why you’re going through my things?”
Startled as she was, she could only say, “B-but I saw you race off.”
“I loaned my truck to Michael. His engine wouldn’t start, and he was late for what I take was a hot date with some local woman. So I ask you again, why are you spying on me?”
Swallowing back her panic, she mustered all her indignation and rattled the paper in her hand. “How dare you ask me that when it’s even more obvious you’ve been spying on me for far longer than I’ve ever— I can’t believe you. You’re a total stranger. A fraud.” Just the way her father had been.
At the sight of the paper, the color drained from Julian’s face, his accent intensifying as he said, “No, Andrea. I’m still the same—”
“Liar,” she said, flashing back to the terrible moment when she’d first accepted what her father was. Because this man, she understood now, had never been more to her than some sort of replacement for the love she’d lost as a child, though she would have sworn the wound had long since healed. “I can’t believe I was so stupid to fall for your line. To imagine that I loved you.”
“I still love you, Andrea. I do now and always will. But you have to understand...Marilyn destroyed me, so much that I swore I’d never again marry. So I had to be sure, dead sure, before I could possibly commit myself to—”
“Get some therapy, then. But don’t count on me standing by your side while you pull yourself together. I’m finished.”
“What do you mean, you’re finished? Please, Andrea—”
“I can’t be with you, not in a relationship. And not professionally, either. When I resigned from the youth center in San Diego, my supervisor left me an open invitation to come back if I ever—”
“You can’t leave. You can’t leave Warriors-4-Life. We need you. Your clients need you. There’s no one else your equal when it comes to—”
“Don’t throw them up in my face,” she said, yet her heart was breaking at the thought of all the vulnerable ex-soldiers she worked with, so many of them already rejected by family and friends, and the society who judged them “crazy” and turned their backs on them. And then there was Ian, caught up in a tortured no-man’s-land between pain and memory.
“What about your lover?” Julian asked bitterly. “Will you really abandon him, too?”
“First of all, Ian’s not my lover.” Glaring, she held up the paper with her passwords as a horrifying new thought occurred. “And secondly, tell me this wasn’t about him. All of it, from the start. That the rest isn’t some cover story you’ve come up with to get to my personal case notes on him and turn them over to who knows who?”
She frowned, realizing, unlike the other passwords, her case-note log-in was outdated, since she was in the habit of changing it every week or two. “Wait— You didn’t get it, did you? Not my notes.” A measure of relief washed over her, a warm wave beneath a shell of ice.
“I didn’t. But I’ll need that password, Andrea. The latest one, right now. You can write it on the—”
“Have you lost your mind? I could lose my license, for one thing, to say nothing of betraying the confidence of all my—”
“Not all of them. Just one. The password, Andrea, before you leave this office.”
She stared into his face, willing this to be a nightmare. What on earth would ever convince him to behave this way? “Just tell me, Julian, are you being coerced in some way? Blackmailed or threatened? Because if you are, I can help you. We’ll call the authorities together to report it.”
Standing as tall as he at six feet, she stared straight into his eyes. And saw the instant a wall slid down, cutting himself off from the possibility of redemption, of salvaging their relationship. She knew she’d never again fully trust him—or herself, around another older man. But Julian had the chance, at least, to save himself, the man whose passion and charisma had drawn her to this place...
A town only an hour’s distance from the ranch where Ian grew up.
She couldn’t let her mind travel down that path yet, couldn’t pause to wonder if her recruitment, maybe even the establishment of the center itself, could be part of some grand conspiracy.
“You have to explain,” she said. “Tell me why you’d be willing to forget every professional ethic you’ve ever stood for to look into a patient’s confidential records.”
“You talk to me about professional ethics—” a cold-steel hardness hammered through his words like nails driven through half-rotted wood “—when you were out there on that ranch swapping DNA with your own client—an admission that would cause you a world of trouble if I happened to report it to the state board.”
“That’s it. I’m out of here.” She tried to step around him, but he moved to block her way.
“The newest password, Andrea. If you care about your country in the least, you have to do this for me.”
“My country?” she echoed, a cold chill raising goose bumps. “Explain yourself right now.”
“You’ll have to trust me on this,” Julian told her. “And trust me when I tell you this is a dangerous game you’re playing.”
“Trust you, a man who’s lied to me and invaded my privacy on so many levels, over someone who’s sacrificed so much for his country? I saw those photos in his file, Julian. I saw what Ian’s captors did to him.” Tears sparkled along the lower rims of her eyes at the memory of angry, raised scars that crisscrossed his back and shoulders. Maybe they would fade with time or a plastic surgeon could diminish their appearance, but underneath, they reached to his soul, wounds to the psyche that would never go away.
“You know, Julian,” she went on, “I’ve wondered why you’ve held back all this time, why you’ve deliberately avoided getting physical.”
“I’ve told you why. The other employees here, the possibility of—”
“I thought maybe you were just an old-fashioned Savannah gentleman, a little out of step with the times. But now, I have to wonder, was there another reason you were afraid to get too close?”
She waited for him to argue with what she’d said, or at least to elaborate a little more. Except he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t, preferring instead to fall back on his most authoritative stare.
Well, she had never been one of the soldiers he commanded, so if he thought she’d accept patriotic duty as a reason without the slightest shred of proof, he’d better think again. Only inches from his face, she leveled her coldest gaze on him—partly to disguise the way her pulse was pounding. “Step out of the way, Julian, unless you want law enforcement tangled up in this, too.”
“In addition to refusing your duty to your country, you’d shut the center down? Stop all the good we’re doing?”
“I’ll do what I have to to get back to California—after I’ve warned Ian.” She owed him that much, at least, even if she feared it might inflame his paranoia. Except that Jessie’s words whispered in her memory: I guess it’s not technically paranoia if someone’s really out to get you. “I’m packing up my things and leaving, and if I lose my license to practice in Texas over this, so be it.”
She tried again to pass him, and Julian’s hand shot out to grip her forearm, hard enough that her attempts to jerk it back were useless.
Before she recovered from the shock, he spoke, his quiet words laden with an eerie menace. “If you cross me on this, I swear to you, you’ll never practice again anywhere. I have connections, you see. Connections that will make certain that wherever you tried to set up shop, the charges against you will—”
“The charges?” She struggled again to free her arm, but his grip only
tightened. “For a single kiss, shared with a confused man I was once engaged to? A man that you pressured me into seeing in the first place despite my strong reservations?”
“That’s all your story.” His gaze was as cold and level as the surface of a frozen lake. “But it won’t necessarily be mine. It’s counted as a sexual assault, you know, when a mental health professional has relations with a client. Especially one whose memory gaps would make him extremely vulnerable to—”
She shuddered, her skin crawling. She couldn’t imagine how such a charge, without physical evidence or a client’s testimony, would ever stick. But crazy as it was, even an accusation of sexual impropriety from someone as respected as Julian Ross would send her life spinning out of control. Using all her passwords, he could easily create incriminating emails, maybe even texts, too—at least enough to get an investigation started. If the media got wind of it, a female psychologist “raping” a nationally known male patient, she’d be the subject of a torrent of media and online commentary. And people would happily speculate that Ian, with his well-known memory issues, had simply forgotten what had really happened. Or enjoyed her attentions too much to complain.
“You’re insane,” she whispered, her tears leaking out the only warmth left in her.
“Insane?” His smile, too, was icy. “And here I thought you psychologists never used that word.”
You psychologists, he’d said, as if the science were completely alien to him and not a world he’d supposedly worked with on the military side for decades. Shaking her head, she asked, “Who are you? Because you’re certainly not my Julian.”
His lips thinned and his mouth tightened, as if the question pained him. “No, I’m not. That version’s gone now. Which means, my darling Andrea, that you’re going to have to find a way to survive this one—you and Captain Rayford both.”
Lone Star Survivor Page 10
