Sisters and Secrets

by Jennifer Ryan

  “Louise, when did Sierra call for an appointment?”

  “This morning. You had a cancellation. She said she’s a friend of yours, so I made the appointment.”

  “Did she say why she wanted to meet with me?”

  The object of his inquiry walked in the door.

  “Hey,” Sierra said, her eyes darting between him and Louise, who couldn’t stop looking from him to Sierra like she could see the sparks flying between them.

  “I hear you need a lawyer.”

  Sierra bit her lip, glanced at Louise, then back at him. “Um. Not really, but kinda.”

  That made him nervous. If she wasn’t in need of a lawyer . . . Well, he hoped she wasn’t here to break up with him.

  Then again, who made an appointment to do that?

  “Mason?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you don’t want to help me . . .”

  “Of course I want to help you.” A strange sense of ease went through him. She wanted help. She didn’t want to break up. And she wasn’t here because she’d found out what he suspected but never told her. “Come into my office and tell me what you need.”

  Louise’s gaze bounced from him to Sierra and back. She gave him a knowing look. “I’ll hold all your calls.”

  He waited for Sierra to pass before closing the door on Louise’s inquisitive gaze. She’d grill him later. She knew him well enough to know that Sierra, a friend, wasn’t here about a divorce.

  Normally he’d greet Sierra with a kiss on the cheek or a brush of his hand on her arm in front of the boys. He’d like to kiss her now, the way he did when the boys were distracted and he stole one from her. But she didn’t take a seat or look like she came here to make out in his office for an hour. Pity.

  Sierra simply stood in front of his desk and stared at him, looking unsure and nervous as hell.

  “Do you want to do this standing up or sitting down?” Okay, that sounded dirty even to him.

  Sierra raised an eyebrow and dropped into one of the chairs.

  He went with her prompt and took a seat behind his desk, keeping this professional. She’d made the appointment. He’d give her his full attention.

  Sierra stared at him for a good long moment, then pulled a stack of envelopes from her purse along with a slip of folded paper. She set it on the desk, opened it, and slid the check toward him. “Your assistant said a five-hundred-dollar retainer would do.”

  He knew she was still short on ready cash, so the five hundred had to be a stretch for her to come up with for . . . whatever it was she wanted him to do for her. Maybe she borrowed it from her mom or Amy.

  “I don’t want your money, Sierra. I’m happy to help you with whatever you need.”

  “If I pay you, that means you’re my attorney and you can’t say anything to anyone about what I’m about to tell you.”

  That confused him. Didn’t she trust him? “Anything you say to me is between you and me. You don’t need to pay for my silence. You just have to ask.”

  “You’re mad.”

  A little bit. “I thought I made it clear what I wanted with you, and it’s not to be your lawyer.”

  She deflated in the chair, her shoulders sagging and all the air going out of her lungs in a loud sigh. “So you won’t help me.”

  “Of course I’ll help you. I just don’t get why you didn’t just ask me about this the half-dozen times you’ve seen me over the last week instead of making an appointment.”

  Sierra stood and paced back and forth. “I didn’t want you to think I was taking advantage of our friendship.”

  “I hope we are moving into a deeper kind of friendship where you trust me and know that I’d do anything for you.”

  She stopped in her tracks and stared at him, looking for something, then deciding she saw whatever it was she needed to see to sit back down and tell him what she needed. “This is awkward. You and I . . . We’re seeing each other now. I don’t want to screw that up.”

  “Hundreds of people have sat where you are ready to end relationships because they couldn’t trust the other person enough to have a civil conversation about what they needed and wanted from the other person. So, Sierra, what do you need from me?”

  She sucked in a breath. “I need your help to find out if David was having an affair or in some kind of trouble that cost him, us, fifty thousand dollars.”

  He thought she needed help navigating the insurance and red tape on her property up in Napa. He never thought this had anything to do with David.

  No wonder she’d been apprehensive to bring it up to him.

  Mason fell back in his seat and tried to get his thoughts together and figure out a way to navigate this. He started with the simple question. “Why do you think he was having an affair?”

  Sierra pulled some papers out of one of the envelopes and slid them across the desk. “He took out a fifty-thousand-dollar loan nearly two years ago. For what, I have no idea. I didn’t know anything about it until after his death and the bank contacted me about delinquent payments I knew nothing about. He had the bills sent to his office, not the house. Once the bank contacted me, I went through the boxes his assistant had packed up and delivered to the house after his death.”

  “Okay. He took out a loan you didn’t know about. Did he use it to pay off debts the two of you accrued during the marriage?”

  “Of course I checked that first.” Annoyance replaced her earlier trepidation.

  “I’m just trying to cover all the bases.” He didn’t want to dig into their marriage, but she’d come to him for help. This was a can of worms he hoped to avoid. “Did you receive any statements for an account you didn’t know about?”

  “No. That’s what I need you to help me find out. If this money, or even part of it, is sitting in some other account that I can access, I need to find it. Then I can pay off the loan—or at least some of it with what’s left.” She raked her fingers through her hair, distress and despair in her eyes. “I have been struggling the last year to pay this and the other bills on my own.” Tears glistened in her eyes.

  David had left her a mess and a mountain of bills.

  “Didn’t he have life insurance?”

  She rolled her eyes. “By the time I paid off the funeral costs and credit card debt we had, hoping to make the monthly expenses more reasonable on just my salary, I only had a small amount left to put into school accounts for the boys. My plan was to use part of the survivors’ benefits money from David’s Social Security to pay bills and transfer what’s left into their college funds. Then I got hit with this.” She tapped her finger on the loan notice. “The job you got me is a huge help. I make more, so I can afford to pay this, but it’s an expense and I have nothing to show for it.”

  Mason suspected he knew where the money went, but he didn’t want to be right. “Did you find any evidence of an affair?”

  “His phone is locked. His fingerprint is required to get into it. Because the phone he used was provided by his company, I don’t have the bills for it, so I can’t see who he called or texted.”

  Smart, hiding his conversations and texts from his wife.

  Bastard.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t find any notes or unexplained receipts among his things.”

  “No. I have no hard evidence that he was having an affair. It makes me sick to think that he hid something like this so well that I didn’t even notice. But I think about the two years leading up to his death and I think about how everything had become so stale and routine. As a family, everything seemed fine, but between David and me . . . We lost something along the way.”

  “You suspect he pulled away because he had someone else.” Mason’s stomach knotted. The bastard didn’t see what he had right in front of him, a beautiful, kind, loving woman.

  “I think we drifted so far apart that I didn’t see or suspect he was seeing someone else. Like I said, everything seemed fine between us. I knew we needed to spend more time together as a couple, but wor
k and kids took over our lives. We didn’t have big, blow-up fights. He mentioned just as much as I did that we needed to get away, just the two of us, but we never did. I don’t know how to explain it, except that we were living our lives and it seemed both of us were thinking that as the boys got older we’d have more time for each other.

  “I did feel like there were days and weeks where he was preoccupied with something he didn’t want to talk about. He went on more business trips the months leading up to his death. The night of the accident, he was driving down south to meet with clients the next day.”

  Are you sure?

  Mason had his doubts.

  She answered his unspoken question. “At least, I think that’s where he was going. I was so lost in my grief and taking care of the boys right afterward, making sure they were okay, I never asked his boss about it. I just went through the motions each day, trying to get whatever needed to be done, done.”

  Mason held his hand out to her across the desk. She laid her hand in his and he squeezed to let her know he was there. “You know none of this is your fault, right?”

  “I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe I just didn’t want to know.”

  “A lot of my clients feel that exact same way. Women and men. They aren’t exactly happy in their marriages but there isn’t enough strife to end it. There’s still hope that they’ll find their way back to how they felt when they got together and married. They let things slide. They make excuses, like staying together for the kids. They don’t open up about how they’re feeling or what they want to change. Sometimes things just fizzle out and they end up here. Other times, someone finds what they need with someone else and they still end up here.”

  “Is that why you never married?”

  “I came close. Once.” But his ex felt like he’d been holding out on her. Maybe he had been, because he’d been carrying a torch for the woman in front of him for a long time. And the engagement with his ex ended right after he saw Sierra at her stepfather’s funeral.

  Sierra showing up here and telling him about this situation made him feel guilty for keeping his secret, even though he didn’t know if what he saw was what he thought he saw.

  “Mason?”

  Jarred out of his thoughts, he met Sierra’s inquisitive eyes. “Yeah? What?”

  “Do you think David was having an affair?”

  “I’m not sure. But I have an investigator who can look into it. He can try to track the money.” But if the money led where Mason suspected, he didn’t know what he’d tell Sierra. The last thing he wanted to do was break her heart. Or lose her because he’d kept quiet about what he suspected.

  Love blinds us all to people’s faults. When love fades, sometimes those flaws are all too clear.

  He wished for Sierra’s sake that she could let David rest in peace with a clear heart.

  Instead, she’d been left with suspicions and come to him to clear them up. Mason didn’t know if he could do that for her without wrecking the new, fragile feelings developing between them.

  He should tell her what he suspected, but he didn’t want to accuse a dead man of something he couldn’t prove. David wasn’t here to speak for himself. And Sierra would only have Mason to take out her feelings of betrayal on, whether he was right or wrong.

  “Thank you, Mason. This means so much to me. I’ve been sitting with this all alone for a long time. I wanted answers, I just wasn’t sure how to get them. If your investigator can find anything out for me, I’ll be so grateful.”

  Mason suspected grateful was the last thing she’d be.

  “I’d appreciate it if you kept this between us. My mom knows, but I don’t want my sisters to find out. David was your friend. I’m sure you’re not thrilled to be investigating him. But I need to know the truth.”

  How did he get himself into this pickle?

  Because he couldn’t say no to the woman sitting across from him. Because he wanted her to be happy. Because he’d let her get away once and wouldn’t let that happen again.

  Investigating David and the money meant it might be that much harder to convince Sierra how much he cared.

  “David and I knew each other a long time ago. I know he wasn’t perfect. He could be competitive.” And go after the girl Mason liked just to see who got her. He had a feeling David learned that winning didn’t mean you got what you wanted and he went looking for someone else without thinking about the devastation he’d leave in his wake. “Maybe all this is, is some kind of deal he made that went south and he had to pay back the money or something.”

  Sierra dismissed that with a shake of her head. “I hoped so, too. But I’ve come to terms with the fact that I would have found some evidence of that in his papers. I looked for some business proposal or investment. I didn’t find anything.” She stared at their joined hands. “I think my intuition was telling me he had someone else and I just didn’t listen to it.”

  “You’d be surprised how many wives say that same thing. You should listen to that gut instinct. I’ve found based on the number of women who come in here, it’s usually right.”

  “Well, my gut’s telling me you’re not happy about doing this for me.”

  He tried to smile but didn’t quite pull it off to ease her mind. “I’m afraid that uncovering the truth will only hurt you and that’s the last thing I want to do.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t shoot the messenger.”

  He was afraid she wouldn’t be able to keep that promise.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sierra stood just as the office door opened. Mason walked in looking fine in a navy suit, white shirt, and blue-and-purple tie. The color made his hair appear even more golden, his eyes a brighter blue. He looked good and had to know it. Every woman still left in the office noticed as they tracked his progress across the entry and through the cubicles to her desk.

  Mason stopped in front of her, his eyes diving down her new lilac-colored dress to her sparkly black strappy heels, then coming up to meet her gaze. “That dress is killer. You’re gorgeous.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing about you.” That got her a huge smile from him. She was glad for it because things had been casual and guarded between them since she appeared in his office three days ago asking for his help with her David problem.

  Mason stepped closer, the woodsy smell of him drawing her in. “I’m so glad we’re finally doing our dinner date. I love the boys, but I’ve wanted you all to myself for a while now.”

  “I feel the same way. Amy has the kids. They’re having a sleepover with their cousins.”

  Mason leaned in close. “Are we having a sleepover tonight, too?”

  She’d thought about it all day, which meant thoughts of him distracted her from doing anything really productive. “If you play your cards right.” She was teasing, but she’d planned for this, hoping it would happen sooner rather than later.

  “Well, then I’ll do my best to impress you with some good food, better wine, and charming conversation.”

  “All of that sounds amazing, but really all I want to do is spend some time alone with you.” It had been so long since she’d dressed up and took the time to make herself feel pretty. Sierra couldn’t remember the last time a man paid her a compliment. It had been far too long since she’d been held. Even longer since she’d had sex.

  Even more than that, she wanted to feel a man against her, inside her, and all around her. She wanted to feel needed and desired again.

  The look Mason gave her went a long way to bolstering her courage and resolve that tonight they wouldn’t stop at a few hot kisses while the boys weren’t looking.

  Tonight was about being a woman again, not just Danny and Oliver’s mom. She’d needed that for a long time.

  Mason’s fingers brushed her face. “I lost you. What’s wrong?”

  She focused on Mason, the man who’d made it clear he wanted a real relationship with her. A man who’d gone out of his way to make her and her kids feel at home with hi
m and at his place.

  “Nothing is wrong. I’m with you.” With that, she went up on tiptoe and kissed him right there in her office. The surprise she felt in him disappeared immediately and he took over the kiss, sliding his tongue along hers as his arms enfolded her and held her close.

  He’d always initiated the intimacy between them. He seemed to like her taking the lead. She’d have to remember that later.

  “Hi, Mason. I see my new employee is more than just a friend you wanted to help.”

  Mason broke the kiss with a huge smile on his face and turned to Sierra’s boss without letting her go. “Hi, Marissa. How are you?”

  “Not as good as you, judging by that big grin you’re wearing.”

  Mason chuckled and loosened his embrace of Sierra, but he didn’t release her, keeping his arm banded around her waist. “Sierra and I go way back. We’ve recently reconnected.”

  Marissa eyed him with a knowing look. “I see that. And I hate to admit it, but you were right about her. She’s fantastic. She’s brought in three new clients since she started. All of our clients adore her.”

  Mason squeezed her to his side. “So do I.”

  Sierra glanced up at him and caught her breath at the wide smile and absolute adoration in his eyes.

  “Looks like you two are headed out for a nice evening together. I just wanted to say hi. Have a great night.” Marissa turned to Sierra. “I knew you had great taste when you picked out the furniture and decorations to stage the last rental property. Now I know you’ve also got excellent taste in men, and you must be something special, because I’ve asked him out at least half a dozen times and gotten turned down flat every time.”

  Mason chuckled. “I don’t date my clients.”

  “From what I’ve seen and heard, you hardly date.” Marissa gave her another bold smile. “I’m glad you changed that. He deserves someone who knows what a great guy he is.”

  “I’ve known that for a long time.” She’d nearly canceled her engagement because she thought Mason was a better choice for her than David.