Jennifer Greene - Secretive Stranger

He closed his eyes, inhaled her scent, the tickle of her hair, the warmth of her body. Crazy as it sounded, that’s all he needed or wanted to do for those moments. Hold her. Just like this. Eventually, though, his vocal cords functioned enough to say, “Not having the best day, huh?”

“Awful.” Finally, she lifted her head, released him from that gluelike clutch hold. “I wasn’t going to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Say hi this way. I don’t want you to think I’m a clinger. Or a chaser. But the thing is…you’ve probably had an awful day, too.”

“You’ve got that right.”

“And it’s because of Jon. Or connected to Jon.”

“Right again.”

“So, who else can we possibly hug about this except each other?”

“This is about hugs, is it?”

Her cheeks flushed like a child’s. So it wasn’t about hugs. For her or him. And maybe she wasn’t all that easy with last night, but her eyes still met his squarely, flush or no flush. She wasn’t denying what happened between them. Or trying to.

She wasn’t denying wanting him, either.

Although she did suddenly ease away. “Hey. No diversions until we get some work done. We need answers. We need information. This limbo land of waiting for the next crisis to get heaped on our heads is hugely not fun.”

“We also need food.”

“Well, yeah.”

He had Thai delivered, her choice. It was clearly a favorite of both hers and Caviar’s, since the cat hung over the edge of the computer desk, occasionally trying to bat the chopsticks from her hand. Worse yet, Sophie shared. With the cat.

How could he possibly be involved with a woman who shared Thai with a cat?

Out of the complete blue, words came out of his mouth that he never planned. “I was involved before.”

“Yeah?” She lifted her eyes to his immediately, which gave the cat the opportunity for an extra steal.

He stood up, bunched up the napkins and boxes and debris. His voice came out light, easy, like he was telling her about the weather. “Yeah. Zoe. That was her name. Closest I came to marriage. In fact, we’d have been married if both of us hadn’t had a lot of travel with our work, so we hadn’t yet pinned down a date. Anyway. It was when my mother got sick. I quit the job and moved back here. She didn’t like that, and that was that.”

Soph rose, too, and dove into the cleanup with him. “If she hurt you, she’s dead to me.”

Of all the crazy things to say, he mused. But he didn’t go on. He hadn’t known he was going to even mention Zoe. And after that, they both dove into their attack plan for the evening.

The plan, simply, was to follow the money. Couldn’t have been more trite or stereotypical, but hell, that was because it generally worked. The police believed they’d been through Jon’s records from every possible angle already-but Sophie figured she’d look at the numbers from a female perspective, and immersed herself in front of Jon’s computers.

Cord parked himself on the floor with boxes of old records. The cat, for no known reason, chose to sidle next to him. At least a half hour passed before either of them spoke.

“Cord?”

“Hmm.” God. What his brother had spent on himself and pleasure boggled the mind. And where and how Jon could afford it all made Cord even more uneasy.

“Did you check Jon’s mailbox today?”

“No. But I will right now.” He jumped up immediately. Sitting still that long was straight torture. And since he had that outstanding excuse to move, he stalked behind her and dropped a kiss on the back of her neck-that spot with the down-soft hair and the silky white skin.

“Do not seduce me now,” she complained.

He hadn’t been. At least not exactly. He just couldn’t get that “if she hurt you, she’s dead to me” out of his head. It was so like Sophie to spill out her heart in a single, bold stroke.

He hustled downstairs and scooped the junk from the mailbox, started sifting through it all on the climb back up. Catalogs. Bills. More bills. Junk mail. And then…an envelope with a Cayman Islands address. A bank. It stopped him dead.

When he came back into the apartment, the darn cat-of course-tried to trip him. He was batting around a rolled-up piece of paper as if it were the best toy a human had ever given him. “Sophie?” How long had he been gone? Three minutes, four? She was no longer sitting in the computer room, although the printer was spewing out a long sequence of sheets.

He found her in the kitchen, crawled up on the counter, looking in the back of the top cupboard-heaven knew why.

“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately.

“I found something. Something not good.”

One short glance, and he could see her complexion had gone from healthy pink to chalk. “What?”

“I’ll tell you. Right away. But sit down. I’m looking for whiskey or scotch or something.”

“Another drinking night?” he murmured.

“For you, not me. I just made myself tea.”

As if to illustrate the point, the microwave pinged. He plucked out her mug. For him, she pulled out a bottle of Talisker from the top shelf, opened it, reared her head away, as if the smell alone could give her sunburn, and scrambled in the cupboards for a glass. By then, she’d leaped back down to the floor and served him the drink-raw, no ice, no water.

“That might be a little strong,” he mentioned.

“Trust me. You’ll need it all.”

“I found something, too. Something not so good, either.”

“Wait!” She held up a hand like a traffic cop. “I need my bracer of tea first. How bad’s your news?”

“Bad.”

“Well, mine’s worse. Mine is so bad that, if I were next door, I’d be cracking open the whole box of Oreos.”

Damn, but she was forcing him to smile. He didn’t doubt she’d found something troubling. He knew he had. But being with her could probably make hell almost better.

“Okay,” she said and gulped a sip of tea. “I’m ready.”

So he spilled his first. “My brother received an accounting from an offshore bank. It doesn’t mention the account amount. It wouldn’t. It just reports what he earned in interest for the last three months.”

“This is scary?”

“I’d say ten thousand bucks-over that short period of time, for one account-is on the road to damn scary.”

She took another gulp. “You don’t suppose he just had a really high-yielding CD?”

Double damn, but he had to laugh. And she knew he couldn’t help it, because she smiled right back at him. “So,” she said cheerfully, “it looks as if Jon had been thriving in his blackmail career for quite a while. It’s not everyone who has that kind of job skill, Cord.”

“Trust you to see the positive.”

“Hey, at least he was good at it. Money seems to be showing up all over the place around here.” She braced, then clunked down her tea. “Okay. My turn. I was following the money, as we talked about. Going through the list of accounts in Jon’s Quicken. I can’t imagine he’d use an open program like that if he was trying to hide anything, so it was just as unlikely the police thought anything looked suspicious. And maybe they were right. But I found a payment of fifteen hundred dollars a month for the last eighteen or nineteen months to the same place.”

“What was the name?”

“JONA.”

Cord shook his head, mystified. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“I’m not through.” Her tone softened, the humor gone. “Once I pinned that down, I went back to when this all started. Around eighteen months ago, Jon paid a ton of credit card bills to various stores.”

“Nothing odd about that.”

“These stores were, like Toys ’R Us. A furniture store specializing in baby furniture. Several hundred dollars spent at another place, called Babies and Blankets.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” Cord frowned.

Since he wasn’t drinking it, Sophie reached over, took his shooter of Talisker and threw back a slug. After another minute or two of violent coughing, she croaked, “I’m afraid it will. Wait a minute.”

She charged back into the computer room and came back with her booty from the printer. The four pictures were grainy, poor-quality prints, but they illustrated the same thing-a baby. The first was a newborn shot, followed by a baby who was obviously a little older, and finally, a shot of a toothless, hairless, chubby-cheeked baby in a red-and-white Valentine dress.

“A baby,” Cord said blankly. And without pause, swallowed three solid gulps of the Talisker-a drink that deserved being savored with respect. “This can’t be what it looks like. You’re telling me my brother had a baby? On top of all the crap he pulled on people.”

“I keep thinking that maybe there’s some other explanation. But I can’t think of one. He’s been paying regular support, paid for a bunch when the baby was born. The pattern’s pretty inescapable.” Sophie studied the last photo, then said, “Looks as if you have a niece, judging from the dress.”

Cord pushed away from the kitchen counter, the way a boxer might shoot off the ropes. “We’re getting out of here.”

“We are?”

“I’ve had enough. So have you. Enough of bad news and sad news. Enough of sleazy behavior and roads that lead to more sleazy behavior. Enough focusing on my brother.”

“But, Cord, we’ve finally broken through, really started making some major discoveries. For the first time, I think we have a shot at figuring out the player, or players, in this whole mess. But maybe we should even be calling the police, telling them what we found out-”

“A lot of shoulds and coulds in that scenario. And I agree with you, Soph. But not right this second. Right this second, we’re dumping this pop stand.”

“Where to?” she asked bewilderedly.

Sophie was still trying to fathom it. How they’d ended up here.