IT’S NEARLY ELEVEN BY THE time Faith is ready to leave to pick up food, and I walk her to my BMW outside her house, while her car waits for the tow truck we called a few minutes ago. Both of us are in faded jeans and boots, me in a black t-shirt with the classic royal blue BMW logo on it and her in some sort of pink, long sleeved lace t-shirt that hugs her breasts just right. Which I notice, because unlike my hair that is knotted at the back of my head, her long blond hair is not only free and smelling like vanilla and amber again, it’s resting over her nipples, which I just had in my mouth fifteen minutes ago.
She dangles my keys between us. “I’m nervous about driving your car.”
“Don’t wreck it and everything will be fine.”
“Thanks for that comforting thought and vote of confidence.”
“That’s what people like about me,” I say. “I’m warm and fuzzy all the damn time.”
Her sexy mouth curves, and damn, I’m thinking about it on my cock again. “Like I said, Nick Rogers,” she says, as if she’s just heard my thoughts. “There’s nothing sweet about you.”
I pull her to me and give her a long, drugging kiss and I swear I can taste that amber and vanilla scent from her hair on her lips. “How’s that for sweet?” I demand.
“Your kisses aren’t sweet, any more than you’re a nice guy,” she says. “But you’re right. Nice is overrated and so is sweet.”
I give her pink painted lips a glance. “Why the fuck does your lipstick never come off?”
She laughs. “Such fierceness over lipstick. It’s not supposed to. They make it that way.”
“Hmmm. Good. I think I like a challenge.”
“Your challenge is your deposition next week. Let me get to the grocery store and pick up that Italian food I promised, so you can get your job done.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a woman scold me about my work,” I say. “It’s surprisingly arousing. But I’m pushing my call back to one.” I release her and open the car door. “But go now before I need to push this call back to noon.”
She starts to climb inside but pauses. “Make yourself at home. Just don’t burn down the place and everything will be fine.”
Laughing at her play on my warning, aware that she manages to keep the playing field even at all times, I watch as she disappears into the BMW. I shut her inside, backing up to watch her depart, and as she puts the car into gear, I decide there’s something very wrong, and yet right at the same time, about a woman I’m fucking in my pride and joy, my custom BMW Hurricane. But then, there is something about Faith that’s both wrong and right, all the way around. She disappears around a curve and I sigh. All I can do is hope like hell she’s as good at driving it as she is riding me.
I cross the drive and march up the stairs. Entering the house, I shut the door and prepare to start a search. But damn it, it’s impossible not to feel the betrayal of Faith’s trust in that act, which feeds my need to prove her innocence and not her guilt, which I’ve already established as a problem. At this point, I’ll take innocence any way I can frame it, and she’s logical and smart. It will be a blow to find out why I sought her out, but she’ll understand. Forgiving me might be another story, but right now, I just need to find a murderer that isn’t her. I glance at my watch: 11:15. I need time to review the material North has certainly already emailed me, but by the time I do this search and eat with Faith, that’s not going to happen. Not willing to compromise the prep for the deposition or my management of North, I snag my cellphone from my pocket, and text him: Move to two o’clock.
He responds so damn fast I don’t know how he has time to type: Copy that, boss.
I smirk and shove my phone back in my pocket. “The kid’s eager,” I murmur. “I’ll give him that.”
In the interest of time, I head for Faith’s bedroom, where most people keep their secrets. Once I’m there, I place my hand on a dresser drawer and hesitate. Damn it, I hate doing this, but I have no other option. I pull open one organized drawer after another, finding nothing out of the ordinary. The night stands are next, and I find more of the same. The bed’s a platform, which means there’s no hiding spots beneath it but my gaze lands on the painting above Faith’s bed, one of her own works, this one of a vineyard, with a streak of red on one vine. She’s talented, stunningly so, which brings my attention to that card from Faith’s father she didn’t want to open. Why do I know that card is all about his confidence and pride in her for taking over the winery, with a negative spin on her art, her passion? And yet, even in death, she wants to please him, craving his love. Not a problem I had with my father. I never craved anything from the man. Hell, he probably only gave Meredith Winter a million dollars so it was a million less that I’d inherit.
Rejecting the grind in my gut with that thought, I turn away from the bed and head into the bathroom, searching the drawers there, and then I move into Faith’s closet. My digging there includes checking pockets and shoes, but the results are the same. Nothing. From there, I make my way to the opposite side of the house where I find a small library, with a couple of overstuffed chairs, and art books filling the shelves. I don’t have time to check those books. I need to find an office. There has to be one, or a place where she keeps her documents and this isn’t it.
Glancing at my watch, I estimate I have thirty minutes before Faith returns and I track a path to the kitchen, do a quick search. Realizing that I have no place but Faith’s studio left to search, I hesitate. That feels like a place she should take me, but there could be an office up there somewhere, and I have to look for that. For now, though, I walk into the dining room, where I’ve left my briefcase that I retrieved from the car before Faith left. I sit down at the rectangular dark wood table, and glance at the credenza that has no drawers before I unpack my MacBook and files to make it look like I’ve been working.
Next, I have to make a phone call before Faith returns, even above searching the studio for an office. Moving to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows framing the credenza, I pull back the curtain to keep an eye on the driveway before removing my phone from my pocket, dialing Beck Luche, a tattooed up former CIA agent who now does private hire work, and not for a small price. He also did five years undercover as a rogue US hacker deep inside a Russian hacking operation. It’s a detail about his past I learned when he was under consideration for a hundred-thousand-dollar paycheck for one of my high-tech clients. He got the job and I hired him personally three days ago after waiting two weeks for him to be free from another job. But I didn’t want this screwed up.
“Nicolas,” he answers, using that name despite me explicitly telling him not to. “How’s the meeting with the would-be black widow if she ever got married?” he asks.
I grind my teeth at the dagger he’s just thrown. “She’s either innocent or a damn good actress.”
“The best criminals are always the best actors.”
He just keeps on throwing daggers. “Macom Maloy. Have you checked him out?”
He snorts. “If you thought I was an amateur, why’d you hire me and pay me so damn much money?” He doesn’t wait for a reply he has no intention of getting in the first place, moving on. “Of course I checked out the ex-boyfriend. And that dude is a tool, but he’s not smart enough to pull off the blackmail and murder, especially living in another city.”
“But he’s got money to pay someone else to do it.”
“That man isn’t thinking about Faith Winter and he has no connections to Meredith Winter at all. That man is thinking about money, art, and some private fuck club like the one you own. He used to take Faith to it, but now, he just takes himself, as in several times a week.”
I had no idea Beck, knew about the “cigar club” that fronts for the sex club I bought from a friend, and client, last year when he went off and got married. But then if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be worth hiring. And the fuck club Macom took Faith to, and replaced her with, explains much of Faith’s references to her sexual past. It also indicates another uncomfortable disclosure with this woman I’m not looking forward to anytime soon.
“Let me run down what I know,” Beck says. “Thanks to the security feed from your father’s house, I’ve determined that Meredith Winter visited your father once a week for six months before she died. The checks he wrote her began at four months.”
I inhale a jagged breath. “So she did visit him.”
“She went to his home during those visits, and stayed there for hours when she did. I have a few instances of them kissing by his door. He was banging her, but it went further than that. They had regular phone conversations in between their visits. No emails, unfortunately. But the bottom line here. A relationship between the two pokes holes in the blackmail theory. He sounds like he was giving her the money by choice. Paid sex perhaps.”
“My father liked his women thirty years his junior,” I say. “He wasn’t paying a fifty-something-year-old woman for sex.”
“She was still a gorgeous woman.”
“That’s not it. Moving on. Meredith wasn’t paying the bills at the winery. She was taking his money and the money made at the winery and doing something with it.”
“I was coming to that. Her banks accounts were dry for that four-month window she was taking checks from your father. She’d deposit those checks, let them clear, and then clean out every penny of her accounts. I don’t know yet where it went, but I’m working on it.”
“She was giving it to someone,” I surmise.
“Or stashing it,” he says. “Meredith had a revolving bedroom door. She’d have a great many candidates for cohorts or enemies but one option stands out. Jesse Coates was seeing Meredith for the few months before your father. Twenty years her junior and a successful stockbroker who moved from New York to San Francisco. He might be behind a scam.”
I scrub my jaw. “My father was too smart to be scammed. Blackmailed yes, but not scammed.”
“Blackmail is a scam.”
“Blackmail is blackmail. Being seduced by a woman and stolen from is another.”
“You wouldn’t believe the people I’ve seen scammed, my man,” Beck says. “It would blow your mind. And if that’s what went down, it was done smartly. I see no contact between Meredith and Jesse in the six-month window that she was seeing your father, but that really doesn’t matter. That could be part of an end game.”
“What are we thinking was the big end game?”
“I don’t make assumptions I can’t back up. And what doesn’t add up to me is that Meredith wasn’t paying the bills at the winery. She could have sold the place for a small fortune.”
“Faith inherited on her death as a stipulation of her mother’s inheritance, which would mean her mother could not sell without Faith’s willingness. And I can tell you that woman appears to be holding onto a sinking ship because it’s her father’s wishes.”
“Yes, Faith. I’m still working on figuring out that hot little number.”
That possessiveness flares in me again. “And?” I ask tightly.
“And right now she looks clean, but so does Jesse. Not to mention the fact that you just gave her motive. She wanted to keep the winery, her mother did not. Maybe her mother was trying to force her hand into selling by not paying the bills and destroying the vines. The mother wanted the payday that property would be worth. Faith didn’t. Maybe your father was in on the payday.”
“Sell for the massive profit margin that property and operation are worth or have them taken away.”
“That’s the theory I’m going to work on.”
“Working that theory, Faith would have to have connections to my father, who she’d have had to have killed, right along with her mother.”
“Which I have yet to find.” “What about her sharing a link to anyone connected to my father?”
“Nothing and I dug through layers as deep as a phone book.”
I consider everything he’s said to me. “Meredith forcing Faith to sell and taking off with a hot young thing for the money makes sense to me. What doesn’t is how my father fits into this. Why the fuck was he writing her checks? Wait. Fuck. He wanted in on the sale of the winery.”
“Then why pay Meredith the money?”
“A down payment on him buying it is my guess.”
“But they’re both gone and so is the money.”
“Which means you need to—”
“Find the money. I plan on it.”
“Call me,” I say, but when I’m about to end the connection, he says, “Nicolas.”
“I’d tell you to stop calling me that, but it clearly won’t matter.”
“Be careful with Faith Winter. She could have the money. She could want to sell herself.”
“Then why go through this hell?”
“Because not going through it makes her look guilty. Like I said, man. Be careful.”
With that blow, he ends the call and standing there, aware that I am guilty of not wanting her to be guilty, but no matter how many times I warn myself of this danger, it doesn’t change. I’m going there again. It is what it is. I want her to be innocent. I’m boring myself with the repeat of this conclusion. Accepting what is allows me to manage what is.
Moving on to what I just learned. Yes. Faith has motive to act against her mother, with financial gain, but I don’t believe she wants to sell the winery. More like save it from her mother selling it, but she could have done that through the court system. But to believe that she would have, or could have, plotted out and killed my father and her mother is a stretch I can’t make. I scrub my jaw. But I don’t want to make it either. I just admitted that.
I glance at my watch and then scan the horizon with no sign of Faith. I estimate I have fifteen minutes until Faith will be here. Just enough time to nose around upstairs if I hurry. Scanning the horizon one last time, I settle the curtain back into place, and waste no time making my way to the stairs. I don’t hesitate when I start the straight climb up. I’m helping her. She just doesn’t know it and I’d be fine with her never knowing it, but that’s not possible.
At the last step, I turn right under an archway, and find myself, in a room with a steepled ceiling, that literally stretches the entire top level of the house. The wood floor has been glossed with some sort of finish I assume is easily wiped clean. There are two arched windows consuming the wall in front of me and both ends cap to the space. And there are random easels sitting around the room, all uncovered, all demanding attention I can’t give them. My gaze lifts to a door to my left, which I hope is an office. Moving in that direction, I enter and flip on the light, and sure enough, I find a heavy dark wood desk, a deep leather chair in the corner and random works of art on the wall that are absolutely Faith’s signature strokes and colors. And damn, there really is something sexy about a talent I’ll never have.
Another arched floor-to-ceiling window sits behind the chair and illuminates the room, allowing me to round the desk and sit down without a light, and to quickly locate random financial documents. I pull out my phone, set my alarm for five minutes, and start snapping photos. It goes off right as I find her father’s will, and I risk the extra minute to click shots of it. Out of time, and nowhere near done, I stand up and exit the office. I fully intend to hurry to the archway, but I notice the table and color palette sitting next to one easel, which means it has to be what she was painting yesterday. I take two steps in that direction and stop myself, some instinct in me telling me that looking at that painting is far less forgivable than searching her house, at least now that I have every intention of saving her from the hell she’s in.
I turn back to the door, and that’s when I hear the front door open and Faith’s footsteps downstairs. Fuck. I run a hand through my hair and make an instant decision. I have to own up to being up here and if I let her walk around looking for me that’s only going to make this worse. Inhaling a jagged breath, I walk to the archway and step to the landing above the steps. As if she sensed I was up here, she’s at the bottom of the steps, looking up at me, her blond hair tousled from the wind, her hand on the railing.
She doesn’t speak. For long seconds, she doesn’t move. And then suddenly she is walking up the steps toward me, her pace steady, controlled, anger crackling off of her. She stops in front of me, her eyes meet mine, and it’s not anger that gets me. It’s the wounded look of betrayal. “This is not my house. This is my private work place. This is my sanctuary.” She doesn’t give me time to reply. “You saw it, didn’t you?”
“Faith-”
“I knew it.” She cuts away from me and walks into the studio.
Fuck. What does she think I found? What the hell am I about to find out about this woman that I don’t want to know. I follow her inside the room, but she isn’t headed to the office. She’s standing at the painting she started last night. She stares at it. “Do know why I painted this?”
I walk toward her. “Faith,” I begin again. “I didn’t—”
“Look at this?” She waves her hand in front of it and turns to face me. “You came up here and you didn’t look at my work?”
“I am intrigued by your work, Faith. I was drawn up here but I got here and realized it was a mistake. I knew this was your private domain and I—”
“A liar is not a better shade for you than fear, Nick Rogers. No. Tiger. Because that’s who you are.” She grabs the easel, struggling with it, and I move toward her, but before I can get to her, she’s flung it around until it lands in the space left between us. My gaze lands on the painting of myself, and I suck in air, a reaction I’m not sure I’ve had more than a few times in my life.
“Do you know why I painted that, Tiger? Because I was trying to figure out why I want to trust you but can’t.”