Daniel was dead. That, in and of itself, was both a sorrow and a huge relief. She had spent the last two years living in fear, wondering if he’d find her and Matthew, and what he would do to them if he did. They were divorced, and she had done a good enough job of hiding her steps, so she had apparently never been notified of his death. Until now. Until Jarrod Marshall had come looking for her, and had done whatever was necessary to pull her here, into his company, working for him.
But who was he really, and why had he manipulated her into moving here and working for him? He had set the bait and she had swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker. She had spent the past several months in his employ, and it had never occurred to her that he had a hidden agenda. Her defenses had really been slipping, she thought. She had been lulled into a sense of security after two years of hearing nothing from Daniel, and now she was paying for it.
It was true that she had had very little to do with Jarrod apart from work, and that there were normally many people in the same room when they were together, but why hadn’t she spent more time trying to decipher the curious and intense way that he looked at her, and how he watched her so carefully whenever she walked into a room? Part of her had hoped that he felt the same attraction to her as she felt for him, even as she told herself that nothing between them was possible. But how had she not realized that he was looking at her in a predatory way, not in a sexual way? How had she not seen through his controlling actions?
This was still so confusing. If Jarrod was telling the truth, it seemed likely that Daniel had lied to both of them. He had lied to her about having no family, and had lied by default when he never mentioned Jarrod to her. He had obviously lied to Jarrod about her. Still, Lana wondered, if they were such good friends, how could Jarrod not have seen the changes in Daniel that his illness had caused? How was it possible that Jarrod had continued to think that Daniel was fine, and that his delusions were truth?
She wondered what Jarrod wanted from her. He had never come out and said, and it made Lana incredibly nervous. She had already proven herself to be rather easy to manipulate, she thought with disgust. After two years of hiding, it had been so simple to draw her out with the offer of full time employment, benefits, and a quiet life in the same city as her sister lived. Money. That's what Jarrod seemed to think had motivated Lana to marry Daniel. In some ways, money was what had led to her taking the job at Marshall Industries – security for Matthew. Jarrod couldn’t be more wrong, though. While Jarrod was clearly a wealthy man, Daniel had not been. He had been smart and charming and sweet and good-looking, but the money in their relationship all came from her.
She sighed, leaning back against the bench and breathing in the cool fall air. She had no idea what to do next. If she was no longer on the run, she could easily leave town and find another job. She loved it here, though, and Sam and Nick were here, so she didn’t really want to leave again. Perhaps she could find something else in this city, but would Jarrod allow her to go, and would he give her a good recommendation? Or at the very least, would he agree to not sully her name among other organizations here?
There was still so much here that she didn’t understand, but through it all, Lana knew that she had been given a real gift today. As long as Jarrod was telling the truth, she knew that Daniel couldn't hurt her anymore, and, more importantly, he couldn't hurt Matthew. Ever. He was no longer tormented by voices. For that, she was truly thankful. Before his illness, Daniel had been a good man. She was glad he had found peace.
Putting thoughts of her ex-husband aside, Lana moved on, acknowledging her attraction to Daniel’s best friend. Jarrod was a very different man from Daniel, and Lana had recognized that from the start. For the first time since her marriage had fallen apart, Lana found herself attracted to another man, and it honestly made her a bit edgy.
It was only an attraction, though. It was clearly not mutual, and it did not need to turn into anything. There probably wasn’t a man on this planet who was more off-limits to her. She ticked off the complications in her mind. He was her boss. He was Daniel’s friend. He obviously didn’t trust her, still caught between the lies Daniel had told him and the truth that Lana was living. Somehow, out of all of these complications, this trust one bothered her the most. What in the world had Daniel told him that had Jarrod thinking that she just might be a money-grubbing, cheating, conniving woman?
She sighed. Scratch that. She knew. According to Daniel, she had been in cahoots with the devil himself.
It bothered her, she realized. It mattered to her what Jarrod thought of her. It mattered to her what Daniel had told him, and what he believed. It shouldn’t, though. After this week, she shouldn’t need to see Jarrod ever again. Once she learned what she needed to know from him, she could resign and be gone. In the meantime, she would start making a list of what she needed to do next – what she needed to do to leave Marshall Industries and make a new life for herself and her son.
Oh crap, she thought. Daniel had parents. That meant that Matthew had grandparents. There was no way that Jarrod was going to let her disappear without a meeting between all of them, and in truth, allowing Matthew to meet them was the right thing to do. Plus, given how easily he had found her when he started to look for her, she was pretty sure that disappearing now would serve no purpose but to make him exceedingly annoyed.
Staring straight ahead, Lana closed her eyes for a few minutes. She wasn’t going to cry, she told herself. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder why her life had turned into such a mess. She had done all she could to be true to her own values and goals all her life. Her only crime was to fall in love with a man who had an illness that couldn’t be cured. An illness that had forced her to spend two years of her life in hell, two years on the run, and now to be under the thumb of a man who was little more than a stranger to her. But she would NOT cry. She had spent far too many hours of her life in fear and in tears, and she was absolutely not going to waste any more time with that. She stood up and walked back to the building. She was going to get her things, and go get Matthew and spend some time with her son. In public. Without looking over her shoulder. The rest would follow.
Jarrod watched from his office window as Lana left the office building and walked across the street to the park. She seemed to walk with confidence, as if her meeting with him meant nothing to her, and yet he knew instinctively that he had shocked her. When she sat down on one of the benches in the park, he realized that she was a lot more shaken than she appeared. He watched her for several minutes as she sat quietly, staring out into space.
When Daniel West had called six years ago and told him that he had gotten married, Jarrod had been shocked, but was very happy for his buddy. His parents had been even more surprised, since the pair had eloped, and there was no talk of a formal wedding or any kind of celebration. To Daniel, who had surprised his family by moving to Colorado when he got out of the service, the marriage was just something that he wanted, so he and his new bride had gone down to the courthouse and exchanged vows.
Jarrod was in the middle of building his business, so he had congratulated his friend, told him that he wanted to meet the lucky woman soon, and had gone about his life as before. But Daniel’s parents, Rachel and Frank West, promptly bought plane tickets to fly to Colorado to meet their new daughter-in-law. When they returned home, they invited Jarrod for dinner, and told him about their visit, and about their concerns. Daniel had apparently met them at the airport and spent several days with them, but Lana had never made an appearance. Frank and Rachel left without meeting her.
“It was odd,” Rachel had told him as she served him a second helping of salmon. “It was like she didn’t exist. Their home had been decorated by someone with good taste, but she wasn’t there. Daniel just said that she was busy at work, but what woman doesn’t want to meet her husband’s parents?”
“Daniel was OK with this?”
“He was acting strange too. I can’t really describe it well, but it was like he kept looking over his shoulder for something. He seemed almost paranoid, but when we asked him about it, he clammed up.”
Jarrod had assured them that he’d head out there as soon as he could to check things out. He had called his friend a few times, but Daniel hadn't seemed very interested in talking to him, so he eventually stopped, though he still planned to make it out to Colorado as soon as he could break away from work. But that day never came, and when an obviously drunk Daniel had called Jarrod out of the blue several months later, what he told Jarrod made sense at the time, and helped explain the odd behavior of both him and his new wife.
According to Daniel, Lana had coerced him into marriage. He was sure that she had found out about his substantial financial holdings and had, all along, only been after his money. Daniel was sure that she was just biding her time now, trying to figure out how to get to the funds. Jarrod had not probed a lot further, since the alcohol made it difficult to reason with Daniel, and he wasn’t sure if what he was saying was true, or the paranoid ramblings of someone who had had way too much to drink. When Daniel never talked with him about liquidating any of his assets, though, Jarrod simply forgot about the conversation.
For a while, it seemed like his marriage had been working, though Daniel would occasionally call late at night and complain about his life, and often voiced his suspicions to Jarrod that Lana was cheating on him with “someone from the government.” The calls worried Jarrod, both because Daniel seemed to be drinking more, but also because it seemed he had married someone that he didn’t trust.
Daniel never returned home to see his parents or his old friends, and he always made excuses to be out of town when Frank and Rachel suggested visiting him. When Jarrod talked with the Wests, they had no idea what to do, wondering how much of what was happening with Daniel to pull him away from them rested on the shoulders of their son’s wife.
At one point, Rachel and Frank decided that enough was enough, and they were going to visit their son and daughter-in-law. But when they arrived in Denver, the apartment Daniel had lived in was empty, and there was no indication of where Lana and Daniel had gone. They returned home, waiting for a visit that never came. When Jarrod asked where they had moved, Daniel just said that they had gotten a place that was more convenient for him to get to work, and said that he'd send the address. He never did.
Over time, Daniel’s calls to Jarrod became more frequent, and each time he called, he seemed drunk or high, but Daniel just shrugged off his friend’s concern. Then two years ago, Daniel had called Jarrod one night, his mood rapidly alternating between rage and depression. Lana had left him. Through sheer luck, he had been able to find out that she was in England, and he was booking a flight and heading there to find her, and talk her into going home with him. He loved her, he said. He couldn't live without her. He never mentioned a divorce, but if Errol was right, the papers had already been filed, a restraining order was in place, and the divorce had been granted. More concerning to Jarrod now was the fact that Daniel had never once mentioned Matthew.
That was the last Jarrod ever heard from his friend. Daniel had been killed in a high-speed auto crash a few days after his arrival in England. Jarrod had never known whether his death was an accident or intentional, but he had blamed Lana for Daniel’s accident. It was only now that, as parts of the puzzle were being added to his understanding, he was beginning to realize that Lana may have been trying to run away from Daniel.
It was clear to him now that Daniel had never mentioned him to Lana. Jarrod had been concerned that she’d connect him to her job offer from Marshall Industries, but she had clearly been blindsided by his relationship to her ex-husband. That worried him a bit – he knew that he had coerced her into coming here to take a job with his company, and he doubted that she was in a benevolent enough mood to give him the benefit of the doubt about that. Before he met her, he would have shrugged with indifference and determined that it didn’t matter what she thought of him. But now… well, it mattered. It damn well mattered. Despite her relationship with his best friend, he was finding himself more and more drawn to Lana, his physical response to her presence growing only stronger over time.
Beyond that, there was Matthew to consider. Matthew was Daniel’s son, Rachel and Frank should be able to meet him, and to have frequent access to their grandchild. Having Lana here in town would make all of that much easier – as long as she decided to stay. He had played his trump card. She knew who he was. He would have to wait and see what her next move would be.