A HIGH STAKES SEDUCTION (7 page)

“My name’s Constance Allen, I’m—”

The girl thrust her hand out. “I know exactly who you are. John told us you might want to see back here. I’m Cecily Dawson. Come in.” She smiled, though Constance saw a hint of suspicion in her eyes. Hardly surprising under the circumstances.

“Is it okay if I watch the cashiers for a while?”

“Sure, follow me.” She led Constance into the large room, where all the cashiers sat along one wall facing out. Cecily beckoned to a dark-skinned man standing behind the row of cashiers, tapping something into his phone. “Darius, this is Constance Allen.”

He pocketed his phone and walked toward her. “A pleasure to meet you, Constance. John told us all about you.” His handshake was firm and authoritative. He held her gaze, and her hand, with confidence. He was almost as dangerously handsome as John.

“Is there somewhere I can sit down, out of the way?”

“No need to be out of the way.” He touched her arm, and she stifled the urge to flinch. “Come stand with me and watch the whole operation.”

“Darius manages the cashiers. He’s always on the lookout for trouble.”

“In whatever form it may arrive.” He shot her a dark gaze filled with mischief.

Constance blinked. “I don’t want to get in your way.”

“If you’re in my way, I’ll move.” His half smile contained a hint of suggestion. He was flirting with her, too? Maybe this was part of their shtick at the casino. Constance was beginning to regret coming down here. “Each cash register records a sale in our central system and all the records are checked four times a day against the takings. I watch the customers to see if anyone’s acting suspicious. It’s my job to look for cracks in the system, too, so let me know if you think we could improve upon anything.”

“Do you get a lot of suspicious activity?”

“Not so far. We have a lot of controls in place to prevent employees from getting tempted to put their hand in the till. That’s more of a problem than the customers at some casinos.”

“Are you all members of the Nissequot tribe?”

“Cecily and I are, and Brianna at the end.” He pointed to a blonde girl counting out cash at high speed. “Frank, Tessa and Marie are just hoping to marry into the tribe one day.” He grinned when Marie, a middle-aged woman in a conservative suit, turned to blow him a kiss. “But we’re one big happy family.”

His phone beeped and he checked the screen. “Our fearless leader is heading this way,” he said to the cashiers. “Look like you’re working.” He winked at her.

Constance pretended she hadn’t seen it. And now John was coming? She braced herself. The cashiers dispensed money with warm customer service and brisk efficiency. They joked and seemed to be enjoying themselves. It wasn’t like this at Creighton Waterman. Joviality was frowned upon. In fact, one junior accountant, Daniel Bono, had recently been let go for smiling too much in meetings, or at least that was the rumor.

Customers were streaming into the casino, which struck Constance as a little odd since it was a Wednesday morning. “Why are so many people here at this time of day?”

“We have tour buses pick them up in Boston, Worcester, Springfield. We’re adding more routes all the time. A lot of our customers are retirees. We run a brisk trade at the nursing homes.”

“Should the elderly be gambling with their life savings?” She felt her brow rise.

Darius’s wicked smile reappeared. “Maybe their heirs don’t think so, but it’s their money, right?”

She shook her head. “I don’t get why people want to do this.”

“It’s fun. Like buying a lottery ticket.”

“Do you gamble?”

He shook his head. “John discourages us from gambling. He thinks it’s better to put your money in the bank. As far as I know, Don Fairweather is the only gambler in the family. Have you met him?”

“I have. He seems like quite a character.”

“I heartily agree.”

John burst into the room at that moment. His piercing gaze zeroed in on her. “I was looking for you.”

“Now you’ve found me.” She tilted her chin up, proud that she managed to sound so calm. “I was just observing how the cashiers work.”

“I see you’ve met my cousin Darius. He only graduated from college two years ago and he’s turning into my right-hand man.”

Darius smiled. “I’ve learned everything from the best.”

John put his arm around Darius. “He moved here all the way from L.A. to join the tribe. We’re working on the rest of his branch of the family.”

“They’re not quite ready to move into the backwoods.” Darius shrugged. “But the way things are going, this won’t be the backwoods for long.”

John looked at Constance for a moment. “I’d like to show you around some more.”

“I think I’ve seen everything there is to see. I came through the gaming rooms and passed the slot machines on my way over here.”

“Not just the casino and hotel. The whole reservation.”

She felt herself frown. Was he trying to shunt her away from here for some reason? She’d barely had time to observe anything. Suspicion crept over her.

On the other hand, she had a feeling Nicola Moore would want her to see as much of the place as possible. “Okay.”

“Excellent. We’ll start with the museum. Darius can tell you what a passion of mine that has become.”

Darius nodded. “It’s a labor of love, all right. And thousands of hours of expert research.”

“It’s not easy to uncover history that’s been deliberately buried. Let’s go.” John gestured toward the door, and she went ahead of him, nodding and smiling to the other employees, and grateful that John hadn’t tried to take her hand or put his arm around her.

They walked back through the gaming rooms to the lobby. Retirees were busy wasting their savings in the slot machines, and a surprisingly large number of other people were hunched over the tables as well.

“I didn’t know you had a museum.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know.” He smiled mysteriously. “All of it good, of course.”

“If you’re covering up a fraud, you’re doing it very well.”

“I take pride in everything I do.” He lifted a brow slightly, taunting her.

“Are you trying to make me suspicious?” She was conscious of matching his stride as they strolled out of the gaming room and across the lobby.

“Nothing could be further from my mind.” Then he touched her. Her stomach drew in and her pulse quickened as he rested his hand at the base of her spine and ushered her though a doorway she’d never noticed before, marked “Hall of Heritage.”

It led into a large, gallery-like room with polished wood floors and high walls. Glass cases held artifacts and sleek, printed text and pictures decorated the walls. “It looks like a real museum.” She walked ahead of him, curious. One of the first exhibits was a glass case containing a sheaf of age-tinted pages and a quill pen. There was a blown-up photograph of the front page on the wall next to it.

“That’s the original treaty between the Nissequot and the governor of Massachusetts in 1648. Two thousand acres of land was given to us then.”

“Two thousand? I thought the reservation was less than two hundred.”

“They chipped away at it bit by bit over the years.”

“The state?”

He shook his head. “Mostly private individuals, farmers, businessmen, greedy people.”

“Your ancestors must have sold it to them.”

“I could say that greedy people come in all creeds and colors, but research has taught me to give my ancestors the benefit of the doubt and respect that they were just trying to survive.”

“You can’t really fault them for that. Apparently they managed.” She smiled at him. The museum didn’t have that many items, but they were carefully arranged and displayed with a good deal of written information accompanying them. A long green cloak in one case caught her eye. It didn’t have feathers or beading, but an embroidered trim in black brocade.

“Not what you’d expect, is it?” He looked at her curiously.

“I don’t know what I’d expect.”

“People seem to want baskets and moccasins and old pots. Precontact stuff. They forget that the history of the Nissequot continues after the settlers arrived. That cloak was worn by Sachem John Fairweather, the man I was named after, when he opened the doors to the first free school in this part of Massachusetts. It remained open until 1933, when the last pupil dropped out to look for work during the Depression.”

“Is the building still there?” She could see a grainy photograph of six people in Victorian-era clothing standing outside a neat white building.

“It is indeed. I’m restoring it along with my grandparents’ old farmhouse.”

“That’s very cool. I have no idea of my own family’s history before my grandparents’ generation.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “I don’t suppose any of us thought it was that interesting.”

“Where is your family from, originally?”

“I don’t know. All over, I suppose. Maybe that’s the problem. It’s easy to get excited about ancestry when it’s all from one place with a distinct culture. If one person’s from Poland and another from Scotland and another from Italy or Norway, no one really cares.”

“Well, the truth is that the Nissequot are from all over the place, at this point. I don’t even know who my own father was. The Fairweathers are my mother’s family. Sometimes you just have to pick a common thread and go with it, and that’s what we’re doing here. We did find an eighteenth-century Bible with the New Testament written out phonetically in the Nissequot language, though. That’s our biggest coup so far. A scholar at Harvard is putting together a Nissequot dictionary by comparing it with a contemporary English version.”

She looked up at an enlarged line drawing of a man and woman in more traditional-looking dress. “Is that how you imagine your ancestors looked?”

“Nope. That’s a real drawing done by the daughter of one of the first governors of Massachusetts in her personal journal. It was found by relentless digging through old records and hoping for the best. It’s time-consuming and way outside my realm of expertise, but it’s all coming together piece by piece.”

“Impressive.”

He led her through the gallery, then disarmed the emergency exit with a key code and pushed through an exterior door out into the bright sunlight. A large black truck was parked right behind the building. “My unofficial vehicle. Get in.”

“Where are we going?”

“To meet my grandparents.” Curious, she climbed in. His truck wasn’t quite as pristine as his sedan. He lifted a pile of papers off the passenger seat so she could sit down. There was an unopened can of soda in the cup holder, and music—the Doors—started as soon as he turned on the engine. There was also a Native American–looking thing with feathers on it hanging from the rearview mirror. “They’re going to like you. I can tell.”

“Why?” They were hardly likely to appreciate someone who was there for the express purpose of digging up dirt on their reservation.

“You’re nice.”

“Nice? I’m not nice at all.”

His loud laugh echoed through the cab. “True, it was cold of you to blow me off at lunch yesterday. But they’ll think you’re nice.”

She glanced at her reflection in the wing mirror nearest to her. She wasn’t sure anyone had accused her of being nice before. Organized, efficient, polite, helpful, exacting, prim, persnickety...a range of flattering and not so flattering words sprang to mind, but nice was not among them. “I’m not sure that nice is good in my line of work.”

“Maybe you’re in the wrong line of work?” He shot her a challenging glance.

“Look who’s talking.”

“I’m nice.” He glanced in the rearview mirror, then over at her. She jerked her eyes from his gaze and stared out the window, taking in how they were traveling along another featureless wooded road to nowhere. “Ask anyone.”

“I’m not sure that’s the first word that would spring to mind if I asked someone to describe you. I’d think
bullheaded, relentless
and
determined
would be right up there. And that’s just going from the newspaper articles I read about you.”

“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.”

“I don’t, but where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.” That was one of the first tenets of forensic accounting. The tricky part was finding a live ember after someone had carefully tried to put the fire out.

“They do say I’m an arrogant SOB. I’m guessing you’d agree with that.” She saw the corner of his mouth lift in a smile.

“For sure.” She felt her own treacherous mouth smile along. “And they say you cooked up the entire Nissequot tribe just so you could open a casino and rake in billions.”

“That’s pretty much true.” He turned and stared right at her. “At least that’s how it started, but it’s snowballed into a lot more than that.”

“Don’t you think it’s wrong to exploit your heritage for profit?”

“Nope.” He looked straight ahead as they turned off one winding road onto another. “My ancestors survived war, smallpox, racism and more than four hundred years of being treated like second-class citizens. Hell, they weren’t even American citizens until 1924. The powers that be did everything they could to grind us out of existence and they very nearly succeeded. I don’t feel at all bad about taking advantage of the system that tried to destroy us.” His voice was cool as usual, but she could hear the passion beneath his calm demeanor. “If I can do something to lift up the people who’ve survived, then I feel pretty damn good about it.”

Constance had no idea what to say as they pulled up in front of a neat yellow neocolonial house with a front porch and a three-car garage.

John had jumped out of the car and opened her door before she managed to gather her thoughts. “What’re you waiting for?”

“Uh, I don’t know.” She’d never felt more lost for words around anyone. “Is this the original farmhouse?” she asked, taking advantage of his offered hand as she climbed down from the cab.

“Oh, no. We just built this three years ago. The old place was kind of a wreck. No insulation, no real heat and A/C. My grandparents were ready to move into someplace shiny and new.”

The front door opened and a white-haired man appeared on the front porch. “Hey, Big John.”