Exposed (15 page)

He eyes me, and even now his eyes roam my body, my breasts, the shadow between my thighs. Then his gaze goes to mine. “I don’t regret it. I just wanted more for us.”

“So did I,” I say. “So
do
I.”

“Then why does this feel like good-bye?” He finally sits up, forearms resting on his upright knees, fingers hooked together.

It does, doesn’t it? The realization makes my chest ache. “Why do we never get more than a few hours together, Logan?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did. I wish I knew how to—how to fix this. You. Me. Us. Everything. But I can’t.” He swivels, and his knees brush my hip and my thigh. I remain as I am, staring at him, drinking him in. Memorizing his features, this moment, this feeling. “You have come so far from the broken, mysterious woman I met at that stupid auction. But you have a long ways to go yet. I can’t make the journey for you. I can’t make the choices for you. I can’t face Caleb for you. I can’t free you from him. He let you go, Isabel. But he didn’t set you free. He won’t do that. He’s not that type of man. He’s just not. You have to free yourself, and I can’t help you with that. I want you, but I also know anything that could be between us can only work if you’re strong and independent and fully your own person.”

“And I’m not, am I?” I rip my gaze away from his. “Not yet.”

A silence hangs. It is a strange, fraught quiet, filled with a thousand unspoken things. Words, sighs. Moans. Ghosts of the love we should be making right now, but aren’t. Because Caleb still has claws in my mind.

“Logan?”

He glances at me. “Hmm?”

“Tell me what you know about Caleb. Tell me what happened between you.”

He looks away, out the window. Gray tinges the sky. Exhaustion creeps at the edges of my mind.

Moments pass, and I begin to wonder if he’s not going to answer me. But then he speaks. “I was flipping houses, still. Making a killing on it, too. I had good taste, and an eye for the houses that would
flip well and the ones that wouldn’t. I was getting to the point that I’d started hiring guys to do the actual construction work, and I was just picking the houses, buying them, and selling the flipped ones. And then I took a gamble on a huge mansion that had been foreclosed. It was outside Chicago a ways, in this gated community. On like six or seven acres. It was a fucking mess. It had been bank owned for several years; no one wanted it. It was old, some pipes had burst, and it was just ugly, you know? That sort of overly gaudy decor rich people think they need to show how rich they are. Plush burgundy rugs, gold-plated door handles, thick dark walnut everywhere, too much furniture and not enough floor space. Ugly as fuck, but it had beautiful bones. It was a huge project, which was why no one wanted it, you know? It really was a complete gut job; all the grass would have to be ripped out because it was all overrun with crab grass, all the beds were overgrown. Most flippers have a sweet spot of around two or three hundred thousand as a max purchase price. Once you get higher than that, you’re entering a whole new tier of things. You buy at four or five hundred, to get a good return you have to start seeing a sale price of nearing a million, and that level comes with its own complications. Well, this property was a huge risk. I got it for four hundred, because they were fucking desperate to unload it at any price. That was a huge chunk for me, and I knew I was in for at least half that much in reno costs. It was worth easily double what I paid for it, just going based on previous sale prices of that property and area comps.

“So I went for it. I gutted the place, ripped every stick of flooring out, knocked down every single non-load-bearing wall, the stairs, the ceilings. Ripped out all the landscaping. I mean I took that fucker down to bones. This was six months after I found out about Leanne cheating on me with Marcus, the man who’d been a sort of flipper-mentor for me, as well as my business partner. I walked away
with nothing but what I’d saved and the return on the house I was in the middle of finishing. And this huge risk, it was the first job I was doing without Marcus. I was in a bad place. Fucked up emotionally, having flashbacks from the war, not sleeping. I got myself in over my head, really. Looking back, I should have gone smaller. Done a couple properties of the type I was familiar with. A ten-thousand-square-foot mansion on six acres, one that needed a complete gut and rebuild? It was idiotic of me.”

He rubs his face, crosses his legs, and covers his lap with the sheet.

“To this day I’m still not sure how I pulled it off. I was drinking all the time, like, the whole project is kind of a haze, because I was half wasted the whole time. I was a goddamned mess. But somehow, I scraped together the money to finish it, pulled a lot of all-nighters. Point is, I finished the flip in like three months, which considering the size of the job is pretty incredible. I finished over budget, though. By a lot. Bought it for four, spent another three hundred thousand on reno costs, most of which went to rewiring and redoing the kitchen. Get the kitchen right, and you can sell just about any house. So I had an overhead of seven fifty. Highest comp in the area was a flat million, but that place was fifteen hundred square feet less than my property, and was on half the acreage, and wasn’t updated.” He glances at me. “Shit, I’m boring you, aren’t I? You don’t give a shit about the flip. Short version for real now. I sold the house for one point eight. Made a killing. But I was burned out, by then. That job just . . . fried me. I didn’t want to touch another flip. So instead of sinking that money back into another flip, I went a different direction. One of the guys I’d hired for the flip had an uncle who was selling his computer parts manufacturing business. I bought it. Streamlined the business, fired a bunch of people and rehired better ones, put in a manager I trusted, got the place running like a top.
Started churning out a profit in no time. One of the people I’d hired was the main sales account manager, and she got us six new accounts that were insanely lucrative. That process landed me a lead on a computer supply company that was going under, so I bought that and, essentially, flipped it. Made cuts, hired new people, got new accounts. Used my parts supply facility to get the computers built more cheaply, so I turned a higher profit on each sale. And then a real stroke of luck for me. I met a guy who owned a whole chain of used-car lots, a couple restaurants, and a gas station. Dude had terminal cancer and was selling everything at a bargain basement price. Bought him out lock, stock, and barrel. He was a hell of a businessman, so his stuff was all in good shape. Saw a return on that investment in a matter of months.”

He glances at me. “Seriously, babe, just bear with me. I’m almost to the interesting stuff. Once the companies I bought were all turning a profit, I sold them. I wasn’t interested in the actual running of the business, just the buy, improve, and sell. I kept that one guy’s chain of business, though. Sort of out of posterity or something. He died a few months after I bought him out, but I still own all those businesses. Well, anyway, I kept making bigger and bigger investments. Buying larger companies for larger payouts when I ended up selling them. Finally, the business took me to New York. A research and development company working on future tech for cell phones and such. Better touch screens, holograph displays, all sorts of stuff we won’t actually see for years yet, even now. The owner of that company, right after we signed the deal, pulled me aside. Said he had a good lead for me. Couldn’t tell me much, but it was a chance to buy into a company with real earnout potential. Millions, he said. Hundreds of millions.

“Well, of course I was skeptical. Someone says shit like that, you gotta throw some side-eye, you know? Like, what’s your angle? He
put me in touch with Caleb. The investment opportunity was a partner stake in a futures trading company. Stocks. Hard to explain if you’re not into business. Point is, there is a fuckload of money in futures, if you do it right. Caleb, it seems, does it right. This was new, for me. I was still a builder, essentially. I just built businesses instead of buildings. Stocks, futures, market indexes? It was all new.”

A long pause now. A sigh. “I was in it deep with Caleb before I figured out that he was rigging things, insider trading, corporate espionage. All sorts of dirty shit. Pissed me off. I confronted him.”

He is quiet for a long couple of minutes, staring into space.

“He’s a sly, manipulative bastard. Talked me around. Wasn’t hard, I guess. I mean, I was making serious bank. More than I’d ever made in my life by a factor of at least ten. I wasn’t stupid, I was scattering the accounts all over the place. Hiding some in tax shelters, offshore accounts, all that jazz. Nothing illegal, just spreading the money around so it wasn’t all in one account. But he had me by the balls, you know? Had me dead to rights. I was in it, I was on the hook as much as him if anything happened. Just go with it, he said. It’s only temporary. He was building up capital for a big buyout, a merger that would make both of us billions, billions with a big fat
B
. So I went with it. Obviously, hindsight is twenty-twenty. A basic life principle for you, Isabel: If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. In this case, the big buyout was all a setup. He was working twice as hard as me behind the scenes, doing an end run on me. This is a complex world we live in, and the high-dollar, big-business scene here in Manhattan? It’s a small world. You don’t run the kind of game Caleb was running without attracting attention. He was getting too big too fast, making too much money too easily. People were suspicious. But it was his world, his game, and I was new to it all. What you have to understand here is that I’m glossing over the details
because the real nitty-gritty of how Caleb set me up is boring business bullshit. It’s not an exciting narrative. He was running a scheme that ran the entire gamut of white-collar crime: embezzlement, money laundering, insider trading, corporate espionage. He’s smart, and he’s careful. Very little, if anything at all, can be directly traced back to him. I wasn’t innocent, mind you. I knew I was part of something dirty. I won’t bullshit you about that. But I wasn’t part of the grand scope of things either; I was just a piece, a minor player. I was good at the organizational stuff, getting the right people hired for the right job, keeping track of what went where and who did what. Caleb was the one running the big numbers, you know? But he had it all set up so that there were layers and layers between the actual dirty work and him. The SEC got a tip-off, probably. I don’t know. They came sniffing, and it all went to shit. Lots of people went down. His setup was elaborate, lots of people involved, and all of them knew to one degree or another what was going on, that it was a dirty operation. I think there were something like a dozen people who were arrested for a wide variety of white-collar crimes, including yours truly.”

A silence, and then a wave of his hand. “I was an idiot, and paid the price. No one to blame but myself. So I sang like a canary about everything I knew, except Caleb. I wasn’t protecting him, mind you. But telling stories about a ghost is how you get turned into one yourself. I told them everything I knew in exchange for a reduced sentence and a transfer to a more white-collar prison. Got ten years, did five.”

“And the only reason you did any prison time is that Caleb didn’t warn you?”

“It wasn’t that he didn’t warn me so much as that he made sure I was left out in the open for them to find. That was always the plan.
There’s always someone as bait. He set me up, and I spent five years in a federal pen for it.”

“What I don’t understand is why you got involved with it in the first place. I mean, if you knew it was illegal, why do it?”

Logan doesn’t answer for a few moments. “You didn’t grow up the way I did.”

I quirk an eyebrow at him. “I don’t know how I grew up.”

A sharp exhale. “Shit, I’m sorry. You’re right. But my point is, I grew up poor as dirt. Skipping school, smoking pot, running in a gang. I watched guys OD, watched my best friend die in front of me because of drugs. So, those kinds of crime, they have victims, to me. I see the effects. They’re immediate. You sell coke, that means someone is hooked on coke. And if you’ve ever seen a real-deal cokehead, it’s not pretty. So I’d never do that shit. I’d never sell drugs. But flipping houses, that was good hard honest work. I was making decent money, and no one was shooting at me, I wasn’t gonna step on or drive over an IED, or have a rocket shot at my helo. But it wasn’t, like, lucrative. I was making good money, but it all went back into the next flip. So when I made that big sale and was actually flush with real cash, I wanted out. I had that tip on a parts facility, and I smelled money, you know? There’s always money in technology. Always. You just have to suss it out and figure out how to sell it. Well, I went into the deal with Caleb skeptical, but at first it seemed legit. And it was big money. The idea of a big payout, like two or three commas and a lot of zeroes in your account? For a hood rat and ex-grunt like me, that was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. And he worked me into things gradually, kind of like how you cook frogs, you know? Start ’em out in the water, keep it warm, and gradually turn up the heat until they’re cooked, and they never even realize it. Caleb did that with me. Hooked me in, bit by bit.”

“How well did you actually know him?” I ask.

A shrug. “Not well. He was always a mysterious sort of cat. You rarely saw him in person, usually just talked to him on the phone, or got an e-mail from him. So did I know him, personally? No. I met him maybe three times, and each of those times was for maybe twenty minutes, max. He was just . . . cool and aloof.” He pauses, takes a breath, and continues. “So that’s how I got involved in a crooked business, and went to jail for it.”

“And you blame Caleb for that.”

He bobbles his head. “Yes and no. I knew what I was doing was wrong after a certain point, but by then I was making so much money that I couldn’t make myself back out. Once you’re clearing a million here, a million there, it’s hard to stop. So in that sense, no, I don’t blame Caleb. I can’t. It was all me. But I do blame him for setting me up, letting me and the other twelve people who went to jail take the fall for him. But then again, we were the dumbasses who let ourselves be taken, so can we blame anyone but ourselves for that, in the end?”