Trust No One (3 page)

W
ell, that was the most awkward evening I’ve spent in some time,” Grace said. “And I include the night of my high school prom, during which I discovered that my date was deeply depressed because the girl he had wanted to be with had turned him down.”

“You want awkward?” Julius Arkwright asked. “Try the annual business dinner and charity auction I’m scheduled to attend later this week.”

Grace gave that some consideration. “I don’t think that qualifies as awkward. A business dinner and charity auction sound boring, not awkward.”

“Yeah, boring, too,” Julius agreed. “I will have to make casual conversation with a bunch of people who are as dull as I am. But the really awkward part comes later, when I deliver the most boring after-dinner speech ever written. The charity auction isn’t so bad. I’ll be stuck buying a piece of art that I don’t want but that isn’t exactly awkward. That’s just costly.”

He didn’t seem to care about the financial cost of the event, she noticed. Interesting.

She had been introduced to Julius for the first time that evening. She barely knew him but she was already certain that he ranked as the least boring man she had ever met. That was, however, beside the point, she told herself. They were talking awkward, not boring, and she doubted that any business dinner could have been as unnerving as the blind date that she and Julius had just endured.

And the date was not over—not until she got back to the lake house. To get there she had to clamber into the front seat of Julius’s gleaming black SUV. She hated SUVs. They were not designed for women who were frequently obliged to shop in the petite department.

She tucked her trench coat around herself and tried to discreetly raise the hem of her pencil-slim skirt so that she could position her left high-heeled sandal on the floorboard of the vehicle. Reaching up, she grasped the handhold inside the cab and prepared to haul her bodyweight up into the passenger seat.

There was no hope of negotiating the business gracefully. Even if she had been wearing jeans and athletic shoes she would have had a problem. Dressed in a snug-fitting little black dress and heels the best she could hope for was to make it up and into the seat on the first try with as little bounce as possible.

She tightened her grip on the handhold and pushed off with her right foot.

“Watch your head,” Julius said.

Before she realized what he intended she felt his hands close around her waist. He lifted her as easily as if she were a sack of groceries and plopped her on the passenger seat.

She tried to control her trajectory and landing but she bounced, anyway. Her coat fell open, exposing a lot of inner thigh. By the time she got things under control Julius was closing the door.

Crap.

The awkward night was not showing any signs of improving. There was probably an affirmation for a blind date gone bad but what she really wanted was a therapeutic glass of wine.

She watched Julius round the front of the SUV. For a moment his hard profile and broad shoulders were silhouetted against the porch lights of the Nakamura house. In spite of all the warnings she had been giving herself that evening, an unfamiliar and decidedly dangerous sense of anticipation sparkled through her. For the duration of the short drive home she was going to be alone with Julius. That was probably not a good idea.

He opened the door and climbed behind the wheel. She watched him angle himself into the seat with the easy grace of a large hunting cat settling into high grass to wait for prey.

Well, of course he had made the process look easy. It wasn’t as if someone had literally tossed him up into the seat.

He closed the door. An ominous but rather exciting sense of intimacy seethed in the dark interior of the SUV. At least it seemed ominous and exciting to her. Julius appeared blissfully unaware of the edgy vibe. He was no doubt eager to dump her on her doorstep.

She focused her attention on their hosts for the evening. Irene and Devlin Nakamura waved cheerfully from the front porch of their home.

Irene was a tall, attractive blonde who could trace her heritage back to some of the many Norwegians who had settled in the Pacific Northwest at the end of the nineteenth century. She was the kind of woman who could handle being the wife of a man who worked in law enforcement. She was also a very sharp businesswoman with a fast-rising local company that specialized in high-end cookware.

Devlin Nakamura bore the unmistakable stamp of a man others looked to in a crisis. Which was a good thing in a police officer, Grace
told herself—unless he was looking at you. He radiated determination and a stern will and he had cop eyes. It was easy to imagine him kicking down a door, or reading you your rights. If you were a criminal, he was not the investigator you wanted on your trail. Grace shivered. She had not been surprised to discover that Devlin and Julius Arkwright had once served together in the Marines.

“I’m sure Irene and Devlin meant well,” she said.

Julius fired up the SUV’s big engine. “Do you always say things like that after someone has ambushed you with a blind date?”

“Don’t be so melodramatic. It wasn’t that bad. Just . . . awkward.”

Grace was certain that Irene’s motives had been well-intentioned. She and Irene had grown up together. They had been close friends since kindergarten.

Devlin’s motives, however, were questionable. He was relatively new in Irene’s life. The pair had met shortly after Devlin moved to Cloud Lake a year ago to become the town’s new chief of police. Grace had been Irene’s maid of honor at the wedding.

Grace liked Devlin and she sensed that he was a committed husband. But tonight she’d had the uneasy impression that he was watching her with the same cold speculation that she had seen in the eyes of the Seattle homicide detective who had questioned her after Sprague’s murder ten days earlier.

“Okay,” Julius said. “We’ll go with awkward as a description of the date. For now.”

The amusement that etched his dark, deep, deceptively easygoing voice sent another chill across her nerve endings. She glanced at him. In the otherworldly glow of the car’s interior lights his face was unreadable but his eyes were a little tight at the outer corners, as if he was preparing to pull the trigger of a rifle.

Not that she knew much about guns or the type of person who used them, she thought. The only man of her acquaintance who
actually carried one was Devlin. But given his job, she supposed that he had some business doing so.

She had to admit that she was probably at least partially responsible for the atmosphere of impending doom that had hung over the small dinner party that evening. The problem was that she was not doing a really great job of thinking positive these days.

Stumbling onto a murder scene was bound to have some unpleasant repercussions. Still, it had been ten days since she discovered Witherspoon’s body and the darkness was not lifting. It hovered at the edge of her consciousness during the day. At night it swept in like the tide. In spite of a lot of meditation and positive self-talk and the three rituals, the bad energy seemed to be getting worse, affecting her thoughts and her dreams. Both were growing darker and more unsettling.

And the disturbing emails from a dead man were still arriving every evening.

Julius eased the SUV out of the driveway and onto Lake Circle Road with the cool, competent control that seemed to be at the very core of his character. The man would make a really good friend or a very bad enemy, she thought. She doubted that he was the positive-thinking type—more likely a tactical strategist.

She refused to contemplate what kind of lover he would be.

Whatever you do, don’t go there, she thought.

She had been too tense—too aware—of Julius all evening to consider the reasons why he disturbed her senses. The best she could come up with was the old warning about icebergs—the most dangerous part was hidden under the surface. Her feminine intuition told her that Julius Arkwright had a lot going on under the surface. So what? The same could be said of everyone. There was no reason to dwell on Julius’s concealed issues. She had her own issues these days.

The only hard facts that she knew about Julius were the bits and pieces that had come out in the course of conversation that evening.
He was a venture capitalist—a very successful venture capitalist, according to Irene. Other investors routinely entrusted gazillions of dollars to Julius to invest on their behalf.

Not that she had anything against making money, Grace thought. As it happened, figuring out how to generate some future income was right at the top of her To-Do list at the moment. Nothing like losing a job to make a person appreciate the value of steady employment. She should know—she’d lost count of the number of jobs she’d had since leaving college to find herself.

The position at the Witherspoon Way headquarters had lasted longer than any of her previous careers—a full eighteen months. She knew her mother and sister had begun to hope that her ever-precarious job situation had finally stabilized. She’d had a few expectations that might be the case, as well.

Julius drove at a surprisingly low rate of speed along the narrow, two-lane road that circled the jagged edge of Cloud Lake. The surface of the deep water was a dark mirror that reflected the cold silver light of the moon.

The silence in the front seat became oppressive. Grace searched for a way to end it.

“Thank you for driving me back to my place,” she said. She struggled to assume a polite tone but she knew she sounded a little gruff.

“No problem,” Julius said. “It’s on my way.”

That much was true. The lakefront cottage that Julius had recently purchased was less than half a mile beyond the house in which Grace had been raised. Nevertheless, she hadn’t anticipated the ride home with him. She had fully intended to drive herself to the Nakamuras’ that evening but Devlin had offered to pick her up. She had assumed that he would be the one to take her home. But when Julius had pointed out that he would be going right past the Elland house and said it would be no trouble to give Grace a lift, there had been no
gracious way to refuse—not with Irene and Devlin both nodding encouragingly.

Dinner would not have been nearly so uncomfortable, Grace thought, if it hadn’t been so obvious that Irene had been trying her hand at matchmaking.

Oddly enough, now that she found herself alone with Julius, she could almost see the humor of the situation. Almost. She settled deeper into the seat.

“Did you know ahead of time that Irene and Devlin were setting us up?” she asked.

“I was told there would be another guest.” Julius’s mouth edged upward at the corner. “Like you said, they meant well.”

“Now that it’s over, I suppose it’s sort of funny.”

“Think so?”

“I’m used to people trying to set me up with blind dates,” Grace said. “My mother and my sister have made something of a hobby out of doing that in the past couple of years. Now Irene appears to be giving it a whirl. Between you and me, they’re all getting desperate.”

“But you’re not interested?”

“Oh, I’m usually interested,” Grace said.

“Just not tonight, is that it? Got a problem with the fact that I’m divorced?”

His tone was a little too neutral. So much for making light conversation. This was getting more awkward by the moment.

She tried to sidestep.

“Nothing personal, really,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve got a few other priorities at the moment. I’m trying to come up with a new career path and that requires my full attention.”

Julius did not appear interested in her job issues.

“Any idea why things haven’t worked out with any of your other dates?” he asked.

She was starting to get the deer-in-the-headlights feeling.

“It’s just that nothing has ever clicked,” she said, very cautious now. “My fault, according to Irene and my family.”

“Why is it your fault?”

“They tell me that I have a bad habit of trying to fix people. If I’m successful, I send them on their way and I move on, too.”

“And if you can’t fix them?”

She tapped one finger on the console that separated the seats. “Same outcome. I send them on their way and I move on.”

“So, you’re a serial heartbreaker?”

She did laugh then. “Good grief, no. I’m pretty sure I’ve never broken any man’s heart. Men tend to think of me as a friend. They tell me their troubles. We talk about their problems. I offer suggestions. And then they go off and date the next cute blonde they meet in a bar or the good-looking coworker at the office.”

Julius gave her a short, sharp look. “Has your heart ever been broken?”

“Not since college. And in hindsight, it’s a good thing he did break my heart because the relationship was a disaster for both of us. Lots of storm and drama but no substance.”

Julius was quiet for a moment. “Looking back, I don’t think there was any storm and drama in my marriage.”

“Not even at the very end?”

“We were both relieved that it was all over, as I recall.”

That was hard to believe, Grace thought, but the last thing she wanted to do was dig into the subject of his failed marriage. She was not going to try to fix Julius Arkwright.

“Mmm,” she said instead.

“Don’t worry, I won’t spend the rest of the drive to your place unloading on you. You don’t want to hear about my divorce and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Whew.” Grace pretended to wipe her brow. “Good to know.”

Julius laughed.

Some of the tension went out of the atmosphere. She relaxed a little more and searched for a neutral topic.

“How long will you be staying here in Cloud Lake?” she asked.

“I plan to use the house year-round. I have a condo in Seattle but most of my work is done online. With some exceptions, I can work here as well as I can at my office. Cloud Lake is only an hour from the city. I’ll commute a couple of times a week to make sure things stay on track.”

She reminded herself that Julius was a very
successful
venture capitalist. He probably bought lakeside cottages and city condos the way she bought new shoes and dresses. Not that you would know that to look at him, she thought. In recent years the Pacific Northwest had proven fertile ground for start-ups and the savvy investors, like Julius, who funded the businesses that hit big. There was a lot of new money walking around the region these days and very little of it gave off a flashy, rich vibe. Most of it blended in very well with the crowd that shopped for deals at Costco and bought mountain bikes and all-weather gear at REI.