Up Close and Dangerous (25 page)

“I always liked him. He was friendly, down-to-earth.” Still that noncommittal tone.

“I enjoyed working for him. He didn’t cheat on Lena, didn’t look at his female employees as his private playground, so I didn’t have to be on guard with him. He was friendly, interested, he gave me investment advice that I sometimes took and sometimes didn’t. He said I was too cautious. I told him I didn’t take chances with my retirement. He laughed at me, but he was interested in some of my investment choices.” She took a long breath, let it out. “Then Lena died.”

“And he got lonely.”

“That’s not what happened,” she said irritably. “The thing is, Jim and Lena had made out their wills years before, when Seth and Tamzin were little. Like most couples, they made each other their total beneficiaries, leaving it to the surviving spouse to figure out what to leave to the kids. Even though Jim went on to make a huge fortune, he had a blind spot when it came to his will and they had never updated it. When Lena died, he realized he had to change the will, but when he looked at his kids he didn’t like what he saw.”

“Neither did anyone else,” Cam said drily. “Still don’t.”

“We’re in total agreement there.” Especially since Seth was the only person on their suspect list. “Anyway, he was in the process of setting up their trust funds when he found out he had advanced cancer. He’d always hoped Seth would wake up, settle down, and start taking an interest in the company, but when he found out he was dying he knew he couldn’t afford to give Seth any more time. So he hatched this plan.”

“Let me guess.”

“Oh, please do.”

He made an amused sound in his throat at her sarcastic tone. “You’re a tough cookie, you know that? That’s probably why he picked you. Okay, here goes: he wanted to hire you to oversee their trust funds, but knowing you’d have to deal with Seth and Tamzin for the rest of your life, you charged so much that the only way he could afford you was to marry you.”

She went from being annoyed to laughing, because, oh, if she’d only known! “I wish I’d been that smart. But you’re sort of on the right track. Remember, Jim was a manipulator. He was always juggling this and dangling that, pulling on a thread over here, tossing a bone over there. He couldn’t help it; that was his basic personality. He didn’t have any hope for Tamzin, but he never gave up on Seth. He thought that if he married me and gave me control of their trust funds, Seth would be so humiliated and outraged that he’d see the light and turn his life around.”

“Yeah, that worked out real well. If Seth’s seen a light, it was the one above the bar in his favorite nightclub.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, and sighed. “If Seth started acting like a mature adult, then I was supposed to turn over control of the trust funds to him—
but
Seth couldn’t know about that part of the arrangement. Jim said Seth was smart enough he could fake whatever he had to fake long enough to get control, then revert back to his old self. Jim was sure this would work. So far, it hasn’t.”

“He didn’t have to marry you,” Cam pointed out. “He could have handled all of this simply by the way he set up the funds.”

“Marrying me was part of the stick he used to beat Seth into shape, though. If I was just a trustee of the fund, in the background, Seth might be pissed about it but he wouldn’t be humiliated. It was everything about me: I’m younger than Seth; I supposedly took advantage of an older, dying man; I moved into their mother’s place. Having people know that Jim gave control of their money to
me
was supposed to be the kicker.”

He said, “Well, that answers one question.”

“And that question is…?”

“Why he married you.”

Wasn’t that what this entire conversation was about? What else was there? “What’s the other question?”

“Why
you
married
him.
”

Bailey thought she’d answered that. She frowned over her shoulder at him, though he likely couldn’t tell in the tiny amount of light coming from the fire. “I told you. It was part of the deal.”

“But why did you agree to it? Marriage is an extreme step.”

Not in her family, it wasn’t. Her parents had looked at marriage as a legal convenience, to be dissolved whenever they got a whim to move on. She didn’t go into all that, though. Instead she said tiredly, “I’ve never been in love. So I thought—why not? He was dying. I would do that for him, and in exchange he’d make sure I was financially secure.”

“So he did leave you some money.”

“No, he didn’t.” The relief had faded, and she was getting very sick of this conversation. “I have privileges, such as living in the house, my expenses taken care of, and I’m paid a very nice salary for managing the funds, but I didn’t inherit anything. All of the privileges stop if I remarry, but the salary continues as long as I do the job.”

“Got it. I won’t even ask what you consider a ‘very nice’ salary.”

“That’s good, because it’s none of your business,” she said acerbically.

He snuggled her closer and rested his chin on her shoulder. “I’m curious about something, though. You’ve truly never been in love? Ever?”

The change in subject made her uncomfortable and she shifted restlessly. “Have
you
?”

“Sure. Several times.”

It was the “several” that made her wince. If it were truly love, wouldn’t it be only once? Real love shouldn’t fade. Real love expanded, made room for children and pets and a host of friends and relatives. It didn’t come with an expiration date, and after that date you moved on to someone else.

“When I was six, I fell madly in love with my first grade teacher. Her name was Miss Samms,” he said reminiscently, and she could hear the smile in his voice. “She was fresh out of college, she had these big blue eyes, and she smelled better than anything I’d ever smelled in my whole life. She was also engaged, to some bastard who wasn’t nearly good enough for her, and I was so jealous I wanted to beat him up.”

“I gather you were smart enough not to try,” Bailey said, relaxing. She couldn’t take a six-year-old’s crush on his teacher seriously.

“Barely. I didn’t want to upset Miss Samms by killing her boyfriend.”

She snickered and he punished her with a pinch. “Don’t laugh. I was as serious as a heart attack. When I grew up, I was going to ask Miss Samms to marry me.”

“So what happened to this grand love?”

“I started second grade. I was older, more mature.”

“Um hmm. Mature.”

“I chose a more appropriate love interest the next time. Her name was Heather, she was in my class, and one day she pulled up her skirt and showed me her panties.”

She barely managed to restrain another snicker. “My goodness. Heather was fast.”

“You have no idea. My heart was broken when I found her showing her panties to some other boy.”

“That’s a big disillusionment. I wonder how you had the strength to go on.”

“Then when I was eleven…Katie. Ah, Katie. She could hit a fastball like you wouldn’t believe. She moved away before I could get up the nerve to make a move on her—but she moved back when I was fourteen. When I was sixteen, Katie wrestled me down and took advantage of me.”

“Oh, I bet! Excuse me, I mean, the nerve of some girls!”

“She was strong,” he said seriously. “I was so scared of her I let her do what she wanted with me for a couple of years.”

She reached back and returned the pinch he’d given her.

“Ouch! Is that any way to treat a man? I’m telling you how I was used and abused, and instead of feeling sorry for me you abuse me some more.”

“Poor pitiful you. I can tell you were traumatized. That’s why you named a certain body part ‘Good Time Charlie.’”

“I considered ‘Go Slow Joe,’ but I had to go with my heart.”

Bailey completely lost control of the giggles that had been building up. “Justice, you’re so full of it the shelter needs shoveling out.”

“You’re laughing at all my trials and tribulations in the romance field? I don’t know if I should tell you the rest.”

“How many more are there?”

“Just one, and this one’s serious. I married her.”

That
was
serious, and the laughter went out of Bailey. She could tell by the change in his voice that he wasn’t kidding any longer. “What happened?”

“To be honest, I don’t know. I didn’t cheat on her and I don’t think she cheated on me. We got married while I was still in the Academy; her father was an officer, she’d grown up with the military lifestyle so she knew what to expect. Her name was—is—Laura. All the moving from base to base, the separations, she took in stride. What she couldn’t handle, I guess, is civilian life. When I got out of the military, that’s when things went to hell. If we’d had kids I guess we would have stuck it out, but without them, the hard fact is we didn’t love each other enough to keep things together.”

“Thank God you didn’t have kids!” she said fervently, before catching herself. “Sorry. It’s just—well…”

“You’ve been there.”

“Too many times.”

“I guess that’s why you’re afraid to let yourself care about anyone,” he said, and her heart jumped violently in her chest.
She
knew why she kept people at a distance, but she’d never before revealed so much of herself to anyone. Too late, she saw that his easy humor had undermined her guard and she’d given him an enormous advantage, one that he wouldn’t hesitate to use.

As if to underscore the thought, he gave a low sound of satisfaction, the sound of a predator with its prey in its grasp, and said, “I’ve got you now.”

27

“M
EN!”
B
AILEY MUTTERED AS THEY TRUDGED THROUGH
the snow. “Can’t reason with ’em, can’t shoot ’em.”

“I heard that,” Cam said over his shoulder. “Besides, you don’t have a weapon.”

“Maybe I can smother him in his sleep,” she mused to herself. Her voice was muted by the cloth over the lower half of her face, but evidently not muted enough.

“I heard that, too.”

“Then I assume you can hear this: You’re a stubborn, mule-headed, macho
idiot
, and if you get dizzy and fall you’ll probably break some bones even if the fall doesn’t kill you outright, and I swear I’ll leave you bleeding in the snow!” Her voice rose until she was shouting at him.

“I love you, too.” He was laughing, and she wanted to kick him.

She had seldom been as furious with anyone as she was with him, but then she seldom lost her temper. You had to care about something to get angry, a fact that made her even angrier. She didn’t want to care about him. He’d made what she thought was a dumb-ass decision, and she wanted to mentally shrug and let it go because he was an adult and he could bear the consequences of his dumb-ass decisions. Instead, she was fretting. And worrying about him.
And
letting her imagination run away with her, picturing all sorts of awful things that could happen to him, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it because he was a stubborn, mule-headed, macho idiot.

He was pulling the rough sled he’d made, loaded down with the things they’d decided they would need along the way, plus one addition he’d made that morning: the battery. Getting it out of the wreckage had taken a herculean effort, one that had left him pale and sweating—a big part of the problem was that the battery was so heavy, over eighty pounds. But he’d tested the battery, it still had juice, and he’d decided that they should take it so that if anything happened to him, she’d still be able to make a fire.

She’d yelled at him that they would have been doing without a fire anyway. He’d said no, they weren’t, that when they got out of the snow and he could find dry wood, he could make a fire using friction, because he’d been a Boy Scout and knew how.

“Fine,” she said. “Then you can teach me, and we won’t need to drag a hundred-pound battery around! You have a
concussion
. You lost a lot of blood. You shouldn’t be exerting yourself this much!”

“It doesn’t weigh a hundred pounds,” he’d retorted, completely ignoring the rest of her comment—as well as the fact that the battery came damn close to weighing that much.

So he’d wrestled the thing onto the sled, and the weight had made the wooden runners dig into the snow. Seeing that she couldn’t dissuade him from taking the battery, she’d grabbed the traces and started pulling the sled herself, only to have him firmly move her out of the way and take over the job of sled dog.

“You can carry the backpack,” he’d said maddeningly, referring to his roll-aboard suitcase that he’d rigged with straps.

She was so angry she’d considered hitting him with a snowball, but she was afraid of what damage any chance blow to the head, no matter how slight, might do to him. She also didn’t want to get his clothes wet, not when she’d gone to so much effort to keep him as warm as possible. Smothering him in his sleep, though…that was a possibility.

The terrain was horrifyingly rugged, and unseen hazards lay under the snow. Sometimes the slope was so steep she had to hold the sled from behind to keep it from sliding past him and dragging him down the mountain. Sometimes there simply was no going down at all without ropes and mountain climbing equipment, so they had to trudge up and around until they discovered a less treacherous descent. After walking for what he said was three hours, she doubted they had managed to descend more than perhaps a hundred feet, but they had zigzagged for miles. And she was still angry.

The snowshoes were clumsy and required that she lift her knees with each step, as if she were marching in a band. Her muscles were burning from the effort. Maybe she didn’t lift her foot high enough, but the tip of her right snowshoe suddenly caught on something buried in the snow and catapulted her forward.

She managed to get her hands out to break her fall, going down on her right knee and then sort of rolling to a sitting position. Her hands and knee stung, but sharp pains shot through her right ankle. Muttering curses under her breath, she held her shin and gently rotated the ankle to see if she’d sustained any structural damage.

“Are you hurt?” Cam went to one knee beside her, his gray eyes worried above the strip of red flannel that covered his own nose and mouth.