Conquer Your Love (23 page)

Just like now.

After
a quick
shower and changing into a clean
pair of jeans and a sleeveless shirt, I joined Sylvie in the backyard. We
talked for an hour straight, during which I recalled the car chase in minuscule
detail. Much to my surprise Sylvie came to terms with Jett being here to help
me. She asked questions about Jett’s reports, Alessandro’s past, and even about
how I felt about Jett being back in my life. She wanted to make sure I was
okay, and that I was happy. When she suggested inviting Jett over for dinner,
my jaw almost dropped. I’ll admit her sudden enthusiasm scared me, but it was
also important to me that Sylvie accepted Jett and forgave him, not least because
I didn’t want to hide anything from her.

We were lounging by the pool.
A soft red tint covered my naked arms and shoulders while Sylvie showed a
healthy golden glow that would soon turn into the most gorgeous tan, building a
beautiful contrast to her blond hair and stunning blue eyes. Knowing about the
estate and the car chase, she didn’t seem as scared as I thought she’d be.

 
“I’m glad we talked,” I said. “Keeping
secrets from you felt terrible. I’m not good at that.”

“To be honest, I already
suspected something was wrong.” Sylvie leaned forward and squeezed my hand
gently. “I just didn’t want to push you, because you were in a bad place. I
reckoned you’d tell me at some point.”

“Yeah.” I wished I had done
it much earlier.

She pushed her sunglasses back
on her head, a quizzical look on her face. “Are you and Jett back together?
Like, officially?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted,
“We haven’t talked about it. We’re dating and he told me his feelings once, so
we might be getting serious.” I shrugged as though it didn’t matter. But it
did. A lot. I wanted
serious.
Ever
since meeting him it had become one of my
favorite
words.

“Might be?” She snorted. “If
a guy talks feelings after you’ve had sex, he wants to be with you. There’s no
doubt about that.”

“I guess,” I muttered.

Something in my tone made her
tilt
her head. Maybe I didn’t come across as
enthusiastic or
confident
as one would expect.

“Does he know how you feel
about him?” Sylvie asked.

Staring at the sparkling blue
water, I shook my head.

“Why? What’s the problem?”

I smiled grimly. Sylvie and I
were so close and yet opposites. She knew a bit about my past and I about hers,
but she denied everything she’d rather keep buried. How could I explain to her
my rules about love and relationships without going into detail about what
drove me to think that way? To love someone so deeply is to risk losing
yourself forever. Once I admitted my feelings to him, there was no going
back—no hope to ever make my heart complete without him.

 
“He’s amazing, but—” I hesitated,
my throat constricting at the thought of a future together. “I want to be with
him but sometimes when I see him, I feel like I’m standing on a cliff, knowing
there is no way to go but down.”

I bit my lip, pondering how
much I could say without giving too much away.

“Right now I’m happy with how
things are. It’s going great. The way I see it Jett doesn’t need to know how I
feel.”

Sylvie smiled and squeezed my
hand. “Sweetie, love’s meant to be shared. Maybe it won’t last forever. But who
cares? Every story has an ending. You can’t stop after one chapter just because
you don’t know how it ends. If you love him, you should at least give it a
chance. What’s worse than loss?”

 
“Regret,” I whispered, thinking back to
all the times she had drilled into me just how great of a bitch regret was and
why I should take risks rather than live in my safe bubble. “You’re right.”

“I know that. Do you?” Her
brows shot up.

I did. And yet the demons
inside my head kept roaring. They were the ones who kept telling me it wouldn’t
end well. It hadn’t for my parents.
Nor Jett’s parents.
Nor Sylvie’s.
Why would I encounter a different fate?

“Think about it,” Sylvie said
gently.

Nodding, I fought back the
moisture gathering in the corners of my eyes and decided to change the topic.
“Has Clarkson called?”

Sylvie shook her head and
squeezed into her clothes—cropped jeans and an oversized tee that fell
off her shoulder. “No, but a letter arrived this morning. I left it on the
kitchen table. It’s the financial reports you requested.
Wanna
have a look at them now?”

I wanted to ask how she knew
what the letter contained, but decided against it. “Sure. I’ve turned into a
lobster anyway.”

As we returned to the house I
noticed the dark clouds gathering in the distance. The soft breeze from before
turned into a strong gust blowing up the leaves, and the air carried the scent
of oncoming rain. It was hard to believe that just a few hours ago the air had
been so hot it had reminded me of a desert.

We entered through the
backdoor and I locked it behind us. I scanned the kitchen area. It looked
spotless, like Sylvie didn’t use it, which was strange because she usually
ordered portions that could feed a family of four—and didn’t gain a
pound. Maybe she had been too worried to eat. The thought ignited my guilt
again.

“Did anything happen last
night?” I asked. “Any strange phone calls?”

She shot me an inquisitive
look. “No, it was pretty quiet here.”

I had never been so happy to
hear she had a quiet night in. It almost made the car chase seem surreal.

“Did you really call the
police?” I asked, grinning.

“Yeah. They told me I had to
wait forty-eight hours before I could fill in a missing person’s report. That
pissed me off big time, but other than that—” Sylvie shook her head.
“Nothing happened.” She blinked a few times, irritated.

I placed a sloppy kiss on her
soft cheek. Ever since we moved to New York City, Sylvie and I had a code that
if one of us didn’t get in touch before
ten
a.m.
the next
morning, that
would be a red call
that something happened. Even though she received the text and shouldn’t have
worried, I appreciated her concern.

“I’m so sorry. I promise I
won’t do that to you again,” I whispered.

 
“You’d better not, Brooke, because you
scared the crap out of me.” The tremble in her voice didn’t go unnoticed.
“Those are the papers. Looks like there’s a lot to go through.” She pointed to
the large yellow folder and headed for the coffee machine.

I watched her fill the filter
and add water, then opened the folder and was instantly overwhelmed by the countless
sheets covered by numbers and yet more numbers. Even though I knew my way
around basic accountancy, I had never glimpsed into the accounts of an estate
as big as this one. As far as my amateur eye could see though, the numbers
looked legit and the taxes paid.

“They look okay to me.” I
closed the folder again.

Sylvie placed a cup of hot
coffee in front of me and sat down. “Can I see them?”

“Sure.” Given that she had a
degree in business to show off and had worked in an accountancy firm until
recently, I was more than happy to oblige. I handed her the folder and took a
sip of my coffee, almost burning my tongue in the process.

Sylvie began flicking through
the papers.

“What do you think?” I asked
her, inching closer. Two minutes passed and she didn’t reply. The silence was
making me nervous, so I bumped her leg under the table.

“Sylvie?”

“Sorry?” She frowned but
didn’t look up. “Did you say something?”

“Is something wrong?”

I laughed to compensate for
the worry in my voice.

“There’s no debt.” She looked
up, her baby blue eyes searching mine.

“So that’s a good thing then,
right?”

Her grimace didn’t quite
manage to erase my unease. Maybe it was the way she clutched at the papers. Or
maybe it was the way her eyes kept darting across one particular page, as
though her findings rattled her. But something told me things weren’t as clear
as they had seemed to me.

“There’s something wrong,
isn’t it?” I asked.

She held up a hand, her face
scrunched up in concentration as she pulled three papers in front of her, discarding
the rest, and started to compare them. I didn’t like the look on her face. My
heart began to beat fast.

I walked around the table and
leaned over her shoulder, trying to see what she saw. Finally, Sylvie flicked
open her phone and began to punch numbers in her calculator.

 
“The numbers don’t add up,” she mumbled
as her fingers pointed around the sheets to show me. “Looks like a loophole in
earnings and write-offs. I’m wondering where the money’s going.”

Turning, she gazed up at me,
her eyes reflecting my own mistrust.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry, Brooke. I’ve no
idea,” she said, handing the papers back to me. “Those look like charities, but
who knows. You need to talk with Jett and find someone who knows more about
Italian accountancy practices. One thing’s for sure, the transactions were made
at regular intervals. The last one took place last January.”

“Okay.” I blinked in
succession. “People donate to charities all the time.”

Sylvie shook her head. “Look
at all those zeroes. We’re talking millions and he wrote them all off. You said
Jett owns a property here, meaning he more than likely has an Italian
accountant to sort out his taxes.”

I knew I had reached a point
where I needed help. Jett was the obvious answer.

She stopped in front of the
kitchen door, her hand on the doorknob, her eyes not looking at me. “There’s
something else.”

“What?” I cocked my head,
regarding her intently. Whenever she tried to make something important sound
casual, she started with the words ‘also there’s something else’, which
instantly made the alarm bells go off at the back of my mind.

“You said Alessandro didn’t
want you to make any alterations to the house, right?”

I nodded.

“Well, I’ve been wondering
why there are cement bags downstairs.”

“Downstairs?”

“Yes, in the basement. While
waiting for you worried sick, I might add—” she paused for effect
“—I checked all the rooms in the house and stumbled upon the bags in the
basement.”

“Are you sure you saw bags of
cement and not—”

“Dust? Stones?” She rolled
her eyes. “I’m not stupid, Brooke.”

“I never said that. It’s just
weird.” Alessandro had been so adamant that nothing changed about the house. I
had to see it and then ask him about it. “Show me,” I said to Sylvie. Not
waiting for her answer, I walked past her, only stopping in the hall, so she
could take the lead.

She guided me down the stairs
and through a door into a narrow corridor that seemed to stretch on forever.
The air smelled stale and dusty. The spare naked light bulbs above our heads
cast moving shadows across the whitewashed walls. My shoes barely made any
sound on the concrete floor, as I hurried to keep up with Sylvie’s brisk pace.

“You came down here all
alone?” I asked, almost sceptical. Who would have thought my best
friend—a closet claustrophobic—would enter an underground place
that resembled an oversized casket with no windows and no escape exit?

“I didn’t exactly have a
choice. I thought you might be trapped in the basement,” Sylvie muttered.
“You’d be surprised what else I’d do for you.”

I smiled at the various
memories of her shying away from elevators and cramped spaces, pretending she
couldn’t breathe.

“It wasn’t easy. I thought I
was going to have a heart attack.”

“Look at you. You’re
conquering your fears. I’m so proud of you,” I said, meaning every word of it.
She shot me a dirty look over her shoulder and muttered something like ‘just
shut up.’

We reached a juncture and
entered a hall with several doors. I peered into the first room. Apart from old
furniture stashed in the corner, it was empty. The second and third cells
looked just the same. The fourth cell was the size of a room and completely
empty. Stopping in my tracks, I shuddered as unease washed over me.

“Where are the cement bags?”
I asked.

“There.” Sylvie pointed to my
left. I turned to follow her line of vision, only then noticing the open
archway hidden by darkness. We walked in and Sylvie switched on the light bulb,
bathing the fifth room in artificial brightness.

The small space was stacked
with racks and bottles, which led me to believe Sylvie had stumbled upon
Alessandro’s wine cellar. Stashed between the wall and a rack were two bags of
cement, almost hidden from view, as though someone had forgotten them there.