Nobody's Angel (10 page)

She would almost feel sorry for Sandra if it weren't for the agony searing through her. Forcefully ignoring the acid burning holes through her stomach, Faith picked up the cruise tickets that had started it all and shoved them into her purse. The travel agency was next on her agenda. Sandra wouldn't be able to afford a baby-sitter by the time she was done, so she wouldn't need the cruise tickets. She was doing the other woman a favor.

Briefly wondering where Tony had found the money to
support his other life, Faith grabbed the odd copies of accounting records and canceled checks drawn on the law firm's escrow account and added them to the contents of her purse. He'd probably filtered the money through the corporation accounts his bookkeeper kept at the office. She would ask Headley about them. She'd met the old reporter while working on publicity for community groups, and knew he liked puzzles.

As she walked out to her old Volvo, she glanced at Tony's gleaming new Jaguar in the drive. He treasured that car as if it were a child. She was pretty sure it was titled to the corporation—the corporation of which she was treasurer. She'd love to see his face when he realized she'd sold it. But she'd be long gone.

How convenient that Tony had allowed her to handle all their personal finances. She knew to a penny how much he brought home in salary, how much she'd saved by keeping them out of debt, just exactly how much he owed to her. The Jaguar ought to just about cover her grandmother's inheritance money.

The Present

Adrian cast his companion's lingering smile a suspicious look. He'd thought she'd be furious, perhaps terrified, definitely frantic. Instead, she'd clasped her hands into tense fists and sat as straight and taut as a ramrod, but the trace of a smile warned of the evil direction of her thoughts.

The fried chicken hadn't filled the hole in his belly. He doubted if any food would. His gut burned with things he wanted and couldn't have, and inexplicably, this female was one of them.

“By the time we reach Charlotte, it will be too late to drop in on my family.” Stick to the mundane, he told himself. Worry about the next meal, the next bed, the safe deposit boxes. He couldn't cure his mother's illness or the kids’ neglect or world peace. He couldn't bed an ice queen. One did
what one could. “Do you have friends, family, who might be up that late?”

In the growing darkness, he couldn't read the expression she turned on him, but he figured it was haughty, if not downright derisive, judging by her tone.

“I have nothing and no one in Charlotte. I'd hoped never to go back there again.”

Well, after the scandal of the decade, he supposed he could understand that. Charlotte was the city that never forgot and never forgave. “Headley sends you his best wishes.” She ought to know there were a few people who didn't blame her.

She looked out the windshield and didn't reply.

“Do you have a credit card?” Back to calculating one thing at a time. He didn't have patience for analyzing human equations.

“Why? So you can steal it, too?”

Well, hell. Adrian gripped the steering wheel tighter, as if he could keep the bug from flying off the road from the force of the semis roaring past. “I don't want to steal anything. I just want to get to Charlotte, locate Tony's safe deposit boxes, and pray they contain the evidence I need to clear my name. Then you can go back to whatever little game you're playing in Knoxville, and I can go back to my family. I'll never have my license reinstated as long as the legal fund has to pay off all those widows and orphans Tony cheated, but at least they'll know I don't have it.”

“Neither do I,” she stated firmly. “I figure it went to support Sandra. Let the lawyers pry it out of her.”

“You're a cold-hearted bitch. Don't you ever spend a sleepless night worrying about the people Tony cheated?”

“Up until you showed up, I'd thought you were the one who pocketed the escrow funds. None of it had any relation to me.”

“What in hell did you think was paying for that fancy house in Dilworth and the shiny Jag and the country club dues?” She was an enigma. He couldn't fit all the pieces of her together into one whole. How could someone this coldhearted find time to buy books for homeless kids and appreciate fine porcelain and sing like she meant every word of her songs?

“I paid for it,” she answered calmly. “My inheritance bought the law office. Tony's salary paid for the house. My scrimping and saving and working for nothing paid for everything else. I controlled our personal checkbook. I know precisely where our money came from. I have no idea where anything else came or went.”

The traffic was too intense for him to turn and look at her, but he actually wanted to believe her. He couldn't, of course, she'd been the one with the falsified copies of the books. She'd been the one who testified against him. She had to be hiding something.

“And that's the reason you packed up and moved away with no forwarding address and hid up here under an alias?”

“I left a mail-drop forwarding address,” she said primly, cleaning her fingers on a damp wipe from a package in her purse. “And Faith Hope is my name, not an alias.”

“I spent years trying to trace you. You're hiding, all right. And you don't want to go back to Charlotte for a reason. You have an accomplice who's looking for his share of that money?”

Again it was too dark to see her look of scorn, but it scathed him just the same. Pure vitriol laced her reply. “I had a husband looking for his Jaguar, among other things.”

“His Jag?” That caught him so off guard, he laughed. “You stole his precious Jag? My congratulations to you, my dear. I didn't know you had it in you.”

“I didn't steal it, I sold it. I sold the house, the stocks, the furniture, and anything that wasn't nailed down. What I couldn't sell, I gave to charity. I left him his suits, though. I sent them to Sandra.”

Adrian chuckled. She looked so prim and proper sitting there, as if she should be wearing white gloves and one of those little fifties hats and be sitting in a church pew. She'd sold Tony's car! His chuckle escalated. She might as well have sold his penis. “The country club membership?” he asked out of pure spite. Tony had spent hours bragging about the CEOs he dined with at the club.

“That, too,” she agreed demurely. “I told them Tony had decided to give up material possessions and donate his wealth to charity.”

He roared. He simply couldn't hold it back any longer.

“You'd better pull over to the side or you'll run us off the road,” she said calmly, watching him without so much as a smile.

“I'm okay.” He wiped the tears of laughter rolling down his face but he couldn't stop grinning. “Do you have any idea how I schemed to strip Tony to his briefs?”

“I spent eight years of my life with Tony, dreaming,” she said softly. “I decided it was time to take action.”

That shut him up. This demure, dainty little housewife had dared to enrage a murderous bull by stealing his balls. Tony must have gone ballistic. He would have torn the state apart looking for her. He'd probably charged her with grand larceny and every statute he could find in the book.

“How did you get away with it?” he asked in pure awe.

“I had the canceled checks from his private account, the account that supported Sandra. And I had the copies of those account pages I sent to Headley. He didn't know what else I had, so he kept quiet. That's how I knew he was guilty of something. But I still didn't want to take chances. I filed the divorce papers and left the state. Tony knew too many people in Encee, and I didn't have anyone. He bad-mouthed me from the mountains to the coast before he left.”

He believed her. He really believed her. He must be losing his mind. Even knowing the agony she must have endured to have her revenge, he grinned all over again. His mother would love Miss Faith Hope Nicholls. They were both brave women who'd done what they had to do to survive.

Which placed him in a hell of a lot of danger. His mother would come after him with a kitchen knife if she knew he'd kidnapped a woman. He didn't want to contemplate what Faith would do to him now that he knew her strength. Faith Hope could be one vicious female.

“You had Headley on your side,” he reminded her, “and I bet a lot of other people you didn't give a chance. You could
have gone back after Tony died.” Reason and persuasion, he told himself. He needed her trust.

“I didn't want to go back. I made a new life, and I like it.”

His lawyer's training heard a note of something behind the defiance, some smidgen of doubt, some yearning he couldn't quite label. He probed for more. “You like singing in a dive?” he asked. It seemed so out of character.

“It paid the rent until the shop showed a profit. Now it helps support the homeless. I'm not so blind as to not realize I could easily have been in their place had Tony thrown me out first.”

In the dim light of the dashboard, she shrugged. “Besides, I'd always wanted to sing, and I'm not denying myself any of my dreams anymore. I lost years of my life for my stupidity, and I don't intend to be a victim ever again.”

He heard the threat even though it was uttered in a perfectly even voice. She gave new meaning to the phrase “steel magnolia.” But he was tough, too. He wasn't a mild-mannered Southern gentleman. He didn't wear kid gloves. Between them, they'd have to find ways of working together without killing each other.

He made the first overture. “You used those years to become a stronger, better person. I don't count that a waste. And you walked away with a sizable amount of cash, so you got a gallery out of it.” And the clair-de-lune piece, but he held back his knowledge of its pricelessness. He still looked for a trap.

“I only kept the amount that would have been mine if we'd invested my inheritance in stocks instead of Tony's office.”

She lied. He knew she lied. He had her now.

“That fancy house in Dilworth was worth more than the office. Who kept all the rest?”

“Not that it's any of your business,” she shot him a look that he knew wasn't happy, “but I set it up in a nonprofit trust fund. I didn't lie to the country club. The worth of Tony's material things was donated to charity. I figured that made us even.”

She was downright certifiable. She'd had enough wealth to subsidize a modest lifestyle for the rest of her life, and she'd given it all away? Uh-uh, sister. He didn't buy that one.

“And the clair-de-lune piece?” he asked nonchalantly, waiting for her to explode with wrath at his trap.

She folded her hands neatly in her lap. “That was my grandmother's. Tony never knew its value.”

Oh hell. She'd beaten him again.

Either she was a liar par none, or she had waters deeper than the deepest ocean.

And he was seriously beginning to believe the latter. He was kidnapping a damned saint—one who could make a blind man drool.

Mist covered the windshield as they drove out of the mountains into the foothills. If they took I-26 out of Asheville, the traffic would ease, but Faith knew she couldn't summon the energy to take a flying leap out of a car going sixty-five miles an hour. She couldn't summon the energy to do more than watch the aging wipers slap back and forth. She'd never told her story to anyone. Why had she told this man?

And how did a lawyer and an ex-con know the value of a clair-de-lune bowl, or even what one was?

She wasn't as good at asking questions as he was. She'd grown up traveling from state to state with parents who taught her that asking too many questions was impolite. Besides, he was a lawyer, like Tony, and could probably interrogate while never giving a straight answer.

She shouldn't show any interest in him at all, but if she wasn't going to jump out of the car, she was stuck sitting here beside him in the dark for another two hours or more, worrying about what lay ahead, fearing her attraction to another man she should despise. She watched through the darkened windshield as they turned from I-40 to I-26, leaving the lights of Asheville behind. There was little more than empty road from here to outside Charlotte. What would they do when they arrived in the city?

Considering Adrian's grip on the steering wheel, and his silence after his earlier laughter, she debated the wisdom of trusting him. How far around the bend had four years in prison sent this man?

A good question, but somehow his laughter had reassured her. If Adrian was really innocent, he had a right to prove it.

“You must have worked with Juan quite a bit to know so much about pottery,” she said abruptly, introducing a safe topic.

His grip didn't loosen, and he continued to focus on the taillights ahead of him. “My mother's family brought the skill with them. They thought to make a living with it in the land of the free.”

She'd spent enough time in Mexico to know about Mexican tiles and pottery. It sold for pennies south of the border. It didn't sell for much more here. “We're a technical society. Appreciation for creativity and artistic ability is limited.”

He snorted impolitely. “Tell me something I don't know. My grandfather became a tile setter. My mother worked in the mills. They survived. That's what we do best—survive.”