Seduced by a Dangerous Man (11 page)

“What? Did you crack the safe? Do you know the code?”

“Answer my question.”

“Partners,” I said. Like there was ever any doubt.

“That’s all I wanted,” he said easily. “I took a moment to relocate your video camera. If we get lucky, we might get the combination without any trouble at all.”

I stared at Rob. “You are a fucking genius.”

“I know,” he said. “About time someone recognized it.”

I would have preferred to have been the one who had found the documents, rearranged the camera… but spending time with Corbin had been a good lesson in not trying to do everything myself. So rather than upbraid myself for getting locked in the closet… well, there was bound to be a bit of self-flagellation because it
was
humiliating… I got down to work.
 

I scanned the documents and backed them up to an email address no one else knew of. Just in case. Then I printed out copies and pored over them, looking for patterns.

Henry was making large cash deposits at the beginning of the month, and he was taking half that money out again in cash two weeks later. With each deposit being over $40,000, he was well in excess of the limit that would trigger an automatic IRS notification from the bank.
 

So why bother? And then why take it out again? I frowned. Bribes and payments. Rob was surely right.

Corbin’s organization must have known about all of this and hadn’t deemed it worth pursuing. But I didn’t need to come up with bulletproof evidence to put Henry in prison for messing with FBI business; I just needed enough to make him leave us alone.

My phone buzzed. It was Veronica:
In town with neighbor boy tomorrow night. Be free or else.

I smiled and texted back:
Guess I’m free, then.
 

“Did you see Dad?” Rob asked. “You owe me, after all.” He was surfing the web on his phone and looked surprisingly nonchalant for a guy who was pushing his luck.

“Tomorrow,” I sighed. “Right after work.”

~~~

I pressed the button for the doorbell, fidgeted with the small white paper bag that was turning soggy under my damp palms. Gross.

Martha opened the door. She wore a long, flowing white dress that made her face look ruddier than usual. Her round blue eyes stared without blinking for a moment, then a cautious smile lit her face.
 

“Good to see you,” she said, opening the door so I could enter. The house smelled faintly of eucalyptus. When she didn’t have fresh flowers, Martha liked to put a few sprigs in the bathrooms and in some of the vases.
 

I mumbled some niceties and handed her the bag. “Bran raisin,” I said.

She nodded, but by the flare of her nostrils, I realized I’d chosen poorly. Apparently she’d taken it as an indictment of her cooking, of her care of my father.

So be it. She
had
been feeding him all sorts of crap since they’d married. Not that the fault didn’t rest squarely on Dad’s shoulders, but she had been his enabler.

“Dad around?”

“Of course he is,” she said, closing the door behind me. “He’s on the back porch. I’m going to put these on a plate, and we can all share them. Don’t forget to remove your boots.”

It hadn’t been so long since my last visit that I’d forgotten the house rules, but I didn’t defend myself. It wasn’t worth it.

Of all Dad’s wives, Martha was my least favorite. The others had been nicer. Sometimes they were too nice, and he’d taken advantage of them. Dad could be a bit of a bully, and as much as I disliked Martha, the woman stuck admirably to her agenda. She’d wanted to hook Dad, and she had. She’d wanted him to retire, and he’d brought in Henry so that he could retire.

I should have been taking lessons from Martha, because, well, my love life. I shoved my feet into plaid slippers and made my way through the house. As usual, it looked ready for a real estate showing.

Someone had dragged Dad’s favorite recliner onto the back porch. It was more of a patio and deck area, furnished with white wrought iron tables and chairs with blue and white striped cushions that always seemed damp. There was a sliding glass partition that was often retracted during barbecues. It wasn’t nearly warm enough for that yet, but Dad had one of the doors open, letting in cool air.
 

He was reading a newspaper, glasses perched on his nose. He’d had a haircut recently, and his curly hair was definitely more gray than dark. There was gray in his eyebrows, too.
 

“Hi,” I said, stepping onto the brick.
 

Dad actually smiled when he saw me. I decided to enjoy it, knowing it wouldn’t be on his face for very long; I gave us ten minutes before we were squabbling about something.
 

He studied me for a long time, like he was trying to memorize this moment. “Audrey. How’ve you been?” he asked, his brown eyes, the exact same shade as Rob’s, sincerely probing mine.

The question, and its naked vulnerability, brought me to a full stop. I wasn’t sure my father had ever said those words to me before—not even as a vague and dismissive greeting.

“Fine,” I mumbled.

“Glad to see you,” he said. “Thank you for coming by. It means a lot.”

“Uh… thank you.” This was new territory for Dad. For us. Maybe he wanted something. Or was on some powerful drugs. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

He snorted, and his gaze darted toward the door. “Can’t wait to get back on my feet,” he said. “Sitting around on my ass all day…” He scoffed and shook his head.

Martha came shuffling out, and I took a seat next to Dad. She placed a silver platter on the white table. She had cut the muffins in half and toasted them.

“Look what Audrey brought,” she said as she arranged the muffins onto plates. Those round blue eyes came to mine. “I nibbled one of the crumbs in the kitchen, and it’s divine. Did you get them from the diner where you work?”

“Yeah.”

“We should come by and visit while you’re working. Wouldn’t that be nice, Bobby?”

I couldn’t think of anything worse. I changed the subject to the first thing I could think of. “Henry is giving Rob a hard time.” Dad didn’t need to know that it was personal, that Henry was attacking Rob to get at me.
 

Martha’s red-tipped nails fluttered near her throat, and she looked nervously at my dad. “Now, that doesn’t mean you need to rush back in there willy-nilly,” she said.

“I’m going to meet with the lawyers again on Monday,” Dad said. “We discussed this already.”
 

With a martyr’s sigh, Martha handed him a plate. There was a dark purple smear of jelly along the muffin.
 

“You’re going back?” I asked him. I wasn’t doing it to antagonize Martha, but she crossed her arms and looked away. I didn’t see why Dad would return at all. He had been on his way out even before the heart attack that nearly killed him.

He nodded as he took a bite. “Rob’s been complaining since the beginning. At first I thought—hoped—it just needed time, but that’s clearly not the case—”
 

“Audrey, you talk some sense into him,” Martha said, and walked away, the door banging shut behind her.

That was out of character for her. I guessed she’d already lost the battle and wasn’t taking it too well.

“What does the doctor say?”

“These are good,” Dad said, neatly sidestepping my question. He had a lot more wrinkles than before. In my mind, he was like a mountain. Immutable. Even though he’d driven me crazy every day of my life—even when he wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity—I had assumed he would always be there.

A weird feeling unfurled inside me. Fear tempered with the acknowledgment of inevitability. I told myself he was still recovering from everything he’d been through, but it was more than that. Dad was getting older. He wasn’t infallible.
 

“Why did you sell to Henry?” I asked, staring at him evenly.

He sighed. Fussed with the bottom of his shirtsleeve. “We needed the money.”

“Why? We own the building.”
We?
Get a grip, Audrey. “The company is turning a profit.”

His eyes didn’t turn toward the house—where Martha was sulking—but then, they didn’t need to. His next words spoke volumes. “I never planned to retire in my fifties. When I loaned your brother the money for his condo, I got a lot of heat for it. It’s a good thing you’re happy in your apartment, because I’m not sure I coulda swung another loan like that.”

“You’re… broke?” I asked, stunned. While I had never been involved in running the day-to-day business of Stroop Finders, I’d seen the records. Hell, I’d seen the tax returns. Dad drew an enormous salary, and the company had quite a few assets.

“I’m not broke,” he said. “Not even close. But assuming I live another thirty years, which I realize might be optimistic given the last few months, the money won’t last forever.” He snorted. “Correction. It would, for me, but I’d assumed I’d be single. Not married to a woman who wants to do month-long cruises and fly first class everywhere.”

“So tell her no,” I said shortly, irritated.

Dad smiled at me. “One day you’ll meet your match, and you’ll understand what it means to never want to disappoint someone.”

“Some people feel that way about their kids.”
 

He pulled off his glasses and squinted through them. Anything to avoid looking at me. “You don’t think I did this for you, too?” he asked.
 

“No. I’m pretty sure that giving the company to an asshole wasn’t for our benefit.”

“You don’t know as much as you think you do, child.” Even though he hadn’t raised his voice much, I knew he was getting angry. He was doing that thing where he puffed himself up, taking up more space. If he kept it up, he was going to float out of the chair and up into the sky.

“You should have consulted us!” I yelled.

Dad looked like he was going to rise up and scream right back at me. In fact, he tossed aside the newspaper that had been sitting forgotten in his lap. But then the tension drained from him. “You’re right,” he said. “I handled it poorly.”

His acquiescence was a brick wall thrown up in front of my indignation, and my mind went blank.

“I didn’t think you and Rob would be thrilled, but I didn’t expect you to storm out of the restaurant like that,” he said.
 

“So it’s my fault.”

“Damn, girl, shut up and
listen
for once,” he thundered. And I had to concede that despite his physical frailness, he wasn’t the least bit diminished once he lost his temper.

I crossed my arms.
 

“Try listening a little less angrily,” he said, but he’d already pulled himself back from the edges of his fury.

The door flew open. “What is going on out here?” Martha demanded, looking accusingly at me.

“Give us some time,” Dad said. “Please.”

Martha sighed loudly, but she withdrew.
 

“I’m sorry I wasn’t a better father,” Dad said.

I sucked in a short breath. “Who said you were a bad father?” I countered.

“You did. In the hospital.”

My face blanched. “I…”

“Just listen. You talked, and I listened. Now you return the favor.”

I very badly wanted to point out that he’d been unconscious and unable to do anything
but
listen; however, I held my tongue.

“I was hard on you. I’m sorry,” he said. He didn’t look at me, which I took as a blessing. Not that I was looking at him, but as I stared at the ragged edge of my uneaten muffin, I could still see him in my peripheral vision.

“I was unfair to you,” he continued. “You said that you didn’t think I realized it. That’s untrue. I knew. You were right. We’re very similar. I love you, Audrey, but sometimes I do want to strangle you. It’s mutual, I know, and deservedly so. I’ve got flaws. I tend to treat people dismissively. It makes me a terrible boss and a terrible father, and when those things were combined…” He trailed off and shook his head. “Every word you said, I deserved. Everything you felt, I take responsibility for.”

“Dad,” I said hoarsely.

“Not finished,” he snapped irritably. Because only my dad could be cuttingly rude to someone in the middle of a heartfelt apology. No, not only him. Me, too. I’d done similar things to Corbin. No wonder he had left.

I sucked in a shuddering gasp of air that burned as it went down.
 

“Watching you make the same mistakes I made… I didn’t know how to handle it. Still don’t. Maybe these things I’m saying are the wrong words. I don’t know the right way to look at it. Probably shoulda been in therapy, all of us. Mrs. Rico suggested that, but I didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to believe I was the root cause of your panic attacks. But my way, coming down harder on you… it just made you more stubborn. More hellbent on trying to prove you could handle everything at the expense of balance in your life. And it didn’t matter how much work I gave you. You resented me for it, then you went out of your way to take more, always picking up the slack for everyone else in the office.”

“I wanted you to treat me like everyone else!” I said, unable to bite my tongue for one second more.

“Kat didn’t get hired right out of high school…”

I forced myself to unclench my fists. “Maybe if she’d spent her childhood
breathing
it—”
 

“Everyone starts at the bottom,” Dad said. “Maybe I was too hard on you, but I was trying to treat you like any other employee. That was a mistake. I should have been grooming you and Rob to take over. You
aren’t
ready to run a business. There’s too much you don’t know. Of course you can’t see it.” He shook his head angrily. “You know the curse of having children? They inherit your genes,” he said.

I wondered if I’d visited long enough to justify staying away another month.

Dad heaved out a sigh. “The good and the bad. You and I are so much alike. Of course we butt heads. Just like my father and I did.”

Our grandfather had died when Rob and I were twelve. We’d never met him; he had lived hours away and never came to visit. Dad never talked about him. I’d once asked Mom about him, but she’d only said she didn’t know him well, that he was a silent man.