Jo Leigh - Confessions Bundle

Juliet took a pad out of her satchel. He’d noticed that while she always had that pad and a pen, she seldom used them.

“The worst news is there’s nothing to report from the Cayman Islands.” She looked straight at him. Pounded another nail in his coffin without flinching. He respected that about her.

“What else?”

Her smile was more genuine, if a bit sad. “We’ve been spending far too much time together if you know me so well,” she said.

With both hands surrounding his whiskey glass, Blake watched her through narrowed eyes. “I don’t think it’s a matter of time,” he told her.

In other circumstances he wouldn’t have been so forthright. But faced with the fact that he might not have all that long, the normal rules of social interaction just didn’t mean all that much.

She didn’t say anything. But she didn’t glance away, either.

“I think it’s a matter of recognition. The first night we met it seemed as though I knew you.”

She licked trembling lips, took a sip of wine.

“You think I’m nuts.”

“No.” She bit her bottom lip. “Not unless I’m nuts, too.”

Blake needed to kiss that bottom lip. And the top one, too. He needed to feel those breasts against his chest. To lose himself inside her again as he’d done endlessly that night so long ago. To be free to have another night like that one…

“I found something else this week.” Her voice cooled him off, though her eyes still bore that strange indefinable something that filled the space between them.

“What?” he asked. He’d had a long week, too, and didn’t want to hear any more about things he could do nothing about. Yet he needed to know everything if the facts were ever going to come together to expose the truth.

“Interestingly enough, as I perused the records of a couple of other Eaton Estates investors, I noticed outgoing payables in the exact dollar amounts that James was paying your father and that were being deposited in the Cayman Islands. We don’t know that the money was going there. It certainly wasn’t recorded that way. Still, just as with your father’s contributions to the Honduras charities, the coincidence is notable.”

“You think there’s a Ponzi scheme?” Had Eaton, like Charles Ponzi, used later investors to pay off earlier investors whose money he’d lost or confiscated?

“Possibly.”

Blake sat up, his heart beating a little faster. If they could prove something like this, he’d be home free.

“If nothing else, it at least means the money in the Islands could have come from any number of sources.”

“Yes.”

“Why isn’t this great news?” It meant there were other places to look for the missing clue—some kind of proof that someone other than him had deposited money in that damn account. Some record of those same amounts of money leaving someplace else with no known destination on just the right days.

“It might be great news, but it makes the pool of possibilities that much larger when our window of opportunity is getting smaller by the day.”

Blake sipped his whiskey, in spite of the noose he felt tightening around his neck.

THE SOUND OF CEREAL pouring into a bowl woke Juliet Saturday morning. Rolling over, she pushed the hair out of her eyes, trying to make out the numbers on the clock through sleep-blurred eyes.

Barely past six. If it were wintertime, the sun wouldn’t even be up yet.

Yawning, pushing past the lethargy that had claimed her limbs during the long night, she grabbed the terry shorts at the end of her bed and slid them up under the spaghetti-strap T-shirt she wore to bed.

Something had to give soon. She couldn’t afford too many more sleepless nights like the one she’d just had.

Worrying about Mary Jane. And Marcie. And Blake’s case.

And refusing to think about the feelings he aroused in her. Desires she’d long since convinced herself had been the result of too much alcohol and a desperate need to feel something besides worry and grief.

She’d had nine years to escape.

And her body was so on fire for the man, she could hardly relax enough to fall asleep. She’d always thought it was only men who walked around all day with raging hormones.

“What’s the rush, imp?” she asked, finding her daughter at the kitchen table. Meandering over to turn on the coffeepot, she stopped to wipe up the puddle of milk spilled on the counter.

“I’m not rushed.”

“You’re up and at ’em pretty darned early. You have some big plans for the day I don’t know about?”

“Uh-uh.” The little girl spoke with a mouthful of cereal.

“You want to spend the afternoon on the beach? We could take the tools and molds and build another sand town like we did last year.”

“Yeah.” Mary Jane was already dressed in cotton flowered overall shorts and a matching purple T-shirt. Her hair, always a mass of unruly curls, had clearly not seen the hairbrush that morning. “If she doesn’t have to come along.”

“Mary Jane McNeil, that’s enough.” Juliet stopped, her arm half out of the cupboard with a coffee cup in her hand. She’d never spoken so harshly to the child.

Mary Jane was staring at her, mouth open. Her eyes were wide and glistening.

Setting the cup on the counter, Juliet pulled a chair up next to her and sat. “I’m sorry.”

Mary Jane said nothing. Nor did she close her mouth.

“I was wrong to speak to you like that,” she tried again, running one finger along the little girl’s thigh.

The child’s gaze moved, following that finger.

“Say something.”

“You yelled at me like Mrs. Thacker.”

The third-grade teacher who’d helped make life hell this past spring.

“I know.” She couldn’t believe it, either. She’d never felt that anger-filled tension toward Mary Jane before. “I lost patience and I’m sorry.” She wanted to promise she’d never do it again, but she was afraid to. She didn’t want to add lying to her list of sins, and because this was new territory for her, she couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t come again.

Mary Jane stared at her long and hard. And then nodded. “Okay.”

Juliet couldn’t leave it there. “It’s just that what you’re doing to Marcie, it’s not right, sweetie.”

“She lied.”

“Yes, she did. But to me, not to you.” Juliet was still trying to comprehend all the ramifications of her last conversation with her sister. “But she had good reason.”

The little girl opened her mouth to speak and knowing that she wasn’t up for a debate on the rightness of lying if the reason was good enough, she quickly said, “We all make mistakes, Mary Jane. You do. I do. Like I just did, snapping at you.” She leaned down, arms on her knees, bringing her eyes level with the child’s. “And think about how awful it would be if every time you made a mistake, I refused to talk to you or spend time with you. What if I didn’t say it was okay when you said you were sorry?”

Mary Jane pushed her spoon around in the milk left in her bowl. “You can’t do that. You love me.”

“And you love your aunt Marcie, too.”

The little girl looked over at her. “But lying is the worst,” she whispered. “You always say so.”

“I know.” Running a hand around the back of her neck, Juliet struggled to focus, to find words to explain something that she was pretty sure she hadn’t completely grasped yet. “But sometimes, there’s more than one truth and the two truths don’t go together and you have to choose which one to tell.”

Mary Jane’s legs swung under the table. She played with her milk. “That doesn’t actually make much sense, Mom.”

“Well,” Juliet said, watching the little person who was as much a part of her as her own heart and bones, aching for her in ways she didn’t really understand.