Kylie Brant - Dangerous Deception

Slowly she rose, sliding the briefcase to the floor. “Tomorrow?”

“When I messenger over the contract and file that you requested.”

“Ah. Yes.” Her tongue suddenly thick, she resisted the urge to wipe her palms on her khakis. He was standing a little too close, as near as he’d been when she’d turned around on that ladder and found herself almost in his arms. Close enough to have her marveling at the deep blue of his eyes, but retaining enough of her scattered senses to wonder at the secrets behind them.

“To our partnership, Ms. Corbett, as brief as it may be.”

Her hand raised of its own volition. “To our partnership.” His hand engulfed hers. It suited her to blame the skip in her pulse on static electricity. But try as she might, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d just made a pact with a very sophisticated, very charming devil.

The plaintive cornet of Bix Beiderbecke wailed from the portable CD Tori had carried into the attic. The blues music provided a perfect backdrop for the task at hand. With resignation layering the ache in her heart, she scanned the contents of the space and wondered where in the world to start.

Rob Landry had been an undisputed pack rat, and she didn’t doubt that he’d saved more than he’d ever thrown out. Furniture was heaped and shoved into one corner, and overflowing boxes teetered in precarious towers, threatening imminent collapse. There were stacks of newspapers, neatly bundled and piled haphazardly almost to the ceiling beams. Why they’d been important enough to keep was beyond her, but then her dad had been the type to let junk mail accumulate, too, until she came in and tossed it. The man had been able to figure every angle of a case and work a source like a master, but hadn’t been able to part with a single scrap of paper.

The memory made her lips curve and her eyes mist. The pain twisted just a bit, leaving a wound that she knew from experience would throb for some time. Cancer had stolen both of her parents now. First her mother, and now her beloved dad, who had seemed so indestructible. Right up until that day three months earlier when the pain he’d passed off as indigestion had been diagnosed as something a great deal deadlier.

Releasing the breath that had backed up in her lungs, she headed toward the furniture. She’d already been through the downstairs, putting aside the pieces she wanted to save and those that would be donated to the needy. She’d expected this to be easier somehow. The things that he had stored up here wouldn’t hold the keen reminders of him, nor still smell of his aftershave. There wouldn’t be memories of him here, as there were in every room below. He’d been a big man, but had filled a room more with his presence than his stature. It would be impossible to exorcise those memories from the house, and impossible to live with them. She’d placed it on the market earlier that week.

Tori worked her way trough the chairs and tables that he’d deemed too good to throw out. It took an hour to decide there was nothing in the collection that she wanted to save, and she restacked the pieces. She’d use the corner to separate those things to be gotten rid of from the things she wanted to keep. Most of what she had decided to hang on to was downstairs, but there wouldn’t be room for all of it in her small house. It would have to go into storage until she had a bigger place.

The newspapers could be tossed without going through them, she determined, passing by them in an effort to get at the boxes. But she must have brushed the stack as she went by, and the entire pile began a slow-motion sway. With a sense of futility, she leaped aside, just in time to avoid being nailed by the bundles as they tumbled to the floor.

The impact of their landing sent up a cloud of dust that sent her into a spasm of sneezing. When her eyes and lungs had cleared, she glared at the mess accusingly. Her dad had tended to keep any newspapers with articles that caught his imagination, talking vaguely about writing a book sometime when he retired. She’d never been able to imagine him in so sedentary a pastime, but had thought it a harmless enough intention until now.

Muttering a few choice words, she set to hauling the papers into yet another pile, this one designated for the trash heap. The headline leaped out at her from the top one of the bundle, and a quick flip through them showed a collection detailing the trial of the notorious New Orleans Ripper, who’d been caught and tried a decade earlier after killing a dozen women.

With a grimace, she pushed them aside and started some smaller, steadier piles. He’d had varied interests. Some of the papers were articles on fishing, a passion of his, others on the history of the city. But it was the bottom bundle that caught her eye, with a headline very like the one she’d clipped and placed in the file she’d given to Tremaine.

Tremaine Heiress Returned Safely.

With a sense of déjà vu she had a sudden recollection of James Tremaine’s face when he’d seen the similar headline in the file she’d given him. A grim mask had descended over his features, but not before she’d glimpsed the bitter resentment in his eyes. He’d made his feelings toward the press and public prying quite clear, but that didn’t stop her from reaching out, tugging at the string that bound the papers together. Flipping through them, she found stories detailing the kidnapping and the car accident a few months later. She scanned the stories, but they elicited no information she hadn’t found in her research earlier that week. Something clicked in the rereading, however, something she’d forgotten to ask Tremaine about. There had been a third passenger in the car. A third death.

To refresh her memory, she pulled the papers loose, looking for the articles detailing the accident and the follow-up investigation. The passenger’s name was given, but she was identified only as a family friend. Tori made a mental note to look up more about the woman.

She set aside the bundle of papers on the Tremaines and finished stacking the rest to be destroyed. But during the task, her gaze strayed more than once to the papers she’d saved. Her earlier excitement at having landed her first job on her own had been tempered by her troubling reaction to Tremaine. She’d thought her interest in the opposite sex had been laid to rest permanently upon the ignoble end of her marriage. Or, to be truthful, months before the official ending. As her husband’s criticism and dissatisfaction with her had grown, her hormones had gone dormant at approximately the same pace. Finding him in his parents’ pool house on top of Miss Texas Rose 1998 had nearly shredded what was left of her confidence. She’d had enough sense, however, to leave him and their marriage behind. And enough self-respect to first send his canary-yellow Ferarri convertible crashing through the fence to sink to the bottom of the pool. It was the only memory of her marriage that still had the power to bring a smile to her face.

Given that, it was more than a little disturbing to experience that inexplicable…awareness when she was near Tremaine. A woman would have to be in the grave not to react to his looks, and so her response to him was only too natural, a cause for celebration, even. But as comfortable as it would be to believe that’s all there was, Tori couldn’t prevent feeling a sliver of unease. There was something about the man that heightened all her sensitivities, which really wouldn’t do. Getting involved with a client was an ethically sticky situation.

A wry grin twisted her lips. Luckily, that was not likely to be a problem. She and Tremaine couldn’t have less in common if they’d been born on different planets. Her brief foray into the monied class during her marriage had taught her only too painfully that the rich were, indeed, different.