Jasmine Cresswell - Missing

“Sometimes habits die hard—”

“That’s a pretty pathetic excuse.”

“Cutting you out of the loop was an insulting decision, I see that now.” Liam gave an apologetic shrug. “I seem to have made a bunch of bad decisions over the past few years. But I was trying to do what seemed right. At least believe that….”

“You should have told me,” she repeated and turned away, still struggling with her anger.

He touched her on the shoulder. “I’m really sorry, Meg.”

She moved away from him. “You’ve been lying to me for years, at least by omission. That’s hard to forgive.”

“Don’t let this force a wedge between the two of us.” Liam’s voice had lost all trace of its usual ironic edge. “Dammit, that’s exactly what I was trying to avoid by remaining silent.”

“It’s bewildering—make that infuriating—to discover that two of the people I trusted most in the world were lying to me.” Megan shoved impatiently at her hair, feeling as if her entire body was misaligned and out of sorts. “I hate that you kept me in the dark.”

“I didn’t want to put you in a position where you would have been forced to lie to Mom. It was bad enough for me, and I only saw her a couple of times a year.”

“I wouldn’t have lied to Mom. I’d have told her the truth.”

“Yes, you probably would have done,” Liam said. “And that’s a big part of why I didn’t confide in you.”

“Why were you so determined to shield Mom from the truth? I don’t understand why you covered for Dad. Or why you felt Mom was in such great need of protection.”

“You think of Mom as a pillar of strength….”

“Yes, of course. Because she is.”

“She’s a pillar of strength here at the ranch, surrounded by everything she loves. Without the ranch, she’d wither away.”

Megan gave an impatient shake of her head. “You underestimate her. Just as you underestimated me.”

“Maybe. I wasn’t willing to put Mom’s happiness to the test and Dad exploited that vulnerability. Basically, he blackmailed me into keeping quiet. He warned me not to make him choose between his wives, because he swore that he’d choose Avery.”

Each new revelation seemed to bring a little more pain than the last. If Avery had been Ron Raven’s favorite wife, had Kate been his favorite daughter?

Megan pushed away the insidious jealousy. “How did you find out about his other family, anyway?”

“By chance. And even then, I practically had to be beaten over the head with the evidence before I put the pieces together.” Liam was visibly relieved to change the subject, even if only slightly. “Six years ago, I went to Atlanta for a business meeting. The night before I was due to fly home I happened to run into Dad at a political fund-raiser for one of the local senators—”

“In Atlanta?”

Liam nodded. “Avery’s family is from Georgia, and she was with him at the party. It was obvious that she and Dad knew each other well. It was equally obvious that he was desperate to shepherd her away before I could speak to her. She’s a beautiful woman, a few years younger than Mom, and I assumed they were having an affair.”

“Why didn’t you confront them before Dad could hustle her away?” Megan demanded.

“I was with the senior partner of the law firm where I worked in those days, and we were being hosted by one of our most important clients. I didn’t want to expose my own father in front of a client, so Dad managed to make his escape.”

“Did you confront him later?”

Liam nodded. “But only after some internal debate. Naturally, the truth never crossed my mind and I wasn’t sure if it was my place to shove my nose into my parents’ marriage by accusing Dad of having an affair. In the end, I made a special trip to Chicago, just to talk to him. He assured me the ‘affair’ was already over. That being caught by me at the fund-raiser had made him realize the risks he was running and how much he cherished his relationship with Mom. And so on and so on, through the laundry list of lies.”

“And you believed him?”

“At the time.” Liam’s smile was bitter. “You won’t be surprised to hear that Dad lied very convincingly. It was another two years before I found out that Avery was much more than a passing affair—that our father had actually gone through a formal marriage ceremony with her and that they had a daughter a few months younger than you.”

“How did you find out those important details?” Megan heard the shake in her own voice. She wasn’t sure if the tremor was caused by anger or something more complicated and even more painful.

“Again, by accident. I was sent unexpectedly to Chicago by my law firm. They needed me to take depositions for a criminal case we were working on. The witness I was sent to interview had offices in Oakbrook—“

“In Oakbrook?” Megan repeated. “That’s where the offices of Dad’s company are located.”

Liam gave a tight, angry smile. “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. In fact, I was working only six or seven blocks away from where I believed R & R Investments was headquartered. So when I finished taking the depositions, I decided to drop in on Dad and invite him to dinner. We’d been estranged since the incident in Atlanta, and I figured it was time to get our relationship back on track.”

“I remember the offices,” Megan said. “Dad took us there the summer you graduated from high school. I was in fourth grade and I spent at least an hour making Xerox pictures of my hands on the copying machine. Then Mom and I went back for another visit years later when I was about to start college. Dad suggested that we might like to come to Chicago and do some shopping. He said it would be a good opportunity to meet his office staff and his partners.”

Liam laughed, the sound harsh. “You have to give the guy credit. He sure had outsized balls. And you met his staff, of course? And his partners?” Her brother’s questions were heavy with sarcasm.

“Well, yes, we did—”

“No, you didn’t,” Liam said, his fists clenching. “You met a bunch of actors. Both times. Both visits.”

“What?”

“I guarantee that every so-called employee you were introduced to during that visit with Mom was an out-of-work actor, hired for the day. Just like they were the time you went there with me. R & R Investment Partnership isn’t even the real name of Dad’s corporation.”

“What’s his company called?” Her dry, cracked lips had to be forced to shape the words.

“The company is called Raven Enterprises, and the head office isn’t in Oakbrook. It’s miles away, northwest of Chicago, in Schaumburg, near O’Hare airport.”

Megan shook her head, which did nothing to clear the fog of befuddlement. “Dad actually set up a fake company and a fake set of offices just to deceive us?” She sat down on the porch bench because her legs suddenly wouldn’t hold her up.

“He didn’t keep the fake company active on a permanent basis. Just long enough to convince us that we’d visited the headquarters of his company—the mythical R & R Investments.”

Megan rubbed her forehead although she’d given up hope of banishing her headache anytime soon. “But even if he hired actors to play his employees, how did he have access to office space?”

“That was easy. He owns the building in Oakbrook and leases it out. He invited us there when he was between tenants. He even had an automated phone service set up so that if Mom or any of us called there, we’d be greeted by a message supposedly from R & R Investments.”

A shiver crawled down Megan’s spine. She’d learned a lot that she didn’t like about her father over the past couple of days, most of it pretty major stuff. It was odd that these relatively trivial deceptions bothered her so much. “It makes his dealings with us seem so calculated. So petty and…cruel.”