Marie Ferrarella - The Parks Empire - Secrets, Lies and Loves - Romancing the Enemy

“Come in,” she said, standing back from the door after opening it at his impatient second knock.

She noticed he had the receiver for the monitor he kept in Stacy’s room hooked to his belt. A thoughtful father, she scoffed. He looked after his own.

She sat in one of the chairs. He took the other.

The space between them, where the coffee table resided, was as wide as a canyon.

“What’s happened?” he asked quietly.

“Nothing.” At his ominous frown, she shrugged. “I was fired this morning. My services are no longer needed was the way it was put to me.”

He regarded her with narrow-eyed scrutiny, then a light dawned in his eyes. “You think I had something to do with it.”

She ignored the disbelief in his voice. “I’m positive of it.” She wrapped her arms tightly across her middle as a shield from the tremors that had invaded her.

“Sara—”

“Was it your idea or your father’s?” she asked, letting the glacier that had formed inside her penetrate her entire being, allowing icicles to coat each word.

Cade observed her without answering.

“It doesn’t matter. I know where we stand now. I was distracted over the weekend,” she admitted, the bitterness of the previous winter entering her soul. “But that won’t happen again.”

He rose. She did, too.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded.

“The mighty Parks family,” she said scathingly. “You can have me fired, but nothing will stop Tyler and me from finding out the truth. We’re not helpless children anymore, and we have friends in the city. You had better not try the same tactics on my brother.”

The pleasant room filled with raging silence as they studied each other like opponents in a boxing ring. It would be a bare-knuckle battle to the finish, and only one of them would be standing at its end. That survivor would be her.

“What truth are you searching for?” he asked with a deadly calm that might have frightened her had she not been sure of her ground.

“The one involving my father, Jeremy Carlton, and your father, Walter Parks…the honorable Walter Parks,” she mocked softly, “who was a liar, a thief, a seducer of other men’s wives, a diamond smuggler…”

“Don’t leave anything out,” Cade invited when she paused, his voice as expressionless as his face.

She inhaled carefully, sensing his cold fury, then said, “Walter Parks, my father’s partner. And his murderer.”

Cade walked unannounced into Walter Parks’s office at nine o’clock the following morning. The secretary followed uneasily behind him. “Mr. Parks is on a conference call,” she repeated. “He isn’t to be disturbed.”

“It’s all right, Connie,” Walter said, placing the receiver on the hook. “I’m through with the call. Please close the door.” It was an order, not a request.

She did so.

“Did I forget an appointment?” Walter asked.

Cade shook his head. “I have one question. Did you have Sara Carlton fired?” He knew the answer by the way his father’s eyes darted away from him. “You did.”

Walter shrugged. “I suggested to one of the directors that her services weren’t needed.”

“What else?” Cade demanded.

“Nothing.”

The older man was lying. Cade knew it in his gut. The blood pounded through his temples at a furious pace. “What else?” he asked again.

“I suggested she might have an unsavory background, which she does,” his father insisted at his snort of fury. “Her mother was an unstable person.”

“Unstable,” Cade repeated. “The way my mother was unstable and had to be sent away?”

“Not like that,” Walter hedged. “Not exactly. Marla was given to depression and hysteria. She, uh, took things more seriously than warranted.”

Cade digested the statement. “Such as the affair you had with her?” he asked softly, icy coldness joining the white-hot anger in his blood as he observed the familiar signs of anger in his father.

“I was not involved with her. Anyone who says so is a liar.” A pulse pounded out of control in Walter’s temple as his face suffused with color. “I suppose you’ve been listening to Marla’s daughter.”

Cade shoved his hands in his pockets and sat on the corner of the desk in a casual manner. “Yeah. We had an interesting conversation last night. She thought I’d gotten her dismissed and wanted to know if it had been my idea or yours.”

Walter frowned. “What did you tell her?”

“Since I knew nothing of it, I didn’t tell her anything.”

“Good. Keep your mouth shut and this will all blow over in a day or two.” He looked pleased.

“The way her father’s death did twenty-five years ago?” Cade asked, keeping his tone neutral, his voice low.

There was a slight jerk to his father’s hand before he waved it in dismissal. “That’s ancient history. The police investigated thoroughly and concluded it was an accident.”

“A convenient one,” Cade murmured.

The flush spread from Walter’s neck to his face. “What the hell are you suggesting?”

“You tell me.”

The older man planted both hands on his desk and viewed Cade with narrow-eyed scrutiny. “Don’t let the fact that you’ve got the hots for the girl get in the way of your thinking,” he warned.

“So you had nothing to do with Jeremy Carlton’s death?”

“No. It was like I told the police. We’d all had too much to drink while celebrating the new enterprise. I went to sleep. When I woke up, adrift on the tide, I barely got the yacht cranked up in time to avoid breaking up on some rocks. Jeremy was a fool to take the boat out on his own. We could have both drowned.”

Cade considered the scenario painted by his father. It jibed with the police reports. But then, those reports used Walter’s story to describe what happened. He shook his head slightly, not liking the way his thoughts were going or the faint shadow of doubt that nibbled at the edges of his mind.

“I can’t believe my own son would ask me such a question,” his father said, his voice rough with pain. “That was a horrible year, first with Jeremy’s death and all the questions about it, then your mother’s illness coming on top of that. With four children to raise, I was at my wit’s end.”

Cade felt a jab of guilt at bringing up old memories. “It was lucky we had Mrs. Wheeler by then,” he said, recalling it had been the motherly widow who’d tucked them into bed at night and listened to their prayers.

“It was,” Walter agreed. “With the business tangle to sort out after Jeremy’s death, I had all I could do to keep the company solvent. Some of the diamonds we’d purchased were missing. We never found them.”

“Sara and her brother think you kept the ones their father had bought.”

Walter shrugged. “They would only see things from Marla’s point of view. She even accused me of smuggling gems. Why would I do that when I had a perfectly legitimate business in diamond trading? The woman was crazy.”

Cade mulled over the odds of there being two crazy women involved in the same scandal.

His father came around the desk and threw an arm around his shoulders. “I don’t know what Marla’s kids think they hope to prove by stirring up the past, but I don’t have anything to be ashamed of. I can assure you of that. You got time for lunch today?”

“Uh, not today,” Cade said. “I’m swamped.”

“Catch you another time, then,” Walter said, jovial now that he considered their problem resolved.

Cade left the building and headed for his law office, aware of the cloud that sat over his head, its presence not quite letting him totally rely on his father’s vow of innocence.