Jasmine Cresswell - Payback

He ignored her hand. “You’re welcome.” His icy tone belied the polite words. “I assume you’re here to talk about your father.”

“Yes, if we could.” She let her hand drop to her side, her voice chilling to match his. If she’d expected the passage of seven months to heal the wounds of their parting, she had obviously been delusional.

“Let’s go to my office.” He turned without waiting for her to respond, not bothering to check if she was following as he wove a swift path to the tiny room set aside for him to make phone calls, pay bills and meet with vendors. Unlike the colorful dining rooms, or the shiny stainless steel of the spacious kitchens, his offices in all three restaurants were tiny, white-walled cubes. Small enough to be oppressive, and cold enough to form a suitably icy background for their conversation, Kate thought bleakly.

“I hope your mother wasn’t upset by what we discussed this morning.” Luke stood behind his desk and didn’t suggest that either of them should sit down. If body language was anything to go by, his attitude to this meeting was several degrees less enthusiastic than her own.

“Of course my mother is upset.” Kate bit back the urge to suggest he should refrain from making ridiculous statements. “Six months ago she found out that the man she’d loved for twenty-eight years was a bigamous, cheating liar. Then she was informed he’d been murdered. The next cheery little revelation was that her supposed husband had left far less money than anyone would have thought possible. What funds did exist went straight to probate, where the lawyers are having a grand time charging huge sums of money to unravel a quarter century of my father’s carefully manufactured deceptions. In the meantime, my mother’s been forced to sell her home of a dozen years and adjust to the fact that at least half her friends weren’t actually friends at all, merely hangers-on, out for what they could get. Now you summon her to your presence so that you can pass on the news that—big surprise!—maybe Ron Raven is alive after all.” She let out an exasperated breath. “How in the world do you think she feels?”

Luke’s voice and expression both remained cool. “Right now I imagine she’s teetering somewhere between overwhelmed and devastated.”

“Your imagination is correct. I’m wondering what the upside of your revelation was supposed to be.”

“The fact that Avery might be able to uncover the truth about what really happened to her husband?”

Kate made an impatient sound. “Where my father is concerned, truth is likely to remain unavailable however much we scrabble in the dust he left behind.”

“It’s clear you disapprove of my decision to tell your mother what I saw.”

“Yes, of course I disapprove. In effect you told her that Ron Raven cared so little about her that he was willing to fake his own death to avoid ever seeing her again. Thanks so much for your comforting words!”

He winced at her sarcasm. For a moment, his guarded expression broke down, revealing unmistakable self-doubt. “I felt I owed your mother the truth precisely because Ron lied to her for so many years.”

Kate wasn’t ready to acknowledge that Luke might have found himself in an almost impossible position. “You should have talked to me,” she said tersely. “Not my mother.”

Luke’s smile was wintry. “Maybe, but I was never into masochism, Katie. Having my balls cut off and shoved down my throat comes way down on my list of ways I want to spend the morning.”

Goose bumps erupted all over her arms when he called her Katie, even though the endearment was tucked inside a major insult. She reminded herself that her body was simply responding to ingrained sexual cues after months without sex. In her current celibate state, she could probably watch Patrick Dempsey making out with a TV lover and her hormones would provide the same knee-jerk response. And, watching Patrick, she’d get the sexual buzz without the added insult.

“For some reason, my mother believes your story about seeing Ron Raven might actually be true.” She hadn’t intended to sound so hostile, but Luke’s presence suffocated her, destroying her good intentions. She struggled to moderate her tone. “My mother asked me to find out if you had any additional information we might be able to hand over to a private investigator in the hope that he would be able to track down the man you saw in Washington, D.C.”

“Do you believe I saw your father?” Luke asked. His voice was unexpectedly quiet and the question seemed less of an attack, more of a genuine request for her opinion.

Kate hadn’t yet summoned the courage to examine that question. She’d focused on her mother’s state of mind and Luke’s transgressions mostly because it let her off the hook in terms of her own reaction to the eerie possibility that her father was alive.

“I’m sure you believe you saw him,” she said finally. Even when she’d first heard the news, she’d never doubted Luke’s sincerity.

“That’s not what I asked.”

She shrugged. “You knew my father quite well. I’m assuming the lighting was adequate and you saw him reasonably close up?”

“Yes.” Luke’s hesitation was almost imperceptible. “I heard him laugh before I looked at him. I was talking to my sister when I heard this familiar sound and I thought, My God, that sounds just like Ron Raven. I glanced up, not expecting to see him, of course, despite the laughter. But there he was. Eating dinner with an attractive, dark-haired woman and looking as if he was enjoying himself. For a couple of seconds, I was literally too shocked to move.”

The sickness in Kate’s stomach returned with renewed intensity. Hearing Luke describe the incident gave her father’s possible reappearance a reality it had previously lacked. An unwelcome reality, she realized. “There doesn’t sound as if there’s a whole lot of room for you to have made a mistake.”

“No. Still, I never exchanged a single word with the man and never heard him speak to anyone else. Everybody’s supposed to have a double somewhere in the world. Perhaps I saw Ron’s.”

She wished she could believe that, but her ability to ignore inconvenient facts wasn’t quite up to the task. “My mother said the man ran away when you tried to approach him.”

Luke nodded. “He was sitting right next to the door, and I was across the room, tucked into an alcove, with at least half a dozen tables between me and the exit. I chased him into the parking lot, but there was no way to stop him driving off once he made it into his car. I discovered it’s a lot more difficult to catch somebody than it looks in the movies.”

“I guess you didn’t manage to get the license number of his car as he drove away?”

“Actually, I did.”

“You did?” She glanced up, startled. “Could we trace it, then?”

“I already had a private investigator track it down before I contacted your mother. The car was a brand-new Mercedes, and it was registered to a man called Stewart M. Jones.”

For a second, Kate was puzzled. Then she realized that—of course—if her father wanted to avoid being discovered he couldn’t go around calling himself Ron Raven. “If you have those vehicle registration details, my mother and I should be able to track the car’s owner back to an address, shouldn’t we? I assume you have to give an address when you register a car in Virginia?”

“Apparently, yes. But my investigator reported that Stewart Jones sold the vehicle the day after I chased him into the parking lot. What’s more, the address given on the accompanying paperwork isn’t valid.”

“He gave a fake address?” Kate realized her surprise was misplaced. “Well, of course he would have to, I guess, since he was trying to stop you tracking him down.”