Nobody's Angel Page 7

  “I could have you arrested for this.” Dumb, Faith, dumb. Remind him of what he had to lose. Guaranteed to make a desperate man sane.

  “I'm living in purgatory anyway. What difference would it make?” He jerked the VW to the right side, avoiding a lumbering truck cutting too close on the left.

  The heavy traffic and narrowness of the aging interstate made her sick on a good day. With growing darkness and terror, her stomach pitched furiously. She closed her eyes and tried not to watch. With her luck, they'd catch a rock slide on the mountain.

  “I can't help you,” she insisted. “I gave everything of value to the court. What on earth do you expect me to do when we get there? Wave a magic wand?”

  “I've been thinking about that.” Adrian jerked his head in the direction of the backseat. “There's a box of fried chicken back there. Help yourself.”

  She reached in the backseat for the box. Maybe food would relieve the distress clawing at her stomach.

  “All right, genius, and what has your male-inflated brain thought of that I haven't?”

  “Safe deposit boxes.” He reached over and grabbed a biscuit. “Tony had boxes in every bank in town. That's how I knew he was a crook. I just didn't bother investigating, figuring it had nothing to do with me.” He snorted in deprecation at his naiveté.

  “I didn't have access to any safe deposit boxes.” Refusing to fall for his pretense of vulnerability, Faith tore into her chicken. They had to stop sometime. She'd call for help then.

  “Somebody did,” he insisted. “I told the court about them, but Tony testified he'd shown the contents to the prosecutor, and no one called his bluff. I tried, but the judge ruled it out. Sandra claims she knows nothing about them. Your divorce wasn't final. As his wife, you can go to the banks and ask if he still has active accounts. They may have already turned the contents over to the state, but you can verify that and start the process to recover them. I'll wager six-to-one that at least one of those boxes contains computer disks with his files.”

  “This is a wild-goose chase.” Wiping her hands on a napkin, Faith glared at him through the growing dusk. “My clerk isn't scheduled to come in tomorrow, so I'll lose a day's business and endure this horrible trip all the way to Charlotte because you're obsessed with the impossible. Tony handled everything through a corporation he'd set up, and there were no bank boxes. I should know. I was an officer of the corporation.” She settled back in the seat with a sigh of satisfaction. That had been Tony's big mistake. He'd given his mousy little lovestruck wife authority over his corporation, thinking she would never grasp her power.

  Boy, had he been wrong.

  Four and a half years earlier

  “Marianne? You know when Tony said we were thinking of selling this house, you said you had someone interested in property in the area?” Biting her bottom lip, Faith fought for the carefree tones of a Southern-belle housewife. She'd played the part for years. She could do it. “Is he still looking? We've found a place over in Myers Park we'd like to offer on, and it would be easier if we knew we had this place sold.”

  Her fingernails should have left dents in the receiver as she listened to the real estate agent on the other end. On the desk in front of her were neat stacks of canceled checks made out to one Sandra Shaw. In the back of the safe she'd found a picture of a well-endowed strawberry blonde in short shorts. Tony had always lacked imagination.

  “Tony's out of town,” she said into the receiver, “but I have authorization through his corporation. You know how lawyers are.” She laughed knowingly while grimacing. She'd never appreciated lawyer jokes before. She still didn't.

  She'd thought and planned this for weeks. She'd made inquiries. She'd driven out to the trailer park address listed in the city directory and watched three dusty boys playing on a swing set. The younger two looked like identical twins, but they were too far away to search for a resemblance. She might not know for certain whose kids they were, but she recognized the strawberry blonde from the photo as soon as the woman stepped from the trailer. Mobile home. Double-wide. Paid for through the loan company with the checks from the safe. The first check dated before Faith's marriage. The last check was dated two weeks ago. Tony had been keeping her all through their marriage.

  The woman piled the kids into a luxury utility vehicle, paid for with the next stack of checks. Faith stared after the cloud of dust for a long time while her heart slowly crumbled. She tried holding it together, tried rationalizing away the evidence before her eyes, but even rationality led her straight into a whirlpool of pain.

  While she'd been scrimping and saving, working in Tony's office without pay, giving up her hopes of college and a career, this Sandra person had been living in a new trailer and driving new cars and raising babies. The babies Faith had yearned for with every ounce of her being.

  She'd never needed the fancy house. She drove an aging Volvo rather than go into debt. And all that money she'd saved, Tony had lavished on this woman who had given him children.

  Shaking, too stunned even to cry, Faith drove away from the mobile home and allowed fury to well up in place of pain. She used fury as the glue to hold all the shattered pieces together, fury as the fuel to keep her moving forward.

  As she drove back toward Charlotte, she was still reeling, but she'd found her focus. Tony was “out of town” again. She hadn't seen his car at the trailer, but that didn't mean anything. He could have floozies all over the state for all she knew. He'd just told her he wouldn't be home for a week. A week gave her lots of time.

  After arranging for Marianne's client to see the house, Faith checked off one more item from her list and picked up the phone for the next. She had learned to be very organized while working for Tony. She would make someone an excellent secretary. With professional courtesy, she called the office of every credit card in her purse and asked for her name to be removed from the account. Then she snipped the cards in half and followed up the calls with a letter and the mutilated cards. She kept copies of everything.

  She'd already been to the bank. She'd withdrawn every cent in checking, savings, money market, and certificates of deposit. She'd worked hard for eight years, given up her career to put Tony through law school, given up her education to provide him with the perfect hostess and housekeeper and bookkeeper and decorator and … She had calculated his debt to her at far more than the sum total of their personal assets.

  She had never been so blindly furious in her entire life. She hung on to that fury as she called the broker and ordered the sale of their stocks. Later, she would weep for what she had lost and what she could never have, but not now. Now, she would get even.

  She'd read about women who had lost everything when their men left them, women thrown on the streets—helpless, uneducated, and unemployable—when their husbands found younger women. Well, she by damn wouldn't be one of them.

  Sandra wasn't even a younger woman. Tony had been supporting Sandra before she came along. He'd been supporting Sandra when Faith's grandmother had died, leaving her a small but significant inheritance—the one they'd invested in his law office after Tony's graduation.

  She wouldn't consider the ramifications of any of this. It was painfully apparent Tony had married her for her little bit of money and her boarding school manners and her eagerness to please. She suited his image of a wealthy professional's country club wife. The Sandra person was too blowzy, too common, too beneath his dignity. She was only suited for being the mother of his children.

  She would almost feel sorry for Sandra if it weren't for the agony searing through her. Forcefully ignoring the acid burning holes through her stomach, Faith picked up the cruise tickets that had started it all and shoved them into her purse. The travel agency was next on her agenda. Sandra wouldn't be able to afford a baby-sitter by the time she was done, so she wouldn't need the cruise tickets. She was doing the other woman a favor.

  Briefly wondering where Tony had found the money to support his other life, Faith grabbed
the odd copies of accounting records and canceled checks drawn on the law firm's escrow account and added them to the contents of her purse. He'd probably filtered the money through the corporation accounts his bookkeeper kept at the office. She would ask Headley about them. She'd met the old reporter while working on publicity for community groups, and knew he liked puzzles.

  As she walked out to her old Volvo, she glanced at Tony's gleaming new Jaguar in the drive. He treasured that car as if it were a child. She was pretty sure it was titled to the corporation—the corporation of which she was treasurer. She'd love to see his face when he realized she'd sold it. But she'd be long gone.

  How convenient that Tony had allowed her to handle all their personal finances. She knew to a penny how much he brought home in salary, how much she'd saved by keeping them out of debt, just exactly how much he owed to her. The Jaguar ought to just about cover her grandmother's inheritance money.

  The Present

  Adrian cast his companion's lingering smile a suspicious look. He'd thought she'd be furious, perhaps terrified, definitely frantic. Instead, she'd clasped her hands into tense fists and sat as straight and taut as a ramrod, but the trace of a smile warned of the evil direction of her thoughts.

  The fried chicken hadn't filled the hole in his belly. He doubted if any food would. His gut burned with things he wanted and couldn't have, and inexplicably, this female was one of them.

  “By the time we reach Charlotte, it will be too late to drop in on my family.” Stick to the mundane, he told himself. Worry about the next meal, the next bed, the safe deposit boxes. He couldn't cure his mother's illness or the kids’ neglect or world peace. He couldn't bed an ice queen. One did what one could. “Do you have friends, family, who might be up that late?”

  In the growing darkness, he couldn't read the expression she turned on him, but he figured it was haughty, if not downright derisive, judging by her tone.

  “I have nothing and no one in Charlotte. I'd hoped never to go back there again.”

  Well, after the scandal of the decade, he supposed he could understand that. Charlotte was the city that never forgot and never forgave. “Headley sends you his best wishes.” She ought to know there were a few people who didn't blame her.

  She looked out the windshield and didn't reply.

  “Do you have a credit card?” Back to calculating one thing at a time. He didn't have patience for analyzing human equations.

  “Why? So you can steal it, too?”

  Well, hell. Adrian gripped the steering wheel tighter, as if he could keep the bug from flying off the road from the force of the semis roaring past. “I don't want to steal anything. I just want to get to Charlotte, locate Tony's safe deposit boxes, and pray they contain the evidence I need to clear my name. Then you can go back to whatever little game you're playing in Knoxville, and I can go back to my family. I'll never have my license reinstated as long as the legal fund has to pay off all those widows and orphans Tony cheated, but at least they'll know I don't have it.”

  “Neither do I,” she stated firmly. “I figure it went to support Sandra. Let the lawyers pry it out of her.”

  “You're a cold-hearted bitch. Don't you ever spend a sleepless night worrying about the people Tony cheated?”

  “Up until you showed up, I'd thought you were the one who pocketed the escrow funds. None of it had any relation to me.”

  “What in hell did you think was paying for that fancy house in Dilworth and the shiny Jag and the country club dues?” She was an enigma. He couldn't fit all the pieces of her together into one whole. How could someone this coldhearted find time to buy books for homeless kids and appreciate fine porcelain and sing like she meant every word of her songs?

  “I paid for it,” she answered calmly. “My inheritance bought the law office. Tony's salary paid for the house. My scrimping and saving and working for nothing paid for everything else. I controlled our personal checkbook. I know precisely where our money came from. I have no idea where anything else came or went.”

  The traffic was too intense for him to turn and look at her, but he actually wanted to believe her. He couldn't, of course, she'd been the one with the falsified copies of the books. She'd been the one who testified against him. She had to be hiding something.

  “And that's the reason you packed up and moved away with no forwarding address and hid up here under an alias?”

  “I left a mail-drop forwarding address,” she said primly, cleaning her fingers on a damp wipe from a package in her purse. “And Faith Hope is my name, not an alias.”

  “I spent years trying to trace you. You're hiding, all right. And you don't want to go back to Charlotte for a reason. You have an accomplice who's looking for his share of that money?”

  Again it was too dark to see her look of scorn, but it scathed him just the same. Pure vitriol laced her reply. “I had a husband looking for his Jaguar, among other things.”

  “His Jag?” That caught him so off guard, he laughed. “You stole his precious Jag? My congratulations to you, my dear. I didn't know you had it in you.”

  “I didn't steal it, I sold it. I sold the house, the stocks, the furniture, and anything that wasn't nailed down. What I couldn't sell, I gave to charity. I left him his suits, though. I sent them to Sandra.”

  Adrian chuckled. She looked so prim and proper sitting there, as if she should be wearing white gloves and one of those little fifties hats and be sitting in a church pew. She'd sold Tony's car! His chuckle escalated. She might as well have sold his penis. “The country club membership?” he asked out of pure spite. Tony had spent hours bragging about the CEOs he dined with at the club.

  “That, too,” she agreed demurely. “I told them Tony had decided to give up material possessions and donate his wealth to charity.”

  He roared. He simply couldn't hold it back any longer.

  “You'd better pull over to the side or you'll run us off the road,” she said calmly, watching him without so much as a smile.

  “I'm okay.” He wiped the tears of laughter rolling down his face but he couldn't stop grinning. “Do you have any idea how I schemed to strip Tony to his briefs?”

  “I spent eight years of my life with Tony, dreaming,” she said softly. “I decided it was time to take action.”

  That shut him up. This demure, dainty little housewife had dared to enrage a murderous bull by stealing his balls. Tony must have gone ballistic. He would have torn the state apart looking for her. He'd probably charged her with grand larceny and every statute he could find in the book.

  “How did you get away with it?” he asked in pure awe.

  “I had the canceled checks from his private account, the account that supported Sandra. And I had the copies of those account pages I sent to Headley. He didn't know what else I had, so he kept quiet. That's how I knew he was guilty of something. But I still didn't want to take chances. I filed the divorce papers and left the state. Tony knew too many people in Encee, and I didn't have anyone. He bad-mouthed me from the mountains to the coast before he left.”

  He believed her. He really believed her. He must be losing his mind. Even knowing the agony she must have endured to have her revenge, he grinned all over again. His mother would love Miss Faith Hope Nicholls. They were both brave women who'd done what they had to do to survive.

  Which placed him in a hell of a lot of danger. His mother would come after him with a kitchen knife if she knew he'd kidnapped a woman. He didn't want to contemplate what Faith would do to him now that he knew her strength. Faith Hope could be one vicious female.

  “You had Headley on your side,” he reminded her, “and I bet a lot of other people you didn't give a chance. You could have gone back after Tony died.” Reason and persuasion, he told himself. He needed her trust.

  “I didn't want to go back. I made a new life, and I like it.”

  His lawyer's training heard a note of something behind the defiance, some smidgen of doubt, some yearning he couldn't quite l
abel. He probed for more. “You like singing in a dive?” he asked. It seemed so out of character.

  “It paid the rent until the shop showed a profit. Now it helps support the homeless. I'm not so blind as to not realize I could easily have been in their place had Tony thrown me out first.”

  In the dim light of the dashboard, she shrugged. “Besides, I'd always wanted to sing, and I'm not denying myself any of my dreams anymore. I lost years of my life for my stupidity, and I don't intend to be a victim ever again.”

  He heard the threat even though it was uttered in a perfectly even voice. She gave new meaning to the phrase “steel magnolia.” But he was tough, too. He wasn't a mild-mannered Southern gentleman. He didn't wear kid gloves. Between them, they'd have to find ways of working together without killing each other.

  He made the first overture. “You used those years to become a stronger, better person. I don't count that a waste. And you walked away with a sizable amount of cash, so you got a gallery out of it.” And the clair-de-lune piece, but he held back his knowledge of its pricelessness. He still looked for a trap.

  “I only kept the amount that would have been mine if we'd invested my inheritance in stocks instead of Tony's office.”

  She lied. He knew she lied. He had her now.

  “That fancy house in Dilworth was worth more than the office. Who kept all the rest?”

  “Not that it's any of your business,” she shot him a look that he knew wasn't happy, “but I set it up in a nonprofit trust fund. I didn't lie to the country club. The worth of Tony's material things was donated to charity. I figured that made us even.”

  She was downright certifiable. She'd had enough wealth to subsidize a modest lifestyle for the rest of her life, and she'd given it all away? Uh-uh, sister. He didn't buy that one.