Playing the Playboy (16 page)

“I agree, Harry,” Marietta said quietly. She’d sat down and was still holding the plate of scones on her lap. “I really like her. I don’t think she’s like that. Please don’t rush to judgment. Remember what you thought about me?”

When her voice wobbled on the last words, Harrison reached out and stroked her hair back in a quick, fond gesture that was almost certainly unconscious. “I know that. I was wrong then, but, sweetheart, she’s not you. I’m not jumping the gun here. I was pretty new to this kind of responsibility when I was handling this project, and I thought Grayson was up to something but had no evidence, so I did more than the normal background checks. I have a whole file on him. And his wife. What did Laurel say she did before she married Grayson?”

Andrew suddenly went cold with dread. “She managed a restaurant. That’s how she met him.”

“It was a bar, not a restaurant.” Harrison was looking down at a piece of paper in a file, as if he were reading it. Then he moved the page to the bottom of the pile. “As far as I can tell, it was mostly a strip club.”

There was a glossy, black-and-white photo beneath that page in the file. Even upside down and across the desk, Andrew could see the picture.

Laurel—very young and very gorgeous, her long hair hanging down her back, wearing tight, revealing clothing in some sleazy bar.

He hadn’t needed the photo to know it was true.

Harrison wouldn’t lie to him. Harrison was his brother, and he was the only person in the world who had always been faithful to Andrew.

Harrison wouldn’t be saying this at all if he didn’t absolutely believe it.

“She didn’t tell you that, Andrew?” Marietta asked. Her face was pale now, and her eyes were wide and anxious.

He shook his head.

“I guess it was a lie,” Marietta continued, “but there might be a reason for it. Maybe she’s just embarrassed and thinks people would judge her for it. That doesn’t mean she’s lying about everything.”

Andrew took a breath, holding onto her words like they were the last thread to his sanity. “That’s right,” he said, shaking his head. “I know it looks bad, but you don’t know Laurel. I do. So she sugar-coated her past. Who doesn’t do that? I’ll talk to her about it, and I’m sure there’s an explanation. I just don’t think she’s lying about everything.”

Harrison looked away, then stiffened his shoulders as if he were steeling himself. He pulled out another piece of paper from the stack in front of him.
“Eight and a half years ago, on the evening of March 17, Laurel Martin who would later marry Jerry Grayson was picked up by the local sheriff for prostitution.”

Marietta made a choking sound.

Andrew shook his head. “An arrest would have shown up on the normal background checks I ran.”

“She was never charged. Our investigator evidently talked to the sheriff, and she wasn’t charged because Grayson applied pressure. He was one of the most powerful men in the county. But she was guilty.”

Andrew shook his head, staring at a place in the middle of the room but not seeing it. “We all have blind spots,” Harrison said softly, “especially if we want to believe.”

“Harry,” Marietta said, shifting in her chair, “I know it all sounds bad, but we can’t judge her like this. We don’t know what she was going through back then. She might have just lied to cover her past. None of it proves Laurel is lying about the inn. Andrew is right. He’s a really good judge of character—you know that’s true. He’s the one who’s been dealing with all this. She doesn’t necessarily know the inn didn’t legally belong to her husband.”

Harrison made a few moves on his laptop until he’d pulled up what he wanted. “She told you the inn was a first anniversary present, but she knew very well he gave it to her two weeks after they were married. I’m guessing it was part of her incentive to accept the proposal. She signed when they transferred the deed to her name. I have a scanned copy right here.”

He turned his laptop so Andrew could see the screen.

Andrew read Laurel’s name on a signature line.

“I don’t believe it,” he said, his voice sounding unnatural even to him. “I’m never this wrong about people.”

“You said you ran into her the day before you were scheduled to meet with her.”

“Yeah. She didn’t know I was coming a day early. She was going parasailing with a friend and her tire…”

Andrew trailed off, suddenly wondering with a cold wave of dread who the mysterious friend was. She didn’t seem to socialize much, except with Hector, Agatha, and the dogs. He’d even followed up on it later, and she’d evaded the question.

“Last night, when I pulled all this up, I called up an investigator we’ve used before on the Greek islands,” Harrison said softly. “He got right to work, so we should hear a report from him soon. Think about it. She lied about her past. She lied about her husband’s financial situation. She lied about when he put the inn in her name. I really think she’s been playing you the whole time.”

It was possible. She’d lied about other things he hadn’t thought were important, like the salt superstition. Despite that, Andrew just couldn’t make himself believe everything was a lie. What he had with her was real—the realest thing he’d ever experienced. “No,” he said. “I don’t think she was. Anyway, we found that letter from the bank, declaring that Grayson’s grandfather had paid back the debt.”

“Can I see it?”

“I’ll go get it,” Marietta offered, with a quick glance over at Andrew’s stiff posture. “Where is it?”

“In the room. There’s a folder in my case.”

Marietta left and came back in less than a minute with the folder.

She handed it to Andrew.

Andrew handed Harrison the letter they’d found in the old Bible.

Harrison studied it carefully. Then he pulled up something else on his laptop, obviously comparing the two. Soon he started to shake his head. Andrew knew the verdict before it was voiced.

“This is fabricated. It’s pretty well done, but the signature is wrong and the header isn’t a match. Look.”

Andrew looked, comparing the letter with the scanned document on Harrison’s computer—supposed to have been written from the same bank and signed by the same person. They weren’t a match.

“Did she give you this letter?” Harrison asked, his voice low, almost mild.

“We found it. We were together.”

“Did she point you to where you could find it?”

Andrew tightened his lips as he thought back.

“Was that after you told her why we believe the inn belongs to us?”

Andrew inclined his head in a semblance of a nod.

“After you told her, would she have had time to do this and put it where you could find it?”

Andrew remembered how long it had taken for Laurel to return with the boxes from the storage room, so long he’d actually gone to look for her.

Laurel was nothing if not efficient, doing every task she set her hand to with speed and skill, with not a single wasted moment or motion.

The last two weeks suddenly fell together in his mind with crystal clarity, the devastating picture complete.

He knew what had happened. She’d deceived him from the start. He’d been the world’s greatest fool.

“I’m really sorry,” Harrison said, his face twisting slightly. “If I’d known you were working on all of this, I would have sent you all the information I had. This was all my personal research, so it wasn’t in the corporate files. If you’d had this earlier, maybe you wouldn’t have… maybe you would have been better prepared.”

Any time over the last month, Andrew could have asked his brother for help with the project—he could have had all the information he needed to protect himself from this brutal revelation.

But he’d wanted to handle it on his own.

Andrew couldn’t respond. He felt frozen, and he wanted to stay that way because, once the truth fully processed, he knew it would hurt too much.

Less than a half-hour ago he’d been imagining a life with Laurel.

“Are you really sure about all this, Harry?” Marietta looked like she was almost in tears. “You have to be absolutely sure.”

“Okay,” Harrison straightened up, evidently thinking hard. “Okay. We won’t draw conclusions until the investigator reports in. He was going to check into her story about parasailing that first day and see if he could find anything else that could help. It might be too early for him to have something, but we can give him a call.”

Andrew still felt blank, dazed, like he wasn’t really himself. At his brother’s words, however, he felt a faint glimmer of hope that this wouldn’t be what it seemed. Surely there was some kind of explanation.

He’d thought Laurel was the one woman who really understood him. Who knew him for real and cared about him anyway.

He’d thought he could find in her what he needed and offer her what she needed too.

He’d been falling in love with her.

It couldn’t have just been a lie.

***

Laurel felt lonely and kind of abandoned in the kitchen.

She’d thought Marietta was just taking Harrison some scones. She didn’t know why she’d never come back, and she was a little annoyed that Andrew was talking business with Harrison without her.

She didn’t like to be left out of things—not something so important to her.

She trusted Andrew, though, and that meant taking risks.

She had to risk that whatever he was discussing with Harrison wasn’t going to end up hurting her.

So she cleaned up the breakfast stuff and then called Agatha to check on Theo’s leg and see how things were going at the inn.

Then she just sat in a kitchen chair with a lukewarm cup of coffee.

What the hell were they discussing in there, and why didn’t Andrew come out to bring her into the conversation?

Finally, Marietta came out, but she just ran down the hall and then back into the office. Laurel was going to call out and see if everything was all right, but by the time she realized she’d need to, it was too late.

Eventually, Marietta came out again. Laurel could see immediately that something had upset her. It looked like the other woman had been crying.

“What is it?” Laurel asked in concern, jumping up and hurrying over.

Marietta took a shuddering breath and sat down at the kitchen table.

Laurel sat down too. “Please tell me what’s wrong. Can I help?”

“It’s bad,” Marietta told her. “Harrison kept a file—on your husband. And there’s stuff in there about you. And then they’re hearing from an investigator now. It looks like… it looks like you’ve been lying to Andrew.”

Laurel froze, the weight of impending knowledge pressing into her slowly, irrevocably.

“We didn’t want to believe it, but it looks really bad. Can you explain it?” Marietta’s eyes were half-pleading, half-suspicious.

“I can,” Laurel said, her shock channeling into crisis-mode as she realized what was about to happen. “I can explain it. Where’s Andrew? I need to talk to him.”

Marietta looked back toward the closed office door. “They’re talking to the investigator. He sent them some security footage from a shop that showed you and Andrew, and the manager said that you… It was too awful, so I left. Plus, it didn’t seem fair not to give you some…some warning.”

Laurel choked and jumped to her feet. “Security footage? No, they can’t—”

It was like a nightmare she’d had repeatedly, where the whole world zoomed around her at a frightening pace, while she had to stand helplessly and watch, waiting for something huge to run over her.

She started toward the office to find Andrew, but it was too late. The door opened and Harrison came out. His expression was cold when he saw her in the hall.

He didn’t say anything, just stepped out of the way so Andrew could come out too.

Andrew looked like a different person—none of the warmth, generosity, or laughter on his face. His eyes focused on her but didn’t seem to see her.

“Andrew,” she said, a naked plea in her voice. She didn’t even care. She ran over to him and grabbed his arm. The strong bicep tensed beneath her hands. “Please let me explain. You don’t understand what happened.”

He jerked his arm away from her and took a quick step back. “I do understand. We know the letter you led me to find in that Bible was a fake.”

He thrust two pieces of paper at her—one the letter they’d found and the other a print-off of another letter. She stared down at them, and even to her it was obvious that one was a fake.

Which meant the inn wasn’t hers after all.

But even that heartache paled in comparison to the heartache standing in front of her, glaring down at her with green eyes.

“We found out everything about your plan to blackmail us with that footage,” Andrew continued, a cool bitterness in his tone she’d never heard there before. “I’ll give you this—it was well-played. I never even suspected. But we know your whole history, and evidently you’ve been playing the same game all your life. You can go pack up your stuff.”

She stared at him helplessly, incredulous for too many seconds to count. This wasn’t Andrew. He wouldn’t believe something so wrong about her. He wouldn’t treat her like this.