Trading Secrets

“Thank you,” she said, genuinely moved by his offer. “But there isn’t anything you can do. Except for the job,” she conceded, almost afraid to think of how far a real salary could go. “The job really would make things easier.”

Something like regret entered his tone. He could help, but there were strings. “I can’t give you the job until I know what’s going on. I have Bess and my patients to consider.”

Her shoulders fell. “You don’t think I was mugged,” she said flatly.

“Honestly?” he asked, pinning her with his deceptively undemanding gaze. “I don’t know what to think.”

His bluntness she could handle. It was the way he had of looking at her, looking into her, that had her wanting to shy away. There was kindness in his darkly lashed eyes, but there was a lot of doubt and suspicion, too. “I wasn’t abused and I’m not hiding from anyone,” she insisted, making herself hold his glance. She was nothing if not honest. She wasn’t about to have him think otherwise. “What happened yesterday morning happened just as I told you. No one is going to follow me here and cause a problem, if that’s what you’re worried about. I promise. Bess and your patients are safe.”

The insistence faded from her voice. “I made a bad choice that led to an even worse situation. It will never, ever happen again. Can we please just let it go at that?”

The masculine lines carved in his cheeks deepened with the pinch of his mouth. Seeing nothing promising in Greg’s expression, Jenny’s glance finally faltered. She blinked at the board between her white canvas shoes. The blue paint that had once made the porch look so bright and cheerful had been weathered and worn to little more than flecks and streaks on the splintering wood. Waiting for Greg to make his decision, she felt like that herself, exposed and worn, and were she to dig too deep, fully capable of breaking into dozens of tiny pieces.

“What about the detectives. You said something about having been cleared, but you never said what you’d been charged with.”

Her focus stayed on the boards. “I was never formally charged.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I was never guilty, so there’s no…”

“Jenny.”

From the corner of her eyes, she caught the motion of his hand a moment before she felt his finger curve under her chin.

His deep voice was as gentle as the brush of his thumb along her jaw. “I keep my word,” he promised. “Anything you say to me goes no further.”

For a moment she said nothing. She just studied the strong lines of his face while her mind absorbed his quiet assurance and her battered heart his quiet strength. In the past month she had grown reluctant to confide anything to anyone. It had come to the point where she honestly hadn’t known who she could trust anymore. Authorities who’d appeared to want only to help her had wanted only to find a way to trip her up so she would confess to a crime she had known nothing about. Friends she’d thought she could count on had turned their backs on her. She couldn’t even trust her own judgment.

Yet, this man had nothing to gain from her that wouldn’t help her, too.

His glance dropped to follow the motion of his thumb. As if he only now realized he was still touching her, he pulled a deep breath and eased his hand away.

It puzzled her that she hadn’t questioned the contact herself. What puzzled her more was what she’d felt in his touch, the quiet assurance that by trusting him, maybe things could be all right.

“I really wasn’t charged with anything. Just suspected and questioned,” she told him, still hesitating to mention exactly what she’d been suspected of doing. The words embezzlement and theft could immediately shade a person’s opinion. She’d learned the hard way that it was far easier to get a person to listen to her if he didn’t have a lot of preconceived notions.

“There is an explanation.” She hesitated. “I’m just not sure where to start.”

He rested the elbow nearest her on his thigh. With his hand dangling in the wide space between his legs, he looked as if he were prepared to give her however long she needed to take.

“Start anywhere you want.”

Chapter Four

T he evening breeze rustled the bushes at the end of the porch and nudged at the grass and weeds stretching to the road. The quiet babble of the stream that curved the property line sounded softly in the distance. Breathing in the sweet scent of the balmy air, Jenny leaned over the towel still tucked against her and picked up a twig that had jammed itself into the crack of a step.

Start anywhere you want, Greg had said. Thinking of the dream that had led her into her little mess, the only place she could think to start was at the beginning.

“Have you ever wanted something badly?” she asked, focused on the slender twig as she slowly twirled it between her fingers. “I mean so badly that it becomes almost consuming?”

“Absolutely.”

His lack of hesitation intrigued as much as it encouraged. She glanced to where he sat beside her, his broad shoulders taking up most of the space. His expression revealed nothing beyond a quiet interest.

“What was it? To become a doctor?”

“No. But we’re talking about you,” he reminded her. “What is it that you wanted?”

She looked back to her twig. She would have thought the desire to be a doctor would be a passion so great it would eclipse nearly everything else. It seemed it would have to be, for a person to get through all those years of study and training.

“To get out of here. You know how this place is,” she said, unable to imagine what else a doctor’s dream could have been. Her own had been so simple. “Once a person graduates from high school, you can either go away to college, get married or go to work for your family or someone else’s. Most of the jobs that don’t require a family connection or a degree are at the quarry or in the shops, and once you start either place that’s where you’ll be for the rest of your life.” Her family hadn’t had a business to run. Her dad had worked at the quarry, her mom had been a homemaker, and they hadn’t been able to afford college for either her or her sister. “I’d wanted more than to get married at nineteen, the way most of my friends did. Or to work at the diner for the rest of my life wondering what I’d missed.”

“That’s why you worked so hard to put yourself through school.”

Bess had mentioned that just that morning.

She gave a nod, still twirling the little piece of wood. “An associate’s degree usually only takes two years, but it took me three because I had to work full-time. As soon as I had it, I headed for Boston. My savings had just about run out when I got a job at Salomon in staff support.”

“Staff support?”

“I was a secretary,” she clarified. “They don’t call secretaries secretaries anymore. At least, not there.

“Anyway,” she continued, now shredding away a bit of bark, “four years later, I’d worked my way up to administrative assistant to one of the company’s senior VPs. Then, a month ago,” she explained, going for the condensed version of her life to that point, “I found myself in the middle of a criminal investigation.” A piece of the bark fluttered to the step. “My boyfriend worked at Salomon, too,” she said quietly. “It seems that he had been using my computer to transfer rather large sums of other people’s money into his own bank accounts.”

“That’s where the detectives came in,” Greg concluded.

“About six of them. Part of them were at the city level. Brent had apparently taken some office equipment home with him, too, so there were theft charges against him along with the federal ones for embezzlement and I can’t remember what all else.”

The federal investigators had been the most frightening for her to deal with. The city police detectives had backed off on her once they’d realized only Brent had company property and how little of it there was. It had been over three weeks before the federal investigators had let her go, though, and then not until what had seemed like a dozen people had asked her the same hundred questions.

“I hadn’t known anything. Nothing,” she insisted. “But no one would believe me.” The strain clouding her expression slipped into her voice. “I obviously hadn’t even known the man I’d dated for over two years.” Which was just a few months shy of how long his little scheme had been going on.

She couldn’t believe how hurt, foolish and betrayed she felt. The emotions sat like a rock in her chest, making it hard to breathe at times, making every breath she took remind her of how easily she had been taken in. She’d been a kid from the backwoods, easy prey as far as a man like Brent Collier had been concerned. A trusting innocent armed with nothing more than a hunger to experience sophistication and excitement and no experience at all swimming with sharks. But what she felt more than anything else was anger at herself for the naiveté that had allowed her to be charmed by a man who’d wanted nothing but to use her.

“I’d even saved myself until I was twenty-three, waiting for the right man, and he’d just been using me in bed, too.”

She gave the stripped twig a toss. It was only when Greg reached over and handed her another one to peel that she realized she’d spoken her last thought aloud.

The admission brought color to her cheeks—and a look of sympathy from the man beside her.

He had to think her truly pathetic. Wanting badly to mask the depth of how very hurt, used and betrayed she felt, she tried to dismiss the emotional slaughter as inconsequential.

“Do you know what’s the real icing on this little cake?” she asked, able to mask everything but her agitation. “The investigators confiscated most of my possessions in case they’d been purchased with any of the illegal funds. They took my furniture, the great little paintings I’d collected at art fairs, and my television. They even took my clock radio,” she said, unable to imagine why they’d want something that had only cost $24.95 and would barely fetch five dollars at a flea market. “The only reason I still have my car is because I could prove I’d bought it before I’d met Brent. But you know what’s even worse than that? “I can’t get a job doing anything that requires references,” she fumed into Greg’s coaxing silence. “Even if I’d wanted my old job back,” which she hadn’t, considering how humiliating the whole scenario had been, “I couldn’t get it. I was fired. After the dust settled and I called my boss to change my status from having been fired to having quit, he informed me that the firing stood. He said that a person with access to privileged information should be a better judge of character than I was. If I was duped once, it could happen again.”

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