Confessions Bundle

“With that theory, you could free up just about anyone for a white-collar crime.”

“The jury has to be convinced,” Juliet told him. “Ultimately, the truth must speak for itself.”

“The truth?” he asked, munching on the chips that she had hardly noticed appear. “Or some twisted bits of fact and fiction that pose as the truth?”

A topic close to her heart. “How do you define fact and fiction?” she asked. “Some people believe in angels. They’d pass a lie detector test claiming that angels exist. That they’ve actually seen an angel. For others, reality is completely devoid of such possibilities. Who’s right?”

“If someone can prove that angels exist, show a picture of ones they’ve seen—” He stopped, smiled. “I’m digging myself in deeper than I care to be at the moment.”

She didn’t know if it was the drink or if there really was something about this man’s presence that affected her, but that strange mixture of anticipation and appeal she’d felt nine years ago was settling over her again.

All these years she’d blamed it on the drinks. She’d had several back then.

Today she’d had three sips. So far.

“Okay, well, think about this,” she said. “You don’t have to buy into it, just try it on long enough to see how it feels.” She helped herself to a chip.

“I’m game.”

“Truth is the means by which human beings try to define reality, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes.” His nod was accompanied by a slow smile. “Most of us anyway.”

“So the issue is defining reality.”

“Maybe.” He took another chip, his eyes narrowed.

“But any psychiatrist will tell you that for every single human being there is a different version of reality. Our realities are shaped by the belief systems we were raised with.” She took another sip. “Say, for instance, from the time I’m a little girl, my mother punishes me for saying the word ain’t. So I end up thinking it’s a bad word. Just like damn. Or worse.”

“Okay.” His enjoyment of the conversation was obvious. His eyes lit up, just as his daughter’s did when Juliet debated with her. Much the way they had that long-ago night, when Juliet and Blake had talked until the bar closed and they had to go somewhere else.

Juliet wasn’t sure there’d been another man in her life who’d risen to the challenge without feeling challenged, without feeling a need to assert male superiority or authority, without ego being involved.

“So then I meet a friend whose mother uses the word ain’t regularly. My friend uses the word. I’m absolutely convinced that she swears.”

“A little feeble, but I get where you’re going with that. I still don’t see the application to Eaton James. In his case, reality is clearly defined by irrefutable documents.”

“The documents aren’t on trial. A man’s intentions are on trial. You look at those documents and attach your meaning to them. But just because it’s your version doesn’t mean it’s the real version. How can he be guilty of defrauding people if he didn’t deliberately mislead them?”

“He invoiced mock companies for goods that were never produced. Those invoices were paid.”

“And he was under the understanding that the goods had been shipped.”

“There was no proof of that. No confirmation of sales. No receipts.”

“So he was too trusting. That’s not a crime.”

Blake shook his head. “I didn’t ask you here to debate Eaton James.”

Neither had she accepted for that reason, though she was content to do so if it kept her out of more dangerous territory. “Here’s the thing,” she said, returning to what she’d started to say earlier. “We all have different views of reality—which, as long as we follow society’s rules, is just fine. And when it’s perceived that someone breaks one of those rules, society’s reality is determined by a vote from the majority. That’s justice. In this case, the majority comprises the twelve people sitting in that jury box. Schuster presented the state’s reality, I present James’s, and it’s up to those twelve individuals to determine which version is true.”

“I’ll say this for you,” Blake said, shaking his head. “You sure have a colorful way of looking at it all.”

“As opposed to you, who sees everything in black and white?” She couldn’t stop herself from issuing the challenge, probably because she somehow knew it would be taken in the manner intended—without defensiveness.

“I do like things to be clearly defined.”

“I remember that about you.” She took a chip, dipped it in salsa, brought it slowly to her mouth.

“What?” The corner of Blake’s mouth twisted slightly.

“That morning, after…you know.” What in the hell was she doing? She paused before continuing. “You were quite serious about making sure that we both clearly agreed about what had and hadn’t happened. And about what couldn’t happen again. You wanted it all spelled out. We wouldn’t exchange information because we weren’t going to contact each other.”

“I was leaving the country!”

“And I would’ve shot myself before I’d have become entangled with a man.”

With both hands around his glass on the table in front of him, he looked over at her, a smile in his eyes, but his mouth was serious. “It was damn good for what it was, though.”

She floundered. Wished she’d downed her drink the moment it came. Where was a safe version of the truth when she needed it?

“Yeah.”

“YOU MENTIONED your ex-wife,” Juliet ventured at the beginning of her second drink. They’d ordered a platter of ribs and chicken appetizers with veggies.

Mary Jane’s Brownie troop was going to Sea World that afternoon, and she wouldn’t be dropped off until bedtime. Juliet had no reason to hurry home. And it wasn’t as though she’d ever have cause to see this man again.

“I didn’t realize you were divorced.”

The one time she’d run into him, he’d just returned to the States five years before—with a wife. Mary Jane had been about three at the time. Marcie had been visiting and Juliet had just run out to pick up some wine for the two of them to have with dinner. Blake had been over in her part of town looking at a prospective building site and had stopped for a six-pack of beer.

He loosened his tie. “She didn’t like San Diego.”

“How can anyone not like San Diego?”

He tried to smile, but failed rather miserably, in her opinion. “Guess that proves your point about individual reality, huh?”

There was more he wasn’t saying. A lot more.

“So I guess you were right back then when you said it was a blessing you didn’t have kids.” Some dormant form of masochism had made her ask him about children that night.

“Until that point Amunet and I had lived a rather unconventional life. And neither of us was completely sure we wanted that to change. We were both fairly disoriented when we first settled in San Diego. Adjusting to a life of routine and stability is rougher than it sounds.”

“Especially after living without it for so long.”

There was gratitude in the blue eyes looking back at her.

“In the long run, I adjusted. Amunet did not.”

There was more to that story, too. But Blake Ramsden’s heartache was not any of Juliet McNeil’s business or concern.

It couldn’t be. It didn’t fit into her version of their reality.

CHAPTER SIX

AT SIX, two hours after she’d arrived at the bar, Blake ordered a third drink. Juliet didn’t appear to be in any hurry to leave, still nibbling on the half-eaten ribs and chicken.

And Lord knew he had nothing to go home to that night but more of the same mental battles he’d been fighting for several days. Amunet’s death had nothing to do with him. In his head he knew that. Just as he wasn’t in any real way responsible for his father’s heart attack or the car accident that had robbed him of all his living family, before he’d grown up enough to realize how much he’d loved them. Needed them.

“I can’t say that I remember parts of that night on the beach all that clearly,” he dropped into the silence that had finally fallen between them. Picking up a piece of celery, he bit into it. “But I seem to remember being pretty down on my father.”

Juliet’s smile was soft. “Young people have a way of doing that.”

The tenderness in her words reminded him of a moment that night nine years ago, just before they’d made love. He’d been about to tell her he couldn’t, that he had nothing to offer beyond the moment and that it wasn’t fair to her. She’d silenced him with a finger to his lips, said the words for him, and told him that even if he offered, she wouldn’t accept anything. Couldn’t accept anything. Rather than judging him and finding him wanting, she’d understood him.

“It’s only when we’ve lived long enough that we begin to see that our parents really aren’t stupid at all,” she continued.

“Unfortunately, I lived long enough. My parents didn’t.”

“You had no way of knowing your father was ill.”

Blake sipped, turned in his seat, lifting an ankle across his knee. “Logically, I realize that,” he admitted. In five years’ time, he hadn’t been able to say that to anyone else. It was only recently he’d acknowledged it to himself. “And then I think about the fact that if I’d made one different choice in my life, come home after that year instead of making the phone call that turned out to be the last time I ever spoke with the old man, lives might have been saved.”

It was a thought that wouldn’t let go.

“Lives?”

A middle-aged couple was being seated in the booth behind them. They were the third party to have that table since he and Juliet had arrived.

“My father’s, my mother’s, Amunet’s.”

“You think you’re that powerful?” Her words were soft, but her eyes gave him no mercy.

“I don’t feel powerful at all.”

She took a sip of a drink that must have been very watered down. She was still on her second and it was more than an hour old. She picked up a chicken wing, bit off a piece, chewed.

“Your father had a bad heart,” she went on. “You didn’t cause that. Nor could you have cured it.”

He appreciated hearing the words. “I say that to myself every night, about two in the morning or so.”

“You think your leaving him to deal with the business all alone shortened his life?”

He shrugged, studied the condensation forming on the outside of his glass. A couple of men at the bar were feeling no pain, their laughter growing louder with each beer they downed.

“It’s also possible that his heart was going to go whether he was puttering around the yard at home or sitting in a high-rise office.”

“Likely not as soon.”

“Maybe not for a lot of men, but the man you described your father to be would never have been content slowing down. The stress of having to sit back and watch someone else run things would surely have killed him.”

Blake raised his head and stared at her. “All the hours I’ve spent going around and around with myself about this, I never came up with that one. Not that I’m going to let myself off the hook that easily, but at least now I have a solid argument to make the mental war more interesting.”

“You wouldn’t be the man you obviously are if you let yourself off the hook easily,” she said. “Perhaps it took someone who didn’t know your father personally to see that less responsibility might not have been the answer.”

His smile was slow in coming, but sincere. “I was actually feeling bad about having spoken so poorly of him to you. I hated that the only view you had of him was as a tyrant. And that I was responsible for that.”

“Being an only son—an only child—to a successful, demanding parent is difficult, isn’t it?”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Not only did you have to deal with all the expectations that were strangling you nine years ago, but you had—and have—the responsibility of being the only one to carry on.”

Shaking his head, Blake took a long, cold sip. “You’re in the wrong profession.”

She raised an eyebrow in question, finishing off the chicken wing and licking her fingers.

“You should have been a damn psychologist.”

Juliet, breaking a chip into several pieces on her plate, looked down. “It’s easy to see other people’s problems,” she said. “It’s your own that bog you down.”

“Not you.” Blake grinned. “The formidable Ms. McNeil getting bogged down? It’ll never happen.”

He expected her to smile, to shoot off some sassy remark. She didn’t.

“It’s happened.”

“When?” He’d meant the word to be playful. It came out honestly interested instead.

She shrugged, and with one hand broke another chip, slowly, methodically, into small triangular pieces. “Various times.”

“Any examples?”

“Not tonight.”

Another time then?

“Does it have anything to do with your being single?”

“Not really.” She paused as the waiter stopped by and dropped off their check, and Blake half expected her to say she had to go. “Unless I’m so bogged down I don’t see it, there’s no particular issue that’s responsible for my single state.” He was surprised when she continued. “I just haven’t met a man I want to spend the rest of my life looking at.”

“Oh.” He switched to the glass of water in front of him. Sipping. “So it’s all in the looks, huh?”

“Damn right it is.” Juliet grinned and then her eyes grew serious. “I haven’t ever been with a man I thought I wanted to look at first thing in the morning, or across the dinner table at night, until the day I die.”

He was a little surprised at the instant disappointment her words aroused.

“So maybe you just aren’t the marrying kind.”

“Maybe.” Her smile was sad. “I don’t think so, though. Looking at an empty pillow, an empty chair, instead, is a pretty lonely prospect.”

“You’re a beautiful woman, Juliet McNeil. If you want to find someone, you will.” A beautiful woman. A passionate, smart, funny, strong woman. What man wouldn’t want her if he were in a position to want anybody?

“I’m opinionated and willful and far too outspoken sometimes. And I expect a man to give as good as I hand out. I’m not sure such a man exists.”

Grinning, Blake nodded. “I see what you mean about getting bogged down until you can’t see straight. Because you sure have that one wrong.”

“You think so?” She peered at him, head cocked to one side.

“I do.”

“Well, I’ll take your word for it. And hope that if I run into you again in another nine years, I won’t have to call you a liar.”

“A liar is one thing I’ll never be. At least not consciously.”

SHE HAD TO GO. Mary Jane was going to be home in another hour or so. “You said your ex-wife died. What happened? Cancer?” She had no idea why she asked. She’d already decided his heartache wasn’t her concern.

That didn’t mean she couldn’t offer comfort, especially since she had the idea he needed some. And he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave.

He glanced down, then back up, focusing just beyond her. If at all. “Suicide.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t expected that at all. When was she ever going to learn to keep her big mouth shut?

“Apparently she’d decided that because of the choices she’d already made, her life was never going to be what she wanted. She’d blown her chance and didn’t want to settle for anything less.”

For Juliet it was almost an instant replay of another time in her life. And the second time around was no less sad. Or wrong. “You never know what might be waiting around the corner,” she murmured, mostly to herself.

She’d learned that one firsthand.

If she’d had any idea what dimensions Mary Jane would bring to her life, she sure as hell wouldn’t have spent the nine months of her pregnancy afraid that life, as she wanted it to be, was over.

“For all her wild ideas, her free spirit, Amunet held a pretty strong belief that marriage was forever. And that a woman should only marry once.”

“So once you divorced she couldn’t marry again?” Pretty outdated, but Juliet certainly understood that different things mattered to different people. Look at her own twin.

“She did marry again. Quickly. I think to try to escape the state of being divorced.”

“So she was married when she died?”

He shook his head, still focused someplace else—someplace inside. “It didn’t last. And then, to her way of thinking, she had two strikes against her.”

Juliet’s breath caught as he finally glanced at her.

“You blame yourself for this, too.”

“Not completely.”

“Yes, you do.”

He finished his drink. Pushed the glass to the end of the table for their waiter to pick up on his way past. “I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in a couple of years. I certainly had nothing to do with the bottle of pills she got hold of. Or the fact that she took them.”

“Of course you didn’t. But you blame yourself anyway.”

His gaze was certain. “I made some choices in my life that were selfish, thoughtless. I married a woman I barely knew at a time I didn’t even know myself. I promised her forever when I had no idea where I was going to be, who I was going to be, the next week. Sometimes I think the only thing I did right back then was refuse to have children when she asked me. I’d hate to think what the kid’s life would’ve been like being raised by a mother who felt trapped by his or her presence.”

“I guess it would depend on the role you played in the child’s life.” Her stomach knotted. She had to go.

His slow grin surprised her. It wasn’t effusive, or filled with humor, but it was genuine. “It’s been good seeing you again,” he said.

“Yeah, you, too.” She really had to go.

“You wouldn’t want to do it again sometime, would you?”

Probably. And no, never.

“How do you go from that night nine years ago to settling for an occasional drink?”

They couldn’t. That night was there. Between them. Incredible. Time out of time. They’d be driven to do it again. And then…

“You probably don’t,” he admitted.

“That’s what I thought.”

“Anything more than an occasional drink wouldn’t be right. We hardly know each other.”

“Too much too soon.” Too much, period. She had a life. One that didn’t—couldn’t—include him. A life that, if he knew about it, could make him hate her. And what kind of effect would it have on him? He was already bearing an unrealistic responsibility for three deaths due to his youthful quest for self-discovery. He’d told her that night on the beach that he didn’t want children, didn’t want to be in a position to have such control over another individual that he might affect another person as his father had affected him. If he knew that, in his zeal to run, he’d run from his own daughter, he might never fully recover. And always, most important, was Mary Jane. What if Blake knew the truth and still didn’t want kids? His abandonment would devastate Mary Jane.

“It’s probably best that we just leave it as a great memory,” he said.

God, she hated how that sounded. So final. “I think so.”

He was quiet for a moment, then paid the check that the waiter brought. “For now, I think so, too.”

Relief caused her stomach to go weak. The disappointment she’d deal with later, when she was alone that night.

They stood. Walked to the door. Juliet was very careful not to let any part of her touch any part of him.

He held the door. She walked by, feeling his heat, but absolutely determined not to touch him.

She turned to the left. He stood by the door.

“I’m parked over this way.”

She nodded. “I’m back there.”

“This is it, then.” He didn’t come closer. If he’d come closer, maybe…

“Thanks for dinner. And the drinks.” She walked backward slowly as she talked.

Hands in his pockets, he stood there, watching. “You’re welcome.”

“Be happy.”

“You, too.”

There was nothing more to say.

“If you ever find yourself in need of a good attorney, don’t hesitate to call.”

People on the street were glancing oddly as they passed. A teenage couple stopped to watch.

“And if you ever need a home built…”

“I know where to find you.” She was at the corner. “See ya.”

If he replied she didn’t hear him. As soon as she rounded the corner, Juliet ran.

SHE HADN’T BEEN HOME half an hour when the front door slammed. She waited to hear her daughter’s robust voice but was met with silence.

“Mary Jane?” Pulling over her head a T-shirt that matched the black-and-white drawstring bottoms she’d changed into, Juliet came out of her room.

There was no answer. Other than a cupboard slamming in the kitchen. The sound of a glass on the counter. The refrigerator being swung open hard enough to rattle the bottles stored inside the door.

“What’s up?”

The child, dressed in jeans with a matching jacket over a purple lace shirt, spilled the milk she was pouring. “I quit Brownies.”

“You can’t quit Brownies. Only I can do that. I paid for it.”

“Then I haven’t quit, I’m just not going back.” Leaving a puddle of milk on the counter, Mary Jane brought her glass to the table and sat down, her chin at her chest. Her cheeks were puffed out with indignation, her lower lip protruding as though she was about to cry.

“Can we talk about it first?”

“Yeah,” she said with more challenge than acquiescence in her voice. “But I’m not going back.”

Juliet ignored the milk on the counter. Pulling out the chair closest to Mary Jane’s, she sat. “Why don’t you tell me what happened.”

“It’s not what happened, it’s what’s going to happen.”

She was having trouble following Mary Jane’s line of thought. “What’s that?”

“Mrs. Byron said we have to do a father-daughter banquet.” Mary Jane looked over at her accusingly, as though she’d planned the whole thing. Juliet didn’t even know Mrs. Byron. The woman, whose daughter was brand new to the troop, had just been made activities director. “I don’t have a father. I don’t want a father.” The little girl stood with such force her curls bounced against her cheeks. “And I don’t want to go to Brownies anymore.”

“No one’s going to force you to go to Brownies,” she said to the retreating back.

When it rained, it poured.

LATE AFTERNOON, a full two weeks since he’d seen Juliet McNeil, Blake was in his office looking over a library bid to be submitted to city council the next morning, when his secretary buzzed him.

“Paul Schuster to see you, sir.”

“I thought you’d gone home.”

“Just leaving.”

“Drive carefully and I’ll see you tomorrow,” Blake told Lee Anne Boulder, the mother of three who’d lost her husband in a construction injury two years before. “And please, send Schuster in.”

Slipping his arms back into the navy suit coat he’d dropped on the chair in front of his desk when he’d come in from a lunch with the mayor several hours before, Blake met the attorney at the door. Why hadn’t the other man called to let him know he was coming?

Schuster got right to the point.

“Eaton James was on the stand today.”

“That must’ve been entertaining.” He motioned to a leather couch on the other side of his office. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Thanks, I could use a stiff one.”

“Whiskey?” Blake walked over to the wet bar along the far wall. It was there strictly for business meetings. He’d never once used it alone.

A habit his father had taught him very early in life. A man who drinks alone at work has a problem with drinking.

“Whatever you’ve got.”

Pouring a couple of shots of twelve-year-old scotch, Blake handed one to the older man and took a healthy sip of his own. If Schuster was here to tell him they were going to lose, he was going to need more than one.

“When you were in court, answering Juliet McNeil’s questions, you testified that you were in the Cayman Islands five years ago.”

“I was. On and off. I was working on a project in Honduras and used to fly over for a week every now and then. Why?”

“Did you ever do any business there?”

Something in Schuster’s voice, his low-key demeanor, set Blake on edge. Putting his glass on the coffee table, he took a seat across from the prosecutor.

“Never.” Where the hell was this going?

“What did you do there?”

“Lay on the beach. Kayaked. Snorkeled. Ate. Made love with my wife.”

Schuster’s gaze was guarded as he looked up. “Where did you stay?”

“Various places, hotels, a bed-and-breakfast. Once we even camped on the beach. Why? What does any of this have to do with James’s testimony?”

Was the man trying to claim that Blake had something to do with the Eaton Estates deal, other than checking to see if it was legitimate at the request of his mother?

“James launched a bombshell in the courtroom today. I’d bet my career on the fact that no one was as surprised as his counsel.”

Chills slid through Blake. Ignoring the drink he’d left on the table, he watched as the other man swirled his whiskey. Drained the glass. Set it down.

“He claims there’s a bank account in the Cayman Islands that holds every dime of all monies unaccounted for in his books. Those paid invoices for shipments that never seemed to happen? Well, that money was being squirreled away in some bank in the Cayman Islands.”

“He admitted it,” Blake said, elated and sickened at the same time. “We won.” And then, observing the other man’s bowed head, he added, “You won.”

“Not so fast.” Schuster shook his head, looking old and tired in a jacket wrinkled from hours of sitting in court. The energy that seemed to pulse through him twenty-four hours a day was eerily absent.

“James didn’t admit to anything but being blackmailed.”

Frowning, Blake sat back, a curious numbness spreading through him. “What? By whom?”

“Your father.”