He could see the artist’s lamp lit over the table, the stool that she’d obviously been perched on. Paper and pencils were spread across the tilted surface.
A project. Writing and illustrating children’s stories that she wouldn’t send out to agents or publishers. The collection was building. Colin had had a friend of his print some up for her to see—thinking that if she saw them as real books she’d be driven to find a publisher.
“I asked you two weeks ago to accompany me tonight,” he told her. “You know way more about art than I do. And...”
“I told you I would think about it. I never said I’d go.”
In ten years’ time he’d managed to cajole, beg and probably guilt her into attending a handful of functions with him. Ten years of her life she’d never get back.
“Come on, Jules. A few hours out of your Thursday night is all I’m asking.” The law firm of Fairbanks and Fairbanks—named for his father and grandfather, both deceased—represented a good many of the contributors who would be attending this evening. It was expected that a Fairbanks be there.
He’d probably be instrumental in the closing of more than one deal that night. Which was fine with him. He liked the challenge afforded him by his job as sole owner of Santa Raquel’s most powerful law firm.
“I know you want me to think you need me there because of the art.” Julie nodded. “But you and I both know you’re just there for the legal contract part, Colin, not the value designation. We also both know you don’t have to go alone. Just put out the word that you want a date and you’ll have your pick.”
Her smile was almost reminiscent of the loving scoundrel Julie had been until her senior year of high school. But not quite. That shadow of perpetual resignation ruined the effect.
“And if I go alone, I’m going to spend what parts of the evening I’m not overseeing potential negotiations fending off whatever women manage to get to me first.”
Her eyes shone with sympathy, and a hint of the old mischief.
“Amber Winslow’s going to be there,” he told her. The woman—a classmate of his from the private high school they’d both attended—was a leech. And newly divorced.
In the olden days Julie would have been all over protecting him from that particular worm.
“So are the Smyths.”
He hadn’t heard, or he wouldn’t have asked Julie to accompany him. He was surprised actually. Smyth wasn’t a big supporter of the arts.
But that was that. As desperately as Colin wished his little sister could move on, he also understood why she couldn’t. In the ten years since David Smyth had gotten away with brutally raping her at a party, Julie had not seen him. Even from a distance. She’d refused to be anywhere that either David Jr. or his father, David Sr.—owner of one of the last family banks in the state—were in attendance.
In spite of the fact that that meant she was cut off from much of the social circle in which she’d grown up and thrived.
Not to mention losing the close relationship she’d had with Margaret Smyth, David Jr.’s mother.
With David Sr. being their father Michael’s closest friend, they’d all grown up together. When Colin and Julie’s mother had died, Margaret Smyth had been like a mother to them...
“Jaime told me they were on the confirmed guest list.”
Julie’s friend from grade school who’d moved to New York before high school, Jaime Mendonthol, had a couple of paintings in the evening’s fundraising auction. She was in town, and the two women had met for lunch the day before.
Jaime had been the reason Colin had been so hopeful that his sister would agree to the night out. Missing Jaime’s local show would be hard on her.
“I knew, anyway. Leslie Morrison sent me the guest list.”
Leslie Morrison, wife of James Morrison, owner and CEO of Morrison Textiles—a third-generation company that had been using Fairbanks and Fairbanks as lead counsel for more than seventy-five years—was, as far as Colin knew, the only person in their circle who knew what had happened to Julie the night that David Smyth slipped a drug into her drink and then proceeded to sexually violate her in every way possible.
Most people knew of, or had heard rumor of, a liaison gone bad between the two of them. But word among “friends” was that their sexual relations the night of the party had been consensual.
“Friends” including Santa Raquel’s esteemed police commissioner.
When it had become clear that Julie wasn’t going to get justice—due in large part to a law enforcement system that was willing to look away if the right money was involved—she’d begged Colin to keep the incident a secret. To preserve as much of the life she’d led as she could. He’d wanted to move, leave the country, even. Start over in Italy or someplace else beautiful enough to distract his little sister from the horror she wasn’t ever going to completely escape.
Julie was the one who’d convinced him they needed to stay home. Pointing out, rightly so, that a lot of people depended on Fairbanks and Fairbanks, trusted them, in a world where having an attorney in business was an absolute must. Pointing out, as well, that if he closed the firm, they’d not only put a couple dozen attorneys and more than a hundred support staff out of jobs, but they’d lose the income necessary to keep their family home on the California coast—a home their grandfather had built from scratch.
Why Leslie Morrison kept the secret, Colin didn’t know. Nor did he know, for sure, how she’d known what had happened. He’d just come home from law school one day, shortly after that horrible night, a twenty-one-year-old kid trying to raise his sister after their father’s heart attack the year before and their mother’s death from hepatitis the year before that, and found Leslie and Julie sitting on the couch.
Not all that unusual, seeing that Leslie chaired the county’s Pet Adoption and Rescue Fund, a charitable fund that raised much of the money that helped support more than twenty shelters and neutering programs in a thirty-mile radius along the coast. Julie had run for and won election to junior chair of the fund her sophomore year in high school.
She’d been sitting on the committee’s board ever since. Now with a college degree in finance, Julie was also part of the Sunshine Children’s League—which raised funds for children without families, providing funding for basic necessities but also some scholarships to California state universities.
She attended luncheons and organized fundraisers. She shopped at the stores she loved and occasionally went to dinner with a girlfriend or two.
But she didn’t date. She never frequented dinner establishments where she might run into a Smyth. She hadn’t been back to Santa Barbara—home to the Smyth mansion where the rape had taken place—in ten years.
And she almost never attended evening social functions.
Colin gave up trying to change her mind that night.
* * *
FROM THE MINUTE she walked into the glitzy ballroom Thursday night, Chantel changed. As though she’d been born to wealth, her persona slid over her, oozing a confidence that surprised her as she entered the elegant party in the five-star resort on the Pacific coastline.
For that night she was a woman of privilege. And she was a woman on the prowl. Not unlike most of the unattached—and probably some of the attached, as well—women there. But unlike the rest of her unlikely peers, Chantel, while prowling for a man, wasn’t there for personal gain. She wanted to pick up a man as badly as any of them. Maybe worse.
But she wasn’t hoping he’d take her home. To the contrary. She wanted him locked up in an eight-by-eight cell, where she knew he’d never be able to hurt his wife again. Picturing the key to the cell flying through the air and landing in the ocean beyond the wall of windows