“Why are you smiling?” she asked just after the waitress delivered their second round of drinks. They’d made a very small dent in the appetizers.
“I didn’t know I was.” It was the truth. He grabbed a bean-and-cheese-filled chip.
“Well, you were.”
“Hmm.” Dipping the chip in sour cream, he took a bite, and then finished it off.
“Why? What were you thinking?”
Damn, the woman was persistent.
“About you.”
“What about me?”
He always told the truth. So he could tell her the truth—that he didn’t wish to answer her question.
Instead, he murmured, “That no matter how bad things appear, being with you makes them seem more manageable.”
Face down, she ran a finger along the edge of her wineglass. Then she looked up. “Thank you.”
“And I was wondering if it’s something about you, something you bring to all of your…clients. Or if it’s more than that.”
“What more would it be?”
He took another chip. Broke it in half. Ate one half. “I don’t know,” he told her. “Something more personal.”
“I don’t get personal with my clients.” The words were said with total confidence. And just a bit too quickly.
“I didn’t think you did.”
“It’s completely unethical. I could be disbarred.”
“I know.”
He ate a wing. And then another. She toyed with a potato skin. He took a sip of whiskey.
“So, is this extra…nurturing or whatever it is something you offer everyone?”
She frowned and looked away, following the progress of an older couple as they left the bar.
“No.”
She replied so softly, he wasn’t sure she had, until that completely open gaze settled firmly on him. He read the truth there and was satisfied. He should leave it at that. Needed to leave it at that.
Wanted to leave it at that.
“When this is all over, will we be friends?” He blamed the question on the whiskey, and a residual fear of being thrown in jail for the rest of his life that was making him needy in ways he didn’t understand.
“As opposed to enemies?” She’d pretty much mutilated the potato, eating only a couple of bites and smashing the rest with her fork.
“As opposed to not seeing each other for another five or ten years, at which time we casually say hello when we bump into each other on the street.”
Assuming he was on the street by then.
She peered over at him, eyes narrowed. “Do you want to be friends?”
“I think so.”
Her eyes closed, her lips not quite steady.
“I…”
Reaching across the table, he touched her lips, barely, with one finger. And even that was a mistake. He wanted so much more.
“I’m not asking for a future, or even a relationship,” he said. “I’m just asking if you’d like to keep in touch.”
He waited a long time for her answer and was forced to realize how much it mattered.
“Yes.” The relief was palpable when her response finally came. “I would like to be friends.”
He chose to ignore the “but” he suspected he heard at the end of that sentence.
BLAKE’S PRETRIAL HEARING went exactly as Juliet had predicted. James’s testimony was disallowed. The Cayman bank statements stood as evidence. The trial was confirmed to start on the morning of July twenty-third and expected to last a minimum of two weeks. She and Blake met a few more times over drinks. Now that Marcie was around, Juliet could get away in the evenings and things just seemed more relaxed for both of them in a bar than in either of their offices.
As the weeks wore on and Blake’s tension grew, she was eager to relieve any of it that she could.
Marcie finally landed a job in one of the larger San Diego studios, which lessened one of Juliet’s worries, freeing her up to focus more completely as she studied tax records, company records and bank records, and followed check trails, invoices, inventory, payables and receivables. She talked to every person on Schuster’s list—and Blake’s. Slowly, systematically, she was building a picture of the lives of Eaton James and Walter Ramsden. And to a lesser extent, Blake.
All she could really do for him was build the world’s best character reference. There simply wasn’t any evidence of fraudulent activity between him and his father or Eaton James. He’d been working in Honduras—and a couple of other countries—rebuilding villages. She’d be flying a couple of key witnesses in for the trial and had taken teleconference depositions with many more who would testify to Blake’s activities.
But none of that meant he hadn’t also been in communication with his father. She just couldn’t prove that he hadn’t been.
Schuster couldn’t prove that he had been, either, she assured Blake one Thursday night in late June. They had bank statements but no matching check numbers—no way to prove where the money in the Cayman account had come from. However, as Blake quickly pointed out, with those bank statements hanging over him, complete with matching payments from Eaton James to Blake’s father, Schuster might not have to prove anything else.
So far, nothing had turned up in any records anywhere to show monies leaving for the Cayman Islands. However, ironically, Juliet had found Ramsden contributions to a charity for homeless children in Honduras in amounts that perfectly matched the amounts of money—and pretty nearly the timing—of all the payments from Eaton James to Walter Ramsden.
Also ironic, and not lost on Blake when she told him, was the fact that the money was doing exactly what the Eaton Estates investment was meant to do—feeding poor and disadvantaged children in Honduras.
Blake had to cancel an appointment for drinks the last Tuesday in June. There’d been a fall at one of his sites and while the fault had clearly been a subcontractor’s not working to safety code, Blake had gone immediately to the hospital to sit with the young man’s pregnant wife.
Arriving home a couple of hours earlier than planned to find what she’d expected to be an empty house blazing with lights, Juliet pulled the BMW into the carport and hurried inside. Other than Marcie’s morning sickness, life had been pretty glorious at the McNeil cottage now that school and Brownies were done, and Mary Jane could spend her days at home, at the studio with her aunt, at the office doing odd jobs for her mother and Duane Wilson, or with Donna Wilson.
There were still moments when Mary Jane worried about her mother spending time with Blake Ramsden. Whenever the little girl knew Juliet had been with Blake, she’d crawled into bed with her mother that night. And Marcie had had some fairly alarming—to Juliet—moments of doubts about her decision to leave Maple Grove. Usually after a bad bout of throwing up. And Juliet—well, she was getting used to waiting out her own moments of doubt and guilt and secret longings, of which she was ashamed every time she came home to her single pregnant sister and sweet insecure daughter.
But all things considered, the McNeil women living together was a successful arrangement.