It had something to do with that man—and nothing to do with him at all.
Chapter 2
Maybe the man had just been teasing, coming on to her with a smug attitude that normally worked with women. Maybe it had worked with her too. But he’d implied that she was weak, guided by soft feelings, incapable of being as strong and impersonal as he was.
And it wasn’t true. It just wasn’t true. She’d lived through hell eighteen years ago, and she could face anything after that.
Including this park. This woods. A certain hiking trail.
Even this wasn’t enough to break her.
So Kelly made herself get out of the car and stood holding on to the door until her legs stopped shaking.
She was aching between her legs from the sex she’d just had, and her back and ass were burning from the scratches. It was easier to focus on those sensations than on the fear that was growing, rising as she stared at the entrance to the trails.
There were a few cars parked in the lot, but no one was in sight. She stood a long time, trying to even out her breath, before she was capable of walking. She took step after step until she reached the trail’s beginning.
It was the one on the left. She knew it.
All she had to do was take a few more steps, and she’d be on the trail, into the woods. She’d known this trail by heart when she was a child, but other memories had blotted the knowledge out in the intervening years.
A familiar panic overwhelmed her as she neared the trees—dark depths and tangled branches that hid dark secrets.
But the fear was irrational. There were no dangers on this trail today. She wasn’t going to let a silly phobia cripple her like this. She could walk this trail—at least for a little while. She wasn’t so weak and cowardly as to turn back now.
Closing her eyes, she took ten steps down the trail, almost stumbling on a large tree root.
She had to open her eyes then, and the woods were already surrounding her. She turned instinctively and took a ragged breath as she saw the clear space and sunshine opening up back at the entrance.
She was shaking all over, and she heard her dad’s voice, coming from somewhere far back in her memory. He was telling her not to run on ahead.
He’d been a scientist—not a particularly athletic man in any way—but he’d enjoyed weekend hikes with her. He would tell her all about the trees and shrubs and birds and little critters, and she would try to race him up the steeper hills.
There was a curve in the trail now, and she forced herself to keep walking, even though her vision was starting to blur. She could barely breathe, and her heartbeat pounded in her head and her feet.
She was going to throw up. She was going to faint. She was going to fall into the darkness beyond the precipice she was barely clinging to right now, fall into the void.
She heard her father’s voice again, echoing through the years.
Kelly! Kelly Bird! Slow down! Wait for me!
She was out of sight of him now—beyond a curve in the trail. She was jogging, but she tripped on a big rock and fell on her hands and knees.
She scraped up her hands a bit, and it stung.
Kelly stared down at her hands now. They were clean. Pale. Well manicured. No scrapes or cuts at all.
Kelly Bird! No joke! Stop where you are and wait.
She’d understood the edge of seriousness in his tone, and she’d stood up from her fall and not moved. She hadn’t always obeyed her parents, but she didn’t want her father to be angry.
It was their Saturday hike together. They always had a good time.
As she’d been waiting, she’d heard a deafening crack of noise, then a lot of rustling. And then—nothing. Not her father’s voice. Not the sounds of his footsteps catching up to her.
Nothing.
Dad? Dad, are you coming?
Her words had echoed through the woods, met only with silence.
So finally she’d turned around and walked back down the trail the way she’d come.
When she got around the curve, she saw her father.
He was lying on his back on the ground.
When she ran over to him, she’d seen that part of his head wasn’t there anymore.
It was blood and brains and pieces of skull, but not her father anymore.
The rest of the day she couldn’t even remember. It blurred into a vague nightmare.
But she remembered the trail, and she remembered her father’s dead body.
She’d had to wait a long time before two more hikers passed by. She’d been covered with his blood by the time the police came.
She was choking now, unable to breathe, unable to see, panic and nausea overwhelming her.
She stumbled back toward the entrance, toward safety, falling twice because her eyes had darkened over.
As soon as she cleared the trees, she bent over, dragging in desperate breaths.
It took five minutes before she could stand upright again, and her whole body was damp with cold perspiration as she limped back to her car.
She wasn’t weak, and she wasn’t a coward.
That man hadn’t been right about her. She would never surrender her self-sufficiency.
But this was one thing she couldn’t face.
—
She lived in a stylish apartment in a very expensive building, one she never would have been able to afford if she’d been living on just her income as a portrait artist. The doorman rushed over when he saw her, asking in concern if she was all right.
She almost laughed. She was still pale and clammy from her panic attack earlier. She probably looked deathly ill.
She reassured the kind man and got into the elevator, leaning against the wall and closing her eyes.
When she got home, she would run herself a hot bath, pour a huge glass of wine, and soak until her mind was clear and the water got cool.
So what if it wasn’t even two in the afternoon yet?
She wondered what that man was doing now, whether he was thinking about her, whether she was lingering in his mind the way he was hers.
The truth was, she wouldn’t mind seeing him again, fucking him again. Her body actually responded to the idea, as if it hadn’t been quite satisfied with their first round.
And that was just plain annoying. She could imagine his gloating smile if he knew. He would think he’d proved something to her after all.
When she unlocked her door and stepped inside, she abruptly stopped thinking about more hot sex with that man. Something was wrong. There were no visible signs of anything unusual, but something felt wrong.
She knew why when she walked farther in, past the kitchen, and saw that there was a woman sitting on her couch.
Her mother.
Her real mother. Not the kind woman who had adopted her.
Kelly hadn’t seen her mother in over seventeen years, not since she’d walked out one afternoon, saying she needed to do some errands and Kelly was old enough to fend for herself. She’d never come back.
The woman had aged—obviously. The long gold hair was now gray and tucked back in a severe knot at the back of her head, and her face was tightly pinched, as if she’d spent too many years frowning.
She probably had. Kelly had never known anyone as bitter, angry, and despairing as her mother had been for the months after her father’s death. She’d been cool and kind of distanced all of Kelly’s life. They’d never bonded the way she had with her father. But it was so much worse after her father’s death.
Kelly had known instinctively—from the evening when she’d been sitting at home alone, wondering if she was supposed to fix her own dinner—that her mother had abandoned her. Every once in a while she thought about her, wondering what had become of her, whether she was still alive. Whether she regretted walking out.
Evidently, she was still alive. And sitting in Kelly’s living room.
“How did you get in here?” Kelly demanded, asking the most inconsequential question first.
> “It’s not that hard in this kind of place. Your handyman is sweet on you, and he now thinks your mama is surprising you for your birthday.”
Kelly swallowed hard as her body swayed. Her knees were weakening. This was just one blow too many for the day.
She carefully walked over to sit on an upholstered chair across from the couch. “I thought you might be dead.”
Maybe the words sounded heartless, but this was the woman who’d walked out on her without a word when she wasn’t even eleven.
“Not yet,” her mother said, still clipped, emotionless.
“So what are you doing here?”
“I’ll get to that soon enough.” She glanced at Kelly’s leather bag, which she’d dropped on the floor. “You were meeting a client?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve made a success of yourself—which can’t have been easy with such an idiosyncratic line of work.”
Kelly shrugged, finding it hard to be pleased at the approval when her mother was studying her like a pinned insect. “I do all right.”
“Your client didn’t show up?”
“No, he—” She broke off and sucked in a sharp breath. “How do you know he didn’t show up?”
“Because I was the client.”
Kelly was too dazed to put any pieces together. None of this made sense. “I spoke to a man—”
“An acquaintance of mine, since the voice needed to be male. But I arranged for the meeting in the park.”
“But why? You didn’t show up there.”
“No. I didn’t intend to.” Her mother folded her hands in her lap in an ironically ladylike gesture. “But you met someone else there, didn’t you? A man with a German shepherd?”
Kelly gasped again, her mind whirling helplessly, trying to figure out what was happening here. “Yes. How did you—”
“He always goes to that park on Saturday mornings with that dog of his.”
“You wanted me to meet him? Why? Why do you give a damn what I do?”
“You’re my daughter, aren’t you?”
“Am I?” There was bitterness in Kelly’s tone now—a bitterness she couldn’t hide. She’d had no fantasies about her mother being here for any sort of peacemaking or family bonding. She’d never really thought her mother was particularly fond of her, and she’d been sure of it after her father died. An obsessive need for justice had consumed the woman, hardening her softer feelings, until she’d completely tossed her daughter aside, leaving her alone in a little apartment to make her own way in the world.
Kelly had learned that lesson well, and any maternal feelings her mother had ever had were obviously completely deadened now.
“You’re my blood,” her mother said, pinning her with a cool gaze. “And that’s more important than you think.”
“Okay, fine. I’ll hear you out, but I’m an adult now, and I make my own decisions about my life.” Kelly was pleased when she sounded calm and confident, since she felt nothing of the kind. “Who was the guy in the park?”
“His name is Caleb Marshall.”
If Kelly expected the identity of the sexy, arrogant man to be significant, she was sorely disappointed. She blinked. “Am I supposed to know who that is?”
“Yes. If you loved your father at all, you would know who it is.”
Kelly actually jerked in response to the brittle words. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that justice for your father was never important to you, and you’ve evidently tried to wipe the memory from your life completely.”
Justice was important to Kelly, but she was too jaded now to believe anything like justice was possible in the world. And her mother was right about her wiping the trauma with her father completely out of her life. She made a point of never thinking about it—any more than she had to—since it simply hurt too much.
Today had proven that, if nothing else did.
“What good would it do to dredge it up now? And what does Caleb Marshall have to do with it?”
It was strange to associate a name with the man she’d fucked a little while ago. He didn’t feel like a Caleb to her, although she wasn’t sure what name would suit him better.
Her mother’s face was ice cold as she bit out the next words. “Caleb Marshall is the CEO of Vendella and Co.”
If she’d been slapped across the face, Kelly couldn’t have been more stunned. She saw white for a moment as her brain tried to process what she’d just been told.
She’d known the man was a business suit power player. She wasn’t surprised he was an executive at some big company. But not Vendella. She couldn’t even take it in.
Vendella had killed her father.
Her father had been a research scientist for a pharmaceutical company called Vendella and Co., which, as it turned out, was not an enviable position when results didn’t come back like they wanted.
“Yes,” her mother went on. “He’s the CEO.”
“He’s too young,” Kelly gasped, clinging to the threads of reason. “He’s too young. Eighteen years ago, he’d have been—he’d have been in his twenties. Way too young.”
“He wasn’t the CEO then. He is now.”
This piece of information allowed Kelly to take a full breath. “Then it wasn’t him. It wasn’t him.” She was leaning over in her chair with her arms hugging her stomach.
If she’d just fucked the man who gave the order for her father to be killed, then she might have to go drown herself in her bathtub.
“Are you really so naïve? You think only one man was responsible? Marshall wasn’t the CEO then, but he was working for Vendella. He was a project manager. He managed your father’s project.”
Kelly lost her breath again and leaned over farther. “So, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying his entire career is thanks to the success of that one project. What do you think would have happened if your father had gone through with exposing those damaging findings? Caleb Marshall would have been ruined. Are you going to sit there and tell me Marshall wouldn’t have done anything to stop that from happening?”
Kelly thought about Caleb, the man who had just fucked her hard and rough against a tree. That man was powerful. Ambitious. Frighteningly intelligent. Used to getting anything he wanted.
She could fully see him being utterly ruthless if something stood in his way.
Her father.
She raised her hand to her mouth.
“You see it now too,” her mother said. “It’s in his nature.”
“Do you have…proof?” Kelly had trouble speaking, since her throat was closing up.
Her mother handed her a sheet of paper.
It took Kelly a few moments to focus on the words, but then she read what was evidently a memo.
It came back to her then. She’d seen this memo before. It was the piece of evidence that her mother had used to try to get the police to make a case against Vendella.
It was a memo written by her father, saying he was concerned about some of the research he was doing on a potential new medication they were developing.
Kelly stared and stared and stared at the name on the TO: line. Caleb Marshall.
“This isn’t real proof,” she said at last. “It doesn’t mean he had him killed.”
“Of course it’s not real proof. If I had any new proof, I would have tried the police again. They wouldn’t believe me now any more than they believed me back then.”
The police had closed the case quickly, calling it a random mugging, since her father’s wallet had been taken. Her mother had believed differently from the very beginning, since she’d known her husband had decided to blow the whistle on the company once they’d continued pursuing the development of the medication despite the problematic findings. But no one believed her. With nothing else to do, she’d spent months filling Kelly’s head with bitter hate for Vendella, making her listen as her mother scoured memos and reports and endless files, searching for concrete evidence to implicate
Vendella in the murder. Kelly had believed her mother, turning Vendella into a kind of monster in her mind.
Even now, the sound of the company’s name caused a chill to break through her spine.
But there had never been any proof. No one believed her mother. And finally the woman had just walked out on everyone.
Including Kelly.
“Then why do you think it was Cal—”
“Because it’s his name on the memo. He knew what your father knew, and he knew your father wasn’t going to let it go. He had the most to lose, and he was the one who gained the most from the murder. Use your brain! Obviously, the top-level executives would have been involved, but in any scenario, Caleb Marshall would have been at least partly responsible.”
It did make sense. Kelly couldn’t imagine a scenario where the project manager wouldn’t know that one of his research scientists was about to turn on the company—unless no one knew at all, when obviously they did.
Her mother handed her a file of papers, and Kelly opened it with trembling hands, staring down at it blankly until the words unblurred again. It was a dossier on Caleb. His picture—grinning smugly at the camera—and the details of his birth, the son of a self-made millionaire, his childhood in DC, his education at fancy private schools and then the Ivy League for college on an accelerated track and a joint graduate degree in business and medicine. He’d climbed the corporate ladder quickly—too quickly to be the result of nothing but hard work.
He was either blessed with the kind of luck the gods only dreamed of or he wasn’t afraid of taking shortcuts.
Kelly flipped the pages of the file. Stacks of articles, documents, correspondence from his years at Vendella. “Where did you get all this?”
“I’ve been working with a private investigator. Read through all that, and you’ll see the lengths he’ll go to to get his way. It’s not a pretty picture.”
“The detective hasn’t been able to get any proof about the murder though?”
“Nothing that will cause the authorities to change their minds.”
“So, what am I supposed to do?”
“How did you get along with Marshall?”