Wish Her Well (5 page)

He hummed against her, then listed his head. “Yet another reason not to piss off Wade Fraser. The one you want goes home with someone else while you go back to work.”

With her senses flashing over, the words didn’t register. The deep thrust of his fingers, however, did. Sweltering from the inside out, she let her head fall back against the seat.

Eric had horrible timing. “Do I need to uh… make myself scarce, here?”

Thomas made an uncharacteristic whimpering sound, and withdrew his hand. Only after stealing one small additional taste did he push himself back onto the curb, then close the door on her.

Reeling from the last half hour culminating in having Thomas kiss her literally senseless, Amanda took a deep breath and let it out. Ignored whatever it was Thomas was saying to Eric. Didn’t look back as Eric got into the driver’s seat and pulled away from the Prescott house.

Eric asked, “Something you need to tell me about you and Thomas?”

“Probably much the same thing you want to tell me about you and Steph.”

Not surprisingly, they rode the rest of the way to her townhouse in silence while Amanda fell into an odd sort of reflective limbo. She didn’t know what to make of Steph’s sting operation. Nor the sparks between her and Thomas. Josh’s ascendance into the Accord. Thomas’s warning to Ridley, or all the people she’d heard so much about but hadn’t lain eyes on until last night: Wade Fraser. Mercury Milazzo. Jennifer Grove.

Eric spotted the trouble before she did: a car parked in front of her house. In the deep dark of the wee hours, when the SUV’s headlamps swept over the car, she almost didn’t recognize the shape resting against the car’s trunk until it moved. Shelley. Her step-sister had been lying in wait.

Good Lord. What else could possibly happen today? She was too tired for this. Too occupied with her Fantasy Heights troubles, and she was absolutely not in the mood for a confrontation over what now felt like ancient history.

Eric was not a huge fan of surprises. And she had no idea he carried a gun until he put the car in park and reached inside his jacket.

“Hey! No!” she cautioned. “She’s my stepsister. It’s cool.”

“No, it’s not. She’s got a bottle in her hand. She’s drunk.”

“It’s fine. Honestly.”

No, it wasn’t fine, but she ordered Eric to go home, grabbed her purse and got out of the car to face the ‘family’ who’d shattered her idea of how life was supposed to work, how her future was supposed to play out. She forced one foot in front of the other as Eric drove away, until she was standing before the younger girl. Amanda couldn’t see her face in the dark, couldn’t tell if Shelley was about to accuse her of something crazy again or what was coming.

“What are you doing here?” Amanda asked.

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

The closer Shelley came to the end of that sentence, the higher and squeakier her voice had become. Right at the end, she burst into tears.

With a sigh, Amanda took the bottle of designer vodka from Shelley’s hand, then marched her stepsister into the house and into the living room before resetting the alarm. Unready to face her stepsister, she rested her forehead against the security panel.

Nothing ever changed. Their relationship had always worked this way from the moment Shelley and her mother turned up in Amanda’s life. She was nine years older than Shelley. The older, more responsible and rigid big sister who could always be counted upon to fix every problem. And now, even though Shelley had broken up her engagement and married Darren, Amanda was expected to comfort the younger, more fragile girl.

Classic. Truly classic.

The next half hour was one of the most trying in months. Weeping and talking at the same time, Shelley apologized for the accusatory phone call, and for breaking up her and Darren’s engagement. Then she explained Darren had left only two weeks after they got home from their honeymoon, upset when he found out Shelley had no plans to return to university. None of his friends liked her, their wives called her a home-wrecker, and it all culminated in Darren jumping straight from their marital bed into his office manager’s.

Surprise, surprise. Amanda said, “I still don’t understand why you would come here.”

Shelley closed her eyes, sending two fat tears down the tracks. “I needed my big sister.”

It took rather a lot of strength not to wring the girl’s neck, but Shelley was shaking so badly from the chilly night air and emotion that Amanda took the coward’s way out: topped the girl off with brandy and put her to bed.

She returned to the living room to sip at her own shot, letting the alcohol burn her tongue, and wishing it could burn her conscience away, too. Without it she could storm into the guest room and yell “Ha! How do you like it? How does it feel?”

But Amanda knew better. She would do no such thing, and in the morning, she would make it all better again. That’s what she did. That’s what she had always done, and would always do.

Things didn’t quite work out that way. The best she could manage over breakfast with a hung-over, sullen Shelley was a few vague, grunted answers to a few vague, idle questions about what she was doing now, and what her plans were for the day.

She didn’t have to work until seven that evening, and she began to grow more and more uneasy at the idea of Shelley sticking around. If her family found out about her job at Fantasy Heights, they wouldn’t understand. Or even if they did, their friends and acquaintances might not, and she didn’t need to be the source of any more gossip.

She was busy peeling an apple and dreaming up reasons why Shelley shouldn’t stay when the younger girl asked another question.

“Who were those guys you brought to the wedding?”

Okay, no. That was one step too far. “No one we’ll ever talk about.”

“The blond one was too old for me but the dark-haired one… Holy crap, is he hot.”

In her mind, Amanda pictured calmly leaning forward to push Shelley’s face down into her oatmeal. Which would be very gratifying, but not her style. “So you steal my fiancé and when he leaves you, you show up here to have a go at my friends? Is that why you’re here?”

Shelley looked stung. “That’s not what I… I was just saying he’s hot.”

“He has a name, and he is none of your business.”

“You’re never going to forgive me, are you?”

Amanda stared at her stepsister across the table. “This isn’t like the time you spilled nail polish all over my laptop keyboard. You and Darren hurt and disappointed and embarrassed a lot of people with what you did. Your mom. Dad. Darren’s family… If you want me to forgive you, start making amends. Go back to school, for God’s sake. Make your own life instead of stealing someone else’s.”

She pushed herself away from the table, tossed the knife and apple into the sink, and hurried into her room to push her feet into boots and grab her purse. She couldn’t be here. If she tried to forgive Shelley, tried to help her sort things out, tomorrow there would be new drama and new problems to replace the solved ones.

Not to be upstaged, Shelley stormed out of the house and left.

With eight hours to kill, Amanda went to the gym and worked out until she was shaking and so sore she could hardly move, then headed for the resort to visit the staff cabin set aside for her use. Maybe she should clean the place up. She hadn’t set foot inside since moving into town, and it could provide a useful refuge if Shelley decided to stick around.

About ten minutes before she was due to meet Josh for their night together, he sent a text:
Change of plans. Meet at security office. Eight thirty.

Now left with extra time to kill, she dusted and moved some furniture around, then lingered in the shower too long. By the time she got out, she had to hustle into a short skirt, tank, vest and sandals. She hurried across the resort to the parking lot, and into the security offices.

The officer on duty stood up and called her ma’am. She returned a polite, if slightly bewildered greeting, and was contemplating asking why they were so formal and polite when Josh came through the lobby doors.

He was not alone. Behind him loomed Wade Fraser.

She wanted to shoot Josh a scolding look for the lack of warning, but didn’t dare take her attention away from Wade long enough. He did not look pleased while he took a small orange plastic envelope from his pocket. From it, he took out a security badge bearing her picture.

“What’s this?” Amanda asked.

“Your temporary ID. We need to take you down into the Accord offices for privacy, and you can’t go down there without a badge.”

The men gave each other cross looks, and she could tell that Josh was not entirely on board with their plan. He looked tired and worried and stressed out, and their silent exchange revealed frustration battling urgency and resolve.

Something was wrong. Had Wade gotten into another scrape with Thomas? Or maybe there was news about Nicole?

Stricken by worry, she followed quietly as the men led her back to the main lobby, down a hallway past Jerod’s office, and through an unmarked door where stairs led down. She didn’t need to be told that the stairs would bring them to the security tunnels, though she’d had no idea the underground network stretched this far. The section they entered wasn’t abandoned like the corridors beneath the quad. This square complex was well lit, and the concrete floor and walls had been polished to a high shine.

They headed into one of the offices: Wade’s, given the way he claimed the seat behind the desk. Josh waved her into another chair before taking the last for himself.

Wade kicked things off. “We’ve been thinking about what Thomas did, the way he dug into Andrew West. Can you explain why Thomas has spent so much time preparing for war without telling anyone else?”

She blinked at him. “How should I know?”

Wade made no attempt to hide the way he scanned her features, nor his blatant skepticism. He allowed the moment to stretch out well beyond the point of discomfort.

Josh snapped first. “It’s okay, Amanda. Maybe you can help us with this one. Why is Jerod Hughes suddenly all moony-eyed over Ridley? Did Thomas put him up to it?”

Put him up to it? Maybe Josh and Wade had reason to find the situation dubious, but she still did not understand why they were asking her about Thomas’s actions. And the longer she watched Josh, reading the signs of guilt and distress in his body language, she knew he hated putting her in a tattletale position even worse than she hated to be there.

She chose her words very carefully. “Thomas hasn’t said a word about Jerod or Ridley.”

Wade examined her for a long moment before speaking again. “Okay, then tell me what you know about this.”

He went into a pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Amanda had plenty of time to build up a generous amount of foreboding before he’d unfolded it and pressed it flat upon his blotter.

Having spent so much time in the scheduling and business offices, she had no trouble recognizing the paper’s contents. The page was a printout from the scheduling software showing a list of exceptions where a booking had been rescheduled or modified somehow.

Four exceptions were listed: each of the bookings with her mystery client.

She looked up at Wade. Why was he looking at these? Surely he knew by now the bookings were part of Steph’s disastrous sting operation. “What do you want to know?”

“It’s my understanding that these bookings were fraudulent. I need to know who showed up for these appointments.”

Uh oh. What was she supposed to do, here? Once again, Thomas’s request to back him up had reared its complicated head, and this time it wasn’t as simple as brushing someone minor like Marla off with a lie. This time it was Josh and the FBI.

Wade led her still further. “Thomas claims it was him.”

She vacillated only long enough to realize Josh would forgive her for siding with Thomas. Again she shuffled through her prepared responses and came up with the same one. “What do you mean, Thomas ‘claims?’ He was the client on those sets, but nothing untoward ever happened, if that’s what you’re worried about. They were only training exercises.”

Wade leaned back in his chair. It creaked beneath his massive frame. “Training exercises. Interesting flair for dissemination, you’ve got. But we know Thomas is lying, Miss Tate. He wasn’t even onsite for a couple of those bookings.”

No response for that. No way to answer. All she could do was stare Wade down and try to look unaffected.

He asked, “Why are you lying for him? And more importantly, why is Thomas concealing the real guy’s identity? If the real client was in collusion with West or Steph, we need to know.”

True. She also wanted to know who the mystery client was, but she could find out for herself, given time and freedom to work on it. What worried her was the echo of something she’d thought about yesterday, the things Thomas had repeated in the shower that day. He kept saying he had to follow orders, that he couldn’t always do what he wanted. But whose orders was he following? Not Wade’s, obviously.

She repeated her question. “Why are you questioning me instead of Thomas? Aren’t you supposed to be the one in charge?”

Wade’s eyes narrowed, and he reminded her momentarily of a cartoon tea kettle, reddening and tightening, explosion imminent. But he contained it. Only just. “All right, fine. Let’s see if your loyalty can outlast this one.”