Afterglow (36 page)

He’d been struggling with all that when his mother had died, and his father accused of Dakota’s murder. He’d had a full fucking plate. “I didn’t give a damn that you wanted to marry a wealthy man,” he told her. She gave him a steady look over the table. Neither had eaten more than a couple bites of the meal. She pushed her plate a few inches away in a final gesture.

“I wouldn’t have cared if you were dirt poor. Your loss that you didn’t believe that.”

His fingers tightened on the stem of his glass. “What about the other men?”
Did you tell
them
the things you whispered to me late at night? Did you stroke your foot up their calves and nuzzle their chests and tell them how much you loved them?

That got her attention, and she frowned. “Other men? What other men? I had two lovers before I met you. Three lovers isn’t considered a lot by any stretch of the imagination.”

It was Rand’s turn to frown. “My mother showed me the report from the PI who followed you for months.” A four-inch-thick red folder, secured with a rubber band, with a stark white label affixed to the front that read baldly
DR. DAKOTA NORTH
. He’d known before he snapped the band off that opening the file was going to change the entire course of his life. “There were nine men. The meetings photographed and documented. Dates, times, places.”

Dakota leaned back in the chair with a shake of her head. “Wow. She was dedicated, that’s for sure. Add
that
to the doctored video, and I guess you have your answer.”

No, goddamn it. He not only had no answers, he had a shitload more questions. “Let me make sure I have this in a nutshell.” He dropped his hand to the table, realized it was clenched into a fist, and flattened his fingers on the surface. “My mother hired a PI who gave her a thick file on your raunchy activities over several months. There’s a video—doctored, you claim—of a conversation that never happened on my parents’ front porch… . And you’re saying it’s all lies, that someone has gone to all this trouble just to set you up. Do you see how this all looks incredibly coincidental and farfetched?”

“Oh, yes. I certainly do. I think that was exactly the goal.” Her eyes glittered. “Now I have a question for you.
Was
your mother trying to set me up? Was she trying to get you away from me, or was this someone else’s manipulation? Because I have some pretty out-there opinions about all this.”

He hadn’t listened before; he would listen now—though he felt his shoulders rise defensively. She still had the power to hurt him. “And those are?”

“Given that I know absolutely that none of these things are true or even remotely as they seem, I think we’re both being manipulated.”

He leaned forward, folding his arms on the table. “A conspiracy theory? Seriously? You think we were
all
set up by my mother? You, me, Paul?”

“I don’t see how this could all be your mother’s doing, although God only knows, this is Machiavellian enough to lay at her feet. But she’s not doing it from the grave. Yet everything about this seems to me as though a puppeteer is pulling strings to suit a bigger purpose. Doesn’t it look that way to you?

“Think about it, Rand; go all the way back.” She leaned across the table, staring intently into his eyes. “Your mother believes, or is
fed
, a pack of lies about me, which she promptly feeds to you; then she’s killed, and your father convinces you that I’m to blame. So neither of us has the other’s support, neither of us knows the whole story. Then the lab is destroyed. Then the wedding that
you’re
doing security for is sabotaged, using a product connected with your father, whose formula was supposedly destroyed years before.
Then
hired killers somehow manage to find us over and over, and to top it all off, Ham is dead and half your security people are missing in action. Have I left anything out? Probably. But let’s start there, shall we?”

“No. Yes. Possibly.” He was shaken; when she laid out the sequence of events that way, it was inescapably disturbing. “But I don’t know who could be doing it, much less why. Obviously not my mother. Yes, I admit that the doctored video and PI’s notes could certainly have been her motherly way of making sure I didn’t marry you. But since she died two years ago, we know that at the very least, the rest of this is someone else’s work.” Rand mulled over the notion, concentrating on the events surrounding his breakup with Dakota. Even if his mother hadn’t suffered severe and debilitating depression, she’d been a vindictive and manipulative human being all his life. She used her wealth as a club to make people do what she wanted them to do. Rand. His father … The list was long. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—negate Dakota’s theory. His mother had been capable of all that. And more.

It wasn’t his mother’s actions that killed him now, though. It was his own. By blindly believing the reports she’d shown him, he’d allowed her venom to poison what he had with Dakota. He’d never even considered that there might be a flip side to the coin, making it that much easier to believe the lies he’d been fed.

In a way, he had almost welcomed his father’s version of events; it had justified his suspicion, his rejection of the woman he’d sworn to love forever. He’d been blind, yes, but he wasn’t entirely blameless, and the realization hit him hard.

He drained his glass, then reached for the bottle to refill it. “If it’s an enemy of Paul’s who’s running the board,” he said flatly, “he’s won that part of the game. Unless there’s a last-minute piece of evidence they’ve missed, Paul will be in jail for the rest of his life.”

“Not necessarily, if Mancini’s law firm is worth what you’re paying them. They have those discs,” Dakota pointed out. “They’re damning, and he’ll use them to sway the jury into believing that
I’m
the one who is guilty. Your father could walk.”

Rand met her intense eyes. She looked exhausted; the smudges of shadows under her eyes had nothing to do with the crappy lighting in the room. Her pallor had everything to do with him. If her conspiracy theory proved true, his entire family was responsible for ruining her life. Him included. “Mancini won’t be using the so-called evidence. I called him and told him they were fakes. I also told him that I had some serious questions about the ‘experts’ he hired to look at them, and that I expected him to get me some answers.”

Her expression barely changed, but he saw a small flicker of hope in her still features. “When?”

“When you were taking your bath.”

“You saw them just a few times. What made you change your mind?”

She’d been in the bathroom longer than she realized. He’d watched them each a dozen times. In slo-mo and without sound. He’d been in the movie business. He knew about dubbing and splicing and creative editing. “I know
you
.”

The harsh light glittered on the rim of tears welling in her eyes. She blinked them back, and Rand saw her throat move as she tried to swallow her emotions. “Don’t—” She had to swallow to get the words out. “Don’t say that unless you mean it. I’m at the very end of an incredibly short rope here.”

For Dakota, who’d gone through so much, no thanks to him, to admit vulnerability, made Rand’s chest ache with compassion. He reached out and covered her icy fingers with his. “I have no idea how or why these things have been put into place, but I believe you. I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you before.”

She couldn’t prevent the raw sob that ripped her throat, but she put up her free hand to check him when he rose from his seat. Rand sank back down, turning her hand and lacing his fingers with hers.

He poured her half a glass of wine and pushed it in front of her as she struggled for composure. “You won’t like it, but drink a little anyway.”

She pulled in a deep, shuddering breath, lifted the glass, and drained the fine wine like medicine. “
That
is truly disgusting.” She put the glass down and grimaced, making Rand smile.

“You should probably try to get some sleep. We’ve been going nonstop for days—we should take advantage of this short respite.”

“Unless the good guys or the bad guys knock on the door,” Dakota pointed out dryly, reading his mind. There was the glimmer of them together that he’d missed for the past two years. The way they could finish each other’s thoughts, knew the other person. It had been so painful when he’d thought that he didn’t know her after all. And now …

“We can talk about this—figure it out—tomorrow when we’re both fresh.”

“Oh no. You don’t know how long I’ve had to mull this over. Examine and reexamine every detail. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? I’d rather hash it out now. Do you mind?”

No. For the first time in a
long
while, he was breathing easier. He too wanted everything out in the open. “What’s your theory?”

“At first I thought someone was setting
me
up for a fall. Now I’m not so sure. Let’s just go with your mother being overprotective and wanting someone better for you. Malicious mischief, nothing more. But then she’s killed. Paul believes with utmost sincerity that I was the one who sent him the drug and the wafers so he could administer the DL6-94.

“We know—
I
know—that wasn’t the case. What if someone wanted Paul in jail? Who could have benefited from your mother’s death, from getting Paul out of the way and leaving you isolated?”

“Nobody.” Rand pushed her plate back in front of her. “Eat while you talk. Yeah, I inherited a chunk of change from my mother, but let’s agree that I’m not behind all this, okay?” He saw a hint of a smile on her face, and drew another breath before continuing.

“If I die, everything goes to a foundation my mother set up for research into depression. Nobody would personally benefit from
my
death. So the who and why?” He shrugged. “No idea. I agree that someone is manipulating the players, but, and I hate to say this, I
do
believe you’re the target. Forget my mother’s shit, which I don’t think was related to the rest of it.

“Someone is responsible for splicing and dicing the video from the lab. I think that footage was taken over the span of several weeks. Then, to solidify the case for your presumed guilt, you were sent to the lab the night of the explosion. I’ll check with Mancini, but I’ll bet that wasn’t anyone from his office who called you.”

“After seeing the video, I’m damn sure it wasn’t. Someone wanted to implicate me in corporate espionage long before your father was put in jail. That footage was taken in October and November. A good four months before your mother died in Italy. The security firm never kept surveillance tapes for more than a couple months, but someone made sure they had what they needed for the blame-Dakota reel.”

She took a bite of the arugula and chewed, then stabbed the air with her empty fork. “Someone wanted to implicate me in the explosion at the lab.”

Rand, who had followed suit and taken a bite of his steak, suddenly had a hard time swallowing his food. “Or kill you.”

“They almost succeeded.” She shrugged, not giving anything away with her expression and leaving Rand to imagine how hideous and terrifying the experience must have been. “Bummer for the bad guys, yay for me. Next step, if the explosion didn’t take me out of the picture: have me arrested for corporate espionage? And if that doesn’t work, use those videos to prove that I wanted your mother dead, and therefore I’d be an accessory to murder, if not an outright murderer?” Her fingers tightened in his.

Rand took a sip of wine to ease his tight throat, then said, “Some pieces fit, others don’t. It all sounds both plausible and, quite frankly, like one of Seth Creed’s movies.”

She smiled. “Blockbusters, all of them.”

“Okay. Let’s try something else. What if you
aren’t
the target? What if this person used you to get to
me,
knowing you were my Achilles’ heel?”

She smiled slightly, a spark of hope igniting behind the pale green eyes. “Was I?”

“In ways you can’t imagine.” But that was a conversation for another time. “Let’s try this for an alternate theory. First, breaking us up. It almost killed me when I saw the proof of your infidelity.” He put up a hand to stop her from speaking. “Then my mother dies from a drug you and Paul were responsible for manufacturing. Paul is arrested. There’s a damn good chance he’ll rot in prison. And while I have no love for him, he is my father. I don’t want that for him.”

“If we go with this train of thought, that you’re the target of all this—we were intentionally broken up,” Dakota agreed. “The wedding you were hired to protect was targeted in a very personal and specific way. They could’ve used Rohypnol, if all they wanted was a scandal-worthy party. But it was
this
drug.
Our
drug, the one your father and I worked on.” She exhaled, then sipped the glass of milk. “Someone seems to have worked very hard to manipulate you, your father, and me. None of what we know adds up to any real solution. Yet nothing about any of this feels coincidental. Does it to you?”

He looked grim. “No. It sure as hell wasn’t a coincidence that Rapture was used there.”

Dakota tapped her fingernails against the edge of the ceramic plate. “Where are the good guys? Not that we’d be any happier to see them than to see the bad guys—but where are they? Even though we used mostly cash, we still used a credit card for the car in Perugia, and had to leave passports for ID at several hotels we stayed at. If the police and/or Interpol knew who we were in Barcelona, they should’ve been able to follow you to the
moon
with that kind of information. They should be right here at the hotel with us, ordering dessert.”