His First Choice (7 page)

She knew it well now.

Being treated poorly didn't mean you were bad. But it could.

“Yeah, we were in contact. It wasn't like I meant to hit her. She knew that. We were, like, best friends all through school. We've lost touch, but we're friends on Facebook.”

“You work in finance, right?” Lacey asked.

“Yeah.”

“So you have a degree?”

“Yeah, I went to Cal State. That's where I met Jem, actually.”

“He went to college?”

“Are you kidding? He has a master's in business administration.”

He owned a construction company, had a hard hat hanging in his truck behind the driver's seat. She'd figured he'd worked his way up.

Not that there was a damned thing wrong with that if he had. It just wasn't her job to assume, one way or another.

With the heat of shame working on her from the inside out, Lacey admonished herself for stereotyping.

It was so not like her. She'd discovered several gems cloaked in mud during her years with social services, people with integrity who'd been dealt blows and were struggling so hard to keep air in their lungs they couldn't worry about the mud on their skin.

A phone rang and Tressa pulled out the phone that had been sticking out of the back pocket of her skinny jeans. “It's Amelia,” she said, letting it ring. “We're hooking up for dinner. I'm supposed to be at her place. If this is going to take a while, I need to let her know I can't make it.”

Lacey had no real reason to stay. Levi wasn't in residence, and his mother had already denied hurting him or knowing anything about anyone else hurting him.

“Do you mind if I see Levi's room before I go?” she asked.

“Of course not.” After sending off a quick text, Tressa stood. “It's this way,” she said, heading back toward the living room before veering off down a hallway with fresh-looking camel-colored paint. “I made it like a racetrack,” she said. “He loves it.”

She stepped into an opened door halfway down the hall, and Lacey stopped. “Wow,” she said, smiling again. The floor was a series of carpets painted with roadways. The walls matched, so there was no break in the road. There were stop signs, speed limit signs, stoplights. There was a park, and a store with parking lot spaces out front.

“He can run his cars to the store, the park...” Even a firehouse.

“Yeah. He loves it,” she said again. “It was Amelia's idea. I'm the artist, though. I offered to do one for Jem so that Levi would have this at home, too, but he said it was good to keep it special for here so that Levi associated it with me.”

She was dealing with a model couple for healthy divorced parenting. Levi had aware, concerned, loving parents who clearly doted on him.

The only problem was, no one could explain bruises on the little boy's body. No one was even admitting to seeing them.

Except a day care worker.

Who could have been wrong.

CHAPTER NINE

O
N
A
W
EDNESDAY
morning in mid-May Jem received a call from social services, from Lacey Hamilton, telling him that while Levi's file would remain open for a required period, she had written a report clearing Jem of any suspicion. If there was any other report of concern, or hospital activity, that could change, she warned. But she'd found no evidence that Levi was being abused and saw no reason to continue an active investigation.

She did suggest that he and his ex-wife consider going back to counseling to maybe give Tressa ways to manage her emotions so that she could be around her son more often.

And she gave no indication who'd called her to make the mistaken report in the first place. It had to have been the hospital. A protocol thing due to the number of visits.

Before she'd hung up, Lacey had told him it had been a pleasure getting to know him and his family.

He wished he could say the same about her.

Yet...over the next couple of weeks, he thought of her more than he might have expected, considering how relieved he was to have her out of his life.

As he grilled hot dogs for his son, he wondered what Lacey did when she was off work. Was she close to her twin? Did she have a big family—one that was all together and perfect and never at risk of having someone over your shoulder, trying to implode everything you'd worked so hard to build?

Not that he made a habit of feeling sorry for himself.

Of course, it didn't help that Tressa was in needy mode with an out-of-control job situation.

Or that his parents, who were solidly settled in Georgia, where Jem had grown up, had told him his older sister was going to be in LA sometime that summer and they thought it would be nice if he offered her a place to stay. It didn't matter to them that Santa Raquel was an hour north of the city.

Or that Jem and his only sibling had never been close.

Family was everything to them. As evidenced by the fact that both his maternal and paternal grandparents lived within five miles of his mom and dad. They all went to the same church, the one Jem had been raised in.

He supposed family was everything to him, too, in spite of the fact that he hadn't been able to wait to get out of Georgia and, as soon as he'd graduated high school, had packed up for the college as far from his hometown as he could get and still be in warm weather.

He called his sister and invited her to stay with him, and prayed that Lacey Hamilton didn't get another bug in her ear while JoAnne was in town. His sister made him nervous.

Family being everything to him was the only explanation he had to give himself for agreeing to spend four hours out on the golf course one Friday toward the end of May.

Jem was a baseball man, but when he'd thrown out his rotator cuff after making it as far as the farm team of a major league California baseball team, he'd had to face the fact that even though he'd healed well enough to have a normal range of activity, he'd never be able to throw a baseball the same. He then became a water-sport man.

“Listen, Mick, I know Tressa comes on strong sometimes, but you know as well as I do that she's gifted when it comes to knowing when, where and how to move money around.” He shot wide and pretended to care.

“She told him to fuck himself.”

He cringed. Closed his eyes and pictured himself and Levi sailing the ocean on a finished schooner that looked amazingly like the half-built one in his garage.

“She went that far?” he asked as the bank's regional director, in from LA, made a perfect shot to the green and picked up his bag. With his own bag on his shoulder, he followed along, letting the older man set their pace.

“She didn't tell you?” The gray-haired man gave him a sideways glance. Mick Hunter, in his late sixties, had a gaze that was as sharp as any Jem had ever seen. Wrinkled skin and slowed pace aside, the man was as strong-willed as ever.

“Only that she'd been understandably upset and had said more than you thought appropriate.”

Nodding, Mick walked in the direction of Jem's misplaced ball. He'd do better to get the game right so that he didn't wear out the man he was there to appease—on his ex-wife's behalf.

“She needs this job, Mick.” He couldn't believe even Tressa had lost her composure to that extent. Not at work.

And wished he couldn't believe that she'd let him come into this meeting ill-prepared.

“I can't have the head office getting calls from wealthy investors because one of my managers doesn't have the ability to reel herself in.”

“He called her a thief.”

“He's a bit senile, Jem, and he wasn't understanding his most recent investment statement. All she had to do was listen to his concerns and explain things to him. And then, when he saw how upset she was by his accusation, he apologized. In person and in writing.”

“Didn't he offer to pay her off for her trouble?” Jem said, dropping his bag as they reached his ball. Pulling a nine iron out of his bag, he lined up a shot for the tee. If he focused, he'd make it. “That's bribery.” If he gave a rat's ass about the game, he'd probably be good at it. “Usually when a man offers a bribe, he has something to hide.” Jem played his best card.

“He doesn't want his kids to know that he forgot about moving money from one fund to another. And he only offered her money after her response to his apology was...so inflammatory.”

Straightening, Jem looked over at the other man. Mick's hat shaded his forehead, but not the serious light in his eyes, or the frown beneath that grayed mustache. That afternoon was the first he'd heard that the man had apologized at all, let alone in writing. Tressa said he'd tried to “pat her on the head” afterward.

“She mouthed off when he accused her,” he clarified. She'd specifically said she'd been a bit tactless when the elderly investor had first accused her. Tressa wasn't one to admit to wrongdoing. So when she did, he knew she was telling him the truth.

“That's when she called him an asshole.”

Obviously the “tactless” reference.
Oh, hell. Tressa, will you ever learn to hold your damned tongue inside your mouth?

She wasn't anything like her parents; he'd give her that. And couldn't imagine what it had been like growing up with them constantly berating her, withholding love on a regular basis.

But how much did she have to lose before she realized that people did not tolerate the verbal lashes that seemed perfectly normal to her?

Lord knew he'd tried to tell her. She thought he was the one who didn't get it. Until she was in trouble. Then she came running to him.

And so he came out to play golf. Or find some other way to chew on her crow.

“Okay, look, Mick, she made a mistake. She was pretty shaken up, a banker being accused of theft. She said the conversation took place where other customers could have heard him.”

Tressa thought she had a case for slander. Jem didn't agree. He just needed her to be able to keep her job. He made good money, but he wasn't going to support Tressa forever. They were divorced. She had to learn to take care of herself.

But still, she was the mother of his child, and a woman with a good heart.

“And other than this one incident, she's been good for the bank,” he continued. “She tells me your accounts have grown a third in the year and a half she's been there.”

“She's good at helping people see how to get their money to work for them.”

“Right.” At least she had given that to him straight. “They benefit and so do you. Everyone wins. Which is a hell of a lot better than having a salesperson who can convince people to do anything, but then later have it not be good for them.”

That kind of thinking backfired eventually, as Mick knew—and knew that Jem knew, too. Tressa had come into a branch that was on the verge of closure due, in part, to the previous manager's smooth tongue and inability to deliver the low interest rates and other terms he'd promised in order to close loans. After homes and cars had been purchased, sometimes even after a client was driving a new car, he'd call the client back with the bad news. If they wanted to keep the car, or have the house actually close, they'd have to agree to higher terms. Most often they did. But the bank had acquired enough of a clan of unhappy customers to do it measurable harm.

“Look, I appreciate what you did, Jem, delivering Tressa up to me at a time when I had no ready answer of my own. You hooking me up with her, that was decent. But I can't...”

“Let me talk to her,” Jem interrupted before the man said something that would be difficult for him to take back. Mick had hired Tressa on Jem's word because Jem's company had built the half-million-dollar addition to the man's Beverly Hills home. He had to hope that his word would be good enough a second time. “I'll have her apologize, in writing, to the customer. And I'll make sure she understands that the customer comes first and she has to treat every one of them with respect. Even when they're rude.”

The man looked at him, his eyebrows drawn together against the bright sun. “You sure you aren't making promises you can't keep?”

Tressa might be unhappy at work, but she wasn't stupid. Her alimony was up in the next month. And deep down, Tressa knew she didn't have a slander case. She'd have to actually prove that someone else had overheard what the elderly customer had said, and then prove that the statement had somehow damaged her or the bank. She didn't have a case.

As Amelia, her soul mate, and also a lawyer, had no doubt already told her.

“I'm sure. Just let me talk to her. You'll have something in writing before Monday.”

Jem shot and made it to the green.

Not saying a word, Mick made the par three in two, watched while Jem made it in four and led the way to the next tee.

He never did actually agree to keep Tressa on, but Jem knew he'd won his ex-wife another chance. He just wished Tressa didn't put him in positions where he had to hang his own reputation on her. Most particularly when it came to people he liked and respected.

He'd stuck his neck out for her, getting her this bank job after she'd walked out on the investment firm because an account she'd believed should have been hers had been given to someone else. The least she could do was see that his head didn't get cut off.

* * *

L
ACEY
WENT
HOME
to San Diego for the Memorial Day holiday. She'd had fantasies about getting out of the traditional family barbecue at the beach cottage her parents had purchased when the twins were little. But in the end she'd gone. As she always did.

As she'd also known would be, Kacey's latest handsome guy was there, doting on her—as her sister certainly deserved. Kacey was beautiful, inside and out.
More
inside than out—which, looking at her, was hard to believe.

The guy this time, Dean Bates, didn't deserve Kacey, though. They never did. Kacey was so sweet and had such a selection lined up out her door, that she never had a chance to find a real guy. One who'd love her even if she wasn't Kacey Hamilton.
The
Kacey Hamilton. Of
The Rich and Loyal
.

Not that Kacey resembled her on-air heiress soap-opera character, Doria Endlin, all that much without the short blond wig and stage makeup.

Scrubbing at dishes they'd all left in the sink when they'd come in from a bonfire on the beach the night before, Lacey worried about her twin. Kacey was getting a little hard around the edges—with some brittleness seeping into her laugh.

“I was planning to help with that.” Recognizing the voice almost as though it had come from inside her own head, Lacey glanced over her shoulder to see the subject of her thoughts grabbing a dish towel off the oven door handle and coming toward her.

“I was awake,” Lacey said. “I've got to get back up north. I've got an appointment this afternoon.” Truth be known, she'd planned to leave the night before, but when her sister had asked her to stay for the bonfire, she'd had a beer and sealed her fate for the night.

“Can't you just take one more day?” Kacey asked. If she'd been pouty, or whiny, Lacey wouldn't have had as hard a time answering.

She shook her head. She could make a phone call. Her only appointment that day, the Tuesday after Memorial Day, was with a potential new service to clean the rented office used by Santa Raquel social services. They'd been given the governmental all clear to switch services, and Lacey had been elected spokesperson for the department on the project.

“We've hardly had a chance to talk all weekend.”

She finished with the small sauce dishes she'd washed first because they fit in the bottom of the drain board and she could stack other dishes on top of them. “What about Dean?” He'd been glued to her sister's side and was mainly the reason they'd had no time to talk.

“He left last night,” Kacey said. “After everyone went to bed.”

Lacey didn't just hear the things her sister wasn't saying. She felt them. Physically. In her gut.

Picking up a dish to dry before Lacey could put another on top of it, Kacey rubbed thoroughly.

Their father, a truck driver who'd had his own fleet of trucks by the time the girls were ten, had never put a dishwasher in at the cottage.

She might not have liked Dean, but... “I'm sorry.” Because she knew Kacey was.

“Can't you stay, Lacey? Just one more day? We can go up to my place and you'd already be partway home.”

Kacey owned a condo in Beverly Hills, the kind with a doorman and a half-acre all-adult pool with mountain views.

Lacey washed the watermelon bowl and the pot with baked beans caked on. Thank goodness they'd used paper plates.

“Even half a day,” Kacey said, keeping right up with her drying duties. “We could leave within the hour and be at my place in time for a mimosa on the balcony.”