“Let’s go,” she said, the urgency she was feeling creating a tightness in her gut that wasn’t good. “Glen needs to speak with you.” Barely sparing an apologetic glance at her brother for stealing his worker, leaving him with a job undone, she led the way out to the little car.

  Having him sit in the back passenger side, hunkered down, just in case, she took the driver’s seat and said, “He’s getting to another location, to avoid tracking, since all anyone will get is the one Shelter Valley cell tower. There’d have to be multiple calls to or from one other tower to even get their interest...” She was babbling. Just sitting there. She’d drive if she had to, but until then... She glanced back at him, saw him lounging on a diagonal slant so that he was facing her. Watching the side of her face when she wasn’t turned toward him.

  She could feel him there.

  She so badly needed to connect to the man who’d played her body so beautifully the night before that it scared her.

  And lashed out with, “What were you and Kierland talking about back there?” For good measure, she pinned him with her stare that brooked no argument.

  Expected him to prevaricate, and was shocked when she was held with an equally powerful stare.

  “Why didn’t you tell me why you can’t be around wealthy society?”

  She needed to swallow. Couldn’t swallow. Couldn’t look away from him.

  And then did.

  “He had no business telling you about that.”

  “He thought I already knew.”

  That brought her gaze back to him. “Why would he think that?”

  “He started to grill me, like I was...let’s say...more than just a client—a big brother routine unlike anything I’ve ever seen—even on television.”

  With a downturned smirk, she harrumphed. Rolled her eyes. Would have apologized except that... Kierland went from protective big brother to spilling her beans?

  “And?”

  “I couldn’t very well look him in the eye and deny that we might have...noticed each other...so I said what I thought would end the conversation immediately. I told him that we’d established from day one that our worlds won’t ever converge. I told him I knew that you wanted nothing to do with my lifestyle.”

  She saw it coming. Felt her lower lip trembling.

  “You were there. You heard what the guy was saying to your mother. The man had done some gardening at your grandparents’ place. Knew who she was. He wanted money. A lot of it. Insisted that he was being reasonable. What he was asking for would be nothing compared to the Whitaker fortune. She kept telling him that she’d been disowned. That she didn’t have anywhere near the kind of money he wanted her to withdraw from various automatic teller machines...”

  Tears welled. She was on the job. Couldn’t let them fall.

  “Your mother was killed solely because she came from wealth.”

  * * *

  Even as Joe said the words, he was hoping McKenna would tell him they weren’t true. The only way...he didn’t know what...but to never see her again...

  She didn’t deny them. Sitting rigid, facing the windshield that pointed toward the road down the mountain, her shoulders stiff, she just sat there.

  “And after years of being forced to live in that same wealthy environment, you had a breakdown.” He said the rest. “That day you drove to Shelter Valley without permission...you refused to leave your father’s house ever again, threatening to kill yourself...”

  “I wouldn’t have done it. Mom’s killer would have won.” The words held dead certainty. No emotion.

  And were the death to his last hidden hope that maybe there’d be a future for them.

  Even just as friends.

  * * *

  Her phone ringing jarred every ounce of air in the car.

  And there were no niceties as Glen’s voice came over the line. “He’s there?”

  “I’m here,” Joe called from the back, and McKenna turned, putting the phone on the console so they could be equally heard. And alternated looking between the phone and keeping watch out the windshield.

  She hadn’t looked at him since the death knell had sounded on any kind of them.

  “A program was written to reroute the three Bellair computers with access to the company’s online banking system to another site set up to look like and act like you were on the legitimate bank site. The transactions you saw, and statements you downloaded, were all fake. That site has since been taken down. Erased.”

  McKenna’s gaze shot to Joe. Was this it? They’d found the piece that would clear Joe?

  While her used-up heart soared for him, it cracked a bit more, too.

  “Turns out, no one from the bank was involved.”

  If they caught the real thief...

  He’d still need her for another day or two at least, right? Until there was time for the news to hit social media and put an end to the #wheresjoenow witch hunt.

  Maybe that would even take a week or more...

  Joe wasn’t moving. Or asking questions.

  Was he sorry to be seeing his time with her end, too?

  “When you hired us, you gave us access to your sign-in password,” Glen continued. Something was wrong with her boss’s tone of voice. She’d never heard quite that tone before.

  “That’s right,” Joe said, more statue than man.

  “But there’s another one, isn’t there? One that has to be used to access secure documents that you create. It’s called a signature. You send a secure document along with a password to those authorized to access it. But they can’t manipulate it in any way. It takes your private password to do that.”

  What in the hell was going on?

  Tell them they’re wrong, she wanted to scream at Joe while still trying to piece together the significance of what she was hearing.

  What it all had to do with the pirated banking log-in and bogus website.

  Silent, waiting, McKenna stared at Joe, who suddenly looked ashen. She hoped it was only the sun moving in the sky, hitting the car differently, putting him more in the shade.

  “There is another one, yes.” Joe’s words sounded, and felt, like death.

  “I need it now.”

  “M-y-f-a-t-h-e-r-k-i-l-l-e-d-m-y-m-o-t-h-e-r.”

  M-y... My...father killed my mother?

  Mouth open, she sat there. Stunned.

  Afraid.

  “Who else has that password?”

  She held her breath. Waiting for the answer. Who’d done this to Joe?

  And where were they now? In custody, she hoped.

  He was talking a long time to answer. She couldn’t reach back and touch him. But she poured her heart into the look she gave him.

  “No one,” he said.

  “No one.”

  “I’ve been using encryption since I got out of juvenile detention. It was something I learned there, and with my father...knowing he lied about me, hanging me out to dry... I wanted everything I did on my computer kept separate from anything he might do.”

  Her heart reached out to him. Needing to soothe him.

  “What about someone seeing you type it? Someone in your office, maybe, while you were signing in?”

  “Never,” he said, sounding adamant and completely unemotional. “I don’t ever enter it when anyone else is in any room I’m in, and I always cover my hand as I type in case of a hidden camera. After so many years living with my dad, it became habit. One I’ve never broken.”

  And her brain froze, as she realized there was way too much significance in what he’d just said. She was missing something...

  Until Joe said, “You’re about to tell me that the fraudulent log-in and scam bank site were created by my computer, aren’t you?”

  “As soon as I get back to the office and have my team type in the password to verify that what they’re seeing from the back door is truly accessible by the front door.”

  She felt sick. Throwing up imminent, sick to her stomach.

  Sierra’s Web had somehow traced the fake bank site back to Joe’s IP address. Found some encrypted something stopping them from accessing it through his computer. And now had the password to do so.

  “Is there anything more you want to say?” Glen asked, sounding a bit more like himself.

  Say something! She stared at Joe, who was looking right back at her through eyes that looked like glass. Say something, dammit!

  At least tell me you’re sorry.

  He shook his head.

  Eyes wide, she implored him.

  “I didn’t do it.” The words carried no punch.

  “We’ll be in touch,” Glen said and dropped the call.

  Chapter 22

  Joe waited for her How could you?

  For a few seconds there, when the phone and subsequently the car fell eerily silent, he didn’t much care if he lived or died.

  He couldn’t be recharged for any crimes related to the commission of the fraud. His lawyer had made certain that those conditions were airtight.

  The assurance was of little consequence at the moment.

  “Stay down.” McKenna’s tone back to day one, she started the car. Headed down the hill faster than he’d have done.

  Made the turns with the precision of a race car driver.

  He didn’t ask where they were going. Could barely see out the front windshield from his vantage point.

  Halfway down, she pulled off onto an embankment and turned around, pinning him with a look blaring so much emotion he couldn’t decipher any of it.

  Other than to know she was deathly upset.

  “Look me in the eye and tell me you did not do this. Not any of it.” Definitely day one.

  And, just as he had that first day—after she’d proven herself to him—he did as she ordered. He looked her straight in the eye. Thought of her body together with his the night before, the second time, when she’d come into his room and crawled into bed, spooning him. “I did not do it.” And then he went rogue. “I know how to create a signature. Period. You think they’re going to teach a juvenile delinquent, a thief, how to create computer programs? That’s giving drugs and a needle to an addict.”

  “You could have learned programming in high school, college or at home from the internet in your spare time.”

  He took her blows like a man. “I could have. I didn’t.”

  She seemed on the verge of going one way or the other. He might as well have been on the precipice three feet away—teetering between staying on solid ground and catapulting over the outer edge of the cliff down to the city below.

  He wasn’t a man who gave up. Who quit trying. “Think, McKenna,” he demanded. “All the months before my trial, during my trial, the month since my trial before I called Sierra’s Web...if I’d known about the programs, known how to create them, wouldn’t I have uncreated them? Or, say I hired someone to do it, wouldn’t I have known they were there and done something to protect myself from them?”

  He was grasping. He could hear it. Was pretty certain she’d heard it, too.

  Her gaze still trained on him, she seemed to be trying to figure out his game.

  And his life was on the line—more so than ever.

  “I made mistakes.” He admitted to her what he’d not dared to say out loud to anyone. “I should have verified the reports I was looking at against actual inventory. I should have made trips to the warehouse more often...”

  While he sat trying to convince McKenna of his innocence, his mind was also scrambling to figure out how anyone had gained access to his encrypted files to save the fraudulent bank program there.

  “Glen told me earlier today that their expert in Alaska has confirmed that your father hasn’t left the island in over a year. He has no registered cell phone and no internet access.”

  So, he had nothing.

  Whoever had framed him was better at getting things done than Joe was. And the better man would win.

  “There’s snail mail,” she said next. Then turned, put the car in gear and started back down the road.

  There’s snail mail.

  He heard the words over and over. His body lighter, his breathing sporadic, he half lay there, taking every turn along with the car.

  There’s snail mail.

  An open possibility for someone to have contacted his father to find out about sacred time. And his juvie record. Cash could have been sent through the mail in payment for the information.

  But, McKenna had said, there’s snail mail.

  Meaning...she was looking for a way for him to still be innocent?

  Finding the answer to that question was reason to stay alive.

  Showing her that she was right to want to believe in him became his life’s goal.

  And Joe was a man who’d made a success out of the ashes his childhood had heaped upon him by honestly pursuing what he wanted in spite of the odds against him. By not giving up.

  Maybe there wasn’t a future for him together with McKenna Meredith, but if he could go into his own future leaving her with the knowledge that the moments she’d shared with Joe Hamilton, that the faith she’d wanted to have in him, were justified, real and true, then he’d be...satisfied.

  * * *

  McKenna felt something wrong the second she pulled onto the long dirt drive leading to her father’s cabin. To the rig.

  No way she could know if there were fresh tire tracks—theirs and her father’s were fresh that day. It wasn’t like she’d notice if some desert brush had moved—wind blew. Coyotes and rabbits, snakes and even a stray bobcat could have been by. Things got moved. Or stepped on.

  And then, as she turned a corner into the clearing, she saw the tire track off to the left, as though someone unfamiliar with the area hadn’t known about the slight dip...

  Before she’d even fully registered the information, movement caught her eye. Someone at the rig. Running toward them.

  “Get down to the floor,” she told Joe, reaching for her gun as she put the car into Reverse.

  “Wait!” The scream was female, and frantic-sounding. Not lethal.

  “Joeeey!” Another loud cry, coming faintly into the car.

  “I know that voice,” he said from the floor. “It’s Priscilla Bellair.” Sitting up far enough to see through the windshield, he continued, “She’s upset, McKenna, not angry. Maybe she knows something. I can’t afford not to speak to her.”

  She didn’t like it. At all.

  The beautiful woman, in skinny black jeans and a white cropped top that left her perfectly flat belly, complete with button, in view, was almost at the car.

  Clearly crying.

  Holding her hands up.

  Against her better judgment, she put the car in Park. “Let me check her out first,” she said, unbuckling her seat belt and opening the door of the car, gun pointing at their intruder.

  McKenna didn’t like her, at all. All up in those heels and the makeup, calling her client Joey. Like they had something special... She approached, daring the woman to give her a reason to shoot.

  Filled with...jealousy.

  Her bad feeling...she was jealous of the woman who was a part of Joe’s normal life. His chosen life.

  “Don’t move,” she said as she approached Priscilla Bellair—a woman who could have been one of her classmates, for all she knew. With her gun never leaving a clear point on Priscilla’s body, she used her free hand to pat the woman down and checked her purse for weapons.

  Finding nothing but cell phone, wallet and makeup, she asked, “Why are you here?”

  “I need to talk to Joe. I know who framed him. It’s big, and I have no idea who else is involved. I’m going to be in danger if I say anything, and I’m hoping Sierra’s Web can protect me, too.” She spoke in a rush, clearly agitated, as McKenna noted by the other woman’s pulse—something she’d purposely sought out as she gave her arm a supposedly warm, calming squeeze.

  Still, she wasn’t convinced.

  Wasn’t eager to have Joe and the woman in contact, let alone working together like McKenna and Joe had been doing. Both of them in hiding together...

  Stop.

  She was a professional.

  “How did you know he was here?” she asked in a kinder voice, lowering her gun but not her guard.

  “I’m on the board of Bellair,” Priscilla said, sounding more...confident...for a second, and then, as if remembering her current circumstances, she took a shuddering breath and said, “I see all the reports. I know Joe hired Sierra’s Web to prove his innocence. And I knew it was all going to come out. I just didn’t know who to trust. I had someone check into registered bodyguards, and when your name came up, I had a friend I trust touch base with your grandparents. As soon as they heard what was going on, they agreed to speak with me and told me that the one place you’d feel safe was here with your dad. They gave me directions. Please, I need to talk to Joe! I don’t know how much time I have...”

  McKenna felt the urgency, from Priscilla, and from Joe, back in the car, too. She didn’t trust him to hang back for long.

  Her grandparents had led the woman to them? Neil and Glenda Whitaker might not like McKenna in Shelter Valley, but they always, always put what they thought was best for McKenna first and foremost. They’d never have sent Priscilla her way if they hadn’t felt she and the story she had to tell were fully vetted.

  And how else would Priscilla have found them so quickly?

  Still, there was no vehicle visible on the premises other than hers. “How’d you get here?”

  “I hired a rideshare in Phoenix. We went by your dad’s house, and then here. I knew, when I saw the rig, that Joe was here. He was always talking about running off for a getaway on the beach in one of those things.”