Without enough time to find out the cause of the changed numbers before quarter’s end, he’d had to report the lower earnings to Bellair’s major shareholder, president and CEO, the man he’d thought of as a father figure, James Bellair.

  And had been arrested that night.

  During the subsequent investigation and the trial that followed, evidence had been produced to show that discrepancies had come from his computer, or his computer log-in on other systems, all done internally, at the office, and he’d known they were done at times he wasn’t there. But didn’t have alibis, as he’d been at home alone. The prosecution hadn’t had solid enough proof that he’d been at the office, either, as no cameras had him on view, and his key card to gain entrance hadn’t been used.

  Joe sat and listened while Glen and Hudson laid out the basics of his case for the entire team they’d compiled. He heard their words. Mentally verified the correctness of their facts as they relayed them.

  And disassociated from any ownership of them. He’d never have made it through the past months, sitting in the front of the courtroom day after day, hearing himself maligned, if he’d bought in to the story that had been fabricated about him.

  His defense lawyer had brought in a great trial-prep guy to work with him—Sam White. Sam had also been tried for a crime he didn’t commit. He’d been found guilty and had spent five years behind bars before he’d been exonerated. He knew all about not buying in to the story that people told about you. And he’d taught the concept well.

  But then, when he’d been under Sam’s tutelage, he hadn’t been holed up with a pretend wife. With the first woman to actually interest him, in a personal sense, for more months than he could count.

  Ignoring the warm body next to his, the way she held herself at attention, her gaze either on the screen or her phone app, trying not to wonder what she was thinking-proved to be a whole lot harder than sitting in court had been.

  But then, when he’d been at trial, and investors had thought he’d be found guilty and would be made to cough up the money they’d lost, when the real perpetrator had figured Joe would be taking the fall for him, he hadn’t had so many people wishing him dead. Or hatemongers on the dark web hunting him down...

  “I was able to match several IP addresses from the Bellair victim message board accessed through the company’s social media pages to the Joe Hamilton board on the dark web,” Hudson said then, continuing to speak as though Joe wasn’t there. “But there are many other addresses out there that didn’t match, so we’re going to continue to assume that we’re not just looking at victims here in terms of threat.”

  Joe had insisted on being part of the meeting. In case anyone had any questions for him, they’d be answered immediately, but also because he wanted every one of the people working on his behalf to see him—the person. To know whom they were working for.

  “We’ve also put in a request to James Bellair, asking for access to some company files and databases, under the assumption that, with Joe being found not guilty, they’d like to know who is. If I were a CEO with no knowledge of how my company had been attacked, I’d sure want to know...”

  “Thinking that if he doesn’t comply, he’s in on it?” Amelia, one of Hudson’s computer experts, asked.

  “Hoping that he will comply.” Hudson’s reply impressed Joe, though he couldn’t say why. Except that maybe it was because he held the same hope.

  “I’ve also made it clear to Mr. Bellair that we have a signed disclosure with Joe Hamilton that if we find proof he’s guilty, we will cease working for him.”

  All eyes turned to Joe, then, and he looked at them all straight on, thinking about the dog he’d had for a while as a kid. Checkers. A mongrel who’d been lost until Joe had found him. Joe had been lost, too, until Checkers had wandered into the yard of the trailer his father had rented that year.

  Until his attention was drawn to the nods—a few more than previously.

  According to Sam, when speaking about the jury Joe would be facing, nods were good when you wanted the speaker to be believed.

  It was to his benefit to have the Sierra’s Web experts believing in the project their bosses were laying out for them.

  And he couldn’t help but notice that McKenna wasn’t among the nodders. He knew from sitting next to her, but also from her face next to his in the little square on the screen.

  “Hold it!” Joe’s heart lurched as Bryce Armstrong, the expert private investigator Glen had hired specifically for Joe’s job, popped on the screen. “Joe, take the SIM card and battery out of your phone,” he said. “You two need to get moving. I’ve got tracers out and someone’s accessing your phone’s location...”

  “My location services are off,” he said, but he grabbed the phone off the table and immediately did as he was told.

  “There are apps, a particularly expensive one used mostly by private investigators...it employs a conglomeration of things, including atmospheric pressure, to track a phone.”

  “Okay, gang, it’s been nice chatting, but we’re out of here,” McKenna said then. “I’ll be in touch.” She was already pushing at Joe to let her out of her seat before she’d closed the laptop.

  “I’m on it,” Joe told her, at the door of the rig in two steps. Pushing buttons to retract the slides he’d just let out with breaths of relief, he jumped down the steps and headed out to hook up the blue car for towing. And wedged the phone between a rock and a wheel of the rig.

  He didn’t just want the damned thing untraceable, he wanted it smashed to hell.

  As though he could somehow get vengeance from the unending hell his life had become by taking it out on the cell.

  “It’s a new phone, and new number, just a couple of days ago,” he announced inanely, making him sound as though he was looking for reassurance, as he reentered the rig. His bodyguard already knew about his phone. She’d grilled him on it and made certain his location services were off in the first ten minutes she’d been formally accepted in the rig.

  McKenna, who’d been securing a couple of the unattached kitchen appliances they’d removed from storage and put out on the cupboards, glanced over at him, met his gaze.

  And nodded.

  Giving him...something good.

  Embarrassed, a bit pissed at himself for needing, or accepting, anything emotional from McKenna Meredith, Joe turned his back, jumped into the driver’s seat of his thirty-three-foot-plus-tow-bar-and-car load and started the engine.

  * * *

  They were going completely off the grid—McKenna’s call. If someone was using high-tech software to find them, they couldn’t take chances. Arizona was filled with roads that ran for miles on end through desert and winding around mountains without even a gas station to refuel. Deciding to head back the way they’d come and then go west again, she had Joe stop at a remote service exit—used mostly by truckers going from the California ports to the eastern states—and bought a couple of burner phones, taking the batteries out of both of them.

  Another long, silent hour down the road, on a flat desert stretch, she put one battery back in place only long enough to see if they had service and then make a quick call to Glen. He and Hudson would be the only two people in the world to have the number. And she’d only be putting her battery in long enough to check in a few times a day. She’d already disabled her laptop.

  “What’s the second phone for?” Joe’s voice, deep and sounding somewhat loud in the silence she’d grown used to, startled her so much she jumped.

  “Just in case,” she told him, trying not to think about how he must feeling. Or wondering what he’d been thinking about during the past few hours on the road.

  “If this phone gets compromised or destroyed, I’ll have a backup.” She was big on backups. “Being prepared gives me the confidence to concentrate on the dangers inherent in the moment, rather than having to worry about what could lie ahead.”

  She heard herself, felt...lacking...somehow, and amended. “Not that I don’t think ahead. Of course I do. I always have a plan.”

  “You mind sharing our current one?”

  “I told you we had to go off the grid.” Maybe there was more tension in her tone than she’d have liked. Not work-related.

  “Right.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Unless she thought of a better one. Or something changed.

  She took a deep breath. Tried to instill kindness, or at the very least, politeness, into her tone, without getting all compassionate or weird again. “You planned to spend however long it took, hiding out on the road, until you proved your innocence.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s what we’re doing.”

  Hopefully as silently as possible. Though not talking to him hadn’t lessened her awareness of him any, it had allowed her to instill mind over matter enough to keep her thoughts more focused.

  “You aren’t nervous, being out in the middle of nowhere, completed disconnected, with someone you think might be a criminal?”

  “I’m disconnected, not unarmed,” she told him before she could blurt out that she had no fear of him whatsoever.

  “Good point.”

  She hoped the conversation was done, until he added, “Noted.”

  And then she thought to ask, “Are you armed?”

  “I don’t have a gun permit.”

  “Which doesn’t answer my question.”

  “No permit, no gun.”

  She could look down past his bony knees and see that he didn’t have a killer knife stashed in his slip-ons. And pretend that her heart hadn’t warmed at his law-abiding proclamation.

  He could be lying to her.

  Would have to be a consummate liar to have committed the crimes he had and still be fighting so hard to prove his innocence.

  “I half expected you to quit me after today’s meeting.”

  Obviously the near-total silence she’d preferred hadn’t been such a good idea after all. Gave the man too much time to think.

  “I’m not a quitter,” she said. Keep it all business. Impersonal.

  Boundaries.

  The way he’d told the guy at the gas station that his wife didn’t want to travel across the desert to Tucson without both of them having cell phones had been all business. She’d known it at the time. Knew it as she sat there beside him with the huge console acting as a physical boundary to remind her that she wasn’t setting out for an adventure in the middle of nowhere.

  She was just having another day at work.

  And still, she said, “Good move back there, by the way, telling him we were heading east when we’re going west.”

  “Only good if he didn’t see us pull out and head in the opposite direction.”

  “He’d have had to follow us out the door around the building and across the lot to do so.”

  Yeah, this was better. Light banter about the job. Reality instead of emotional chaos.

  “I haven’t seen you make any other phone calls, other than to Glen.” His question lacked levity. And bordered on personal.

  Raising an awareness of him as a person again.

  “I haven’t.”

  “Your people are used to you disappearing for days at a time without contact?”

  Absolutely none of his business.

  But it showed humanity, the fact that he’d thought about any toll his job could be taking on her life.

  “If you mean family, personal people, then yes. If I don’t check in with Glen, every top cop in this part of the country will be hunting us down.”

  Maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but not as much of one as he might think.

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Whether you did or not isn’t any of my business.”

  “I’m making it your business. Everything you heard today... I’ve heard it so many times, in court and out of it, during countless sessions with my attorney, and in my own head...but hearing it alongside you, out here... I’m telling you, I’m innocent.”

  He wanted them to be people, experiencing a situation together.

  She couldn’t do it. “And I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter, either way. I do my job the same.”

  He glanced her way briefly. Nodded.

  Some of the tension seeped out of her. And then he asked, “Is your mind open at all to the possibility that I’m innocent?”

  Her head shot in his direction so fast it made it her dizzy. “Of course it is,” she blurted out, exploding with the need for him to know that she wasn’t sitting in judgment on him.

  And she wasn’t closed-minded, either.

  She just...

  Had to protect herself.

  Most particularly with the unwanted feelings he was arousing in her. She couldn’t go down that road. Because of the job—but it was way more than that.

  “I’m hoping that Sierra’s Web experts are able to give you the proof you need,” she told him. “Really hoping. I want you to be able to get your life back.” There. She’d given him the bit of herself she had to give.

  Because anything more...even thinking about letting him be more than a job in her life, ever, was not an option.

  No matter how much her body was tuning in to his.

  Or how much her heart sympathized with his plight.

  Because in the end, if he was exonerated, she still couldn’t have anything to do with him. He lived in a world she could not inhabit.

  Valued things she did not value.

  He’d made his entire life about being wealthy.

  And she’d refused the trust fund that was her birthright.

  Chapter 6

  Late in the afternoon, they came to a small desert community that consisted of a couple of golf courses, some housing developments, a few strip shopping areas and many RV and mobile home parks. Six of them that Joe counted from the signs coming into town. He’d exited the long, long road into nowhere to get gas.

  McKenna thought they should stop for the night. At least. As husband and wife, and with his disguised looks, maybe they’d get to hang around a bit longer.

  She chose the smallest, least expensive, least opulent park. And went in to register them as John and McKenna Meredith, using her driver’s license as identification. They couldn’t check in without valid state ID and he certainly couldn’t use his.

  So what if there was no luxurious built-in pool and spa, or clubhouse filled with billiards, card rooms and tool shops. It wasn’t like he’d be frequenting any of the facilities. Their site was spacious, though it had other sites on all four sides of it, with only a road separating them from the site in front of them.

  “We’re here to blend in,” McKenna told him as he pulled up to the site and hesitated before unhooking the car so he could back the rig into the hookups. “And unless someone who’s after you is staying here in the park, there’s not much chance any of your stalkers would be able to linger without being noticed. Not only do you need the key card to get back here, they have twenty-four-hour security patrolling on a golf cart.”

  He had to wonder about why that was...what kind of community were they in that would require such a thing? But, keeping his thoughts to himself, he got the rig parked and turned to see McKenna parking the car in the designated spot next to their RV. And while he hooked up to electric and plumbing, she pushed out the slides and, he found as he entered the rig, she’d already set the toaster, blender and small canisters back up on the counter next to the built-in coffee maker.

  Just like he’d always imagined a camping trip with a wife would be. The two of them working together, just knowing what to do to complement the other and get the chores done without having to talk it through. Or ask questions.

  “You’ve done this before,” he said as he went to the refrigerator for a bottle of water.

  “Nope. I’ve never been in an RV before yesterday. It’s my job to pay attention to my surroundings and to know how to take care of them in case of emergency.” She’d said something similar the day before when she’d been observing the hookup process. Thankfully, his embarrassing momentary lapse into something more personal was just between he and himself.

  They were parked. Set for the night. Which meant it was time for him to get to work. Pulling out his laptop—he’d already disabled the battery and all internet capabilities—he started in immediately with a reorganization of his investigation, splitting it up as Glen and Hudson had during the video meeting earlier that day.

  The chair across the table, and close to the wall, instead of directly opposite him, pulled out and McKenna sat down. He could have done without the flowery scent. It distracted him.

  “I called Glen,” she told him. “And hooked up to the park’s free Wi-Fi, rather than the phone’s internal connection to download the camera app. I’ll be turning it on and off throughout the night, and someone will be monitoring my number in the event that anyone tries to track the phone.”

  “How would they know?”

  She shook her head. “No real clue. Except they can see if there is more activity on the phone’s data or number or something. I don’t ask...”

  They had all night together in that tiny space. Him, and this woman who drew him to her just by admitting that there were things she didn’t know, and being okay with the not knowing.

  He’d always felt like what he didn’t know could kick him in the ass.

  Ironic beyond any sense of humor at all that he’d turned out to be right.