Charlie wanted her to be a villain, but when she spotted Nicole in the banquet room, she was laughing with a group of employees as they laid out tablecloths. She wasn’t haughty and bossing them around. They seemed to like her. The conversation sounded like talk among friends.
Nicole’s laughter died when she looked up and spotted Charlie. There was no mistaking the alarm that chased over the woman’s face. Charlie didn’t need surveillance training to identify that emotion.
Nicole smothered it, but the woman was no poker player. Her eyes darted from employee to employee, as if she expected them to immediately figure out some secret she wanted to keep hidden.
“Do you have a minute?” Charlie asked drily.
“I...” Her eyes kept skipping around the room. They settled briefly on a door set into a far wall, as if she wanted to run. But then she pasted on a smile and chirped, “Of course!” before rushing toward Charlie and pulling her through the doorway.
“Please just go,” she hissed
as soon as they were out of sight of the room.
“I need to know why you said that to Walker.”
“Shh! Just... I was mad. And I’d had a couple of glasses of wine before I went over. I didn’t know what I was saying.”
“So you made up something about me?” Charlie asked.
“Yes!” Nicole smiled with relief as she led the way to an empty meeting room and pulled Charlie in. “Yes, I was lying. I was jealous that Walker was seeing someone else, and I lied about you.”
“Yet you brought up my brother.”
Charlie almost wanted to laugh at the fear that shaped Nicole’s mouth into a surprised O, but it was too damn unfunny. “Your brother? How could I know anything about your brother?”
“Really? You’re going to pretend you don’t know anything now?”
Nicole shook her head in a parody of innocent confusion. Her blond hair settled perfectly back into place.
“You know. Brad Allington? He’s the guy who paid your husband millions of dollars for a piece of land three years ago.”
“Oh, shit,” Nicole breathed. She hadn’t expected that. She started shaking her head and didn’t stop. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“So what do you know about?”
Her head shook again. Charlie leaned closer. “Tell me what you know, or I’ll tell your husband you’re fucking Keith Taggert.”
Her eyes went wide, fear flashing in their depths, but her mouth didn’t open.
“Okay,” Charlie drawled. “I’ll tell Keith that you were also messing around with Walker.”
She shook her head. “No. I didn’t have sex with him.”
“Not quite. Do you think Keith will appreciate that small detail? You’re hoping to leave your husband and snag Keith, right? That’s cool. If he’s open-minded about these things, he won’t mind about Walker.”
She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. Then another. When she opened her eyes, she tossed her hair back and her shoulders stiffened. “Fine,” she said, sneering, pretending it meant nothing to her. “I’ll tell you what you want to know. What does it matter? Your brother’s an asshole anyway.”
Charlie smiled. “Finally a little bit of truth. Now...how about the rest of it?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
IT WAS SUPPOSED to be simple, Nicole had whined.
Oh, sure. These things were always supposed to be simple. People forgot that life was one giant chaos machine that would insert itself into your plans whether you planned for it or not. So a simple moneymaking scheme hatched among a gang of thieves had turned into a bitter divorce and frozen assets and investment losses.
“Idiots,” Charlie spat as she sped back toward town.
She didn’t even give a damn about that. They could be criminal idiots together as often as they wanted to, but their backup plan had apparently been pulling Charlie into the mix for a little temporary ass-covering.