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“He left a window open and I climbed in it. He needs better security.”

Kim had only been in the old building once and that had been before the rebuilding had begun. Jecca said her dad had worked the men from New Jersey in shifts 24/7. Whatever he’d done, the transformation was stunning.

They were in a big room with tall ceilings and all around them were boxes. From what was printed on the cartons they appeared to be full of equipment and tools.

“Looks like he kept some trucking companies busy.” Travis’s frown was deep.

“What’s that look for?”

He hesitated.

“We’re friends, remember? We share secrets.”

He smiled at her. “That’s not easy for me to remember, but I’ll try. My mother . . . Well, when she ran away from my father, she also took some money from him.”

“Six or seven figures?”

“Multiple seven.”

“Yeow!” Kim suddenly realized why Travis was frowning. “You think maybe Mr. Layton used your mother’s money for . . .” She waved her hand. “To buy all this?”

“What hardware store owner do you know who could afford this much?”

“I don’t know,” she said, but the truth was that Kim did know quite a bit about opening a business. Her little jewelry shop was a quarter the size of this room, and to get it she’d had to take out a mortgage, borrow from her father, and max out her credit cards. She’d only paid it all off a year ago. She’d celebrated by putting herself back into debt by buying a house that was a bit more than she could afford. At

first the bank had said no to the mortgage, but then the bank president had personally called her and said they’d be happy to give her financing. No one ever said, but Kim was sure her father had arranged it.

But Kim said none of this. Jecca was her best friend and this was her father they were talking about.

She looked around the big room and noticed that way up in the top, high above the exposed steel rafters, was an open window. Everything else looked sealed shut. “Is that the window you came through?”

Travis didn’t glance up. “Yeah.” He was reading the labels on the boxes. Saws, hand tools, power equipment, garden implements. Even at wholesale prices this had cost a lot. Had his mother told this man Layton about the money she had hidden away? She knew Travis had access to her account, so maybe she’d used it as collateral to buy the man’s tools.

“Travis?” Kim asked, getting his attention. “That window is at least twenty feet up. How did you get up to it from the outside and down from the inside?”

“Climbed,” he said distractedly. “I’m going to look around.”

She followed him into a smaller room that held two large restrooms. Travis went past them but Kim stopped. She knew that Jecca had sent her dad designs that the New Jersey workmen were to follow.

In keeping with the age of Edilean and the fact that the building used to be a factory to make bricks, Jecca had used a color palette of cream and Williamsburg blue. She’d left the bricks exposed wherever she could, and trimmed them in that soft blue that the Colonials had so loved. Kim wasn’t sure, but she’d be willing to bet that Lucy Cooper had made the curtains.

Smiling, Kim went back out into the big hall to see that Travis was gone. She found him standing in the next room, which had three offices in it, with windows facing into the hall. He tried the doors, but they were locked.

“I’d like to get into his computer and see his source of income for all this.” He looked at Kim as though asking her a question.

“I don’t know how to hack into a computer.”

“Me neither,” he said, sounding as though his education were lax.

“Nice to know there’s something you can’t do,” Kim muttered. So far he’d cleaned her pool, cooked breakfast, driven like something out of an action movie, and scaled a brick wall.

She hurried after him. He was standing in a long, narrow room with windows that opened to the front. He had an expression on his face that she couldn’t read. There was nothing in the room, no boxes, no desks, just the walls on three sides, the windows on the other.

She waited, but he just kept staring, saying nothing. “Want to see the room Mr. Layton planned for Jecca to use? She likes to paint and she’s quite good at it, so he was going to make her a studio. But Jecca said she’d never get any work done if she was so near her father. She said he’d bully her into working for him because, you see, Jecca knows how to take chain saws apart. She can put them back together too.”

Travis was looking at the room as though he were in a trance and she didn’t think he’d heard a word she’d said.

“But Jecca would rather raise pink unicorns, so she didn’t take her dad up on his offer.”


Tags: Jude Deveraux Edilean Romance