ONE
Anthea
As I watchedthe coroner load my husband’s black-bagged body into his van, the last thing I expected was to find myself crying. But when emotion welled up at the base of my throat and in a prickling heat behind my eyes, I let the tears trickle out.
It would look good to the police officer who was just finishing up the rounds he’d made of the house. It’d look like I was grieving. Particularly important when the widow was forty years her husband’s junior, and therefore people might be prone to speculation.
He wouldn’t be able to tell that the sensation welling up inside me had nothing to do with loss. It was pure, bone-deep relief.
Clyde was gone. After five years of jumping at his every call and submitting myself to his whims, I was free. And after the initial inspection, the police didn’t appear to be concerned that there was foul play involved.
I’d chosen my poisons very carefully. Not a single thing the medical examiner would find should point to anything other than a totally natural heart attack. The toxin had merely primed his heart to fail, after all, not outright killed him.
I’d gotten to throw the final trigger right in his face. Bursting into the bathroom where earlier I’d polished the tiles extra slick, yelling at that asshole exactly what I thought of him and how he’d treated me after bottling up all that venom for our entire marriage. Spitting with anger, he’d stormed out of the shower and immediately slipped hard on the floor. The physical exertion combined with the emotional distress had been the final stab to the weakened organ.
To everyone else, it looked like he’d simply stumbled getting out of the shower and the jolt alone had set off the attack. Nothing particularly surprising in a man just past sixty who was at least fifty pounds overweight and who considered the walk from the front door to his chauffeured car a good day’s exercise. That was why I’d picked it.
The most important part of making a death look like something other than murder was to go with a story that would make people sigh and nod as if they’d seen it coming from a mile away.
The cop nodded to me with obvious sympathy as he walked by, and I offered a dip of my head in return. Maybe I should have felt victorious as well as relieved. I’d succeeded, hadn’t I? But I couldn’t dredge up even a flicker of triumph. Mostly I felt exhausted.
Clyde was gone and I was free, but fresh bruises mottled the inside of my arm, just below the pit, where my sleeve covered them. When I shifted my weight, my hip still twinged with a pain that’d never quite healed.
He’d left a mark on me I wasn’t sure I’d ever completely shed.
At least I could move forward, onward to better things now. Or things I was choosing for myself, anyway.
“Are you going to be all right here on your own, Mrs. Hoffman?” the cop asked, pausing by his car.
One of my first acts as a free woman was going to be changing my name back to the one that actually belonged to me.
I swiped at my eyes and gave him a wobbly smile intended to look grateful. “I won’t be on my own for very long. My brother is on his way.”
The cop gave another respectful nod. “Good to have family support at times like these.”
I’d have agreed more if it hadn’t been family who’d sent me here in the first place.
As I gave the cop a little wave farewell, a black sedan pulled into the drive, leaving room for the coroner’s van and the police car to depart. I waited on the front steps as my brother Ezra stepped out.
I’d barely seen him since my marriage—only once, at Dad’s funeral a little more than a year ago. At the time, I’d been too busy sorting through all the possibilities that had started spinning in my head to notice just how much gray had come into his dark auburn hair or how many more lines had formed at the corners of his eyes. Or maybe a lot of that had arrived in the past year now that he was fully in charge of the Noble dynasty.
He walked over, his loafers thumping against the asphalt, and came to a stop at the bottom of the steps. His expression was more somber than I remembered it usually being.
Had he figured out what I’d done? Was heangry? He’d argued with Dad about the arrangement the old man had made, bargaining me away to Clyde Hoffman to secure an exclusive business arrangement, but not enough to stop the marriage from happening. And who knew how much he’d been enjoying the fruits of their arrangement since then?
We’d always had a bit of an odd relationship, my brother and me. He was old enough to bemyfather. I was only a year older than his older son, Roland. And as heir to the Noble crime syndicate, he’d shouldered the weight of many more family expectations than I had. But he’d seen me as more than a possession to trade.
“Anthea,” he said quietly, in a tone that sounded like an apology, and then, with a brief glint dancing in his eyes, “Back to your old tricks?”
He wasn’t an effusive man, but there was admiration in that question. My posture relaxed, and I almost started crying all over again. This time, I held the impulse in.
Ezra respected me because I was made of the same tough stuff every Noble should be. Because I’d learned how to hold my own among the men who controlled so much of my world, honed my own skills to make myself useful among them.
Dad hadn’t known about those skills—I didn’t think he’d have approved. But I’d revealed my evolving studies to my brother, figuring he’d recognize the value in them. He’d have a reason to speak up for me.
It just hadn’t been quite enough to save me from the marriage altogether.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said evenly, and the corner of Ezra’s mouth twitched with a hint of a smile. The last five years had allowed me to practice my poker face to the point of perfection.