Fool Me Once (First Wives #1)

Reed timed it so he left his apartment after the morning traffic was done clogging up everything. Although, in LA it was always a crapshoot when you aimed your car toward a freeway, even at two in the morning.

He’d spent two days painting profiles of four women.

Shannon Redding-Wentworth, just about to turn thirty-two, had met and married the governor before his run for office. Then a year and a half into his four-year term, they filed for a divorce. Shannon walked away without fanfare, a tidy sum, and a house in Southern California. The divorced couple were still seen at the same functions at times, no bad publicity circulated in the gossip magazines that didn’t appear completely fabricated. After meeting the woman and spending the better part of a week with her, he didn’t believe for a minute that she’d been found with twenty-one-year-old twins at a seedy Hollywood club. The tabloids had a way of making a story where there wasn’t one. So did politicians, like the one who hired him to find dirt. Any other case, Reed would have reported to his client that there wasn’t anything there. Except he had the nagging feeling that something wasn’t completely right. Then there was Sasha . . . who didn’t seem to be following Shannon at all. No, she was watching Trina and Lori. Why?

The retired police officer in him had surfaced sometime between when he climbed into a crowded plane for a free trip to Europe and now.

And that hadn’t happened in years. He’d reinvented himself as a PI void of emotion. He had gone through the motions of investigating, spying, gathering dirt for his clients, delivering it, and walking away with enough money to pay his rent and have a few nice things. No emotion, no involvement . . .

Until Lori.

He found her text when he forced his eyes open at eight in the morning. The irony was he’d been up thirty minutes before she’d sent her message, and desired to send one himself.

He didn’t, not wanting to wake her . . . and more, not wanting to come off as an infatuated lover.

Even though that was exactly what he was.

Instead, he sent her a text after nine, made a crack about her inability to sleep because of him.

Lori flirted back with a crack about his ego.

He shook his thoughts about her aside and thought about the case he was forming in his head.

Avery Grant, just turned thirty, newly divorced from a man nearly twice her age. It took some searching, but he found enough information about her divorce to know she’d also walked away with a tidy sum from her rich, hedge funding husband. No nasty tabloid bits about their marriage, but keeping with the theme he’d seen on the ship, Avery didn’t wait to cut loose. He didn’t know divorce parties were a thing, but someone managed to take pictures that were printed in a tabloid the week after her divorce was final.

Trina Petrov . . . now there was a woman with some seriously bad mojo. He found pictures of her late husband and her . . . they didn’t match. She was stunning, and he had been less than mediocre. Then again, that happened sometimes, like the supertall woman with the man scratching at five four with a two-inch boot. Still, they’d been married for just under a year when hubby offed himself. The financials of what was left to her weren’t disclosed, but he was still digging. Follow the money and you’ll have a case . . . or so he had learned when he was on the force. He could only imagine the kind of wealth the man had. He was a grandson to a prominent oil family, a businessman with his own multimillion-dollar company.

Trina’s face was in plenty of tabloids with the death of her husband and mother-in-law all in the same month.

She was a woman torn. He’d seen her with barely a smile on her face, and he’d seen her stumbling drunk and dancing. Sure, there was a high probability of someone drugging her, but still. Would a widow who loved her late husband even be on that ship in the first place? There was something missing in this link.

And then there was Lori. The divorce attorney who said they were all friends simply traveling together.

Avery and Shannon’s divorces were highly publicized, and Lori was mentioned both times. Trina didn’t count, since her husband was dead.

Or did she? There was something he was missing, yet he knew it was right there if he just looked close enough to see it.

Lori’s office was a posh little affair sitting in ambiguous office space in one of the many high-rises in Los Angeles. She didn’t work for a firm and didn’t have several partners of her own. Which told him that she didn’t need their financial help in keeping office space or staff. That didn’t mean she had a tiny footprint, however. Her office screamed money nearly as much as the clientele that walked through the door.

A little over a week after he’d left her in Spain, Reed walked through the thick wooden door of Lori Cumberland, Attorney at Law, and into a reception area large enough to keep two feuding parties far enough apart to avoid Armageddon.

He stepped up to the empty reception desk and looked around.

Lori’s business card, along with one for her paralegal, sat in a small basket. He picked up Lori’s and ran his thumb over the silver embossed lettering.

“Can I help you?”

The voice belonged to a woman in her late forties.

“Is Lori in?”

“Do you have an appointment, Mr. . . . ?”

“Barlow, and no, I don’t. If you can tell Lori that Reed is here.”

“Ms. Cumberland isn’t back from lunch yet.” The secretary took a seat in one of those ergonomic chairs and placed a set of reading glasses on the bridge of her nose. “She’s extremely busy this afternoon. I can schedule an appointment.”

Reed leaned against the high reception desk, offered a smile reserved for charming answers out of women.

“I’m not in need of a divorce.”

The secretary smiled, her eyes questioning him before she asked, “Are you writing up a prenuptial agreement?”

“No, I am not.”

“Then what is it that you need Ms. Cumberland’s service for?”

He couldn’t stop the image of Lori’s face as he kissed her from taking firm hold in his head.

“It’s personal.”

“I’m sure it is, Mr. Barlow, but I’d still need to make an appointment in Ms. Cumberland’s schedule to accommodate you.”

The office door opened from behind.

Business Lori wore a tight pencil skirt, heels that weren’t too tall. Her silk blouse covered the creamy skin of her chest but accentuated the curve of her breasts. Her hair was partially held back in a loose bun that probably took her way too long to put up.

She made it two steps into the office with an auburn haired petite woman at her side before she recognized him.

“Reed?”

“Hello, Lori.” He dropped his voice.

She blushed.

“What are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood.” Via a few freeways and with no other destination in mind.

“I was encouraging Mr. Barlow to make an appointment,” Lori’s secretary said from behind the desk.