Tristan was officially in over his head. He didn’t make mistakes. Not big ones at least. And in the past hour, he’d made every mistake in the book. He hadn’t gotten clear of a potentially hostile situation. He’d been distracted. He’d stayed out in the open for way too long, with a stolen car. He’d dragged a civilian into a compromising position. He couldn’t even be discreet about it. Considering Toni knew exactly how far away he was, she was going to be asking why they were delayed. He wasn’t concerned about himself. He could lie, no problem. But he knew the second Toni asked about it, Shae’s face would glow as bright as a Christmas tree. No, the tryst was going to be discovered. Considering Toni already saw them walking down the aisle together, that could only lead to more complications in his life.
Shae was distant the rest of the drive. Tristan didn’t know whether he should be happy about that or not. Who wanted a whole long talking session after sex? He sure as hell didn’t. He was usually the one grabbing his clothes and heading out the door. It wasn’t exactly an option in this case.
He glanced away from the road and at her, but she was firmly looking in the opposite direction. He reached over and set a hand on her knee. She jerked in surprise at the touch and finally looked at him. “I didn’t mean to make things awkward.” It was the truth. He wouldn’t apologize for what happened, but it was not exactly ideal either. She was just so damn pretty, and seeing her walk away from him had hit him so much harder than he ever thought it would. Kissing her seemed like the only option at the time. Considering what followed, he sure as hell wouldn’t have taken it back even if given the chance. But now that they had to sit together in silence for an hour, the consequences were closing in on him.
“It’s fine. I mean, yeah, it’s awkward. I’ve never... I’ve never done a one-night stand thing before.”
He raised an eyebrow, wishing he wasn’t driving so he could stare at her face more intently. “One-night stand?”
“Well, you know what I mean. It might not be night, and I’m not exactly leaving you forever right now, but you and I both know this isn’t a long-term thing. It just happened. Which is good. It was fun and everything. But....”
He couldn’t argue with that. Dating was for normal people. People with nine-to-five jobs and 401(k)s. Not people with hidden accounts overseas. Once again, he was annoyed when he really should be relieved at her words.
“I’m thinking about my father right now,” she said.
Well, that was a Freudian twist. “It didn’t look like you two were that chummy back there,” he said carefully. He wanted to know more information about them, especially considering it was obviously pertaining to their current job, but he’d rather she tell him at her own pace.
“That’s an understatement.”
“What exactly happened between the two?”
Shae rubbed at the back of her neck, and Tristan wished he didn’t have to put her through this. “Well, my dad didn’t exactly throw me into the water to drown, at least not in a physical sense. We didn’t always used to be this way. He used to love me. I was the perfect package. I was smart, pretty. He would show me off to all of his coworkers and business partners, talking about how I was going to grow up to take the world by storm.”
“You decided that’s not what you wanted to do?”
“I decided it wasn’t what I wanted to be. My dad was always nice to me. Loving. But I came to find out that wasn’t actually who he was. He’s good at business because he’s ruthless. He’ll do whatever it takes, even if pesky laws or ethics get in the way. I guess, at one point, he was making a slightly less than legal deal overseas. At some shindig we were attending, one of the accountants approached him and told him he couldn’t go through with it. That it was wrong. And then, as normal as could be and with a smile on his face, my dad told this poor guy that if he didn’t do it, he’d be out of a job and find himself with no 401(k), no pension, and no one would ever hire him again.”
“Yeah, I’d call that ruthless.”
“Well, I wrote it off. I thought he was all talk and no bite. I mean, this is the guy who got me my first bike. He took pictures of me before homecoming. He helped me study for my first business school exams. He was everything to me. And then, when I came to the office a week later to visit, I realized that accountant wasn’t there anymore.”
“You realized?”
“Okay, I asked. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It was part of him I’d never seen before. But he wasn’t kidding. The guy was gone, and when I asked the receptionist about it, she told me this horrible story about how he’d been skimming money from the company.”
Tristan nodded. The guy who’d told her father not to do some shady business deal probably hadn’t actually stolen anything from the company. It was a story Manuel Grant had created to make this guy look bad. A smear campaign. “A lot of people wouldn’t have thought twice about their parents doing something questionable.”
“I didn’t think twice about it. I thought a thousand times. Millions. I tried to pretend it never happened. I tried to go on like everything was normal, but I had dreams, even nightmares about it. And I finally decided I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t live a life where I was plagued by guilt. Or even worse. What if I stopped feeling guilty?”
Suddenly her accusations against him made a lot more sense. When she asked whether he felt any guilt at all. When she asked how he could do the things he did. Apparently she asked herself the same question and had come up with a vastly different answer than he had for himself.
“So I decided to do something completely different, and also the same. Real estate. Instead of doing the big game like he was by investing in different properties on the million-dollar scale, I went smaller. I’d be a one-woman business and focus on local housing. It was risky, but I figured I had my dad’s expertise, and my own expertise I’d gained from being around him for so long. I told him what I was going to do, and he seemed super supportive. He helped me to find a property and fronted me the money for it.”
Tristan frowned. That was vastly different from the story she originally told him about the first house she’d gotten super cheap in Miami. “I’m assuming things didn’t go like you planned?” he asked.
“That’s an understatement. It was my plan to go out on my own and make it, but it was always my father’s plan to have me work with him. He knew he couldn’t just tell me no, because that would make me more determined to do what I wanted. So he told me yes, and behind my back, he did everything he could to sabotage me. He hired people to vandalize the place constantly, so every time I’d sink money into a repair, I’d have to do the whole thing over again. I ended up losing thousands of his money on the place.”