“We had a feeling you’d be around,” Rick said, scrubbing his hand across a recently shaven jaw.
Mike pulled the door back and motioned her forward. “Come on in.”
“Thanks for letting me find out about all of this from the press,” Zoe said, as she slid past them both. “A great surprise for a reporter.”
“Sorry, Zoe,” Mike said from behind her. “I meant to call.”
Zoe whirled and shoved her fists into her hips. “Meant to call? Is that the best excuse you can come up with?”
Mike shut the door and turned to Zoe, irritation evident in his face. “It’s been hell. We—”
“I don’t want your excuses,” Zoe spat. “Just talk.”
“If it isn’t my lovely daughter.”
Zoe rotated to find her father standing near the dining room table just past the entryway, cup in hand. Like her, he had a coffee habit. Dressed in a silk robe, he looked tall and distinguished. Even from a distance, she could see he looked tired. And older. At sixty, most guessed him to be fifty. Today he looked his age.
“Why don’t you join me for coffee, little one,” he said. “We’ll chat about current events.”
Zoe felt Rick’s hand on her shoulder. An act of comfort Zoe found calming. Rick worked for Marks and even looked like Mike on the exterior, but he had a softer side that the corporate world had never quite destroyed. At least, not yet.
Zoe reached up and touched Rick’s hand before walking toward the table. “Hello, Father.”
She pulled out a chair and sat down at the deep mahogany table, reaching for the delicate china filled with coffee her father sat in front of her. Sleep had been slow in coming and had been restless. Caffeine sounded damn good. Answers sounded better.
Rick chose a seat next to her, while her father, in his normal fashion, took his spot at the head of the table. Mike, as usual, stood alone, leaning against the bar that separated the dining area from the kitchen.
Her father spoke before she could finish her first sip of coffee. “Mike and Rick didn’t call because I forbade them to.”
Swallowing, Zoe almost choked on the hot liquid. “And why is that?” she asked, setting her coffee on the tabletop. “You didn’t think I had the right to know before the rest of the world?”
“I meant to talk to you before the news got out,” he said with a heavy voice. He ran his hand over his thin, gray hair. “The next thing I knew, it was all over the papers, and I had fireballs being thrown at me left and right.”
Grasping her fingers together in front of her, Zoe studied him. The tension in the room was palpable. “What happened?” she asked.
“As you know your Uncle Ray does my financial management. I did what he advised me. With my upcoming retirement, I won’t hold the control at Marks. Selling off my stock seemed a natural step toward the future. We started slowly diversifying my portfolio and the next thing I knew the authorities came knocking.”
His explanation seemed weak and Zoe made a mental note to find out more from Mike later. “You don’t really think Ray would do anything unethical, do you?”
“It’s beyond unethical,” Mike said. “It’s illegal. And that’s what we’re trying to find out. We think he might have owed someone money and needed the cash.”
This made no sense. Zoe shook her head rejecting the idea that Ray would do this. He was like family. “He’d come to you for money,” she said, looking at her father.
“Things have been…tight. The company hasn’t done well, and I’ve made some bad investments.”
“Ray made bad investments,” Rick corrected. “We think he was trying to make the cash back for both Father and himself.”
Zoe sank back against her chair, stunned by the hard reality of the truth. “So beating this means convicting Ray?” she half whispered, thinking of the times Ray had been there for her. On her sixteenth birthday, he’d taken her to the theater, something her mother would have done had she been alive. Ray was family.
“It looks like this might get nasty,” Mike agreed.
“Each man for himself,” her father said. “Sometimes there isn’t a way around it.”
Zoe narrowed her gaze on her father. “You against Ray?”
“Do you want me to go to jail?”
“I don’t want either of you to go to jail.”
“It’ll work out, honey,” he said.
In other words, the conversation ended. He didn’t want to explain himself because she wouldn’t like what he had to say. Zoe pushed to her feet. She needed out of here. No matter how she pushed, she wasn’t going to hear the entire truth. Even Rick wouldn’t tell her. Though he had more compassion than the others did, he still lived the Marks corporate life. He did what success demanded.
Now Zoe wondered how far her entire family would go to protect their world. Would they break the law? She cringed at the idea. She eyed her brothers and then stared at her father, shaking her head as she saw the blankness of their expressions. All of them had cut her off. She’d heard all she was going to hear.
Damn it, she was tired of being on the outside looking in. But then again, Zoe didn’t want to be like them either. All she wanted was honesty.
True, sincere honesty.
Was that so much to ask for?
* * * * *
Declan unlocked his apartment with a smile playing on his lips. He’d left his office early, eager to get to Zoe’s place and begin their Friday night out. This date had been a long time coming. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked forward to something as much as he did seeing Zoe. The need to see Zoe had him charged with an adrenaline high. He’d never been like this about a woman. What that meant he wasn’t sure but he knew he had to find out.
He hung his jacket on the coat rack just inside his doorway and placed his briefcase on the floor. He didn’t know why he’d bothered to bring it home. For once, he might just take a weekend off. Hell, he wouldn’t mind spending the next forty-eight hours lost in Zoe. Not one bit. Maybe he’d work her out of his system. And if he didn’t, then maybe he wasn’t meant to.
As he took the stairs leading from the entryway to his lower-level flat, he started unbuttoning his shirt, recalling their brief phone call the prior day. Zoe had tried to back out of their dinner, but her objections had lacked true resistance. In fact, the heat between them held such a charge, distance did nothing to contain it. He’d hung up from that call, after listening to the soft, sexy play of her voice, with a damn hard-on. No woman had ever given him a damn hard-on over the phone.
A half-hour after arriving home, Declan was showered and clean-shaven. He’d dressed in black pants and a thin matching sweater. Just as he headed for the front door, the bell rang. His brows dipped as he reached for the knob. Normally, the doorman would have called to alert him of a visitor.
When he opened the door, he found his mother. “Mom?” he asked, quickly noting her tear-streaked cheeks. “What…” He motioned her forward. “Are you okay? Is everyone okay?”