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      She cringed as he picked up the document and began thumbing through it, partly because many of the questions were uncomfortably personal, but mostly because, in the end, she had lied about having slept with the stranger from Studio 9. Haley needed the money too badly for her to risk the truth. And she justified her falsehood by repeating over and over to herself that it was the only time in her life she’d done something so irresponsible.

      When he paused about halfway through, Macy squirmed in her seat. What was he reading? Her answer to the question about having regular menstrual cycles? The one that asked about her marital history? She wished he’d take the darn thing home to go over it, but he thought of their arrangement as business. And if it was business, then this was a business dinner and a perfectly acceptable place to study the “prospectus” in which he was considering investing so much.

      God, when had she become a commodity?

      The moment I walked through the door of his office a week ago.

      Fortunately the waitress arrived with Macy’s drink, interrupting him. He set the package aside in favor of the thick, tasseled menu the young woman handed them both.

      “Are you finding anything you like?” he asked after several minutes.

      Macy peeked over the menu she was using to block his close regard and offered what she hoped was an at-ease smile. “I think I’ll have the chicken salad.”

      When the waitress returned, Thad ordered her salad and a steak, medium-rare, for himself, then retrieved something from his briefcase. He glanced through it, apparently comparing it to what Macy had written on the application, and she suddenly felt as though the word liar hovered in the air over her head.

      A frown creased his forehead. “Your grandmother died of heart disease?”

      “Yes, but she was eighty-eight, hardly cut down in her prime.”

      He nodded. “There’s no information here about your father.”

      “Because I don’t know anything about him.”

      A raised eyebrow told her he expected to hear more.

      “He ran out on my mother after she got pregnant with me. It seems he didn’t share her desire to raise a family.”

      “I see.” He went back to his questionnaire, and Macy suddenly wished she’d ordered something much stiffer than soda water.

      “You’ve had a miscarriage?”

      “Just after my husband and I were married, I became pregnant, but it only lasted three months.”

      “What happened?”

      “My doctor had no idea why I lost the baby. He said it happens all the time. He gave me a D & C and sent me home.” She took a gulp of her drink, feeling the tasteless fizz roll down her throat and wishing their food would arrive to divert Thad Winters’s attention from her before he reached the infamous Have you had unprotected sex with anyone in the past ten years? question.

      “It says here you’ve never taken any drugs.”

      “Right.” At least her conscience was clear there.

      “You’ve never even experimented? No pot? No acid?”

      Macy thought back on all the college parties where she’d been offered such things. She’d been tempted occasionally, but she’d heard of too many bad things that had happened while people weren’t themselves. Except for that short window after Richard left, when she’d drunk more than she should have, she’d always decided to protect her judgment. “No.”

      He nodded and kept reading. Finally, he stopped and glanced up, and Macy knew he’d arrived at the question she most wanted to avoid.

      “You claim here that you’ve never had unprotected sex, except with your husband.”

      Macy let her gaze slide away, unable to face the ocean-blue intensity of his eyes while she lied. Instead of voicing her answer, she nodded, hoping he’d let her get away with that and move on. But he didn’t. He frowned and waited until she started fidgeting with a lock of her hair.

      “Do you want to change your answer?” he asked at last.

      Forcing her hands away from her hair and beneath the table, where she clenched them, Macy shook her head. “No…ah…no. Why would I?”

      “You gave me permission to do a background check, remember?”

      “So?” She cleared her throat when the word squeaked out, wishing she could lie as easily and effectively as Richard had always lied to her.

      “There’s a woman by the name of Julia Templeton who claims you slept with her boyfriend once. She’s a bartender at Studio 9.”

      Macy’s jaw dropped. “You must have turned over every rock in my past to have come up with that information,” she accused.

      “That’s what a background check does. Did you think I wouldn’t bother, Macy?”

      Being forced into the awkward position she was in and having embarrassed herself by trying to lie made Macy angry. “I’m sure you were most thorough, Mr. Winters. Tell me, what else did you find? That I was the slut of Hillcrest High?”

      A muscle ticked in his cheek, but his voice was still civil when he said, “Were you?”

      Grabbing her purse, Macy dug through it and tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the table. Then she stood up. “Enjoy my salad, Mr. Winters. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

      THAD SAT in the booth at the steak house long after Macy had left, staring at the report Rychert had compiled on Macy McKinney. It was certainly thorough. She’d been raised an only child by a single mother who’d worked for the Department of Motor Vehicles for thirty years and was now retired and living in Las Vegas. She’d attended college on academic scholarship, had dated a lot, despite her pressing studies, and had married a popular football player for the University of Utah. They’d had one daughter, who would be five years old now, and had divorced a year ago when her husband took off with a teenager who’d worked at the local McDonald’s. Since her husband left, she’d enrolled in school again, for the first time since having the baby, and she was now living on student loans, plus some help from her mother, and what she could earn at home transcribing, formatting and proofreading dictated medical reports for various physicians.

      Not an easy life for a bright young woman like Ms. McKinney, but one with promise. Her history pointed to an inner strength, dedication and resilience that Thad admired. Rychert had found no evidence of drug use, no alcohol abuse, though she did drink heavily for a short period after her marriage broke up, no particularly worrisome diseases or mental instability lurking in her family genes. And no sexual indiscretions beyond the claims of that one bartender at Studio 9.

      Few women had a résumé so clean. Thad had thought he’d found the one. Until she’d lied to him. Then he’d known it would never work. He refused to involve himself with someone he couldn’t trust, not when it came to his child.

      Sighing, he finished his drink and pushed the baked potato around some more on his plate. Sex was an uncomfortable subject for most СКАЧАТЬ