Body Movers: 2 Bodies for the Price of 1. Stephanie Bond

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      While he waited for his opponent to see the bet, raise or fold, Wesley nursed a pang of regret for once again reneging on his promise to his sister to stay away from gambling. He told himself that the fact that he’d sold the motorcycle that she hated would temper her anger if he wound up losing the five grand he’d gotten for it.

      Poor Carlotta. They’d both taken it hard when their parents had been forced to leave town to keep his father out of prison for a crime he didn’t commit, but Carlotta had borne the brunt of the fallout, having to raise his smart ass and generally try to keep him out of trouble.

      It had worked for the most part. Oh, sure, he’d racked up some debt and had been caught hacking into the county courthouse records, but no one—not even his buddy Chance or his hot attorney Liz Fischer—knew that his crime wasn’t as sloppy as it seemed. The incident had left him with a back door into a database that would hopefully divulge details about his father’s case, and an impending community-service job with the city’s computer security department that would give him all the access he needed.

      The fact that his probation officer had turned out to be a stacked redhead who kept him awake at night was an unexpected bonus.

      Carlotta was less convinced that their father was innocent of the charges levied against him, but Wesley chalked it up to her anger. She certainly had a right to her resentment—suddenly saddled with a kid, dumped by her boyfriend and left to scrape by on a retail job. His sister’s life hadn’t been easy.

      Which was why he’d love nothing better than to take home this money and prove that he could contribute more to her life than migraines. And why he was determined to prove his father’s innocence so their parents could come out of hiding and they could be a family again.

      “Hey,” Chance said from a chair where he slouched, watching. “Ain’t there some kind of time limit for placing a bet?” Chance had bought into the game too but, as usual, had been eliminated with record speed.

      “Yeah, get on with it,” the owner of the place said to Wesley’s opponent between puffs on a cigarette. The guy stood to get his cut no matter who took home the pot—totally illegal, but no one here was going to call 911.

      This money could be the first step toward the kind of life he knew that Carlotta dreamed of: a normal one. If they got their debts paid off, maybe she would even relax enough to start dating. His boss Cooper was nuts for her and he’d seen the way that cop Jack Terry looked at her. Plus her old boyfriend Peter Ashford seemed eager to make amends.

      Raise, he urged the guy silently. Try to bluff me. Put another couple of grand on the table. Wesley chewed on his fingernail to fake worry over a bad hand. In truth, he had a damned gorgeous hand that he had slow-bid to this point.

      Real Estate Man zoned in on Wesley’s nail-gnawing, then shifted forward in his chair. “All in,” he said, pushing his remaining chips and cash to the center of the table.

      Wesley almost wet himself: it was more than he could have hoped for. He wanted to play it cool, but couldn’t help grinning as he responded, “Ditto.”

      Chance lurched to his feet to see the reveal. Real Estate Man groaned and turned over a lousy pair of tens. Wesley threw down his full house with a whoop and the celebrating began. With a rebel yell, Chance picked him up and shook him like a rag doll. Wesley couldn’t remember being so happy in all the years since his parents had left. He had finally won a big pot and he couldn’t wait to tell Carlotta.

      He’d bet it would be the biggest surprise of her week.

      4

      Carlotta stared at Peter as his words sank in. Her mouth opened, then closed. “My father called you?”

      He nodded. “Can we go somewhere? You should sit down.”

      “I … let me clock out.”

      She went through the motions automatically, refusing to think about what her father’s phone calls meant. Was he ready to come home? Turn himself in? Had he heard about Wesley’s run-in with the law and wanted to check on them? Then a paralyzing thought seized her—had something happened to her mother?

      Panic clogged her throat. She harbored more animosity toward her mother than her father for deserting them. But that wouldn’t soften the blow if something had happened to her.

      Carlotta allowed Peter to lead the way to a bistro connected to the mall. Walking next to him felt so familiar, it brought moisture to her eyes. He’d been her first love, had proposed to her before leaving for Vanderbilt University. To outsiders the fact that she wore a Cartier engagement ring most of her senior year of high school might have seemed elitist, but Carlotta had been raised with the best things that money could buy—a grand home, exotic vacations, private schools. Marrying into the uber-wealthy Ashford family had seemed the next logical step.

      She had loved Peter more than was healthy, she realized in hindsight. When he’d broken their engagement on the heels of her father’s scandal, she’d thought she might not recover.

      She had, but the experience had callused her emotions. Now Peter was single again and pressing on her heart … along with this bombshell from her father.

      By mutual consent, they waited until they were seated at a table and had ordered coffee before tackling the mountain of issues between them. She was desperate to hear about the phone call, but reminded herself that Peter had buried his wife only a couple of weeks ago and had just been released from jail himself.

      “How are you?” she asked carefully. Undoubtedly, Angela’s death was beginning to settle in and, their bad marriage aside, it had to be a horrific adjustment.

      “I take it day to day,” he said. He looked haggard, his boyish good looks compromised by the stress he’d suffered.

      “Are you planning to go back to work soon?” Peter worked for Mashburn and Tully Investments, the same firm where her father had been a partner and had perpetrated his white-collar crimes.

      Alleged crimes, Wesley would say.

      Peter nodded. “Walt Tully has been good to me. I went into the office today to catch up. It feels good to be busy and doing something normal. It was quiet. I was the only one around. When my phone rang and your father identified himself, I was floored.”

      Carlotta fisted the cloth napkin in her lap. “What did he say? Are … are they okay?”

      “He said they’re fine … healthy, I mean. He said that he’d tried to call you on your cell phone, but that you’d hung up on him.”

      “I dropped the phone and accidentally disconnected the call.”

      “Oh. Well, he said he couldn’t blame you. But that’s why he called me.”

      “How did he know that you were working at Mashburn and Tully?”

      “He said he’d been keeping up with the company.”

      The company—not his family. That hurt.

      “What did he want?”

      Peter squirmed. “He wanted me to look for some files.”

      She frowned. “What kind of files?”

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