Enemies under one roof

Chapter 2

There is a specific kind of silence that happens when your husband of eleven hours admits he conspired with your dead father, and I can now report that it sounds exactly like a refrigerator humming.

"Explain," I said. My voice came out thin and strange, like it belonged to someone standing a few feet behind me. "Slowly. Using small words. And please keep your hands where I can see them."

"Sophia."

"Do not Sophia me. You are standing in your own study at two in the morning holding a photograph of my father, and I am wearing pajamas with avocados on them. I have nothing left to lose but my dignity, and that has already left the building."

Something flickered across his face that might have been a smile on any other night. He bent, picked up the photograph, and set it face down on the desk, like he couldn't stand to look at it either. Then he dragged a hand through his hair, and I noticed, with irritating clarity, that he looked tired. Not movie-star tired. Real tired. The kind that settles into the corners of a person's eyes and lives there.

"Your father came to see me," he said. "Three weeks before Bennett Freight collapsed."

"You're lying."

"I wish I were." He leaned against the desk, arms folded, a careful distance from me, the way you might stand near a wounded animal you didn't want to startle. "He was in trouble, Sophia. Not the kind you knew about. Someone inside your company had been moving money for years. He didn't know who. He only knew that if he fought it openly, they'd bury him, and your family along with him."

My mouth had gone dry. "And he came to you? The Sterlings? The sharks?"

"He came to me because I was the only shark who owed him a favor."

I laughed, a sharp, ugly sound. "What favor could my father possibly have done for you?"

"He kept my name out of the papers when I was twenty-two and made the worst mistake of my life." His jaw tightened. "That is a story for another night. Possibly one involving whiskey. The point is, he asked me to buy the company. Quietly. At a price that looked terrible on paper, so the people stealing from him would think they'd won and stop watching. He wanted me to hold it safely until he could prove who was behind it."

I stared at him. The room tilted, just slightly. Everything I had believed for two years, every hot-tempered midnight, every curse I had hurled at the Sterling name, shifted like furniture rearranged in the dark.

"That doesn't make sense," I whispered. "If you were protecting him, why did everything fall apart? Why did he die?"

"I don't know." It was the first time I had ever heard Daniel Sterling say those words, and they seemed to cost him. "That's what I've been trying to find out ever since. He was supposed to meet me the night he died. He never arrived."

The refrigerator hum had somehow gotten louder. I realized it was just the blood in my ears.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked. "Before the wedding? Before I signed my life away to a man I thought had murdered my family's name?"

"Because you'd never have believed me." He said it simply, without self-pity. "Look at you. You've hated me for years. If I'd walked into your living room and said, trust me, I'm the good guy, you'd have thrown the nearest candlestick at my head."

"I have excellent aim."

"I've heard." The corner of his mouth lifted, then fell again. "And because the person who betrayed your father is still out there, still close, and I couldn't risk them knowing what I was doing. Marrying you gives me a reason to keep you near. It also gives me a way to keep an eye on whoever is circling the Bennett family."

"So I'm bait."

"You're protected." His eyes met mine, steady and gray and impossibly serious. "There's a difference."

I wanted to scream. I wanted to hit him with something heavy. Instead I stood there, barefoot on his cold marble floor, shaking with fury and relief and something else I refused to name, because naming things makes them real, and I had rules.

"You should have told me," I said at last.

"Yes."

"You should have trusted me."

"Yes." He took one step closer. "And you should have asked why a man who supposedly destroyed your family kept sending your mother anonymous checks for two years."

I froze. "What checks?"

For the first time, Daniel looked genuinely caught off guard. "She never told you?"

"Told me what?"

"Ah." He winced. "That's a conversation you'll want to have in daylight. With coffee. Possibly a lawyer."

I pressed my palms against my eyes and breathed, in and out, until the room stopped swaying. When I looked up, he was closer than before, close enough that I could see the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, the small scar above his left eyebrow I hadn't noticed at the courthouse. Close enough to smell cedar and warm skin and the faint bitter edge of the coffee he'd obviously been drinking for hours.

"I don't trust you," I said.

"Good. Don't."

"I don't forgive you."

"I wouldn't, either."

"But I'm going to find out the truth. All of it. And if you've lied to me about even one detail, I will ruin you so thoroughly they'll write textbooks about it."

His gaze dropped to my mouth, just for a heartbeat, then lifted again, and my entire body went on high alert. "That," he said quietly, "might be the most attractive thing anyone has ever threatened me with."

"Rule one, Daniel."

"Right." He stepped back, abruptly, like I'd burned him. "Rule one. Go to bed, Sophia."

I went. Obviously. A woman has to know when to retreat with some shred of pride. But I made it exactly three steps down the hall before I heard him say, so softly I almost missed it, "For what it's worth, I'm sorry about your father."

I stopped. My hand rested on the cold wall. And before I could stop myself, I said, without turning around, "Thank you for trying to save him."

Silence. Then, rough and low, "I didn't save him."

"No," I said. "But you tried. That matters."

I felt his stare on my back the whole way to the bedroom.

Sleep did not come, of course. I lay on my edge of the enormous bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying every word, every flicker of his eyes, every second in that study when the air between us had felt thick enough to touch. At some point near dawn, I heard the door open and the mattress dip. Daniel slid under the sheets, careful, quiet, a respectful two feet of cold cotton between us.

And then, in the dark, he said, "Sophia?"

"What?"

"There's something else I haven't told you."

My pulse spiked. I turned my head on the pillow. He was lying on his back, one arm behind his head, staring at the ceiling like it held an answer. "I'm listening."

"Your father didn't die in a car accident." His voice was barely a breath. "The police report was changed. I have the original."

The air left the room.

"And the name written at the top of it," he said, finally turning his head to look at me, his eyes dark with something that looked terrifyingly like fear, "is someone you have already trusted with your life."