to. I know you can’t stop.”
“I just—”
“I know, Jules,” she said, her voice low. “Truth is, I’m not even sure I want you to stop.”
Juliet froze, afraid to hope. “You mean it, Marce? You’re actually thinking about moving here?” Her heart rate sped up as she ran through the possibilities.
“Not really,” Marcie’s reply wasn’t as disappointing as it might have seemed. It wasn’t the adamant no that was all she’d ever issued in the past. “I just don’t want you to quit asking. It’s good to know I have a place to go.”
“Always, sis.”
“Yeah. Still, it’s good to hear, you know?”
Juliet did know. After losing everything they had to go live in squalor in a trailer the size of one of their bedrooms at home, security had gained a pretty high spot on the priority list of both girls. Right beneath the need to provide it for themselves.
In the space of a weekend, she and Marce had gone from living in a San Francisco mansion with every possible luxury and socially prominent parents to a rusty, skinny, two-bedroom trailer in Maple Grove with a broken woman who had no training, no marketable skills and not enough esteem to pull herself up. They’d left behind the man who’d lost his fortune and found himself a rich woman who was happy to keep him in the style to which he’d grown accustomed in exchange for his company. The man who’d come home one Friday afternoon to bid a cold adieu to the wife he’d grown to hate and to the children he’d never wanted and didn’t intend to see again.
Juliet could still remember the moment when, thinking that she could solve everything by wrapping her skinny arms around the man she’d adored and telling him that she’d help him get his money back, her father had shoved her away so hard she’d landed on her butt on the ground.
“You going to tell me what kind of criminal Mary Jane’s father is?” Marcie asked when the line hung silent.
“He’s been harboring illegally gained money in a bank account in the Cayman Islands.”
“No way.”
“I know,” Juliet said, shrugging out of her blouse and leaving it on the floor beside her. “I couldn’t believe it, either. I’m still not sure I do, but the evidence is pretty conclusive. Eaton James gave me the account number today just before lunch along with paperwork showing who opened the account. It’s in Blake’s name.”
“Oh, God.”
“Yeah, and it was opened during a period of time he already admitted to being in the islands.”
“Damn.”
That was exactly what Juliet thought.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“HAVE YOU CALLED HIM?” Marcie’s question started the butterflies fluttering around inside her again. She’d spent the past hour telling her twin about the day’s events, the shocking developments in a trial of which she’d thought herself in complete control.
Juliet lay in her bed, pillows propped up behind her, the comforter pulled to her hips. Darkness, broken by a moonlit glow from the open shutters, gave the room a sleepy feel.
“I have no reason to call him,” she said aloud, something she’d been repeating to herself since Eaton James had delivered his startling testimony that afternoon. “I hardly know the man.”
“You had dinner with him two weeks ago.”
She wished she’d never told her sister that.
“And very clearly said a permanent goodbye,” she muttered.
“But you were there in the courtroom. You heard the whole thing. And, even if you haven’t spent many hours with him, you did fill those hours with some…fairly intimate communication.”
“We had sex.” They’d also had a baby. But since he didn’t know that, it didn’t count. Did it?
“Do you want to call him?”
“Dammit, Marce, can’t you just leave me in blissful self-deception for a while?”
“If that’s what you wanted, you wouldn’t have called me.” Her sister said. And then added, “Would you?” with a little less confidence.
“No, I wouldn’t have. I rely on the absolute honesty between us,” she admitted. “I always have.”
“Okay. So…why do you want to call him?”
Juliet sighed, ran a hand through hair that was loose and falling free around her face. “I don’t know. I just feel uneasy, you know? I mean, I’ve been working with Eaton James for months and he never breathed a word about any of this.”
“But I’ll bet you assured him, when he first came to you, that you could get him off, didn’t you?”
“I think I would have.”
“And would you have been able to do that if he’d told you about the forgery?”
The Monet lithograph on her wall was a square shadow with little glowing pinpricks where the light hit bright color. “No.” It could be said that she presented different forms of truth, and left out incriminating evidence when it suited her client’s case to do so, but Juliet McNeil never knowingly lied. “It’s his first offense. I’d have gotten him off with nothing more serious than a light probation term.”
“And a damaged reputation that would’ve been hard to recover, at least professionally. Not many people trust their charitable contributions to a crook.”
James had said something similar when she’d come unglued on him late that afternoon. Just what she wanted, a client who tried to outmaneuver her. When would she ever fully grasp the fact that in her world, it was always each man for himself?
“What happens now?” Marcie asked a couple of minutes later.
“I expect the D.A. to drop the charges. He’ll never get a class-two felony out of this. James’ll be charged with numerous counts of forgery and get his hands slapped.”
“And what about Blake Ramsden?”
Glancing out the window at an ocean she couldn’t see in the dark, Juliet held tight to the phone with a sweat-slick palm. “I suspect he’ll be charged with a class-two felony.”
“You think Schuster will do it?”
“Yeah. That’s one thing you can count on Paul Schuster for—he’ll take up any case he thinks he can win. Even more so because he’s going to be driven to get a win out of all the months he’s spent on this. Hell—” she chuckled without humor “—knowing Schuster, he’ll probably figure out a way to make it look like he knew that Blake was guilty all along.”
“Except for the little matter of having wasted the state’s money to press the charges against Eaton in the first place.”
“Who
