way it hadn’t rung for her in the two days since the police had searched her home.
“’Lo,” said a laughing female voice.
“Lara,” Keely said with a rush of gladness. “It’s Keely.”
There was a beat of silence. “Oh. Hi, Keely,” Lara responded, the laughter gone now.
Lara Tremayne, her closest friend in the city. Lunches and gallery openings, committee meetings for fundraisers, they saw each other once or twice a week. Lara didn’t, Keely noticed, ask what was new. She didn’t have to. The newspapers and television news had taken care of that. Still…
Keely swallowed. “The cancer ball is coming up and we need to get the planning committee together.”
“Oh, right. I meant to call you. The committee had a discussion—”
Keely’s fingers tightened on the phone. “About what? I’m the chairperson.”
“Yes, well, that’s the thing. The feeling is that with your, er… With what’s going on, well, we thought it was better if someone else took over.”
“I see.” Keely fought to keep her voice emotionless. “When did you make that decision?”
Lara hesitated. “The day before yesterday.”
“When, exactly, were you planning to tell me?”
“Soon, Keely. I’m sorry. It’s just awkward.”
It hurt, Keely realized. She’d thought Lara was genuinely her friend. It looked like she’d thought wrong.
Lara cleared her throat. “Look, for what it’s worth, I don’t think you would ever have gotten into this without Bradley.”
Keely bit back a reply as the phone line beeped and the caller ID panel flashed her boss’s extension. “Look, Lara, I have to go.”
“Me, too,” Lara said in obvious relief. “Bye, Keely. I’ll call you.”
Yeah. Keely would hold her breath for that one. She pushed down the hurt and punched the button by the flashing light. “This is Keely.”
“Keely, Ron. Can I see you in my office?”
Ron Arnold, her boss. Normally if he wanted to talk with her, he just stuck his head into her office when he walked by. This time, he was summoning her. With a sense of foreboding, Keely rose.
Since the day she’d walked in on Bradley, work had been the only part of her life that had been remotely normal. Normal, that was, if you discounted the crowd of paparazzi that camped out around the entrance of Briarson, snapping photos and shoving their microphones in her face. After all, it wasn’t every day one of the hottest couples on the social scene got busted for white-collar crime. They couldn’t find Bradley, so Keely was the next best thing, a photo to run next to the stories. “Fiancée and suspected accomplice Keely Stafford.” Only she and Bradley knew their engagement was off.
“Sit down, Keely.” Stocky and balding, Ron Arnold had been her department head ever since she’d been at Briarson. “How are you?”
“Fine,” she said automatically.
Arnold’s gaze wasn’t unsympathetic, though she wasn’t sure pity was any easier to tolerate than the judgmental or frankly curious looks she got from the rest of the staff. “I’m sorry for what you’re going through. It can’t be easy.”
Easy? Hounded by the press, watched by the authorities, returning at night to the shambles of her invaded home, no sanctuary anywhere? No, it hadn’t been easy. “I’ll survive,” she said.
“Have you seen this?” He laid a folded copy of the New York Post down on his desk. It showed Keely walking into the building amid a crowd of reporters, her head down, her coat bundled about her. And on the wall behind her, clearly legible, was the Briarson Financial name.
“I’m sorry, Ron. I’ve tried getting here early, staying late. They’re always after me, wherever I go.”
“Hard to escape. Kind of like ticks that way,” he said.
She gave him a grateful smile. “If it wasn’t for this place right now, I don’t know what I’d do. I think I’d go crazy.”
“Keely.” He hesitated. “There’s been some concern from higher up in the organization. We’ve gotten calls from clients who’ve read your name in the papers. Some of the accounts you’re working on.”
Of course, she thought with a sinking heart. Keely Stafford, accountant at Briarson Financial, the center of an embezzling scheme. Not exactly the kind of thing a client wanted to hear.
“Your work here the past three years has been top notch. All of your reviews have been outstanding, even with the high-pressure accounts. We can’t have our clients upset and doubting the organization, though. And every time you show up again in the press it only gets worse. I’ve been trying to keep things on an even keel but the higher-ups are demanding I do something. I think you understand.”
Her lips felt cold. “Are you letting me go?”
“Not now,” he said. “But we need you to take a leave of absence.”
To where? The confines of an apartment that didn’t feel like hers anymore? To the streets or a hotel, to be hounded by the press? “Ron,” she began helplessly.
“Don’t you have family in Connecticut?” Arnold cut in.
“Chilton.”
“Good. Go there. Take the rest of the month. Go home. After all,” he said, “it’s Christmas.”
Chapter Two
How had it happened? Lex Alexander wondered as he drove down the snow-bedecked main drag of Chilton, Connecticut. How was it he was back in Chilton, where everything looked just the same, from the herringbone parking on Main Street to the wrought iron arches that spanned the boulevard? The benches on the town common were green now, rather than the white they’d been twelve years before, but otherwise, little had changed in the time he’d been away.
Except him.
He’d hitchhiked, stowed away and knocked around the less savory parts of pretty much every continent on the globe since he’d turned his back on Alexander Technologies and everything that went with it. He’d sought out places most people in their right minds fled. And those who didn’t faced them armed with a hell of a lot more than just their wits. He was nuts, some said.
If anything he did showed he was nuts, it was coming back to Chilton.
He’d known he was in trouble when he’d heard his mother’s voice crackle over the phone. The fact that Olivia Alexander had tracked him down on the back side of nowhere was impressive in itself. In the places he frequented, he wasn’t Aubrey Pierce Alexander III, he was just Lex, the man he’d made himself into since he’d turned his back on the role of heir apparent, turned his back on his autocratic bastard of a father. Or non-bastard, rather, since nobody had more impeccable breeding than the late Aubrey Pierce
