thoughts.
‘Twenty-five grand,’ she said. Her dad’s life savings. Peter MacCabe had believed he was giving Iona a shot at her dream—but Brad’s promises of setting her up as a wildlife artist in Los Angeles had been as false and shallow as he was.
She pushed out a shaky breath.
Stop being a drama queen.
Once she’d given Detective Sexy the slip and worked out a way to get back into Brad’s room, she’d finally be able to look for her dad’s money.
‘You don’t seriously think he’s got twenty-five grand in Irish bills stashed in his motel room do you?’
The incredulous statement had her head whipping round. And her eyes narrowing.
‘I’m not Irish, I’m Scottish,’ she said, indignation ringing in her voice—how come no one in California knew the difference between a Scottish and an Irish accent—hadn’t any of them ever watched Braveheart? ‘And I don’t see where else he would put the money. He’s not likely to be using a bank account, is he?’
‘When did he hit your old man?’
‘December.’
December the twenty-third, to be precise. What a merry Christmas that had turned out to be. To think she’d actually believed the story he’d told her about popping over to Inverness to get her and her father a Christmas present. Until her father had dropped the bombshell about cashing in all the bonds he owned to ‘give you a chance at happiness with your new young man.’ She hadn’t even had the heart to tell him she and Brad were hardly a love match.
‘That’s three months ago.’ She heard the note of pity in the detective’s voice, and hated him for it. ‘The money’s long gone by now.’
It couldn’t all be gone. Not all twenty-five grand. ‘How? He’s not exactly spending it on his accommodation.’
‘He’s got a cocaine habit. He could lose that much up his nose in a weekend.’
‘But…’ A cocaine habit? Was that why he’d seemed so fragile and vulnerable when he’d walked into The Kelross giftshop?
‘I’m taking it he kept that quiet while he was in…’ The detective paused. ‘Where are you from?’
‘The Scottish Highlands,’ she said absently.
‘So that’s why he disappeared from our radar for a couple of months,’ he murmured more to himself than her. ‘I figured he might have skipped town to avoid his marks, but I didn’t think he had the imagination to skip all the way to Europe.’
‘He has other marks?’ she said dully.
‘Querida, he’s a high-end hustler with a class-A habit—where do you think I come in?’
‘I don’t know, where do you come in?’ she snapped. Did the guy really have to be quite so patronising?
‘My name’s Zane Montoya. I own and operate a private investigations firm based in Carmel. We’ve been investigating Demarest for six months. Gathering evidence, witness statements, establishing a money trail, all on behalf of an insurance company who made the mistake of insuring some of his victims.’ He waited a beat as she struggled to absorb the information.
So her father hadn’t been the only one who’d fallen for Brad’s clever lies? This hadn’t been some arbitrary, opportunistic con? Her stomach pitched at the thought.
Had she really believed this couldn’t get any worse?
She’d got over her ludicrous fantasy that Brad Demarest cared about her and admired her artwork—enough to help her get out of Kelross Glen—months ago. But Montoya’s revelations felt like the final rusty nail in the rotting coffin of her pride and self-respect.
‘A complex, high-level investigation,’ Montoya continued. ‘That your dumb stunt came close to screwing up tonight.’
She ignored Montoya’s irritation. If he expected an apology for her ‘dumb stunt,’ he’d be waiting until they were serving snow cones in hell. She couldn’t care less about him or his anonymous insurance company or his complex, high-level, ‘almost screwed up’ investigation.
All she cared about was her father.
Peter MacCabe was a good man, who’d wanted to give her a dream. A dream she’d destroyed by letting a professional conman into their lives.
They rode in silence for the next few miles. Iona stared into the darkness and tried to get her head around what she was going to do next. It had taken her over two weeks to track Brad this far, in the hope she could get some of the money back. But if all the money was gone, was there even any point in confronting him? The hopelessness of the situation felt debilitating.
The lights of a strip mall shone in the distance as they approached another seaside town, but her mind had gone numb and she simply could not get it to engage.
Even her bones felt tired. She’d been running on adrenaline since she’d got to California, trying to live on as little as possible while she waited for Brad to return to the motel she’d had staked out. Tears of frustration and weariness pricked her eyes. She sucked them up. Crying never solved anything.
The yellow sign of a fast-food franchise flickered on the side of the road. Her stomach protested audibly and the hot flush of shame fired up her neck. Seemed the coffin of her self-respect hadn’t completely rotted away because she’d be mortified if Montoya had heard her hunger pains.
No such luck.
The car bounced across the cracked pavement in the fast-food restaurant’s forecourt, then stopped at the drive-through window.
He slanted a look at her belly. ‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing, I’m good,’ she said, even though she hadn’t eaten since the coffee and doughnut she’d splurged on at breakfast. She’d rather die of starvation than accept charity from this jerk.
‘What’ll it be, sir?’ The teenage girl in the drive-through window blushed profusely before letting out a choked sigh—clearly suffering from the same asphyxiation problem Iona herself had had after her first good look at Detective Sexy.
He glanced at her over his shoulder and she got another unwelcome eyeful of that staggering face. An alarming series of pinpricks shimmered across her nerve endings.
‘You sure?’ he asked.
‘Positive.’ She lifted her chin.
The flat line of Montoya’s lips curved up at one end, sending a dimple into his cheek. The pinpricks gathered and concentrated in all sorts of inappropriate places.
A dimple? Seriously? Give me a break.
The hint of a smile was more rueful than amused, but there was no denying the spectacular blip in Iona’s heart rate—or the loud answering growl of the lion in her stomach still hoping to get fed.
‘Suit yourself.’ He turned back to the blushing
