off of his hard-earned money for years.
Five years.
Five hellish years he’d spent locked up as the murderer of a woman. Of his wife.
Not a great situation, all in all.
But he’d survived it. Like he’d survived every damn thing that had come before it.
Money was supposed to protect you.
In the end, he supposed it had, in many ways.
Hell, he might not have been able to walk out of that jail cell and collect his Stetson on his way back to his life if it wasn’t for the fact that he had a good team of lawyers who had gotten his case retried as quickly as possible. Something you would’ve thought would be pretty easy considering his wife had been found alive.
The boy he’d been...
He had no confidence that boy would have been able to get justice.
But the man he was...
The man he was now stood on a vacant plot of land that he owned, near enough to the house he was renting, and waited for the architect to arrive. The one who would design the house he deserved after spending five years behind bars.
There would be no bars in this house. The house that Alicia had wanted so badly. To show everyone in their hometown that he and Alicia were more, were better, than what they’d been born into.
Only, she wasn’t.
Without him, she was nothing. And he would prove that to her.
No, his house would have no bars. Nothing but windows.
Windows with a view of the mountains that overlooked Copper Ridge, Oregon, the town where he had grown up. He’d been bad news back then; his whole family had been.
The kind of guy that fathers warned their daughters about.
A bad seed dropped from a rotten tree.
And he had a feeling that public opinion would not have changed in the years since.
His reputation certainly hadn’t helped his case when he’d been tried and convicted five years ago.
Repeating patterns. That had been brought up many times. An abusive father was likely to have raised an abusive son, who had gone on to be a murderer.
That was the natural progression, wasn’t it?
The natural progression of men like him.
Alicia had known that. Of course she had. She knew him better than any other person on earth.
Yet he hadn’t known her at all.
Well, he had ended up in prison, as she’d most likely intended. But he’d clawed his way out. And now he was going to stand up on the mountain in his fancy-ass house and look down on everyone who’d thought prison would be the end of him.
The best house in the most prime location in town. That was his aim.
Now all that was left to do was wait for Faith Grayson to arrive. By all accounts she was the premier architect at the moment, the hottest commodity in custom home design.
Her houses were more than simple buildings, they were works of art. And he was bound and determined to own a piece of that art for himself.
He was a man possessed. A man on a mission to make the most of everything he’d lost. To live as well as possible while his wife had to deal with the slow-rolling realization that she would be left with nothing.
As it was, it was impossible to prove that she had committed a crime. She hadn’t called the police, after all. An argument could be made that she might not have intended for him to be arrested. And there was plausible deniability over the fact that she might not have realized he’d gone to prison.
She claimed she had simply walked away from her life and not looked back. The fact that she had been accessing money was a necessity, so she said. And proof that she had not actually been attempting to hide.
He didn’t believe that. He didn’t believe her, and she had been left with nothing. No access to his money at all. She had been forced to go crawling back to her parents to get an allowance. And he was glad of that.
They said the best revenge was living well.
Levi Tucker intended to do just that.
* * *
Faith Grayson knew that meeting an ex-convict at the top of an isolated mountain could easily be filed directly into the Looney Tunes Bin.
Except, Levi Tucker was only an ex-convict because he had been wrongfully convicted in the first place. At least, that was the official statement from the Oregon State District Attorney’s office.
Well, plus it was obvious because his wife wasn’t dead.
He had been convicted of the murder of someone who was alive. And while there was a whole lot of speculation centered around the fact that the woman never would have run from him in the first place if he hadn’t been dangerous and terrifying, the fact remained that he wasn’t a killer.
So, there was that.
She knew exactly what two of her brothers, Isaiah and Joshua, would say about this meeting. And it would be colorful. Not at all supportive.
But Faith was fascinated by the man who was willing to pay so much to get one of her designs. And maybe her ego was a little bit turbocharged by the whole thing. She couldn’t deny that.
She was only human, after all.
A human who had been working really, really hard to keep on top of her status as a rising star in the architecture world.
She had designed buildings that had changed skylines, and she’d done homes for the rich and the famous.
Levi Tucker was something else. He was infamous.
The self-made millionaire whose whole world had come crashing down when his wife had disappeared more than five years ago. The man who had been tried and convicted of her murder even when there wasn’t a body.
Who had spent the past five years in prison, and who was now digging his way back out...
He wanted her. And yeah, it interested her.
She was getting bored.
Which seemed...ungrateful. Her skill for design had made her famous at a ridiculously young age, but, of course, it was her older brothers and their business acumen that had helped her find success so quickly.
Joshua was a public-relations wizard, Isaiah a genius with finance. Faith, for her part, was the one with the imagination.
The one who saw buildings growing out of the ground like trees and worked to find ways to twist them into new shapes, to draw new lines into the man-made landscape to blend it all together with nature.
She
