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He sighed, deeply sick of this argument. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Everly, I don’t care who you slept with before me. I want you. I want you now, and whatever went on in the past is in the past. Eventually Sara will accept you in my life. She’ll come around. She’s a smart woman, and you’ll win her over.”
She stood again, this time steadier than before. “No, I won’t because we’re through. You see, it might not matter to you, but it’s everything to me. I won’t be with a man who thinks I’m a liar.”
Everly walked away, and Gabe was fairly certain he really had lost her forever. He’d never felt more desolate in his life.
TWELVE
Everly fought her instinct to go back to Gabriel and accept whatever he would give her. It was weak, but she really wanted to believe he was telling her the truth. A friend in her neighborhood had recently miscarried after a very stressful reorganization at work, and it had been heartbreaking for her family. So Everly understood why Gabe might have thrown her under the proverbial bus to calm his pregnant sister. But she also hated the thought that she might become one of those stupid girls who made excuses for a boyfriend’s bad behavior because she couldn’t stop loving the jerk.
All that aside, by his own admission, he intended to force her out of her job before his sister assumed Crawford’s helm because he believed she’d been Mad’s mistress. And she couldn’t get that report out of her head. Now she wished she’d been able to hold on to it. How much more had he found out besides the crap about her dad? Shouldn’t she know what he could come at her with? Maybe she should do her own digging. She wouldn’t need a PI. She could find out everything about Gabriel Bond. She could hack into his banking records and make it look like he was laundering money. . . .
Oh, god, this was what life with a man as ruthless as Gabriel Bond would be like. Warfare. She was prepping for a war with a man she’d fallen in love with. Her heart sank. Even though she’d liked Maddox, he’d been the same. Always prepared to take down his enemies.
She couldn’t live this way.
“Are you two good?” Dax asked as she walked in the room.
“As good as we’re going to get. Now what did you find?” Everly saw no reason to vomit out the details of her relationship with Gabriel, especially to his friends. Instead, she headed for the table. What she needed was to lose herself in work and figure out the mystery in front of her. Then she and Gabriel could go their separate ways.
Connor glanced up from the papers he’d been studying. “You knew Mad pretty well, right?”
“I think so.” She wished Mad was here now so she could get his opinion on how to deal with Gabriel, who’d behaved this morning like a complete douchebag-asshole-idiot. She bet that Maddox would have given her some crazy-sounding advice, which, under the punchline, would have been terribly sage. Or he would have offered to find her a male prostitute. Really, it was a fifty-fifty proposition with him.
“Do you have any idea why he would be looking for two women?” Connor asked.
Roman sighed as if the answer was obvious. “You’re talking about Mad. Ménage à trois, you moron.”
Connor rolled his eyes. “I don’t think he would have spent ten grand merely to find a threesome. Fine. He might have, but I doubt he would’ve hired a PI. He knew a fair number of high-class escorts. He would have just called them.”
“I’ll give you that,” Roman conceded. “So who did he hire this PI to find?”
Connor looked down at his notepad. “According to the PI’s daughter, Mad hired her dad, Wayne Ferling, to find two women over the last two years. The first was named—”
“Why talk to the daughter, rather than the man himself?” Everly interrupted. “Could you not reach him?”
“Mr. Ferling was killed by a mugger two months ago,” Connor explained. “Right in front of his house, in fact.”
“That’s suspicious,” Dax said with a whistle.
“Yes, it is, considering the fact that Ferling lived in a safer part of the city,” Connor admitted. “I checked and his was the only murder in that vicinity in the last two years.”
“So Mad’s dead and so is the PI he hired under mysterious circumstances,” Gabriel posited, strolling into the room.
Everly tried to act as if he was nothing more than another cog in the wheel of this mystery. “Sorry I interrupted you earlier, Connor. Carry on.”
He nodded. “Ferling’s daughter said that Mad first hired her father to find a woman in her fifties, Deborah Elliot. That was a little over nine months ago. She’s alive and living in Florida. Then more recently, Mad sought a woman named Natalia Kuilikov. She was a Russian immigrant who came to the States almost fifteen years ago. Apparently, she disappeared a while back.”
“We keep finding Russians in the middle of this shit.” Dax paced the floor, his face thoughtful. “First, Sergei, then the Bratva, and now Natalia. That’s awfully coincidental. But Deborah Elliot doesn’t sound remotely Russian. How does she fit in?”
Suddenly, Everly wasn’t thinking about Dax’s question or her problems with Gabriel. “Maddox was trying to find Deborah Elliot? You’re sure about that?”
“Yeah.” Connor nodded, looking quite certain.
A wave of dizziness rolled through her head. She braced her hand on the table, trying to process the possible implications. Now more than ever, she wished she could lean on Gabriel.
“Everly? What’s wrong?” He moved behind her and pulled out a chair.
She sank into the seat. Deborah Elliot. He’d been looking for Deborah Elliot. The idea made Everly’s head spin again. “Deborah Elliot is my mother.”
The room stopped, and every eye suddenly turned to her.
“Are you kidding me?” Roman asked.
She shook her head. “No. I mean, that’s my mother’s maiden name. I’m sure there are plenty of Deborah Elliots out there, but for this to be another coincidence . . .” She finally looked at Gabriel. “Maddox searched for my mother. Once he found her, he apparently went out of his way to find and hire me. Why? And what made him go looking for her in the first place?”
“With Mad gone, we may never know,” Gabriel answered. “But I think I remember your mother’s name listed in the financial records I found on his desk last night.”
“Are they in that folder you saved from the fire?” Connor asked, looking around the table for said file.
“Yeah.” Gabe pointed to the plain manila folder at the far end of the t
able. “That’s it. When I studied it, everything inside seemed so random. Mad had shoved a ton of receipts into that folder, along with old payment records to a Deborah Elliot.”
“Payments? How did Maddox even know my mother?”
Connor flipped through the files Gabriel had saved. “He didn’t. His father did. These payments were made some twenty-odd years ago. Is there any way to pull up Crawford Industries’ archived HR files? I have a hunch. I happen to remember Benedict Crawford really well, since I spent a bunch of holidays with Mad and the old bastard.”
Before she could clear the shock buzzing through her brain to volunteer for the task, Gabriel grabbed Connor’s laptop and started typing, his face grim. “I remember, too. Do you think—”
“Yeah, I do.” Connor’s face tightened with thought. “These payments totaled north of two hundred thousand over the course of six years. What else could this be about?”
“Sounds like hush money to me,” Dax put in.
