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He chose his words carefully. “If I could have that time of my life over again, I would have handled things differently.”
Miranda met his gaze. “Handled things differently? You mean you would’ve done a decent job of investigating before you issued a statement to the press that damaged a good and honorable man, before you called the police in to arrest my father?” The eyes that had seduced him were full of pain. “The humiliation of that was what killed him.”
“Wait a moment!” He leaned forward. “Even if no statement had been made to the press, your father would still have been arrested—just perhaps not so publicly.”
Her expression grew closed, shutting out anything he could say. “My father didn’t steal anything from your company,” she bit out.
She still believed her father had done nothing wrong. Callum sighed. “Miranda, you need to face the truth.”
“It’s not the truth. Let’s just agree to disagree.” She picked up her bag and rose to her feet.
God, but this woman was stubborn!
He snagged her elbow as she tried to force her way past his chair and pulled her to him. Ignoring the startled looks from the only other couple in the dining room, two gray-haired women, he murmured close to her face, “Your parents were living way beyond their means. I can only assume your father meant to pay back the money he took.”
She tossed the gold, tousled hair that always gave him bedroom fantasies. The gesture made him want to haul her into his arms. He wasn’t sure what he’d do next—shake some sense into her…or kiss her stupid.
“He never took it—he left us letters telling us that.”
“Letters?”
Callum had never heard anything about any letters.
“Before he shut himself up in the garage and gassed himself, he wrote letters to me and Adrian and Mum telling us that he loved us. He said he could never have done such a thing—that he’d been convincingly framed for his predecessor’s mistakes, and that the humiliation of living with it was too much for him. He apologized for being weak.”
Her eyes filled with tears, but her pain and anger glittered through the moisture. “The whole charge was a fiction to cover administrative blunders from the financial department. You know that—you’ve already said you were sorry for framing him.”
“No!” Jeez, how had this happened? He couldn’t let her labor under such a misunderstanding. “I never said that. I was apologizing for making your father’s shame so public—I didn’t need to have been quite so gung ho, but my appointment was still fresh and I thought I needed to stamp my authority. I’ve never said his arrest was unjust. I believe people should be held accountable for their actions—”
But Miranda pulled her arm free. “I’m not listening to this garbage. You’re lying! I’ll wait for you at the car.”
By the time Callum stalked out of the Rose and Thorn fifteen minutes later, Miranda’s teeth were chattering.
She supposed it served her right. She could’ve waited in the warm hallway, but she’d been so angry, all she’d wanted was to get out of the space Callum occupied. She’d needed to breathe the clean, crisp air outside to cool down.
Without glancing in her direction, he pointed the key fob at the car and the doors unlocked. She scuttled in and Callum climbed in beside her.
When he didn’t start the car, she swiveled her head to see what the holdup was. And nearly wilted under the blast of his blue gaze.
He said softly, with lethal contempt, “I’m going to say this once more and never again. I would never have a man I believed to be innocent arrested.”
Maybe Callum didn’t know the full extent of it. “The evidence was falsified. He was framed.”
“The written admission from your father was not falsified.”
The quiet menace of his statement silenced Miranda like nothing else could have.
“And no one tampered with the evidence he produced that showed what he’d done with the money he’d misappropriated.”
Her lips parted, but the shock of what he was telling her had frozen her vocal cords. At last she stuttered, “That’s a lie.” It had to be.
