AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His flat words hung in the air between them. Blinking, she tried to decipher them. “What?”
Walker tipped his head up and smiled bitterly at the sky. “All this time you’ve been trying to work on me, improve me, but at least I’m not a damn lying thief. I may be dumb as a rock, but I’ve got a soul.”
“I’m not helping anyone stealing anything!”
“Yeah. Considering that everything else Nicole told me was true, I’ll take that with a grain of salt.”
“Nicole told you I was stealing?”
He shot her an impatient look and reached for the door of his truck. “She told me your brother brought you in to pull off the same shit that went down in Tahoe. I don’t know what you call it to make it right with yourself, but I call it stealing. Come on. I’ll drop you off at the apartment and get out of your life.”
“My brother...” she repeated. It didn’t matter that Walker got in his truck and closed the door, because she couldn’t say anything else. She couldn’t exhale, couldn’t speak, couldn’t move.
Her brother had brought her in to embezzle money? That didn’t make any sense. She couldn’t just embezzle unknowingly via osmosis. She’d have to be in on it.
But it did make more sense than Brad helping her out of the goodness of his heart. And Nicole would be in a position to know. She was sleeping with Keith and her husband had sold the land to Brad at what seemed like a steal.
What the hell was going on?
Walker started the truck with a roar. Charlie jumped almost a foot, her heart scrambling into her throat, but she still couldn’t do more than stare at him past the glass of the windshield.
He rolled down his window and stuck his head out. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
She watched him. His normally warm eyes were distant now. His deep voice was rough and damning, when it had once been so sweet and rumbly in her ear.
“No,” she said. “I’ll find my own way back.”
“Get in the truck, Charlie. I’m not leaving you here in the middle of nowhere.”
“There are plenty of people here. I’ll find a ride.”
“Get in,” he snapped.
She looked back at the ranch and thought of trying to explain her predicament to someone. But she was so embarrassed. Mortified at what Walker thought of her. She couldn’t deal with more of that today, so she forced her feet to carry her to his truck and she got in.
They didn’t say a word to each other. He didn’t even look at her.
Charlie felt her fingers trembling and pressed them to her thighs. The fear was back. She’d left it behind sometime this past week, but it was back now, like a beast lurking in the dark, stalking her, waiting.
Was she being set up? Was this what her life had come to? Bad enough that she had to work at a place she hated, but now she was being set up, too? There couldn’t be another explanation for it. She wasn’t in on it. She wasn’t helping. She was just...an easy target. A pawn. Something to be used and tossed away. By her own brother.
But just because Nicole had said it didn’t make it true. Maybe this was a move in a game that Charlie wasn’t part of. Maybe Nicole had said it just to win Walker back.
“It’s not true,” she repeated, her voice cracking around the words.
Walker didn’t respond.
Because even if it wasn’t true, some of the other stuff was. The things she hadn’t wanted him to know.
He was right. She hadn’t trusted him, but she’d expected him to fall in line behind her lofty demands. Do this. Do that. Make yourself better. And pay no attention to the woman pulling the levers behind the curtain.
But he didn’t understand the why of it. She hadn’t wanted him to know, but only because she’d wished she was better for him. She’d been ashamed, just as he had been, but with so much more reason.
Walker had been the last person on earth who’d believed in her, and she hadn’t been able to let that go. And now he was lost to her forever.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE MOMENT WALKER pulled away from the curb, Charlie rushed upstairs to grab her laptop. Email and internet access alone weren’t going to solve this mystery. In fact, she wasn’t sure they’d be any help at all, but her computer might come in handy.
