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“Very much so, thank you. It’s a lovely cabin.”
“It will be when we’ve finished the renovations.” He glanced at Casey with a wry half smile. “And if I can keep my cousin-in-law, here, from flooding the place.”
“Cousin-in-law?” she repeated, glancing at Casey, who stood quietly behind the man who was probably his senior by a decade. “You’re Molly’s cousin?”
He nodded. “On my father’s side. My last name is Walker, which was Molly’s maiden name.”
“I didn’t realize.” But it explained a lot, she decided. She knew now how he’d gotten the job.
He grinned as though he had somehow read her thoughts. “Gotta love nepotism, right?”
Her lips twitched with a smile she had a hard time containing. At least he admitted he hadn’t been hired for his maintenance skills.
“Molly told me to ask you to dinner,” Kyle said, shifting a heavy toolbox in his left hand. “Maybe Friday night?”
Though she still wasn’t feeling very social, it seemed ungracious to decline. “I’d like that. Tell her I said thank you.”
He nodded again. “She’ll be pleased. Since Micah was born, she hasn’t been able to get out much. She spends a lot of time with the kids and with Jewel, but she’ll enjoy having someone new to talk with for a change.”
Because she’d been so busy with her career the past few years, Natalie hadn’t been able to visit her aunt and uncle much. She had met Molly only a few times, but she liked Kyle’s bubbly, redheaded wife quite a bit. The young mother of three-year-old Olivia and two-month-old Micah had an infectious smile and an inviting Texas drawl. She seemed to have a knack for putting people at ease within minutes of meeting her. She had certainly done so with Natalie.
Leaving the men to work in the big, eat-in kitchen, Natalie returned to the bedroom she’d been sleeping in since she’d arrived four nights ago. This was the only real bedroom, though the couch in the large living room was a sleeper that pulled out into a queen-sized bed. The cabin had two bathrooms, a smaller one with a shower off the living room, and the master bathroom with a shower-tub combo. The master bath was also being renovated during this off-season remodel. A new toilet, sink and countertop had already been installed. There was no mirror in the bathroom now, though she could see that one had hung above the sink.
She’d been told that a new mirror would be installed within the next few days. In the meantime, she was able to use the mirror over the bedroom dresser for applying her makeup and doing her hair.
Like the rest of the small, older vacation cabin, the bedroom decor was country casual. A big iron bed was covered with a hand-pieced quilt for a bedspread and lots of comfy pillows. Matching oak nightstands topped with a pair of antique lamps sat on either side of the bed. Country prints hung on the log walls. What appeared to be homemade lace curtains framed the window that looked out over the mountaintops. Too bad she hadn’t been able to really appreciate the stunning view while she’d been here.
Her laptop sat on the tiny writing desk in one corner of the room. The screen saver had activated, and colorful animated fish swam across the screen. She’d always wanted a real aquarium, but her demanding career had taken so much of her time that she wouldn’t have been able to maintain or enjoy one.
She had time for an aquarium now, she thought glumly. Not that she would be able to afford one once her savings were depleted, as they would be rather quickly if the private investigator she had hired recently didn’t come up with some answers soon.
A flick of the wireless mouse made the screen saver disappear, replaced by a list of her former associates in the large Nashville law firm where she had worked for the past four-and-a-half years. It was a lengthy list—thirty-five members, seventy-five associates, and fifteen staff attorneys, which didn’t even count all the clerical staff. A big firm. A lot of suspects. And she could rule out only about half of them. She wondered if Rand Beecham, the rather eccentric P.I., had had any more success in the week that had passed since her last update from him.
She heard a clang from the kitchen, and a curse that sounded like Casey’s voice, followed by a quick laugh that might have come from Kyle. She glanced that way, then looked back at the names on her screen, her slight smile fading. Someone on this list had set her up, framed her for leaking confidential client information to the media in return for under-the-table payments. Because of that untrue accusation, she had lost a position she’d spent several long, hard years working to achieve. Until she proved her innocence, her career—her very life—was on hold.
“So, when are you coming home?”Leaning back in a patio chair on the deck of the tiny, A-frame cabin in which he was staying—one of the two cabins currently under renovation and not rented during this off-peak season, the other being Natalie’s—Casey gazed at the wooded path stretched in front of him, and tried to come up with a satisfactory answer to his cousin’s question. “I don’t know, exactly,” he said into the cell phone he held to his ear. “A couple more weeks, maybe.”
“You’ve been there almost two weeks already,” Aaron Walker complained. “What are you doing there all this time?”
“Kyle and Mack are renovating two of their vacation cabins during the off season, and I volunteered to give them a hand.”
“You’re doing carpentry work?” Aaron made no effort to hide his skepticism.
“Yeah. And a little plumbing. Some painting. Cleaning gutters. That sort of thing.”
“You. Plumbing. That can’t be good.”
Casey was glad Aaron couldn’t see him wince as he remembered the way he’d soaked Natalie with a spray of cold water. Wouldn’t Aaron and his twin, Andrew, have gotten unholy delight out of that scene? Not to mention their slightly older cousin, Jason, who was always commenting on the younger trio’s proclivity for trouble.
Maybe he’d tell them about his first real attempt at plumbing sometime. But not now. “I’m doing okay. Kyle said I’ve been a lot of help.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve had your vacation and you’ve gotten to play with tools. So, don’t you think it’s time to come home now? Everybody’s asking about you. And this hiatus can’t look good to the powers that be at your firm. If it weren’t for the family connections, there’s no way they’d have let a junior associate take off this long without repercussions.”
Casey scowled in response to the reminder of those “family connections.” It was true that his paternal aunt Michelle D’Alessandro was one of the firm’s wealthiest and most prestigious clients. And that his maternal grandfather was a nationally known and admired prosecutor in Chicago, who’d roomed with the senior partner in Casey’s Dallas firm years ago back in their college days and had maintained that friendship ever since. And that Casey’s father was a partner in the largest and most respected private investigation and security company in Dallas and his mother the CEO of an acclaimed accounting firm. All of which might have gotten him hired in the first place, but he’d worked damned hard to justify that decision. He’d earned every dollar of his generous paychecks.
At least, he’d thought so until he’d lost the first truly high-profile case he’d been assigned. Not only had it been a defeat, it had been a particularly painful, public and humiliating one. His friends and family had rallied around him, assuring him that every attorney suffered losses, but there had been more than a few in the Dallas legal community who had taken great pleasure in seeing “the wonderboy,” as they had dubbed him, taken down a few pegs.
A week after that loss, he had suffered a second career blow. Only that time, at the hands of an arrogant young man Casey had successfully defended in a previous charge, an innocent person had died. And Casey still wondered if he was at least partially to blame for that tragedy.
