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Her face deflated in disappointment. “All right. I guess I’ll wait to hear from you about Spencer then,” she said after some struggle to get the words out. She opened the door, pausing a moment as she looked back at him, her enthusiasm from earlier eclipsed by her disappointment at not getting the job. “Thanks again for taking the case.”
He watched her walk almost dejectedly down the sidewalk, passing the front window as she did.
For a second, Reynolds had to fight the urge to tell her that she was hired and he’d see her here first thing tomorrow, but he managed to stay strong.
Something about that woman was trouble, and although he didn’t know precisely what kind of trouble that was, he wasn’t going to take any risks.
Chapter 3
Waverley unlocked the car door and slipped inside, but she didn’t make any move to buckle up or start the car, her mind still processing the outcome of her meeting with Reynolds Cavanaugh moments before.
He was definitely not what she had envisioned.
Since the moment she saw that investigative report, saw the details of her and Spencer’s life recorded in pictures and a timeline of her husband’s activities, she’d felt violated.
Violated, angry, and admittedly embarrassed.
He’d seen her for the cuckolded wife she was before she had. He’d known that her husband had been cheating on her and had divulged all her private details to her husband’s mistress before Waverley had a clue.
Needless to say, she’d spent many of the previous few months stoking the blaze of her disgust for a man she’d never met. Whereas he’d known her, watched her, maybe even passed her on the streets a few times or talked to her at the grocery store when she was picking up eggs or milk without her being aware. But somewhere after New Year’s and her decision to stop being a doormat and to start living her life on her own terms, her anger had slowly slipped away.
After all, the guy had only been doing what he’d been hired to do. It probably wasn’t personal to her. And if he hadn’t been hired to look into Spencer, then she might very well still be married to the lying, scummy, deceptive jerk.
At least that’s what she’d told herself. Until she’d gotten that letter about Ginny Johnson at risk of being kicked out of the place that had become her home. It felt only right that Waverley should finally come face-to-face with Mr. Reynolds Cavanaugh and let him see the repercussions of his actions and hopefully guilt him into helping her make things right.
In her mind, she’d imagined him to be some guy in his fifties who probably smoked at least a pack a day, wore rumpled old shirts, and had a fake, cheesy smile. Only Reynolds Cavanaugh wasn’t a smelly middle-aged man, and there certainly wasn’t anything cheesy about him.
To the contrary, Reynolds Cavanaugh was young, quite healthy, and far more handsome than she’d expected. Maybe not handsome in the traditional sense that people considered handsome like Spencer had been, all tall and lithe, with thick dark blond hair, a thin, patrician nose, molded cheekbones, and perfectly pearly white teeth thanks to regular bleaching.
Reynolds had a different quality about him. Almost…virile. He was shorter and stockier than Spencer, built more like a Mack truck than a Mercedes, with his thick, muscled arms that she had tried to ignore when he crossed his arms and frowned at her. His nose wasn’t long or refined but wide with a crook at the bridge like it had been broken a time or two, and his brows were unruly and as dark as his wavy hair that looked like he’d spent the greater part of the day pulling at and probably had never seen a can of texturing spray.
As to personality, Spencer had been long on charm even if short in sincerity as he smiled and teased the stodgiest socialites into granting him a smile. Reynolds’s ability to hold a conversation was right up there with that of a Buddhist monk.
And yet despite those differences and what she should find desirable in a man, there had been a strong vibration that reverberated from the depth of her belly and outward in the moment she first saw Reynolds Cavanaugh. A feeling that had only increased as he drew nearer, until he was standing over her, leaving her to stare into those dark brown eyes so penetratingly grim but also filled with intelligence and strength, that for a moment she’d completely forgotten why she was there.
She’d been so utterly captivated by this man and the raw, dangerous sex appeal he exuded that, even now, she was still trying to calm the butterflies fluttering in her belly and her heart’s erratic pounding as she remembered their meeting.
It was a miracle that she hadn’t chatted away with the nervous tension in the air. But she’d told herself too many times on the drive from Denver that she needed to be brief, to the point, and present a compelling case so he’d have no choice but to take it on.
Which he had. But also with a hefty fee she hadn’t expected.
After covering Ginny’s stay at the home through next month along with the past due amount, there wasn’t much left. She’d hoped to live on the meager leftovers until either Spencer was found and the money recovered, or, with the help of the attorneys her father hired, she regained her rightful property that the feds had seized.
She’d never considered the prospect of finding a regular job with an hourly pay until she’d actually asked for one a moment before. She’d never had to, embarrassingly enough. But even in the face of Reynolds’s rejection of her offer, she was becoming more and more convinced that it was the right thing for her at this time.
She needed to get out from under her father’s thumb, needed to stand on her own. It had nearly killed her going to him last week, trying to prevail on his sense of decency in helping her pay for Ginny’s bill at the center, but he’d scoffed. As he saw it, Spencer’s cheating, his lies, and his thievery were as much an affront to Waverley as they had been to him and the Abbott family, and he refused to help Spencer or, by extension, his sister, any longer than he had. Leaving it to Waverley to find another way.
And she had, temporarily at least.
But it still left the rest of her life to figure out. And the first step was to find an actual, bona fide job. Even if, like Reynolds had mentioned, other than her work at the foundation, a job that she doubted any real employer would take very seriously, she had no actual experience at holding a job. It also wasn’t going to help that her name and face—even as unrecognizable at that face might be these days—was well recognized in the state of Colorado thanks to the events of the past few months.
The only solution she saw before her was proving to Reynolds Cavanaugh that she was both capable and smart enough to handle whatever being a receptionist for a small private detective firm would entail.
She smiled, feeling a bit better already. She would be back here bright and early in the morning, and she’d convince him that she would be the best candidate for the job.
And if that failed, there was always a healthy dose of good old-fashioned guilt.
Starting the engine of her father’s vintage Mercedes that she’d been borrowing these past many months, she realized that in leaving her father’s house and going out on her own, she would also be leaving behind her only means of transportation for the next little while.
