Wind Chime Wedding (A Wind Chime Novel Book 2) (26 page)

He wasn’t the kind of man who could slip into a room unnoticed. Becca’s fingers curled around the chipped wood at the edge of her desk. She hadn’t seen him or spoken to him since the night before, when she’d gone to his apartment, when she’d kissed him. The memories swam back—his lips, warm and firm and hungry on hers. His hands, strong and calloused, cruising over her hips, her waist, her breasts. His voice, desperate and pleading, asking her to stay.

She looked quickly over at Luke, worried he wouldn’t want the attention. But Luke’s eyes were focused like lasers on Colin and it didn’t appear that he seemed at all concerned that everyone else had gone completely quiet.

“Hey, buddy,” Colin said easily, as if it were just the two of them in the room and close to thirty people weren’t hanging on his every word. “Your uncle had to stay at the inn and work on something for me. I told him I’d stop by and see how you were doing.”

It was a lie, Becca thought. Why would he come here and lie for Jimmy? Why would he cover for him this way? As far as she knew, Colin hadn’t had any contact with Luke before the other day when he’d picked him up on the side of the road. He barely knew him.

Luke blinked, but he didn’t hunch his shoulders or shy away from the attention. “I’m fine.”

Colin gestured to the drawing of the flying fish. “What are you working on?”

Luke quickly passed the paper to another person at the table. “That’s not mine.”

Snagging a chair from the back of the room, Colin pulled it up to the table. Nodding to the rest of the parents in the group, he sat down.

Luke stared at him. “You’re…staying?”

Colin nodded.

Luke’s eyes widened. “For how long?”

“As long as you want me to.”

Luke’s mouth fell open, stayed that way for a few beats, then broke into a wide grin. “Cool,” he breathed, pushing the hood of his sweatshirt back from his face and scooting his chair closer to the table.

Beside him, Colin leaned back in his seat, folded his hands in his lap, and looked back at Becca, as if it were perfectly normal for him to offer to spend the day in a classroom with a child he barely knew.

Becca was aware, in some far off corner of her mind, that it was time for her to say something, to take charge of the room again. But her tongue felt thick, her mouth dry. She didn’t trust herself to speak. Not yet.

How was she going to handle having him here, in her classroom, for the rest of the day?

She could barely be in the same room with Colin for five minutes without wanting to touch him, without wanting to be near him, without feeling—every time he looked at her—like her entire body was on fire. Tearing her eyes from his, she looked up at the clock in the back of the room, silently counting the hours left in the day.

The second hand ticked. A teacher’s voice from a neighboring classroom drifted down the hall. Her gaze swept over the walls covered in student artwork, the wooden counter in the back overflowing with craft supplies, the bookshelves filled with worn paperbacks and hand-me-down textbooks, the cubbies painted bright rainbow colors.

Just as she had when he’d first come to her house, she imagined how this room might look through his eyes—how this classroom, her mother’s old classroom, a place that meant almost as much to her as her own home, would look to him. Nerves jumped, low in her belly, as if this were the first class she’d ever taught, the first time she’d ever stood up in front of a room full of parents and students.

Why did she care so much about what he thought?

When someone quietly cleared her throat in the front row, she glanced down, jolted from her thoughts. Annie looked back at her, watching her with a strange expression on her face. It was the first time Annie had really looked at her in days, not since the news about the school had come out.

Becca swallowed, looking away. Many of her friends were watching her strangely now. When one woman lifted an eyebrow, Becca felt a flush of color creep up her cheeks. Turning, as several more brows went up, she glanced back at the day’s schedule printed in neat handwriting on the chalkboard. “Let’s move on,” she said quickly, grabbing a math workbook from the pile of books on her desk. “Everybody open to page fifteen.”

“What about the next story?” a child in the front row asked.

Right, Becca thought, her heart fluttering in her throat. The next story. They still had two more to go. She set the book back down, her hands shaking as she wiped her damp palms over the front of her skirt. How was she going to pull this off if she couldn’t get a hold of herself?

“Erica,” she said, forcing herself to get a grip as she called on one of the girls at the table in the back by the door. Her voice sounded funny, far off, like she was speaking through a tunnel. “Why don’t you read us your story?”

Erica began to read the story, and Becca stole a glance at her father. He was watching her closely, a worried look on his face. She attempted a smile to put him at ease, but it felt forced, even to her. She rested her hands on the back of her chair, trying to regain her composure, letting a full minute pass before risking a glance back over at Colin.

When she did, she saw that his body was relaxed, his expression perfectly calm, but he was gazing back at her with the same heat and intensity as he had the night before. And she knew, without a doubt, that he hadn’t taken his eyes off her since the moment he’d sat down.

She tried, fleetingly, to imagine that it was Tom in that chair, that it was Tom who had dropped everything to be here for Luke today, that it was Tom who had cleared his schedule to spend the day at the school.

But she knew he would never do that.

He would never dream of taking off a day of work to hang out with a kid he barely knew. He hadn’t even been willing to take Easter Sunday off to spend the day with her and her father.

Colin held her gaze, as if it were just the two of them in the room, as if it had always been just the two of them.

She heard the faintest sound of silver charms clinking together—a delicate, familiar song drifting over the wind—and her heart simply turned over in her chest.

W
e have a problem,” Jenna Price said, walking into Tom’s office in Baltimore and shutting the door.

Looking up from his computer, Tom eyed the firm’s youngest investigator. Barely a year out of college, she had already managed to make a name for herself by uncovering valuable information on a number of cases that had led to several crucial verdicts coming out in their favor. Every lawyer at the firm fought over her time, not just because she was good at what she did, but because she was nice too look at, too.

“What’s up?” he asked, reluctantly lifting his gaze from the perky breasts straining against her tight sweater. He’d earned a right to look a few months ago when they’d celebrated one of her first big wins by downing a bottle of champagne in his office and then screwing each other’s brains out in the elevator on the way down to the parking garage.

“I did some digging into the claims Lydia made against Governor Foley, like you asked.” Jenna sauntered up to his desk and dropped a manila envelope on it. “Turns out, our client was bending the truth a bit.”

Tom frowned, reaching for the envelope. “What do you mean?”

Lowering herself to a chair across from him, she crossed her legs. Her short skirt rode up several inches, exposing a pair of long, toned thighs. Tom tried to focus on emptying the contents of the envelope but his gaze strayed helplessly back to her legs.

He knew what those legs felt like locked around his waist, what those breasts felt like pressed into his palms, what sounds she made when she came. They’d had a few more slip ups recently—two weeks ago in the copy room on the eleventh floor, a week ago in the supply closet down the hall, and the night before on the conference table in the boardroom after everyone else had left.

Who could blame him?

He had needs—needs a woman like Becca could never fulfill. It was unfortunate that Jenna was falling in love with him. He knew she was secretly hoping he’d leave his fiancé for her. But Jenna wasn’t the kind of woman a man like him married. She was the kind of woman he had sex with before going home to a wife like Becca.

Tom forced his gaze back to the contents of the envelope, flipping through what looked to be a new set of financial statements and a collection of photographs of a man and a woman on a beach wrapped up in each other’s arms. The woman in the photographs was obviously Lydia, about ten years younger, but he didn’t recognize the man. “Who’s that?”

“Henry Cooper.”

Tom’s eyes widened as all thoughts of a midday tryst with Jenna vanished. “What?”

“They were having an affair.”

“But…” Tom struggled to wrap his head around it. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Actually, it makes perfect sense.” Jenna leaned back in her chair. “Lydia said Henry invested in her charity in exchange for political favors once her husband got elected, but she never said
who
made those promises.”

Tom looked back down at the photos. It did make sense. In a twisted way, it made perfect sense. With Henry’s investment, Lydia would get the money she needed for her school in the Dominican Republic and, once her husband became governor, the Maryland school system she had worked in all her life would get a brand new stream of tax revenue that would flow in from the casinos.

A sinking feeling formed in his gut as he realized what he’d done. He’d handed this information to his boss to use publicly, against his opponent, before fact checking it. Richard had asked him specifically if he’d verified it, and he’d said that he had. But the truth was, he’d only done a quick Google search to make sure the school in the Dominican Republic existed, and as soon as he’d seen that it had, he’d simply assumed the rest was true.

If Richard found out about this, he’d lose his job. He looked back up at Jenna, racking his brain for a way to cover his ass. “Even if Lydia was the one who made the promises, the governor’s still liable. His name was on the statements when the donations came into the account. He had to have known what was going on.”

“Not necessarily. I managed to track down one of the original teachers at the school. She said Nick Foley never came down to the island, never even visited the school. It was entirely Lydia’s project. Besides,” she said, nodding to the rest of the papers in his hands. “He signed the entire account over to Lydia before the divorce, a year before he even announced he was running for governor. Any political favors he might have granted when he got into office would have gone to people who’d supported his campaign—not to a person who’d supported a charity that belonged to his ex-wife.”

Tom’s heart pounded as he flipped through the papers, desperate to find something that would excuse what he’d done. “So, what are you saying? That none of what Lydia said was true? What about the other contribution, the one Henry made to the veterans’ center?”

“It took me about five minutes on the phone with his secretary to find out that the reason Henry Cooper invested in Colin Foley’s wounded warrior charity was because his older brother was a Vietnam vet who lost both legs in the war.” She gave him a long, measuring look. “Three months after he came home, he killed himself because he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.”

Tom gaped at her, his head spinning. Why would Lydia bring this information to them if it would fall apart so easily in an investigation? Why would she risk ruining her own reputation when the truth was exposed? “She must have known that we’d look into the claims, that we’d find out about the affair, the promises, Henry’s brother…?”

“I think she was counting on Richard running with it before that, which is why she waited to bring it to us until the night before the announcement—so there wouldn’t be enough time to do a thorough investigation. Besides,” she said, nodding back to the pictures, “Lydia and Henry were very discreet. Those pictures weren’t easy to track down. It’ll take Nick Foley’s investigators weeks to find them, if they even find them at all. In the meantime, enough voters will turn against him, will question his integrity as a leader. Even when the truth comes out, it’ll seem like he’s making excuses. It’ll make him look weak.”

Tom stared at her. “You think she’s been sitting on this information all this time, just waiting to use it against her ex-husband when he ran for a second term?”