Page 53 of Sinful Attraction

The only question now is whether I let it rule my thoughts or go somewhere I know it will get pushed out by something a lot more pleasant quickly enough.

The parking lots are full when I get to the docks, and I swear as I circle them for a while. Finally, someone pulls out, and I take their place.

It rains on me the whole three-block walk to Michael’s houseboat. I do my best to watch my footing and not let the downpour dampen my mood further, but I’m nearly soaked by the time I step off the pier, and he opens the houseboat door for me.

“Jesus, that was crazy,” I sigh as I walk in. Then, I see two filled suitcases of his, smell whiskey on him, and stop short, turning to stare at him in surprise.

He shuts the door behind me and locks it before he says anything. Then, he quietly says, “I found our perp, and I got kicked out of my house for it.”

His expression looks so desolate that I know his day has been a lot worse than mine. “Shit,” I say unhappily. “It’s your sister, isn’t it?”

He nods silently. “Don’t say ‘I told you so,’ please.”

“I’m not that much of an asshole.” I hug him instead. “What can I do?”

“Come sit with me, have some iced tea. I’m off booze for right now.” He leads me around the suitcases to the couch. I sit down with him and nestle against him, and he slings an arm around me to pull me closer against his side.

We stay there for a while. He sometimes goes in for a kiss: slow, sweet, and lingering. But then, he just goes back to sitting there.

By the end of that, he seems better, and I feel a little better, too. “It’s definitely my sister,” he says finally. “With the guy you were looking into as an accomplice. She has the money, and she’s even hiding it from him.”

He sounds almost despairing in spots. I brush my fingertips over his shoulder, and he sighs.

“My father won’t accept the truth without hard evidence or a witness, and since I can’t pin my sister to anything directly, we have to go with the witness. But my dad’s men let the sonovabitch go.”

“So, we have to find him. We’ve already made some progress...”

That’s when he pulls out a wallet. It has a naked woman with giant tits branded into the leather on one side and “NO LUBE NO WARNING” branded into the other. “This should help.”

I stare. “Wait a second. You lifted his fucking wallet?”

That’s when he grins, and I start to be a lot less worried.

But I’m still pissed, especially when I begin getting more details out of Michael while I go through the wallet. Brian Cleary. Late thirties, had a card for his own computer business. And from what Michael is saying, an incel. The kind of shit that flies out of this Brian guy’s mouth just screams it.

“So, here’s my big theory on what happened, using the facts we know,” I say finally.

He nods. “Let’s hear it,” he says without a hint of contentiousness in his tone. The argument that almost tore us apart has been settled.

I don’t feel smug about that. I’m not happy that he has been proven wrong and that it turns out his sister is not only a brat but a family Judas. I’m not enjoying being right, not when I see the tired and baffled sadness lurking in Michael’s eyes.

It hurts to see it, but since he kept his wits during one of the hardest moments of his life, we now know a lot more about his sister’s accomplice.

“Your sister has no common sense and is an airhead, but people like that can still be very cunning. She paid attention to the details of you planning to take money from me and my family, and she decided to hire a black hat to do the same to you. She hires this asshole Brian Cleary, who probably talks his way out of a lot of good jobs with that mouth of his and is thus financially desperate.”

He’s starting to smirk again. “Go on.”

“So, he steals my work from you just like you stole it from me, and then he leaves it for your sister to use, probably using a plug-and-play system on a thumb drive or similar so she can’t fuck it up. She steals the money. She pays him half of what she owes him and tells him to come back in a week for the rest.”

He nods, looking a touch grimmer. I am sure it hurt his pride to be stolen from, but he has to know I still don’t have much sympathy for his situation. He didn’t break my relationship with my family—it was already falling apart—but he did steal from me and humiliate me, and so far, I haven’t seen any kind of compensation.

But that’s a bill to settle once his sister has seen her comeuppance, and we have the original five million back. Right now, I’m focused on that.

“So, my family freaks out, your family freaks out, your sister gets your extended family gossiping to throw up a smoke screen around her activities and sap your energy. And meanwhile, she still hasn’t paid Brian Cleary his other quarter million.”

He sighs. “And that brings us to tonight when he went off like a fireworks display in my sister’s bedroom and nearly strangled her. Because she decided to hire an unstable creep.”

“Lowest bidder?” I suggest as a motive.

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