Page 71 of The Last Dance You Saved
When I woke, the body I expected to have tucked up next to me was missing, and the shadowed gray light of the predawn hours filled the room. I was more pissed she wasn’t there than I was at the morning having found us.
I sat up and discovered her sitting on the floor next to the bed with my computer in her lap.
A hint of trepidation flew through me—old wounds and old doubts about those I could and couldn’t trust returning like the baggage it was—before it faded just as fast. Sadie didn’t have a malicious bone in her body. I wasn’t sure if she even hated the man who’d shot her.
I fisted her hair, dragging her head back against the bed so I could lock my gaze on hers.
“What are you doing?”
She smiled at me, and somewhere deep inside me, the last wall I hadn’t even known I’d left standing between us crumbled down, vanquished with that singular, stunning look. She put her hand over mine and squeezed.
“I think I found something.” Her voice was full of excitement.
I leaned over her shoulder, looking at the screen. “What?”
“When I woke up, I was thinking about how messed up Uncle Phil’s accounts were after he died. At first, I couldn’t make heads or tails out of them. All I knew was they didn’t reconcile. Then, Mama told me Uncle Phil was dyslexic, which meant he reversed numbers a lot. It was a pain in the ass to straighten it all out, but we did it in the end.”
My brows furrowed, and her smile widened at my obvious confusion, saying, “You said nothing in the accounts looked off when you took a quick glance at them. That was what happened with me too. It was only when I started lining up every invoice and every deposit that I found the differences, the inverse numbers scattered through them. If Uncle Phil had hired an accountant instead of insisting on doing it himself, it would never have been so screwed up—which made me wonder what an accountant who wanted to steal would do so it wasn’t obvious? Wouldn’t they just invert a few numbers here and there in places no one would notice?”
With my head full of her scent and that dazzling smile capturing me, it took an enormous effort to tear my gaze from her and turn to the screen.
“I didn’t have access to all the invoices,” she explained. “But looking at the ones I did find, I saw a few differences in what he said he paid compared to the actual amount due.”
She scrolled down through a spreadsheet she’d created. The first few columns were entitledbillsand had both the actual amount on the invoice and the amount paid side by side. Next to those columns were ones listing the invoices the ranch sent to clients and the amount received. I slid out of bed, planting my naked ass next to her T-shirt-clad one. It distracted me, seeing her in my shirt, but then I forced myself back to the screen in her lap. I pulled the computer onto my knees, swiping through the document.
It was a handful of bills and invoices, nothing compared to the full scope of the ranch’s books, but even in that small amount, she’d found twenty thousand dollars of discrepancies.
Fury burned through me.
He was stealing from his sister. From his niece. From my brother.
On the heels of that thought came a much worse realization. What if this was what Spence and Adam had been arguing about? What if he’d confronted Adam about the embezzlement, and it was the reason my brother was dead? Because of goddamn money.
“Is Adam dyslexic?” Sadie asked, but I barely registered her voice through the guttural roar and pain consuming me.
I tossed the computer onto the bed and headed for the dresser as red filled my vision, and anguish tore through my veins like an insidious poison, tainting every molecule. My body was rigid, muscles straining against skin and bones as I pulled on a pair of jeans and dragged a clean T-shirt over my head.
I threw open the door, and it hit the wall with a bang that echoed like a gunshot through the silent house. The stairs were cold as I took them two at a time, but they did nothing to cool the raging inferno inside me.
“Rafe!” Sadie called after me, but I didn’t stop. I leaped over the last three steps and barreled down the hall to the butler’s quarters where Adam had been staying.
Through the blood pounding in my ears, I heard her call my name again, heard her telling me to wait, that she wasn’t one-hundred-percent sure, and that we needed to do more research.
I wouldn’t wait. I wouldn’t be in control or stay calm.
I would strangle him until the breath left his body. Until he admitted the truth.
I half expected the door to the butler’s quarters to be locked, but when I spun the handle, it opened easily. The door flew into the wall with the same ferocity as mine had, shaking a shelf where dainty tea cups were on display.
The room was dark and quiet.
I flicked on the light and found a sitting room stuffed to the gills with Harrington heirlooms. The once plain and functional servant’s furniture had been replaced with a collection of items from around the house, including priceless art, antique Victorian chairs, and an irreplaceable escritoire desk.
Motherfucking thief!
I stormed through the pieces of my family’s history to the bedroom door and found it wasn’t locked either. The bedroom was fitted with more things that belonged to my family, including a beautifully carved bed that had once been in my childhood bedroom. He wasn’t even afraid of being caught with the items that didn’t belong to him! Didn’t even have the goddamn decency to hide them behind bolted doors.
My hope of dragging him from it, of slamming my fists into his flesh, evaporated at the sight of the neatly made bed. He’d either woken even earlier than us, or he hadn’t slept there at all. Through my simmering, blood-thirsty rage, I remembered him talking about a girlfriend. Some mysterious person no one seemed to have met.
