Page 117 of A Legal Affair
Daniela stared, in abject horror, as a black-and-white photograph of herself leaving Roarke Investigations landed right at her feet.
“How apropos,” Caleb jeered. “That’s the very same photo I wanted you to see. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, Miss Roarke. What do you suppose that particular picture is saying?”
Daniela knelt down to pick it up, her heart sinking further when she saw her smiling image, and realized how Caleb must have interpreted it. She looked up at him. “It wasn’t like that, Caleb,” she said, imploring him to believe her.
“Oh, really?” he mocked bitingly. “So youdidn’tleave campus after we spoke that day and run straight to your brothers to brag about landing an interview with my father?”
“I didn’t brag!” she cried, surging to her feet. “If anything, I was hoping they’d talk me out of going!”
Shaking his head slowly, Caleb raked her with a look of withering scorn. “You must really take me for a fool, Daniela. And why wouldn’t you? I fell for your little scheme—hook, line and damn sinker. Oh, you were good, I’ll give you that. Oscar-winning good. That whole help-me-find-my-calling act was inspired.”
“It wasn’t an act!”
His brow arched in cynical disbelief. “So you reallydohave an interest in becoming a lawyer? Is that what you’re telling me?” When she floundered, he nodded tersely. “That’s what I thought.”
Daniela took a beseeching step toward him. “Listen to me, Caleb. Almost everything I told you about myself is true. About my family, about where I attended college?—”
“That’s even more insulting,” he bit out. “You were so confident in your ability to win my trust that you didn’t even bother to invent a solid alias. It never once occurred to you that I might see through your lies, that I might grow suspicious enough to check into your background. My God, Daniela, you didn’t even bother supplying the school with a fake address! All it would’ve taken was a basic online search to ascertain the name of the homeowner at this address, and you would’ve been busted. But that never occurred to you, did it? You and your brothers knew I would be easy prey?—”
“No!” Daniela cried, unable to bear the thought of him somehow blaming himself for letting down his guard with her. “That wasn’t it at all! I never for one moment thought you’d be easy prey! We made the decision to stick as close to the truth as possible to make it easier for me to…to—” She couldn’t even bring herself to complete the awful explanation, which sounded far worse than she could have ever imagined.
“To lie to me,” Caleb finished for her. “You stuck close to the truth to help you keep your lies straight. Brilliant strategy.” He shook his head, his mouth twisting contemptuously. “I must commend you for pulling it off, Miss Roarke. I never saw you coming.”
Tears crowded in Daniela’s eyes and rolled, unchecked, down her face. “If you believe nothing else I say, Caleb,” she told him in an aching whisper, “believe me when I tell you that I never meant to hurt you.”
His gaze hardened. “You’ll forgive me if I have a hard time believing that,” he mocked scornfully. His eyes narrowed on hers. “Tell me something,” he said, understated menace in every inflection. “What did you really expect to learn about my father? What deep, dark secret did you hope to expose by seducing me?”
She shook her head helplessly, on the verge of hysteria. “I don’t know, Caleb!” she choked out miserably. “Hoyt Philbinthinks your father has ties to the Mexican mafia, that he tampers with juries and engages in economic espionage, that he accepts bribes from corrupt labor union bosses and extorts money from his clients.”
When she’d finished rattling off the litany of alleged offenses, Caleb said in a low, quelling voice, “Hoyt Philbin doesn’t believe a single one of those things. And you know why? Because they’re not true.”
“I’m just letting you know what I was told!”
“Yeah? Did Philbin also tell you that he’s hated my father for over forty years, long before Crandall built his empire and became a target of random government audits and secret investigations?” At Daniela’s surprised look, Caleb’s mouth twisted sardonically. “Did you seriously think your ‘undercover operation’ was the first my father has ever endured? Did you think your little detective agency was the only one Philbin had ever approached to help him in his personal crusade to take down my father?”
He didn’t raise his voice above a low growl, and yet each word snapped in the air like the crack of a whip, lashing at Daniela, breaking her down until she sank weakly onto the sofa and dropped her head into her cupped hands.
But he wasn’t finished with her yet. “Did Philbin tell you therealreason behind his grudge against my father? No? You mean he didn’t tell you that long before he met his wife, Tessa, she and my father were madly in love? He didn’t tell you how young, social-climbing Tessa deserted my father for Hoyt Philbin because he was white, and his political future looked more promising than Crandall’s? And he didn’t tell you that forty years ago, my father and Tessa saw each other again for the first time in ages, that one thing led to another and they wound up having an affair? And out of that affair came my half-sister, Melanie, who was born a little too dark-skinned for Hoyt’sliking, so he made Tessa give her up for adoption, telling her that they’d have other children later, when his political career was more established.”
Aghast, Daniela could only stare up at him, unable to believe the incredible tale he was sharing with her.
Coldly amused by her horrified expression, Caleb gave a soft, mirthless laugh. “This is the kind of dirt you were looking for, isn’t it, Daniela?” he taunted bitterly. “This is what you hoped I would tell you during pillow talk. Oh, but wait, it only gets better.”
Her heart constricted painfully. “Caleb?—”
“Let me finish!” His voice softened to a silky, dangerous caress as he added, “After all, it’s the least I can do, since I never gave you the ammunition you came into my life seeking.”
Swallowing hard, Daniela closed her eyes for a moment. It was impossible to reconcile this cold, ruthless version of Caleb with the tender, fiercely passionate lover who’d brought her to shuddering heights of ecstasy every time they made love.
But it wasshewho’d brought him to this dark moment, tension and lethal fury radiating from his body as he stood a few feet away from her, no doubt wishing he’d never set eyes on her.
“When I was fourteen years old,” Caleb began, his voice low and controlled, “I came home from school one day to find my parents kneeling over the dead body of a nineteen-year-old girl. They told me that the girl had broken into the house wielding a gun, and that she planned to rob and kill them. When I looked down at the body, all I saw were torn jeans, ratty sneakers and wild, dirty hair. I remember thinking that shelookedlike a homeless person capable of violence, so I believed them. I was so scared and shaken up that it didn’t even occur to me to wonder why the girl looked so much like me. And then the police arrived, and my father told them what had happened, that he’d accidentally shot the intruder during a struggle for the gun.The police filed a report and conducted an investigation that eventually cleared my parents of any suspicion of wrongdoing, and after a while the whole thing went away. Until sixteen years later, when Hoyt Philbin paid me a visit at work bearing an envelope full of court-sealed documents.That’show I found out that the girl my father accidentally killed that day was actually my half-sister, Melanie, who’d been bounced around foster care homes all her life until she finally aged out of the system at eighteen.
“Before that day, I never even suspected that I had a sister out there somewhere. Philbin told me that she’d gone to the house to confront my father about abandoning her, just as she’d confronted Tessa the day before. He claimed that my father killed Melanie to keep her from going to the media, but he was never able to prove it—though he’s never stopped trying. As you can imagine, I was devastated by this news. Having to learn about Melanie from my father’s long-time enemy sent me into a fucking rage. The second he left, I punched a hole in the wall and sliced my hand open.” He held up his scarred, tattooed hand for emphasis. “I’d already been thinking about leaving the firm. As I told you before, I was burned out, physically and emotionally. Learning about my half-sister, knowing that my father kept the truth from me all those years, hastened my decision to leave.”
As Daniela gazed at him, tears welled in her eyes, and her heart broke for him. She mourned the tragic loss of innocence he and his sister had suffered so senselessly. And she mourned the life of a desperate young woman who’d been cast aside like a ragdoll because of the selfish, reckless actions of the three adults who’d failed her.
“I’m so sorry, Caleb,” Daniela whispered brokenly. “I had no idea.”
