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Relief percolated inside her, making her feel suddenly giddy. “You believe that Brandon’s framing me?”
Ty Redstone bowed his head, his inky hair sliding in thick, sleek clumps behind his ears. “Problem is, I can’t prove it,” he said matter-of-factly, stepping to the end of the table. “Yet.” Beth didn’t know she was going to do it until her arms were around his neck and she was leaning into him across the blunt corner of the table.
“Thank you! Oh, thank you! You don’t know what a relief it is to—” She realized abruptly that he was standing with both arms raised, palms facing outward, the very antithesis of an embrace, while she wrapped herself around him. She realized, too, that his heart was slamming every bit as rapidly as her own. He was trying to keep his distance—and not completely succeeding.
Clearing his throat, he gingerly brought his hands to hers, gently disengaging her arms as he pushed her away.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, very aware that he wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he was focusing on the folder that he had laid on the end of the table.
“Sure. No biggie.”
“I suppose that sort of thing happens all the time,” she said, hearing the husky tenor of her voice.
“Uh, no, actually. That’s, uh, that’s a first.”
She was oddly pleased. “Really?”
He nodded and flipped open the folder. A hand drifted up to rub at the corner of one eye. “I’m usually considered kind of, oh, unapproachable.”
“Unapproachable?” she echoed disbelievingly. “You?” He slid her a look around the tip of his finger. She sensed a challenge in it, a watchfulness, a measuring calculation. She shook her head. “Uh-uh. No, that’s not how I’d describe you at all.”
“No? And how would you describe me?”
Beth knew she was being audacious and didn’t care. “Personable. Sexy. Drop-dead gorgeous.”
His mouth dropped open. Then he coolly folded his arms and swept his gaze over her, up and down and up again. She was breathless by the time he said, “Not even my friends would describe me as personable.” Amusement laced his tone. “I like my privacy too well for that.”
“Do you?” Beth said, swaying close again. “I can understand that.”
His dark eyes were focused intensely on hers, so compelling that she sensed, rather than saw, his smile. Then abruptly he pulled back again. “I bet you can. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t find the name Maitland somewhere in my daily newspaper.”
She wrinkled her nose, disappointed. “You get used to it after a while. Sort of.”
He shook his head and broke the eye contact. “Not me. The press are all over this one, and it’s driving me nuts.”
She winced and rushed to apologize. “Look, I’m sorry about that. She really didn’t do it on purpose, you know. They were going on and on about it, and she just sort of threw it out there.”
His smooth, copper brow furrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“My mother. She gave your names to the press, yours and Detective Jester’s.”
Ty chuckled. “Ms. Maitland, the press has had my name and number for years. Your mother may have saved some newshound an extra phone call to find out who was handling the investigation, but that’s all. Trust me on this.”
Beth laughed. “Oh, I’m so glad. I was afraid we’d caused you all kinds of trouble.”
“You have,” he said flatly.
“Oh.” Properly chastised—or at least pretending to be—she bowed her head, looking at him from beneath her brows.
“But not on purpose,” he admitted. “I know that. Comes with the Maitland territory, I guess.”
“I’m afraid it does,” she answered unapologetically.
He nodded and straightened, bringing his hands to his hips once more. “Listen,” he said after a moment of intense silence, “I don’t want you to worry. We’ll get to the truth.”
“I’m not worried, I’m angry,” she declared feelingly. “At first I just couldn’t believe Brandon would do this to me, that he’d go this far. Now…” She looked at Ty openly, needing an answer. “He killed her, didn’t he? He killed her to frame me.”
Ty shook his head. “Ms. Maitland, we have no proof of that.”
“Beth,” she corrected automatically.
“What?”
“Call me Beth. There are a number of Ms. Maitlands. I’m Beth.”
He shook his head again and picked up his thought. “We have no proof that Brandon Dumont killed his wife, and you’re not to go around telling people that he did—or even that I suspect him of framing you for the murder. That will only alert him to the focus of our investigation and give him a chance to more deeply bury his trail. Do you understand, Ms. Maitland?”
“Beth,” she repeated, and he sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose with one hand.
“Do you understand what I just told you, Beth?”
Pleased, she answered him primly. “Yes, I do, Ty.” She leaned forward slightly. “I may call you Ty, may I not?”
His lips twitched with what could have been a smile. “I suppose so.”
The light of interest fairly smoldered in his eyes, but he was working hard to suppress it. She didn’t want him to suppress it. She wanted just the opposite. Placing both hands on the tabletop, she leaned closer still. “Now who’s unapproachable?” she teased huskily. “I don’t think you’re unapproachable. I think you’re a blasted magnet.”
A slow grin spread across his face, and he leaned down, bringing his nose close to hers and flanking her hands with his. “And I suppose there’s iron beneath that sweet, feminine exterior of yours.”
“Must be,” she murmured, feeling breathless, as if he might be about to kiss her. When his gaze dropped to her mouth, she felt a surge of exultation and tilted her head. Suddenly the door opened, and Paul Jester breezed in.
Ty jerked back from her as if she’d suddenly developed an offending odor. She glared at Jester and barely restrained herself from stamping her foot. Jester sent a surprised look between the two of them and quickly closed the door.
“Uh… I, uh, I got the Velasquez statement.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Ty said smoothly. He tapped his lower lip with his forefinger and turned to face his partner, face totally expressionless.
Beth could only marvel. He did that so well, covered so smoothly. It was like a mask that he could produce at will. She, on the other hand, was all too transparent, blatant even. She wondered what he thought of that.
“What do you think?” Ty asked Paul, ignoring her.
Paul glanced at Beth and carefully hedged. “About Velasquez? Uh, we’ll have to check out a few things.”
“You can speak freely, Detective Jester,” Beth said, folding her arms. She glanced at Ty at the same time Jester did and added, “I’ve been given to understand that I’m no longer an actual suspect.”
Jester lifted both eyebrows at Ty. “Yeah?”
For the first time, Ty appeared a tad flustered. He licked his lips, then said, “Let’s say…not the chief suspect.”
Jester split another gauging look between them, accepted the obvious and shrugged. “I didn’t get much out of her,” he said baldly. “She just kept saying that Ms. Maitland called often, sounded mad and stopped by sometimes to shout at everyone. She couldn’t remember dates, and she kept apologizing, saying she didn’t want to hurt Ms. Maitland but couldn’t help it.” He looked at Beth. “She begged me to help you, says she knows you’re a good woman.” He addressed Ty. “I can’t help feeling that he’s got something on her.”
Ty looked at Beth. “What about that? You know any reason Ms. Velasquez could be coerced to give testimony against you?”
“It could have to do with Frankie,” Beth suggested.
“Her son?” Jester clarified.
“Yes. I know Brandon helped him enter the country once after he’d been deported. I don’t know how Brandon worked it. I just know that Letitia was weeping and thanking him one day. Her English was all jumbled together with Spanish, but it was all about Frankie. I know that.”
“Okay. That’s where we’ll start then,” Ty said.
“Maybe I should go with you,” Beth suggested quickly. “My Spanish is pretty good, and—”
“No.” It was a flat refusal, no room for compromise, and it hit her as patently unfair. It was her neck in the noose, after all.
“But—”
“No,” he repeated. “Officially, you’re still a suspect. I can’t let you tag along on an investigation. Jester will take care of the Velasquez question.”
“What about you?” she demanded.
He slid his hands into his pants pockets. “I want to take a look at Brianne Dumont’s background.”
“She had some socially prominent friends,” Beth pointed out quickly. “I could—”
“No!” Ty reiterated strongly.
Beth felt like a little girl being scolded for requesting a cookie. She shot to her feet, arguing, “They won’t tell you anything. They’ll speak more readily to someone they know.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just that I know these people. I know how their minds work. They’ll talk to me.”
“But not me,” he said, “because I’m not one of the club.”
“They’ll talk to me because they know me,” she argued.
“You’re one of their own, you mean!” he accused, jerking his hands from his pockets to snap up the folder on the table.
Paul made a sound that told Beth she’d overstepped, but she wasn’t sure how exactly. She glanced in his direction, then back to Ty. “Well, yes, if you want to put it that way.”
A flash of temper lit those midnight eyes. The mask slipped away, revealing his disdain. “I may not get my name into the society pages, but I know what I’m doing.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. You’re misreading me completely.”
“Leave the detective work to the professionals, Ms. Maitland,” he snapped. “Social standing doesn’t figure into this in any way.”
“I never said it did.”
“No, but you meant it,” he told her, striding toward the door. He threw it open and slid a scathing look over one shoulder. “I know exactly what you said and exactly what you meant. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have work to do.”
He was throwing her out. She considered, for a moment, digging in her heels, but a glance at Paul Jester told her that he wouldn’t recommend it. Another time then. Coolly, she snatched her purse and lifted her chin.
“I trust you’ll keep me informed, at least,” she said regally, sweeping toward the door.
“We’ll be in touch,” was the cool reply.
She meant to walk out without a backward glance, but she couldn’t do it, not after what had almost happened in this room only moments earlier. At the last second she stopped and turned, seeking his gaze with her own.
“Ty?” she said softly, imploringly.
For an instant, that icy disdain seemed to melt a little, but then he swept back the sides of his coat and parked his hands on his hips in a gesture of sheer implacability. “Go home, Ms. Maitland,” he ordered, “and let us do our jobs.”
Angrily, she whirled, fleeing a deep disappointment. But he was more than just wrong if he thought she was going to sit on her hands and wait for him to slowly dig up what she could uncover in a twinkle. It wasn’t the only thing about which Ty Redstone was wrong, but it was the one in which she was going to rub his handsome nose.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE DOLL-LIKE COUPLE smiled with practiced civility and murmured patent responses. Sitting side by side on their immaculate sofa in their immaculate home, they looked like magazine cutouts, perfectly groomed, perfectly dressed, and they did everything in tandem, including smile and politely evade substantiative answers to direct questions. With some inborn sense of protocol and timing, the husband politely checked his watch twice before bringing a firm end to the interview, if the efforts of Detectives Redstone and Jester could be called such.
More like a waste of time, Ty thought glumly as Jester aimed their nondescript, department-issue sedan toward the next address on their list. So it had gone for days now. The interviewees were interchangeable. The results as well. Nada. They hadn’t learned a darned thing. Brianne Dumont remained a cipher, a dead cipher, unfortunately. The answers to their questions were rote.
“I really couldn’t say.”
“I pay no attention to gossip and rumors.”
“One doesn’t like to pry into the private lives of others, you know.”
“We were friends, but casual acquaintances more than intimates.”
Brianne Dumont might have been a cardboard cutout for all the attention her “friends” seemed to have paid her. Undoubtedly she’d moved on the very fringes of the upper echelon of Austin society, but if she’d had another circle of intimate associates, they hadn’t been discovered yet. Her co-workers might have been more forthcoming than her so-called friends, but the late Mrs. Dumont had held herself aloof, letting them all know that they were beneath her consideration socially. Those listed in her personal address book and calendar were saying the same thing, albeit very politely, about her. The gist of it seemed to be, “She was around a lot, but we didn’t really know her and didn’t care to.”
As much as he hated to admit it, even to himself, Ty sensed that they were getting the royal runaround, just as Beth Maitland had predicted. What he wouldn’t give for one lousy scum sucker in the mix. That sort always had something to fear from law enforcement and so could be pressured, shaken, fouled up. These society types had money, prestige and respectability to fall back upon; they wouldn’t allow themselves to be intimidated by mere civil servants.
“Who’s next?” Paul asked, after flashing his badge and guiding the sedan expertly through the guard gate of one of the city’s more exclusive neighborhoods.
Ty checked his itinerary. “Name’s Giselle Womack. According to Dumont, she and Brianne were roommates for a short while after college until Giselle married.”
“Womack,” Paul said thoughtfully. “Hmm. Wouldn’t be any connection to Womack Industries, would there?”
Ty sighed. “Oh, yeah.”
“All this money in the world,” Paul said, shaking his head. “You’d think a little of it would fall on us, wouldn’t you?”
“Speak for yourself,” Ty said. “I don’t much like what money does to people.”
“Most of us don’t have that prejudice,” Paul quipped. “Personally, I’d like to see what a little of it could do to me.” He slowed the sedan and turned it off the broad, tree-lined street onto the pebbled circular drive of a large Italianate house in cream stucco and white marble.
Paul whistled. Ty groaned. “Does the term ‘exercise in futility’ mean anything to you?”
