Page 146 of Untouchable

Attached was a photograph. He felt wrong, guilty, like he was stomping all over Kelly’s privacy, as he clicked it to pull it up.

But he still did it.

The photograph took him a few seconds to identify as one of the annual company picnics his father had thrown for Reliant. This one must be from around twenty years ago based on his father’s appearance and the clothes people wore. It was a casual snapshot, and there were a lot of employees and their families scattered around the park, eating and talking.

It didn’t take him long to find what was significant about this particular photograph.

One of the women in the background looked enough like Kelly to make him jerk. Zooming in to see her more closely, Caleb peered at her face, her long blond hair.

She was older than Kelly was now, but she had to be related. And right next to her was a little girl with the same long, blond hair. Caleb wasn’t skilled at identifying the age of children, but he guessed she was maybe eight or nine.

Kelly.

That little girl was Kelly.

At a picnic for employees of Reliant.

His heart was freezing into a hard block in his chest as he shifted the zoom on the image to the side. To the man beside the woman and girl.

He recognized the man. There was no way he could fail to recognize him.

It took a full five minutes for the reality to process.

When it finally did, the photo, his computer screen, his monitor, his whole office blurred in front of his eyes.

He was shaking all the way from his teeth down to his feet. He couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t understand it. It left him cold and numb.

Kelly’s father had worked for him. Caleb had been his supervisor. He thought he might have even seen a picture of her as a child on her dad’s desk, although the memory was too vague now to retrieve.

Her father had been murdered. Her mother had been sure the DiMauros were responsible. And now Kelly was here—with him, hiding what shemusthave known.

The whole story came together slowly, but it clicked into place with perfect precision.

She was here on purpose. She thought he had killed her father. She wanted him to pay. There was no Russian gangster. Nothing about what they’d had together was real.

All of it—all of it—nothing but the worst kind of lies.

He loved her, but she didn’t love him.

She must hate him. She must absolutely, irrevocably hate him to have done what she’d done, used him so heartlessly, not even cared when he’d fallen head over heels in love with her.

He was shaking so much now that his teeth were chattering, so he stifled it, held it back.

Tried to hold everything back.

All his life he had been smart and careful. All his life he’d protected his heart. Never in his life had he been a fool.

Until now.

It hurt so much he couldn’t even feel it anymore, but he kept holding it back until he thought he might actually be sick.

Then his phone vibrated with a text and he reached for it blindly, taking a full minute before he could focus enough to read the words.

I’m coming over now.Kelly. Coming to him. Acting like nothing had changed. Like they were really in love.

When they weren’t. They just weren’t.

Caleb finally lost it. With a roar of anguished rage, he grabbed his sleek, high-end computer monitor, yanked it away from the cords, and hurled it across the room to slam against the far wall.