Page 112 of Whispers

“He’s a prick!” Sean’s voice filtered through the screen as he bounded down the stairs.

“Wait a minute. Don’t talk like that.”

“He is. I saw the way he looked at you. He just wants . . . well, you know.”

She opened the screen door and found her son, freshly scrubbed from a shower, hair wet, clean shorts and T-shirt, standing on the bottom step of the staircase and towering over her. He’d grown so fast and he looked so much like Kane. Why neither one had noticed, she couldn’t fathom. But, for the time being, it was a blessing.

“I don’t trust him,” Sean said, glaring through the mesh of the screen. “Not half as far as I could throw him.”

He was waiting for her. The minute Miranda drove into the garage of her row house in Lake Oswego, Denver Styles climbed out of a rental car he’d parked across the street.

Great, Miranda thought, just what I need. Grabbing her briefcase and purse, she locked her car and pressed a button to close the garage door. Not that it mattered. By the time she walked up the five steps to the living room level, he was at the front door, leaning on the bell.

“Determined son of a gun,” she said, tossing her briefcase and purse onto a chair in the kitchen before walking to the foyer and opening the door. “What is it?”

“We need to talk.”

“There’s nothing to discuss.”

He arched a serious black eyebrow. “I think so.”

“I said everything to you I needed to when we met with my father. I don’t know why he’s obsessed with the idea that any one of my sisters or I had anything to do with Harley Taggert’s death.”

“Because he halted the investigation himself and he knows that Kane Moran won’t give up until he finds out the truth.”

“The truth is that we were at the drive-in and—”

“And I would think you’d want to know what happened to Hunter Riley.”

Her knees nearly gave way. “Hunter?”

“You were involved with him.”

Sixteen years were suddenly stripped away and she was eighteen again, running along the beach, holding Hunter’s hand, meeting him at the cottage, making love to him until the wee hours of the night. Her heart nearly collapsed on itself. “Hunter . . . Hunter was my friend.”

“Who left you.”

“He took a job in Canada.”

“Did he?” Styles’s eyes, gray and harsh, didn’t flinch. His lips compressed. “He never made it to the logging camp.”

She held on to the wall for support. “But Weston Taggert told me—he showed me employment records.”

“And you believed him?” Styles shoved his hands into the back pocket of his jeans. “From what I understand there was no love lost between your family and the Taggerts.”

“Can’t argue with that,” she admitted, hardly finding her voice. What was he suggesting? That Hunter had lied to her? To everyone? That he skipped out because she was pregnant? An old pain, raw as if it were brand new, sliced through her heart and nearly drove her to her knees.

“Except for your sister Claire. She was engaged to Harley.”

“But she broke it off that night,” Miranda said, scrabbling to grab onto the rags of her composure. She couldn’t slip, couldn’t allow Denver Styles to find a chink in the armor that was her alibi.

“That’s right.” He looked past her into the house. “Why don’t you invite me in?” he suggested. “I think we have a lot to discuss.”

Tessa was back. And looking better than she had the last time he’d seen her. With shaking hands, Weston lit a cigarette and walked out to the back deck, where Kendall insisted he smoke. Why he put up with his wife, he didn’t know. Maybe because she had a certain class to her, maybe because he knew she’d take him to the cleaners if he ever made noise about divorce, or maybe because she turned her head and allowed him his little dalliances. She was nothing if not loyal, his wife.

He leaned against the rail and looked out to sea. A fishing trawler was moving slowly along the horizon, and a few hazy clouds deigned to hide the sun. From this monstrosity of a house on the hill, he could look over the town of Chinook and feel as if he were the king.

The house was Kendall’s idea. Glass, cedar, brick, and tile, it curved along the face of the cliff and glinted in the reflection of the sunset. The largest and most ostentatious house on the northern coast, it fit him and his passion for building his own empire. He hadn’t been content to run his father’s businesses. No, when he took over, he’d pushed for expansion and now there were three more resorts on the coast, an interest in a casino on tribal lands to the south, and two more sawmills in western Washington. And each time he outbid Dutch Holland for another scrap of land, each time he raised a bronze sign for Taggert Industries over another development or building, each time he heard that Dutch’s interests were dwindling, he felt a moment’s satisfaction. Take that you old bastard. That’s what you get for fucking my mother.