“Yeah,” he said, not looking at her. “That’s why I put in for the transfer.”
“Do you think that Mercedes Epstein bidding on you at the auction had anything to do with…with the past, with your mother’s job at the Frontline?”
“Why the hell should it?” Truth was, that question really unsettled him. “Mercedes showing up at your auction probably has more to do with the old business your father had with Frank Epstein, Jenna, than anything to do with me.”
She stared at him in silence, opened the door. The interior light flared on and droplets of rain blew inside. But she wavered again.
“Lex?”
“What?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For showing me something about myself that I’d forgotten today. It meant a lot to me, being with you. And those kids.”
Lex didn’t trust himself to speak right now, so he said nothing.
She leaned forward suddenly, kissed him fast and light on the mouth, and was gone, door slamming shut as she ducked through the rain and ran up the stairs. Clive swung open the door for her, and she was swallowed by her mansion as it closed.
Lex shut his eyes for a nanosecond, still tasting her on this mouth. He inhaled deep.
He was a cop.
He’d acted like an idiot.
Enough games.
He’d crossed too many lines, and now he had to pull back. But as he drove out of the Rothchild driveway in the pelting storm, he knew that he’d already gone too far.
Because deep, deep down, a part of him knew that he was falling for Jenna.
In spite of himself.
Jenna crouched down in the hallway to ruffle Napoleon’s fur as he squiggled about her feet, happy to have her home. But as she petted her dog, she sensed a presence, someone watching from within the darkened interior of the adjacent living room.
She stilled, got slowly to her feet, walked into the dark room. “Hello?” she said, reaching for the switch of a lamp.
“Jenna.” Rebecca Lynn’s voice came from near the bar.
Jenna flicked on the lamp, saw her so-called stepmother sitting in a chair in front of the floor-to-ceiling window. From that window she’d have seen Lex’s SUV, possibly even Jenna kissing the agent, illuminated by the vehicle’s interior light because the door had been partially open at that point.
“Rebecca Lynn,” Jenna said coolly. “Why are you sitting in the dark? Is Ricky in bed already?”
Ricky was Harold’s newest child, his first with Rebecca Lynn, and his only son. Little Ricky was a spoiled kid, constantly being used as a bargaining chip in the relationship between Harold and his latest wife. A relationship that was going sour. Already.
“I was watching…the storm,” Rebecca Lynn said.
Jenna realized from the studied delivery of Rebecca Lynn’s words that her stepmother had already been drinking. Quite a bit.
“Was that the federal agent who dropped you off?” she asked. “The one on Candace’s case?”
“Why do ask?” Jenna said, recalling the movement in the drapes upstairs after she’d dashed out to Lex’s SUV yesterday.
She sighed dramatically. “Your father is hiding things from you, Jenna. Do you know that?”
Here we go again, trying to drive a wedge between me and my dad. “Look, I don’t have time for this, Rebecca—”
“Oh, I think you do.” She pushed herself up out of the chair, wobbled, smiled, then teetered over to the bar. She poured a heavy shot of gin, topped it with tonic and plopped a slice of lemon in, stirring it with her pinky. “I’d be surprised if that FBI agent doesn’t think you could have done it.”
“Done what?”
“Murdered Candace.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, are you insane? Or is that the gin talking again?”
“Hmm.” She sucked the moisture off her pinky. “I did happen to tell the FBI there was no love lost between you and Candace, you know? I told them that when they questioned me the first time around. And then—” she took a sip from her glass “—Agent Duncan came to see me at work this morning. He asked me again about your relationship with Candace. Did he tell you that, Jenna?”
A cold chill seeped through her. Lex hadn’t mentioned it.
“He didn’t, did he?”
The feeling deepened. “Why should he? It’s his case, he can’t talk about the details with me.”
“He’s using you, Jenna Jayne, to get inside the Rothchild cloak of secrecy.” She made a woo woo motion with her hands.
“Nonsense—I was the one who set him up at the auction remember?”
“At whose request, I wonder?”
“Well, that should prove a point, shouldn’t it? The Rothchilds are the ones using him, not vice versa.” Hell, why had she even said that? Rebecca Lynn was baiting her and fool that Jenna was, she’d taken the lure. Hook, line and sinker.