Luck Is No Lady(20)
Freddie Goodwin had been with him from the day Bentley’s opened its doors nearly four years ago. Goodwin’s financial reports were produced promptly when requested, and the information was always presented in a way Roderick could easily decipher. Roderick never considered it odd that Goodwin preferred to handle every aspect of the books personally, even when he went out of town on holiday. It made sense the accountant would not want someone interrupting his system. Besides, Bentley’s turned a steady profit, and as long as their stores were full and their coffers sufficient to hold for the time Freddie was away, Roderick saw no reason to cross that threshold.
He never once sensed anything deceptive in the accountant’s modest character. Roderick may be a horrid hand at figures, but he had always been able to trust his intuition.
Then fifteen days ago, Freddie Goodwin disappeared.
On that day, while Roderick waited for his bookkeeper to come to his office for a scheduled appointment, a sick feeling settled in his stomach. The longer he waited, the worse he felt. When he finally decided to search for the man, he discovered Goodwin’s rooms within the club had been emptied sometime the night before.
Tracing back through everything he knew about Goodwin, Roderick had hoped to discover some clue to his former employee’s motivation and his new whereabouts. Unfortunately, every lead ran into a dead end. Frederick Goodwin didn’t seem to exist beyond the scope of his dealings as Bentley’s bookkeeper.
Goodwin did, however, leave behind the ledgers detailing Bentley’s accounts from day one to present. It was as if he didn’t even care to conceal his actions now that he had gotten away. He was clearly quite confident in having made a safe escape. That, or he didn’t think his employer would find anything useful in the accounts.
Most everyone assumed Roderick’s acumen with investments involved mathematical skill. It didn’t. He made his money on the exchange the same as he made it at the gambling tables: through pure gut instinct.
Goodwin had been with him long enough to know that.
Still, Roderick had quickly gathered up the ledgers to review the club’s financial data, searching for evidence of embezzlement. Despite hours of studying the rows and columns of numbers and symbols, he never got beyond the feeling he was trying to read ancient hieroglyphics.
He finally accepted that he would need to bring in someone with the proper skills to decipher the accounts. But he was not going to make the same mistake twice. After placing the advertisement a full week ago, Roderick had received numerous applicants, all of them quite adequately versed in the required skill set.
He had hired none of them.
Not one of them had discovered anything out of the ordinary in Freddie’s accounting. They had all, each and every one of them, come up with the exact same total the bookkeeper had documented in the ledger. Yet Roderick remained convinced there was something off about the calculations. He just hadn’t the skill to find it. And apparently, none of the applicants had either.
It was terribly frustrating.
He returned his gaze to the young lady calling herself Mrs. Adams just as she rose abruptly to her feet with her gloves in one hand and the financial documents held delicately in the other. She had finished the calculations much faster than her predecessors.
When she saw him staring at her, she hesitated.
He did not shift his focus, and after a moment, she came forward to set the paperwork on the desk. Taking a step back, she drew the serviceable gloves back over her hands, linked her fingers in front of her, and waited. She moved as though she had carefully calculated the amount of energy required for every physical adjustment and did not expend the slightest bit more than absolutely necessary.
She was rather attractive in a buttoned-up, impervious sort of way. Perhaps even more so than when she had been in her ballroom finery. Her figure was gently curved and perfectly proportionate to her height. He might have called her petite if not for the fact that the strength of her presence belied such a diminutive description. But more than the pleasant makeup of her physical attributes, an element of mystery lay carefully concealed beneath her subdued appearance.
Roderick narrowed his gaze.
She allowed very little to show in her expression or manner, but he noticed one thing she could not disguise. If he hadn’t been so familiar with the look of desperation, having seen it a thousand times in his life, starting with his mother, he might have missed its presence in this woman. But there it was, crouching in the shadows of her intelligent gaze.
Right alongside the desperation, Roderick detected something his mother had never possessed: fortitude. The young woman’s strength of character was present in the taut line of her delicate jaw, the tension in her mouth, and the way her eyes, a crystalline shade of gray, met his with unwavering focus, despite the fact that he had been rudely staring at her for an inordinate amount of time.