“That’s why you dropped out?”
“Yes.” He walked around and agitated the logs with a stick. “My parents had been helping me. I couldn’t afford it after we lost everything.”
“What happened to your father when it was discovered he took the money?”
He put the stick down and came to sit beside her on a neighboring rock. “He went to jail for three years.”
Oh. She’d wondered if the more lenient laws on white-collar crime had kept him out of jail. “What does he do now?”
He stretched his long legs out in front of him and looked into the fire. “While he was in jail, my mother divorced him and married the head of the European Central Bank. When my father got out, he disappeared. I had him traced to the Caribbean, where he’s been living in a hut on the beach ever since.”
Wow. She tried to digest it all. “Do you have any idea why he did it?”
His lip curled, emphasizing the rather dangerous-looking, twisting white scar that ran across it. “Why he stole money from his employer and his closest friends? I’d have to be a psychologist to diagnose, but it might have something to do with my mother. She bled him dry every day of his life. And it was still never enough.”
She pulled in a breath. Well, there you go. When you had attitudes like his, they came from somewhere. “What do you mean, bled him dry?”
He looked back at the fire. “She didn’t know when to stop. My father made a fortune in investment banking, but you could tell in the later years, he was done. He needed a break. But she never let him back off. Their wealth defined her. When she couldn’t flash the latest hundred-thousand-dollar Maserati in front of her friends, when my father failed to provide, she left.” His jaw hardened as he turned to her. “And if you’re going to ask what happened then, my father lost the plot completely. As in his mind.”
She looked over at him in the silence that followed, as big as any she’d encountered. “Still? Is he still like that?”
He kept his gaze trained on the leaping flames. “I haven’t talked to him in a long time. I don’t know. I send him money every month and he takes it.”
She stared at him. How hard that must have been. How much it must have hurt. His manifesto made so much sense to her all of a sudden.
“Not all women are like your mother, Jared. I’m not.”
“See, here’s where I’m having a problem with that, Bailey.” His low, tight tone sent a frisson of warning dancing across her skin. “I don’t even know who you are. I have a multimillion-dollar deal tangled up in a woman with a past that could bring it crashing down around us. And you won’t talk.”
She flinched. “I’ve told you all that’s relevant.”
“Now you’re going to tell me the real story.” He picked up the folder sitting beside him and waved it at her. “This is where it ends.”
She stared at the folder, her heart speeding up. “What is that?”
“It’s your past, Bailey. In one convenient little package.”
He was holding it with his far hand, far enough out of her reach that she never could have gotten to it. But she realized that wasn’t the exercise.
“Who did it?” she demanded quietly.
“My PI. And trust me when I say he didn’t miss anything.”
Her blood pounded in her veins. Suddenly she felt very, very light-headed. “Jared. I can’t—”
“You can. I’ve just told you the whole sordid story of my family. Now it’s your turn. I haven’t read it, Bailey. This is your chance.”
She watched with big eyes as he stood up, walked to the fire and threw the folder into the flames. It sparked and licked up the paper until it turned gray and curled in on itself. Just like her stomach.
He turned back to her and stuck his hands in his pockets.
“Who is Alexander Gagnon to you, Bailey? What does he have on you?”
The flames licking the folder engulfed the remainder in a fiery glow. His gesture wasn’t lost on her. He was giving her a chance to tell her side of the story. To trust him as he’d trusted her from the beginning.
A clamminess invaded her palms, a by-product of her racing heart and the adrenaline surging through her. A million thoughts filled her head. But in the end it came down to the truth.
“I met Alexander Gagnon when he came to my show at the Red Room in Las Vegas.”
“The Red Room? Isn’t that a strip joint?”
“That’s right.” She met his gaze. “I was a high-class stripper, Jared. I made oodles of money taking off my clothes for men.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as if he was going to say something. His lips pursed as words formed, then he stopped, stared at her and waved a hand. “Go on.”